Rod Dreher's Blog, page 101

The Power Of The White Wing-Wang

I’m hearing this morning that control of the US Senate is not the fait accompli that I had thought — that it’s going to come down to the January runoff in Georgia. I hope that’s wrong. I dearly hope that’s wrong.

Meanwhile, Politico reports that the House Democrats are turning on each other with recriminations:

House Democrats are asking themselves one question after Tuesday’s election stunner: What the hell happened?

In the House, bleary-eyed Democrats were still sorting out the wreckage when they awoke Wednesday with dozens of their members’ races still uncalled and not a single GOP incumbent ousted — an outcome that virtually no one in the party had predicted in a year in which Democrats were going on the offense deep in Trump country.

Even with tens of thousands of ballots still to be counted, shell-shocked Democratic lawmakers, strategists and aides privately began trying to pin the blame: The unreliable polls. The GOP’s law-and-order message amid a summer of unrest. The “hidden Trump voters.” The impeachment hangover. The lack of a coronavirus stimulus deal.

Some corners of the party were also beginning to question the message and tactics at the top, with several Democrats predicting — and some even demanding — a significant overhaul within the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, including possibly even ousting chairwoman Cheri Bustos, whose Illinois race has yet to be called.

Just 24 hours earlier, Democrats including Bustos and Speaker Nancy Pelosi were boasting about the opportunity to expand their majority, with some even predicting they could win as many as a dozen seats in the House by clawing back GOP territory in the suburbs of Texas, Ohio and Illinois.

But by Wednesday morning, party officials and the rank and file were in panic mode as they awaited the results of nearly 20 members of the Democrats’ historic freshman class that handed the party control of the House just two years ago. And already they were saying goodbye to at least a half-dozen of their centrist Democratic colleagues, who were stunned by GOP challengers on Tuesday, including Abby Finkenauer in Iowa and Donna Shalala in Florida.

I suppose we will need to see exit polling to know for sure what happened, but my guess is that the Black Lives Matter rioting and looting played a role. I want to be careful and not engage in confirmation bias, but I’m thinking this morning about Omar Wasow’s academic research looking at the 1960s, and finding that when protests are peaceful, they help Democrats, but when they are violent, Republicans benefit. Simply pointing to this is what got prominent Democratic data guru David Shor thrown out of Progessphiles, the e-mail list of his profession. It was theorized by Shor’s persecutors that anything that spoke ill of the holy riots was a racist aggression, because it devalued the act. Well, my instinct tells me that the results on Tuesday vindicated Shor.



The fact is, the Democratic Party is the party of Black Lives Matter — and not just the good parts. People get this. Saving the all-holy Narrative is going to be the prime directive for the Left now. Here is Charles Blow, a black and bisexual New York Times columnist, soiling himself in public with a hysterical claim that the fact that Trump drove minority turnout for Republicans to a height not seen since 1960 is evidence that white male supremacy is even more powerful than we thought:

After all that Donald Trump has done, all the misery he has caused, all the racism he has aroused, all the immigrant families he has destroyed, all the people who have left this life because of his mismanagement of a pandemic, still roughly half of the country voted to extend this horror show.

Let me be specific and explicit here: White people — both men and women — were the only group in which a majority voted for Trump, according to exit polls. To be exact, nearly three out of every five white voters in America are Trump voters.

It is so unsettling to consider that many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, white people are monsters. We get it. This is the New York Times. More:

But, that’s only part of what was shocking to me about the exit polls.

Turns out that blacks and gays voted for Trump in surprising numbers. Naturally they cannot have moral agency if they choose wrongly. It must mean that they were hypnotized by the Power of the White Wing-Wang. Blow:

All of this to me points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. It reaches across gender and sexual orientation and even race. Trump’s brash, privileged chest trumping and alpha-male dismissiveness and in-your-face rudeness are aspirational to some men and appealing to some women. Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.

Does The New York Times, which pays cash money for garbage takes like that, ever wonder why it doesn’t understand this country? As absurd as that diagnosis is — and keep in mind that the NYT would not publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton that reflected the views of half the country on the use of troops against rioters, but it publishes this — I’m telling you that this will be how the progressive elites process the meaning of the vote. They are going to be as reactionary as any 19th century Catholic pope to defend what they consider to be revealed truth. Anybody who thought that the election results would strike a blow against Wokeism in their own workplace, and gain for them space to breathe, is going to be disappointed. It’s going to get worse in the short term before it gets better, because this religious vision dies hard.

James Lindsay, one of the most incisive diagnosers of Wokeness (you must follow him on Twitter if you don’t already), reminds us:

Anybody know how the segregated “listening sessions” at SUNY Buffalo went yesterday?

I’m telling you, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Now is the time to gear up for the fight.

The post The Power Of The White Wing-Wang appeared first on The American Conservative.

Ketman And The Left’s Problem

Much is still in flux as I write on the day after the Election. We won’t really know what it means until all the votes are counted, and we have had a chance to see the exit polling data, to see why people voted the way they did.

That said, I am not accustomed to being optimistic, and I certainly didn’t anticipate sunshine on the day after the election. But something very good happened, and I want to celebrate it. First, let’s check in on some anti-Trump stalwarts:

(Note well: Jesse Singal is a progressive, but he’s making fun of a certain attitude prevalent among progressives, his own tribe.)

Now, let’s concede that it is possible for a people to become corrupted. Maybe that has happened here. I don’t believe it, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it has. We remain a democracy, and if the Democratic Party wants to win elections, it had better figure out a way to convince enough of the supposedly corrupt people to vote for it.

As I said, we won’t really know why Americans voted the way they did until we see the exit polling data, but a massive data point that ought to be shoved at the tip of a spear into the brains of anti-Trump liberals is this: all the polls predicted a Biden landslide and quite possibly the GOP losing the Senate. Not only will the GOP almost certainly keep the Senate, but if Biden ultimately wins, it will be by the skin of his teeth.

Why were the polls so wrong? The answer to that question is also a big part of the answer of why people voted against the Democrats, I believe.

Many people are afraid to tell strangers that they support Trump. Why is that? Because they have eyes to see and ears to hear. They get every single day from the media the message that Trump is wicked, and only bad people support Trump. They have seen in their own workplaces, or reported on media (especially social media), how people who get on the wrong side of the Left lose their jobs, or find themselves treated like outcasts. They know that their support for Trump might some day be used against them. I know this because I have talked to these people myself.

They also recognize that left-wing identity politics has conquered all the institutions of middle-class professional life. If you want to succeed in the corporate world, academia, media, and the rest, you had better be seen as woke — that is, as a supporter of hardline ID pol ideology. Again, I know this in part because I hear from these people all the time, mostly within academia. They are afraid, and they’re right to be afraid. Donald Trump has not made them afraid — the Left has. Because they see him on TV a lot, ordinary people know that the elites have made a guru out of Ibram X. Kendi, the Boston University professor whose “antiracist” ideology can be summed up like this (the words are Kendi’s own):

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.

The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.

The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

They know that wherever Kendi’s formula is adopted, they will face discrimination for the color of their skin. They do not want to live in such a country. They also know that it is impossible on the Left today to object to any of this without risking your job and your reputation.

I am sure that only a tiny fraction of the American people has any idea what Progressphiles is, but it is a perfect illustration of the ideological malice and fanaticism of leftist elites. Progressphiles is an email list for Democratic Party data professionals — that is, people who work in the party’s establishment, crunching numbers and trying to figure out how to move votes to the Left. One of the most prominent members of Progressphiles was David Shor, a 28-year-old data genius who distinguished himself in service to President Obama. As I wrote in this space back in June, Shor was driven out of Progressphiles because he wrote in public that data show that violent protest helps Republicans, but peaceful protest helps Democrats. You will recall this was the summer of Black Lives Matter riots. Shor warned that this would hurt the party in November.

For this he was vilified by his own colleagues, and driven out. Seriously, read the insane things they wrote about him (from e-mails provided to me by a member of that 1,000-person list). Shor’s accusers said that simply by challenging the preferred narrative (that the riots were completely justified), he was harming BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) members of the group. The message was clear: these Democratic data professionals, on whose expertise the party’s fortunes depend, exiled anyone who challenged their narrative. As my inside source at Progressphiles told me, Shor is one of the best in the business, but this disfellowshipping him for ideological reasons is going to hurt his career.

This is precisely why people don’t tell pollsters that they’re going to vote for Trump. They don’t trust progressives with this information. And they’re right not to do so. Progressphiles is unknown to all but a small sliver of Americans, but the madness, the denial of reality, that rules in spaces governed by progressive elites is something that many of us can see and feel.

If people come to believe that to tell the truth to a pollster, or to anybody in authority over them, could put them in danger, they are going to lie. They are going to practice what Czeslaw Milosz called ketman. I explain it in my book Live Not By Lies:

Ketman is the strategy that everyone in our society who isn’t a true believer in “social justice” and identity politics has to adopt to stay out of trouble. On Sunday, I heard about a professor in a large state university in a state that yesterday went for Trump, who is filled with constant anxiety. He believes that his interactions with colleagues and students are filled with the potential to destroy his career. Why? Because all it takes is an accusation of racism, sexism, or some other form of bigotry to wreck a lifetime of work. This is the world that the identity politics left has created for us. As long as we have the secret ballot, though, we can register our discontent in the vote without suffering backlash.

I believe that that explains yesterday’s results to a certain extent.

Look at what happened in California, the wokest state in America. There was a ballot initiative to re-instate affirmative action, and thereby allow racial discrimination to remedy past discrimination. The ballot initiative went down handily, 56 percent to 44 percent. Here’s how the vote was distributed:

Only in L.A. and the Bay Area did Californians support returning official discrimination to public life. Look at this list of all the elected officials, organizations, and business groups who supported Prop 16 — that is, who wanted to see a return to discrimination for progressive ends. That list includes every single major Democratic official in the state, as well as all the Chambers of Commerce.

And they lost. It wasn’t close. In pre-election polling, whites, Latinos, and Asians indicated that they were likely to vote against it. As it turns out, most Americans want to live in a country where people are not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, and their accomplishments.

I would wager that most Americans do not want to live in the anti-American fantasy world of The New York Times, whose 1619 Project proclaims that the United States was conceived in iniquity, and dedicated to the proposition that the black man must be kept down at all times. If anybody at the Times — or the Washington Post, or any major American newspaper or broadcast network — had a heretical thought about this racialist narrative, would they have been able to express it? As longtime readers know, I have long been a fan of NPR, but I quit listening to it this year because the network gave itself over to woke propaganda, especially on race. Our elite media have rendered themselves incapable of seeing reality in this country, and reflecting those complex realities in their reporting.

My hope is that finally the Republican Party will get off its butt and take legislative action against woke bigotries. It’s okay to talk about it! Defend America and its classically liberal values! We are about to see the media progressives double down on the poisonous lies that got them to this point. Here is the 1619 Commissar’s verdict:

Turns out, this really is the country we thought it was.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) November 4, 2020

I believe that the Democratic Party’s elites — including those in the academy and the coastal media epistemic bubbles — are incapable of learning a damn thing from these results. Good. If they can barely beat Donald Trump, for pity’s sake, and cannot flip the Senate after four years of Trump’s chaotic government, and at the height of a pandemic, then that shows that their message remains unpopular. Americans don’t want wokeness. They want old-fashioned American values. They’re tired of living by ketman.

Come on, GOP, whatever happens to the Trump presidency, it’s time to find your voice and lead. You have the people on your side. If the Democrats cannot even sell wokeness in California, where can they sell it? The administrative and journalistic elites are going to double down on the woke narrative, because they cannot abide the alternative. Now is the time to fight back, and fight back hard.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

About today’s article where you mention California voters rejected bringing back Affirmative Action.  Yes, this ballot measure lost, but Californians overwhelmingly voting for the party whose ideology supports what the people reject on a ballot measure, shows there is a disconnection in our politics between policy and the appeal of a party to voters.  This is an intentional disconnection because the Democrats hide their real aims, and the Republicans do not know how to reach voters about specific policies, because their electioneering is controlled by a small group of profiteers with no interest in policy, and are likely Progressives themselves.

As for the exit polls, there are two results I think are not getting enough attention.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/exit-polls-president.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-elections-2020®ion=TOP_BANNER&context=election_recirc


1. Demographics: The two factors that determine Democrat party affiliation are college education and immigration.  These two factors create a break toward the Democrat party by two to one.  As debt-funded college education and unlimited immigration are increasingly significant in the national life, it will shut out any chance of Republican election victories in the near future, as the older Republican voters die off.  Republicans are completely blind to these ceaselessly growing demographic factors.

Singleness is also a powerful determining factor of Democrat affiliation, and this increasing demographic trend is showing no signs of slowing.

2. Washington D.C. and the surrounding suburbs vote 95% Democrat every election.  That means that the political center of power is grossly unrepresentative of the American public.  This is the kind of ideological conformity that you see in countries like Iraq under Saddam Hussein.  The GOP that you hope will “get it together” are surrounded by neighbors and colleagues who are hostile to them, and the bureaucracy that does the work of policy are 95% Progressive Democrats, people who will do whatever they can to put the breaks to policy changes for any GOP electoral victory, and will do all in their power to put into effect the hidden Progressive policies of any Democrat victory.  We saw this mentality clearly on display in the FBI emails surrounding the faux “Russia” investigation.

That last graf makes a good point. I would not be surprised if it explains why the Republican Party is so useless on culture war issues: their members and staff live in hostile territory, and don’t want to have to put up with cold shoulders at their kids’ sports events.

UPDATE.2:  I received the following e-mail from a gay reader who shared with me his name and institutional affiliation, and granted me permission to publish this letter if I conceal those facts to protect him. He describes himself as “a Mondale/Ferraro Democrat”:

Just wanted to say bravo on the Ketman column, and that I’m living that Ketman reality every day, being a professor in higher ed.  I met my boss today to discuss something work-related, and she held forth about the election for a bit, before ending, “I just can’t understand why anyone would vote for that man!”

I kept my mouth shut, but…I voted for him!

I believe in the need for immigration controls. My mother’s sister was killed by an illegal immigrant who had been caught and released as well as deported several times before he finally killed someone. The experience of having her sister taken from her changed my mother, and not for the better. The Democrats have completely abdicated all responsibility re. immigration.

I believe that wokeness in higher ed will eventually result in the death of academia. In my own field, my program’s curriculum has recently been destroyed – basic functional knowledge removed in favor of discussions of identity, nationalism, etc.  After all, the basic material can be “looked up on Wikipedia,” but it’s necessary to introduce “culture” via the foundational courses. This summer, a colleague demanded that we “put race at the center of all we do” – that statement received approving noises from a number of senior colleagues, though nothing concrete has yet been put into place. (That colleague, btw, made that statement from his vacation home in Martha’s Vineyard). The Democrats are pushing the notions which are destroying higher ed.

I believe that we should not be involved in foreign wars, even ones where the reasoning presented involves humanitarian claims. The Democrats voted en masse for Iraq and Afghanistan, and did nothing substantial to end those wars, particularly the latter. The Democratic party’s “foreign policy experts” are no less neo-con than the Bush gang, and I have no doubt that if Uncle Joe makes it into office, we’ll have another war within a year or two.

Most of all, I believe that people should be able to have differing political opinions and discuss those things with folks who have opposing views without anyone resorting to hysteria. The Jesse Singal joke quoted in your column is right on, and I’ve already experienced it ca. 100 times today. Every time I turned on NPR this year, or popped open Facebook to see new baby/pet pictures, I was inundated with variations on “orange man bad!” Eventually, the contrarian in me decided enough was enough.

I don’t have tenure yet, so I will continue to keep my mouth shut, but I hope that once tenure is granted (knock on wood), I have the balls to fight for the things I believe and be willing to have reasoned debates with my friends and colleagues who currently control the discourse.

UPDATE.3: A reader sends in Nature magazine’s report on the election results. Why on earth is a leading scientific journal reporting on the US presidential election? The headline and subhed say it all:




Said the reader who sent this:

These people are are incapable of seeing how much damage they are doing themselves. So much for objectivity.

Idiots. Total idiots.

Say, if you’re interested in exploring the topic more of the dangers of confusing what is correct with what is true, check out my new Substack newsletter tonight, “Where’s Comrade Brezhnev?” I’d love it if you’d subscribe. It’s free, and I write there in a far less polemical vein.

The post Ketman And The Left’s Problem appeared first on The American Conservative.

National Conservatism’s Big Night

I’m writing this after midnight Central time, now that it’s clear we won’t have an idea tonight who won the presidential race, and probably not which party will control the Senate (though it’s going to be very hard for the Democrats to pull out a win). Still, I retire tonight a far, far happier pundit than I expected to be at the end of the evening. Why? Consider:

I expected to slink to bed crushed by a Biden blowout, and the possibility of a Democratic Senate. That’s what the polls had predicted, after all. Now it appears that the GOP has held the Senate, and Trump might actually pull out a stunning upset.
Even if Trump loses, the Senate will still almost certainly remain in Republican hands. That means elderly President Biden will take office as an enfeebled one-termer hemmed in by a GOP Senate.
Trump out of the picture opens the path for new conservative leadership in the national conservative vein. Tonight’s result makes it clear that there will be no restoration of the pre-Trump Republican status quo. The Lincoln Project will have been its last hurrah.
The president’s amazing performance with black and Latino voters signals a potential for realignment, with the GOP becoming a broad working-class party with a socially conservative base. Look at this:

According to the exit poll, Trump did better in 2020 with every race and gender except white men.

Change from 2016:

White Men -5

White Women +2

Black Men +4

Black Women +4

Latino Men +3

Latino Women +3

Other +5 pic.twitter.com/hUc17Iy1ip

— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) November 4, 2020

This election was a massive repudiation of Wokeness and identity politics. It should give conservative politicians the courage to go on the attack against it within institutions. If Trump holds the executive branch, the Justice Department, the EEOC, the Education Department, and others ought to put the fear of God into the likes of Smith College and Woke Capitalists. Despite what Stacey Abrams and other leading Democrats want to believe, there can be no illusion that the future of America is identity politics.
The media will melt down, again. Couldn’t happen to more deserving people. Same with the piss-ant Stalinista sisters at Progressphiles, who drove David Shor off for telling the truth.
If Trump holds the White House and the Republicans hold the Senate, Justice Thomas could retire from the Supreme Court if he wanted to, and they could put a young conservative in his place. Also, the GOP could create a 7-2 conservative majority if Justice Stephen Breyer, 82, retires in the next presidential term.
If the GOP emerges from all this as the overall winner (which it will even if Trump loses), everybody is going to need to listen to Yoram Hazony’s 2019 speech defining national conservatism, to get an idea of where the Right is headed.

However the White House race is decided — and we might not know until week’s end, if it comes down to Pennsylvania — this year’s vote marks another catastrophe for pollsters. But I wonder how you poll accurately when so many people are afraid to tell the truth about their support for a conservative candidate? I cannot tell you the number of private conversations I’ve had in the past week or so, both in person and online, with Trump voters who expressed confidence that Trump would be re-elected because they knew so many people like themselves: voters who supported Trump, but would never admit it to a pollster or to someone they didn’t know.

Why is that? Because they are afraid. Of what? Of that information being used against them in some way. Of it costing them their job, or worse. These people aren’t fools. They see how the progressive left in power behaves, and how getting on the wrong side of woke ideology can destroy a person’s career.

One reader of this blog told me last week that his wife, who grew up in China under the Cultural Revolution, participated all campaign in a major weekly tracking poll, and consistently lied about her voting plans. She said she was a Biden backer who was planning to vote for liberals. The truth was the opposite — but she didn’t dare say so, because she was afraid. She has been watching the rise of woke mobs, and ideological persecution within American institutions, with horror, because she knows from her own family’s experience where this sort of thing leads.

What the Democratic Party and its progressive activist base have done is bully the American people into practicing ketman. What is that? It’s a concept that the Polish dissident writer Czeslaw Milosz introduced in his 1950s classic The Captive Mind, explaining why so many intellectuals fell for Communism. I write about it like this in my book Live Not By Lies:

Lying to pollsters makes sense in a society in which telling certain truths can cost you your job. This is the world that the Left has made for itself, and for us all. Joe Biden should have won this election going away, given the Covid crisis, and the president’s record. But he either lost the race, or he will have barely won it, and will take office with no mandate. My sense is that a lot of this comes from the fact that people hate the humiliation of having to lie to protect their jobs and their reputations from persecution by the Left — by college administrators, by HR departments, by woke, race-obsessed mobs within companies, and snitches, and media. For now at least, we still have the secret ballot. Someone said that Donald Trump is the last middle finger people like this have left.

The Democrats will not be able to absorb this lesson. Can you imagine the shock to their system? Already Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project fabulist, is busy trying to rewrite the history of the 2020 election to blame white people for the Latino repudiation of intersectional solidarity:

Again, we don’t know yet who the next president is going to be, but we can say for sure that almost nobody foresaw this kind of setback for the Democrats. It is possible — and maybe even probable — that in the aftermath of this bad election, the woke power centers within media, academia, and corporations will double down on “antiracism” and other ideological madness. But now the American people have demonstrated powerfully that there’s no future in it outside of the pathetic precincts of middle and upper class power.

That’s not nothing! That’s very far from nothing. But it’s less than they thought they had before Tuesday. Well done, America. And to be fair, though I don’t often have much positive to say about him in this space, well done Donald Trump. Even if you wind up losing the White House, the party wouldn’t have had this unexpected performance without you.

The post National Conservatism’s Big Night appeared first on The American Conservative.

Election Night-A-Palooza

Hey errbody, have you bitten all your fingers down to the knuckles yet? I’m writing after 8pm Central time. I’ll be updating this blog entry throughout the night, so keep refreshing; I’ll post here some of your comments as we go.

The big story as I write is that it appears that Donald Trump has won Florida — and it was the Latinos of Miami-Dade County that won it for him. In fact, Trump’s numbers among Latinos nationwide are eye-opening. Look:

Latinos are voting for Trump in much greater numbers than four years ago. And no, it’s not just Cubans.

The “rising demographic majority” for Democrats is one of the most dangerous ideas in American politics.

It’s also unscientific gobbledygook. https://t.co/h5OHhYPGZp

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) November 4, 2020

Questions we’ll be asking after tonight, no matter who wins:

To what extent is the Trump support among Hispanics a matter of Trump’s personality?
How can the GOP hold on to them?

Similarly, Trump is losing college-educated white women by huge margins. I think we can confidently say that has a LOT to do with Trump’s personality. How many of these women will return to the GOP after Trump goes? Or is this a more permanent re-alignment? Are we looking at the GOP becoming the party of working-class whites and Latinos, and the Democrats becoming the party of urban liberals, educated whites, and blacks? Gonna be fascinating to see how this all plays out.

Ohio is a lot closer than many expected. Nate Silver says:

Earlier tonight on NPR, Mara Liasson said that Ohio going to Biden would be a meteor strike on the race. It would be game over for Trump.

Another big story tonight: how close Texas is. Whoever thought Texas would be in play?

Remember, I’ll be updating throughout the night. Keep refreshing!

UPDATE.2: Ho, ho, ho!

Whatever happens next, this has been a crushing defeat for left racial identity politics. If Trump wins because of Latino voters it strikes the heart of an entire worldview.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) November 4, 2020

UPDATE.3: This is a relief:

Friend texts me:

I feel like a Syrian Christian tonight, guiltily rooting for a terrible person because his opponents want to cut my head off. Figuratively, for now.

Trump now ahead in Ohio. Good lord, he might just pull this off!

UPDATE.4: The 1619 fabulist is concocting a new story to explain why a Latino-driven Trump victory (if we have that) is the fault of wypipo after all.

UPDATE.5: From prominent Johns Hopkins political scientist:

But it’s what the Leftist elite is going to say. They never learn.

I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had, both in person and online, in the last week of Trump voters saying that they thought he would pull it out, because they all know so many people who are going to vote for him but won’t tell anybody about it, because they all believe that somehow, if this got out, they would suffer professionally. This is going to be a HUGE issue if Trump goes back in. The damn Stasi Democrats.

UPDATE.6:

“I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are, and it’s exactly how we won.” — Stacey Abrams, 5/24/2019

Ha! Even if Trump loses tonight, the unambiguously great news of the evening is that the Woke narrative is in trouble. Naturally I expect that the Human Resources Departments, college administrators, and media managers will double down on it — but that’s not where the country is, it appears.

Believe the data: only white men can save the country from white hetero-cis male supremacy. https://t.co/acWMJyk87V

— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) November 4, 2020

UPDATE.7: This is good news here in Louisiana. Anticipating the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Louisiana voters have amended the state’s constitution to declare no state constitutional right to abortion, thus blocking any possibility that the State Supreme Court might invent one.

BREAKING: @AP reports that Louisiana has passed Amendment 1, which establishes there is no constitutional right to an abortion. pic.twitter.com/JRaECGhLhe

— Catherine Hadro (@CatSzeltner) November 4, 2020

UPDATE.8:

results from starr county, texas, the most latino county in the united states (96% latino)

2016: clinton+60

2020: biden+5 with >98% reporting

we are witnessing a dramatic and historic realignment pic.twitter.com/PxC7ofJYL7

— Thao Nguyen (@nguyenthevote) November 4, 2020

UPDATE.9: Absolutely yes. If Trump wins, no more tolerance for the violent:

Speaking for myself and probably most Americans, I’d love to see every one of them in jail. We’re sick of this. https://t.co/tBlY3Lvs0V

— James Lindsay, astonishingly ignorant (@ConceptualJames) November 4, 2020

I’ll tell you something else. On Twitter, lots of people are talking bout how tonight’s shocking results are a failure of polling. (Recall that the final polls had Biden up by 10 points.) I don’t necessarily agree. How can you poll people who are afraid to tell pollsters the truth? You might recall a few days ago a reader wrote that his wife, a naturalized citizen born in China, agreed earlier this year to participate in a newspaper/network tracking poll. All the campaign she has been lying to the pollsters, telling them that she’s a Biden voter, and giving all the correct “liberal” answers — this, because she watches the news, and she has come to think of the Left’s behavior as akin to what she saw in the Cultural Revolution. That is, she has no faith that those who get that information won’t use it against her. This woman is a registered Democrat.

All these so-called “shy Trump voters” have learned to practice ketman. From my book Live Not By Lies:

If Donald Trump defies the polls and wins tonight, I am confident that it will have been because our twisted Woke establishment — not only the Democrats, but those institutional power holders who enforce Woke orthodoxy — have compelled tens of millions of their fellow Americans to feel compelled to lie to protect their jobs and livelihoods.

If Trump pulls this out, it is time for the executive branch to go after wokeness, hard. Start bringing Justice Department prosecutions against these bullies.

UPDATE.10:

Cheap answer is, some people are frustrated that a professor of philosophy makes 3 times what they do for cleaning their house, or making sure they are supplied with electricity, or keeping them safe from muggers, or cooking them Pad Thai, only to then be talked down to a scolded pic.twitter.com/Dh7CBfubmr

— Chris Arnade

A View From Butovo Field

It’s been a whole year since I was in Russia, doing reporting for Live Not By Lies. Here’s a post I put up after my visit to the Butovo field memorial, in the far southern reaches of Moscow. It’s the national monument to those murdered by political violence. It encloses a field on which the secret police massacred 21,000 Soviet citizens in a 14-month period in the 1930s. From that post:

Standing at an exhibit at the edge of the field, looking at a tally of the number of dead killed each day, a Russian man struck up a conversation with us. He was there because his grandfather had been murdered by Stalin for telling people on the collective farm where he lived and worked to save their own houses in a fire, not the farm. Someone told the authorities, and that was the end of Vladimir Alexandrovich’s grandfather. On this spot they killed the priest of his church back then, and also the man who held the door at the church.

“And for what?” said Vladimir Alexandrovich, not expecting an answer.

Speaking to him in Russian, Matthew told him what my new book was about. When I told him that people are losing their jobs in the US over political issues, he said, “That’s a bad sign.”

“History always repeats, one way or another,” he said, heavily.

The main reason there is a national memorial here to the dead, and nearby a new church built to the memory of those martyred there, is the labor of Father Kirill Kaleda, a Russian Orthodox priest who lobbied the government for years to establish this permanent site of memory. From my talk with him in the kitchen next to the field:

But how to resist? We spoke of political combat. I don’t think Father Kirill had heard of The Benedict Option, but I told him about my frustration with American Christians who think the best and only way to fight these things is by electing politicians who will put the right judges onto the court.

He seemed to agree.

“The most correct way and the most productive way of battling has to be in your own world, that you can effect,” he said. “Not everybody can share their opinions with large number of people, but the way your living your own life, your insistence on having your own opinion, and more importantly the way you’re running your own family, this is more available to ordinary people. What did St. Seraphim of Sarov say: ‘Acquire the Holy Spirit and thousands around you will be saved.’ That is the best way. In fact, this path of podvig [a feat, a deed] is the one chosen by the faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church even in the middle of the most horrible persecutions.”

In the future, when Americans ask me what use the Benedict Option would be in a time of persecution, I will remind them of what the priest who serves a church named for the martyrs of the Bolsheviks said. He went on:

When thinking about this topic, it’s important not to be limited to just the canonized saints. What’s more significant is what in Russia we call the white headscarves — usually women, simple women with low education levels, who continued to go to church no matter what the conditions were. They were able to save something, and pass it on to their children. We can’t lose sight of these. There were so many of them.

One can be tempted to think that they performed no holy feats, that they just went to church. But in fact they were the ones that saved the faith and were able to preserve the church.

As he spoke, I looked behind his shoulder, through the window where snow was falling on a field where 21,000 men and women met their deaths, and were buried in a mass grave. It added weight and depth to the priest’s words.

Father Kirill continued to speak of the personal responsibility every Christian has for the space around him. He emphasized that believers can’t wait for great leaders to emerge to set things aright. Doing so is a way of avoiding responsibility for mastering the small spaces in which we ourselves live. “Out of these small spaces, that is what society is built of,” he said.

He spoke of a second-century saint who had a mystical vision:

He was shown the construction of a tower. When they were building tower in his vision, people brought stones. Some of them were perfect, and could put right into the construction. Others needed only a little bit of work. Others had to be thrown out. The angel who showed him this vision told him this tower is the church: a buillding that is being constructed throughout the course of human history. Each one of the stones is an individual member of the church. Those that spend their lives getting ready to be a part of the structure, they were able to be put right in by the builder. The history of the construction of this tower is the history of the construction of the church, and that is the history of humanity. The story of this construction is also the story of these people. The history of this tower is the history of these individual people — not of wars, not of church councils, not of a certain bishop occupying a certain position, that’s not what this tower is made of. So, the story of humanity is the story of individual people, not the story of presidents.

I told Father Kirill that the rise of identity politics seemed to me a worrying sign. The American left is training its people to regard others only in terms of their group identities, and to regard some groups as evil oppressors, and others as virtuous victims, simply by virtue of their group membership. How can we resist that? I asked.

“Here the most important thing is maintaining simple human contract, making sure that people have contact with each other,” said the priest. “This is made clear by the people who come here to Butuvo. They arrive with all kinds of opinions about what happened here, and about our country’s past. From their conversations, you can see a new relationship is being built, maybe even a brotherhood. It’s not that everybody changes their opinions, but the weight of what happened here begins to break down barriers. The most important thing is to see a humanity in others.”

Those words are why I re-posted part of this year-old entry today. Here are Father Kirill and me, after our interview:

I want to add one more thing. At the top of this post you will see a detail from an icon image of St. Alexei Mechev, a Russian Orthodox priest who died of natural causes in 1923, and his son St. Sergey Mechev, also a priest, who was martyred in the gulag. I knew nothing about them until I met with Father Kirill, who said:

Every person in his life goes through some kind of test, through different kinds of difficulties. People that are accustomed to living in some kind of comfort, not only in a typical household way, but even in a spiritual way, then they are not able to bear these trials. The memory of a Russian saint who lived at the beginning of the 20th century, Father Alexei Michev comes to mind. Where did everything begin for him? He served in a small, poor church in the center of Moscow because of the fact of where their house was in this church, it was a raw, unheated space. His wife got tuberculosis and died, leaving him with a young son. In the Orthodox Church, you can’t marry a second time if you’re a priest, so he was in despair. He met with Father John of Kronstadt, now St. John of Kronstadt, who said to him, “What are you doing walking around grieving all the time? Look around you. Look at how much grief everyone around you has? Take that grief upon yourself, and when you take their grief upon yourself, you’ll feel that your grief is smaller. And he fulfilled the words of St. John.

Father Alexei Michev died in old age. His son Sergei was also an Orthodox priest — one who was martyred by the Bolsheviks. Here is their story from a Russian Orthodox website. Notice what it says about St. Sergei, whose name and story was unknown to me before Father Kirill brought it up:

Fr. Sergius entered the ranks of Russia’s New Martyrs for his uncompromising stand in ecclesial matters. His principal renown, however, rests upon his pastoral skills. The Maroseyka parish was unique in Moscow in cultivating an inwardly monastic orientation. Fr. Alexey often said that his task was to create “a monastery in the world,” by which he meant a parish family guided towards the same goal of sanctity and deification as the monastic.

Fr. Sergius held the same principle although later on he stopped speaking of it as a “monastery in the world,” because others had adopted this term as meaning some kind of community of secret monks or nuns who lived in the world while under obedience to monastic vows. Instead, Fr. Sergius took from ancient Russian church practice the term “repenting family.” He also referred to his parish as a “repenting-liturgical family.” It was very apt. As a spiritual director, he strove to cultivate in his flock a spirit of repentance and he encouraged frequent attendance at church services, which he considered to be the best school for the development of spiritual life.

My God. This martyr-priest, Father Sergei Michev, was living what I call the Benedict Option, and leading his parish that way. I will look for an icon of him today while I am in Moscow.

I asked Father Kirill what his message is for American churches. He said:

What happened in the 20th century in Russia serves as witness to the fact that many Russian people not only believed in God, but they also entrusted themselves to God. For them, the spiritual world and the kingdom of heaven were a reality. Despite the fact that for them, because of their own human weaknesses, it was a scary and painful time. Their podvig is the witness to the existence of another world, a spiritual world, and the Kingdom of Heaven. The lesson for us are the values of this earthly life, including our comfort, are nothing in comparison to the value of the Kingdom of Heaven. But this is a very difficult lesson. 

What he meant was that it is not enough to say that we believe. We have to cultivate deep faith in the reality of God’s kingdom, and live it out. There is no other way.

As Matthew and I put on our coats to leave, Father Kirill called us into his office. There he showed us the mitre of St. Alexei. We both crossed ourselves and kissed this precious relic.

Russia! What a country.

Later, back in Moscow, my translator Matthew took me to the Maroseyka church, where both father and son had served. I prayed there, and bought an icon of the two in glory. It is now in my home. I have added them to the communion of saints whose prayers I ask. What a strange and wonderful thing. Only about a year ago, I did not know these men, but now, they are among my closest friends.

This is the kind of religious-themed post I might better have put on my new Substack daily newsletter, which I use for more religious and philosophical posts, ones less driven by the news. (Subscribe for free here.) But on a day fraught with anxiety over political violence, I thought it was important to highlight the words of a priest whose vocation it is to tend the garden of memory of those whose lives were taken for political reasons. There is a better way to live.

The post A View From Butovo Field appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Fateful Day Arrives

Well, I just returned from voting. Got up early to get to the polls when they opened at six a.m. Arrived a bit late — 6:20 — and there was already a long line. This was good, because it gave me more time to pray about what I was going to do about the presidency. Voting for Biden, which I had considered earlier this fall, was out. For me, it was between the American Solidarity Party candidate, and Donald Trump. I had settled on the AS line, but a number of you wrote to me to make the case for why I should vote Trump anyway, even though I can hardly stand the man. I took you all seriously. I took the words my college-age son, who supports Biden, said seriously about the danger of a Trump vote. I also took this seriously:

In his 1974 essay “Live Not By Lies,” Solzhenitsyn said a truthful man “will not vote neither openly nor secretly for a person whom he considers unworthy or of doubtful abilities.” I am taking that principle into the voting booth with me on Election Day. https://t.co/kkIRsiGDmh

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) November 3, 2020

I was literally praying to God for guidance up until I entered the booth. I took a photograph of the voting machine, with my presidential vote on it, so I would have a record. But I also decided that I was not going to reveal my vote to anybody, not even my wife. I don’t want to put up with the abuse by people who are mad I didn’t vote for Trump, or from people who are mad that I did. This entire campaign has been so unpleasant that I don’t want to extend the misery of it by inviting contempt from both pro-and-anti-Trump strangers, and pro-and-anti-Trump people I love. I will say that I have never thought harder and prayed more over any vote I’ve ever cast. However you voted, reader, you are still my friend, because my love and my loyalty do not depend on your political views and acts.

The next president will be either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. I have no faith at all that the next four years will be good, no matter which one is elected. This country is in a bad way. I expect the malign totalitarian trends I write about in Live Not By Lies to continue, no matter what. If Trump goes back in, Woke Capitalism, universities, and all the institutions will double down on enforcing their ideology; we can hope that an activist Trump Justice Department will fight them at every turn. If Biden goes in, that will simply move the entire power of the executive branch behind Wokeness. Either way, the next four years are going to bring a hell of a fight to the lives and institutions of religious and social conservatives. Today’s vote, however it turns out, will solve nothing from this point of view. It only marks a new and worsening stage of the crisis.

The English political philosopher John Gray has an important book review essay in New Statesman, about the disconnection between America and reality. Gray is more or less a conservative, and NS is a magazine of the Left. It’s an important read for everyone. Excerpts:

The unmasking of the bourgeois belief in objective reality has been so fully accomplished in America that any meaningful struggle against reality has become absurd.” Anyone reading this might think it a criticism of America. The lack of a sense of reality is a dangerous weakness in any country. Before the revolutions of 1917, Tsarist Russia was ruled by a class oblivious to existential threats within its own society. An atmosphere of unreality surrounded the rise of Nazism in Germany – a deadly threat that Britain and other countries failed to perceive until it was almost too late.

For the Portuguese former diplomat Bruno Maçães, however, the decoupling of American culture from the objective world is a portent of great things to come. Finally shedding its European inheritance, America is creating a truly new world, “a new, indigenous American society, separate from modern Western civilisation, rooted in new feelings and thoughts”. The result, Maçães suggests, is that American politics has become a reality show. The country of Roosevelt and Eisenhower was one in which, however lofty the aspiration, there  was always a sense that reality could prove refractory. The new America is built on the premise that the world can be transformed by reimagining it. Liberals and wokeists, conservatives and Trumpists are at one in treating media confabulations as more real than any facts that may lie beyond them.

Maçães welcomes this situation, since it shows that American history has finally begun. As he puts it at the end of this refreshingly bold and deeply thought-stirring book, “For America the age of nation-building is over. The age of world-building has begun.”

More:

One of the problems of Maçães’s account is that it does not clearly distinguish between different ways in which human consciousness can be detached from the real world. For those who construct it, a fiction is not an illusion but a tool for shaping the perceptions of others. A virtual world is not a fantasy, which may be personal and private, but an alternate reality that is necessarily collective. Lying behind these conceptual slippages are deeper ambiguities. Are virtual worlds deliberately manufactured, or do they emerge – like myths in past times – from the depths of a common form of life? Might not a society produce radically antagonistic virtual worlds? American society is polarised between a view in which the country is a flawed but basically benign experiment and a vision in which it has been irredeemably racist from its foundation. Will one of these virtual worlds triumph in the up-coming presidential election? Or will the division in America persist regardless of who wins?

Under what conditions do virtual worlds disintegrate? Some – such as the one Karl Rove inhabited – are self-destroying and essentially ephemeral. Others – such as the Trumpian view that the virulence of coronavirus has been nefariously exaggerated – may suffer a shock from reality, only to subsequently grow stronger in the minds of tens of millions of conspiracy theorists.

Read it all. 

People of the Right, like me, focus almost entirely on Wokeness, because we see it as the greatest threat to the nation. Wokeness is based on an old left-wing ideal: that reality is socially constructed, and that all men are essentially blank slates. Therefore, any inequality of outcome between them can only be because of an unjust distortion that can be straightened out by government action. The Soviet Union and its empire was built on that lie. Reality eventually caught up with the Soviets, but not before incalculable destruction was wrought upon nations and peoples. It’s going to happen here too. The mania for this Woke vision has even taken over the armed forces. Here’s an op-ed by Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas, head of US Air Force recruiting. Excerpts:

The tragic death of George Floyd and recent events have fueled widespread protests and a renewed call for racial equality nationwide. Amid this, our country has been compelled to reflect on issues that are often uncomfortable, and leaders have been driven to examine their organizations in ways like never before. The Air Force, in many ways, is no different. But as a war-fighting organization we cannot afford to squander this moment, because our future — and national security — depends on it.

Pursuing equality means we must be sure that we are attracting the most capable members of our society, from all races and walks of life, as we prepare for the next fight. This fighting force should be highly capable while reflecting the diversity of the country we serve.

Before I even took command of my service’s recruiting efforts this spring, Air Force leadership made it clear to me that improving diversity would be on the top of my to-do list.  And recent national events only serve as an accelerant as we take aim and tackle this vexing issue.

Pentagon leaders didn’t need to explain the why, although Gen. David Goldfein, our former chief of staff, did that in calling diversity “a war-fighting imperative.” It’s been clear for some time that our progress in better reflecting the society we serve has been too slow.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the first African-American to lead any branch of the military, has called on us to accelerate change or risk losing ground to Russia and China, both of which are integrating potential game-changing technologies like artificial intelligence and hypersonic flight. We need both the best technologies and the best people to win. Improving our diversity falls squarely in Brown’s mandate.

You see the bullshit here, I take it. It goes on:

To be clear, the Air and Space Forces are not setting quotas based on race or gender.  We will, however, focus intensely and concentrate our efforts in traditionally underserved communities. It wouldn’t be legal or productive to hold recruiters accountable for bringing in a certain number of recruits from various demographic groups. But if we see that we’re not hitting recruiting targets that mirror the qualified population in those categories, we will adjust to concentrate on areas where we can get a more representative balance in our applicant pool. To use a fishing analogy, recruiters must not only cast a wide net but ensure we are spending time in the right fishing holes.

And by measuring those targets, we’ll employ the old management axiom that what gets measured gets done. And we’ll get it done.

While we are meeting or exceeding nearly all demographic targets in our enlisted ranks, inside our cockpits is where we have the greatest disparities and opportunities for improvement. In all, 86 percent of our aviators are white males. Less than 3 percent of our fighter pilots are females.

Whatever, General. If the US risks losing ground to Russia and China, then it seems to me that the armed forces don’t have the luxury of worrying about the phony “problem” that nearly 90 percent of its pilots are white males. Why does the sex of a fighter pilot matter? Shouldn’t we only be concerned that we are recruiting and training the most capable fighter pilots, regardless of sex and ethnicity? The kind of people who care about this stuff remind me of the people who say that cops ought to be shooting only  to wing attackers — this, because they want the real world to be arranged in ways that allay their anxieties.

Why is diversity “a war-fighting imperative”? It’s not. This is another instance of American elites talking themselves into believing that they can create reality. The NBA doesn’t believe that diversity is a “sports-playing imperative.” The NBA, woke as it is, understands that the point of professional sports teams is to win games. Its coaches don’t care about the color of their teams’ athletes. They just want to win, and spend their resources recruiting the most skilled players money can buy. What does it say about a country in which the leadership of professional sports leagues are more realistic about the world we live in, and what it takes to accomplish their mission, than the leaders of the armed forces?

Anyway, that’s what the Left cares about, and not just the Left, but the leadership elites across the institutions of society. But on the Right, we have the QAnon cult, which really is more like a new religion than anything else. I am not remotely as concerned about Q as I am about Woke, because however popular Q might be, it has made no inroads with the ruling elites (Trump flirts with it, but that’s about it). The most troubling thing about Q, though, is how willing its followers are to believe things that are weirdly detached from reality, and how impossible it is to reason with them about any of it (I have tried). In this, they are like the zealous apostles of Wokeness, who cannot accept any dissent from their ideological program, or even imagine that they might be wrong.

As readers of my book Live Not By Lies will have seen, Hannah Arendt said this kind of thing is a sign of decadence that can lead to totalitarianism. Excerpt:

[Arendt writes:]

They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent with itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Why are people so willing to believe demonstrable lies? The desperation alienated people have for a story that helps them make sense of their lives and tells them what to do explains it. For a man desperate to believe, totalitarian ideology is more precious than life itself.

“He may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and frame his own death sentence if only his status as a member of the movement is not touched,” Arendt wrote. Indeed, the files of the 1930s Stalinist show trials are full of false confessions by devout communists who were prepared to die rather than admit that communism was a lie.

Totalitarianism’s most dedicated servants are often idealists, at least at first. Margolius Kovály testifies that she and her husband embraced communism at first precisely because it was so idealistic. It gave those who had walked out of hell a vision of paradise in which they could believe.

More, from Arendt’s The Origins Of Totalitarianism:

Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction, from coincidence into consistency.

The chief disability of totalitarian propaganda is that it cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense. … [W]hile it is true that the masses are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects, it is also true that their longing for fiction has some connection with those capacities of the human mind whose structural consistency is superior to mere occurrence. The masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist, since coincidence has become its supreme master and human beings need the constant transformation fo chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative consistency. The revolt of the masses against “realism,” common sense, and all “the plausibilities of the world” (Burke) was the result of their atomization, of their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense. In the interdependence of the arbitrary and the planned, the accidental and the necessary, could no longer operate. Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity.Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices — and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect.

Look at this, from one of the US’s top researchers in youth psychology:

Here’s the complete chart, cut off in that tweet:

What explains it? Twenge said the only plausible reason is the 2007 advent of smart phones and the subsequent rise of social media.

The radical Great Awokening among those who came of age post-2007 is likely the result of the radically alienating effect of that technology, and how it replaces contact with the real world with a curated simulacra mediated by TikTok, Instagram, and the rest.

Point is, we are a people increasingly groomed to accept the unacceptable, because we are disconnected from reality. This is manifesting in our politics, and will continue to do so. When you are rich and powerful you can afford your delusions (think of Karl Rove’s saying in 2004 that the US creates its own reality) for a time, but eventually, gravity asserts itself.

So, where do I find hope? Our priest said exactly one line about the election in his Sunday homily: “Put not your trust in princes” (Psalm 146:3). My hope is in my God, who remains sovereign no matter what follies and passions rule us. I find hope in knowing that whatever happens to us, as long as we align ourselves with Him, and with His righteousness, we will prevail. To lose, and to suffer — even to suffer death — is to win if we suffer for the sake of His Kingdom. I really do believe that. It is therefore imperative that Christians remember what the Bible teaches us: that worldly success does not necessarily mean anything in the Kingdom of God. Yes, I expect that believers will suffer, and suffer greatly, in the years to come; this is coming whether Trump wins, or Biden. This is realism. This is why I believe these words, which I wrote in Live Not By Lies, after talking to men and women of the Soviet bloc who endured persecution without breaking:

To recognize the value in suffering is to rediscover a core teaching of historical Christianity, and to see clearly the pilgrim path walked by every generation of Christians since the Twelve Apostles. There is nothing more important than this when building up Christian resistance to the coming totalitarianism. It is also to declare oneself a kind of savage in today’s culture—even within the culture of the church. It requires standing foursquare against much of popular Christianity, which has become a shallow self-help cult whose chief aim is not cultivating discipleship but rooting out personal anxieties. But to refuse to see suffering as a means of sanctification is to surrender, in Huxley’s withering phrase, to “Christianity without tears.”

How are we supposed to judge the right approach to suffering though? Unfortunately, there is no clear formula. As Father Kirill Kaleda says, we ought not to go out looking for it. Even Christ, in Gethsemane, prayed that the cup of suffering might be taken from him if it be God’s will. The virtue of prudence is critical, in part to help us discern the difference between reasoning and rationalizing. All of us prefer the cup to pass, but if our moment comes, then we have to be ready to make a costly stand.

We will not know how to behave when that time arrives if we have not prepared ourselves to accept pain and loss for the sake of God’s kingdom. Most of us in the West don’t yet have opportunities to suffer for the faith like Christians under communism did, but we have their stories to guide us, as well as the accounts of Christian martyrdom worldwide throughout the ages. Familiarize yourself with their stories, and teach them to your children. These stories are near the core of the lived Christian experience, and form an essential part of Christian cultural memory. Learn them, so you will know when and how to live them.

God cannot will evil, though as he showed in his Passion, he can permit suffering for some greater good. Judging accurately whether or not he is calling us to share in his Passion in a particular instance requires having faith that our suffering will have purpose, though that purpose may not be clear to us at the time. When he went to prison as a layman, George Calciu was moved to deep conversion by the witness of priests who were his fellow inmates. When he returned to prison later in life, Calciu was a priest and led other inmates to Christ as he had been led decades earlier. Ogorodnikov’s ministry, he is confident, led condemned men to paradise. Krčméry’s laid the groundwork for the underground church. Solzhenitsyn emerged from the grinding misery of the gulag as a fearless man of God whose prophetic witness to the world helped bring down an evil empire.

When we act—either to embrace suffering on our own or to share in the suffering of others—we have to let it change us, as it changed these confessors of the communist yoke. It could make us bitter, angry, and vengeful, or it could serve as a refiner’s fire, as it did with Solzhenitsyn, Calciu, Krčméry, Ogorodnikov, and so many others, purifying our love of God and tortured humanity.

No Christian has the power to avoid suffering entirely. It is the human condition. What we do control is how we act in the face of it. Will we run from it and betray our Lord? Or will we accept it as a severe mercy? The choices we will make when put to the ultimate test depend on the choices we make today, in a time of peace. This is what Father Tomislav Kolaković understood when he arrived in Czechoslovakia and set about preparing the church for the coming persecution. This is why when the secret police came for Silvester Krčméry, he knew how to carry that cross like a true Christian.

Even as I prepare for bad times, that is the source of my hope. It’s not optimism — it’s hope. Whatever happens today at the polls, that will remain the source of my hope, not the capabilities and promises of princes and sons of men. Not in Trump. Not in Biden. Only in Jesus Christ. Might sound hokey to you, but that’s all I have.

How about you? How are you feeling today about the future of America?

UPDATE: Yes, this:

There's an entire class of American public intellectual whose brains are simply broken.

Yes, it's self-inflicted. Nothing actually happened to them beyond staring at pixels too long. But it's also reflective of where society is headed when all of life is mediated. https://t.co/v9zsC0NfDw

— Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) November 3, 2020

The post The Fateful Day Arrives appeared first on The American Conservative.

An America Afraid Of Its Left

Though I would be doing the same thing if I were a business owner, it still infuriates me:

Businesses across America are boarding up their windows ahead of potential chaos following tomorrow’s election as special police units prepare to tackle looters and rioters and foreign governments warn people not to visit the US for fear of civil unrest.

In cities all over the country on Monday, retailers, offices and art galleries were putting plywood on their windows to protect their inventory ahead of tomorrow night’s election and the mayhem it might spark, no matter which candidate wins.

You know what? Nobody fears pro-Trump riots. They fear antifa, they fear Black Lives Matter, they fear the Left — the same people who have been rioting all year, and for which our media have been carrying water. If the Trump voters are disappointed tomorrow, they’re not going to burn down their communities, smash windows and grab loot, and generally behave like a hoodlum.

Even if Biden wins, I would not be surprised if we saw rioting in some cities, simply because that’s what the militant left does. There were no MAGA riots this year, or any year.

Cities boarded up for fear of rioting. The President of the United States having to barricade himself in the White House. This is what the Left has done to our country in 2020. And you watch: if this happens, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and the lot will all be blaming Trump.

UPDATE:  [deleted]

UPDATE.2: The Left, openly strategizing to paralyze Washington DC, and target Trump supporters:

OH pic.twitter.com/OzUheBysQ7

— 2020 Retweet Champion Dr RollerGator PhD (@drrollergator) November 2, 2020

UPDATE.3: But not strictly confined to the Left. A reader writes:

I am writing this on the cusp of tomorrow’s election and I realized that in some ways I am truly fearful of what is to come. I think having a family multiples that fear. Not the fear that I need to hunker down in some bunker, not that kind of crazy, but the fear of that need to just be prepared mentally. Your book, Live Not By Lies, really did that for me.

Today I had a conversation with a guy who was angry at me because I was not voting for Trump (I am not voting for Biden either). Like you I am hesitant about the whole thing. This guy is a big Doug Wilson (Pastor at Moscow Id; that guy). Doug is a bit of a bully in my opinion and not the good kind. He tends to think once he is right, he is right despite differences. Wilson has been going on for the last few days about John Piper and Piper responded to Douglas which of course it goes back and forth etc. All of that to say the guy I talked to started with the comment, “Why don’t you enlighten me about the problems with Trump.” I know by now, years in politics and in higher education, that when someone starts with a comment like that they are ready for a reason to get in a fuss over something that is truly not of eternal value i.e. the Gospel is eternal not tomorrow’s vote kind of eternal value.

It got me thinking just about the degree of authoritarian bullying that we have moved towards up to this election. I live in San Antonio TX. We have Trump trucks running up and down roads everywhere. And yeah, I honestly believe they are trying to intimidate like they did on I-35 highway in Texas as the bus was traveling from San Antonio to Austin: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/31/biden-harris-bus-texas-trump-supporters-highway

They drive up on you and I have my kids in the car and they will just do outrageous stuff sometimes to show off or whatever.

But it really made me think of this totalitarian drive in people that we are seeing now in the United States, that pushes them to the extremes by means of even bullying people to vote one way or another. We see that from Biden supporters but it also comes from Trumpers too.

Wilson talks about all the right reason to vote for Trump with his most recent “vlog/blog” titled Something Like Dryer-Vent-Lint-for-Brains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCc7CVJeTAY

He holds the whole character that if you do not vote for Trump you are an idiot. But here is the kicker, “pastors” like Paula White and John Hagee heavily support Trump to a fault. And yet somehow Piper is the bad guy? Wilson is again a bully who thinks he is just always right. And that is how that guy was today. He was not there to have any real discussion.

I emailed you because at this time I am thankful to read and follow someone who thinks like me. It feels good to not be alone in this matter. I know I have emailed a few times, sorry. It is just that in these times I am thankful to God for men of courage. I always regretted not reaching out to others who have been an encouragement in my life, Sir Roger for example. And those are my observations.

Yeah, Doug Wilson. What a guy.

The reader gave me permission to publish this, and include his name, but I choose not to do that, to protect him. Just in case. Because that is where we are in America 2020.

UPDATE.4: From an American soldier in Iraq:

First, a quick note regarding the video of the National Guard in Chicago.  Those are absolutely NOT mounted machine guns.  What they are is standard up-armored HMMWVs that have a CROWS system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CROWS) mounted, which is common in combat arms units.  I’m very familiar with the CROWS, because I used it frequently in Afghanistan 10 years ago.  It consists of a screen and joystick inside the vehicle, linked to a mount with daylight and thermal cameras outside, plus a laser rangefinder and a large ammunition storage box, and can be configured to accept a variety of machine guns and automatic grenade launchers.  However, while the system is basically fixed on the vehicle, requiring mechanics to remove, the actual machine guns (or AGLs) are only mounted when specifically required (i.e. range, training, or combat), in part because then the truck has to be attended 24×7.

I agree that it WOULD be a huge escalation if the ARNG did mount machine guns, but that is not what happened here, and any combat arms soldier can easily see that from the video; especially now, it’s important not to panic and start spreading inflammatory BS.  Plus, according to Google Maps, the ARNG armory is less than a mile away from where that video was taken, so the Guard is likely just doing their regular mission with some extra preparation for civil disturbances (i.e. issuing out riot gear, not machine guns).

Also, to respond to the larger issue of your piece, while I agree that it’s terrible that people have to fear rioting over an election, and that businesses are boarding up their windows, I am absolutely worried sick about violence from both sides (probably more destruction of property and opportunistic looting from the “left” but voter intimidation and far right militia violence from the right).  When I came home on leave from Iraq last month, I tried to get my wife to go over some rehearsals on basic home and self defense with my guns, but she’s too busy dealing with the overstressed ER where she will be working on Election Night (from COVID and the general deplorable state of our healthcare system).

One of the most depressing and infuriating things I’ve encountered over here in Iraq is that many of the men I’ve proudly stood shoulder to shoulder with for months, defending our diplomatic facilities against rockets and drone attacks, have increasingly made it clear they care more about Trump than democracy.  Given the sorry state of the mail in general nowadays, and especially coming from over here, many people have been sending their ballots back with those traveling home to make sure they get delivered in time.  On multiple occasions, I’ve heard senior federal law enforcement officers (who I thought I could respect and trust) “joke” about discarding the ballots of anyone they don’t think is 100% voting for Trump.  While I try to keep a low profile politically (beyond saying that I’m not a fan of Trump OR Biden, which is true), when I followed up to confirm if they were serious, they didn’t hesitate.

Anyway, I’ll close by noting that we’ve had several deaths of local staff due to COVID, and I’m currently stuck in quarantine, so I’m not able to distract myself with work and am fighting the temptation to give into my OCD RSS reading.  I’ve been reading your blog for several years now and always recommended you as a thoughtful conservative (and truthfully I used to call myself socially conservative, because I loath the direction the left is going with racial and sexual identity politics over holding financial elites accountable), but if I’m honest I find myself fighting back the urge to hate anyone who could support such a vile and destructive man (when until recently I argued with my wife that that shouldn’t be a reason to stop seeing people socially), which I suppose is the true measure of his success.

I appreciate the e-mail, and have deleted the video I had embedded above, in the first update.

The post An America Afraid Of Its Left appeared first on The American Conservative.

Hating Your Mama Over Politics

This Reuters report is so depressing:

When lifelong Democrat Mayra Gomez told her 21-year-old son five months ago that she was voting for Donald Trump in Tuesday’s presidential election, he cut her out of his life.

“He specifically told me, ‘You are no longer my mother, because you are voting for Trump’,” Gomez, 41, a personal care worker in Milwaukee, told Reuters. Their last conversation was so bitter that she is not sure they can reconcile, even if Trump loses his re-election bid.

“The damage is done. In people’s minds, Trump is a monster. It’s sad. There are people not talking to me anymore, and I’m not sure that will change,” said Gomez, who is a fan of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants and handling of the economy.

Gomez is not alone in thinking the bitter splits within families and among friends over Trump’s tumultuous presidency will be difficult, if not impossible, to repair, even after he leaves office.

In interviews with 10 voters – five Trump supporters and five backing Democratic candidate Joe Biden – few could see the wrecked personal relationships caused by Trump’s tenure fully healing, and most believed them destroyed forever.

More:

Gayle McCormick, 77, who separated from her husband William, 81, after he voted for Trump in 2016, said, “I think the legacy of Trump is going to take a long time to recover from.”

The two still spend time together, although she is now based in Vancouver, he in Alaska. Two of her grandchildren no longer speak to her because of her support for Democrat Hillary Clinton four years ago. She has also become estranged from other relatives and friends who are Trump supporters.

She is not sure those rifts with friends and family will ever mend, because each believes the other to have a totally alien value system.

Read it all. What kind of lunatic would tell his own mother that she is dead to him because of her vote for Trump? What kind of monster would leave her husband because he voted for Trump? What kind of broken people would refuse to talk to their grandmother because she voted for Hillary Clinton?

In the story, some people blame Trump for this. Bull. This is on us — every one of us, liberal or conservative, who values politics more than family. That number also includes people who care so little about preserving family bonds that they will not shut up about their personal politics (pro- or anti-Trump) for the sake of respecting others in the family, or friendships.

I cannot imagine caring so much about politics that I would cut off a friend or family member. I don’t make friends on the basis of politics, so why would I cease being friends with someone I otherwise cared about, because they came to a different political conclusion. I mean, yeah, if it were Germany 1934 or Russia 1917. But we aren’t there. We get there more quickly by becoming the sort of people who value politics more than friends and family.

Here’s a great reflection by Ian Marcus Corbin on what we have become, and what we might be if we turn back from it. Excerpts:

America, as a community, is convulsing. When we picture our fellow citizens, many of us hate and fear what we see. How could we not? Our LED screens are jammed with Americans who look like monsters – all different, all threatening, all judging, shrieking, denouncing, hoarding, and even – God help us – shooting. Our reflex is to hide ourselves away, or cluster with the safe ones who are like us, who share our interests, gender, skin tone, whatever—and maybe even to make a whole politics, a whole identity, out of this hiding or these clusters. This is mass loneliness, and as Hannah Arendt says in her reflections on the Third Reich, it’s the seedbed of tyranny.

Yes. This is what I explain in Live Not By Lies. Corbin talks about a new study out reporting research findings “that awe, the perception of one’s own finitude and fragility, led to ‘reduced dogmatism and increased perceptions of social cohesion.'” This reminds me of the 1991 movie Grand Canyon, whose central thesis — that awe before the mystery of life should bring us together — seems vindicated by this study. Corbin writes:

After study participants were shown images of the night sky, they reported being less certain of their own opinions, and less interested in establishing separation between themselves and their political opponents. Facing the massive, cold cosmos, our knowledge, power, and the pet differences that keep us apart melt down to size. A few minutes of stargazing, and our feeling for universal human solidarity starts to grow. You feel like it should have been there all along.

And of course it has been. We just haven’t been paying attention; we live in a time and place that seems absolutely determined to keep us from acknowledging or sharing our weakness, that fetishizes strength and independence. It doesn’t need to be this way. Alienation is a choice. I recall the moment I first realized this. Sometime in my early twenties I was complaining to my dear friend Andrei, a Russian by birth, about the awkwardness of being forced to spend two hours in the dingy office of my auto mechanic – awkward, I explained, because Tom and I (Tom who also fixed the cars of my father and grandfather) have very little in common, and therefore little to talk about.

Andrei was nonplussed. Why the hell would I say that? Tom and I are both human, we share a great deal. We’re sad and hopeful. We regret that we’re not living our lives as well as we want to. We long to be loved and respected, and fear at times that our relationships are growing stale or distant or resentful. There’s a thousand years of conversation between us, ready to be broached. I asked him, incredulous, whether he would talk about these things with his mechanic in Moscow. Yeah, of course, he said. Why on earth wouldn’t you? It was—it is—so obvious: there’s a decent, hopeful sufferer like you standing behind the cash register, another one fixing your car, another one competing for the promotion you want, another panhandling outside your office, another one handing you a speeding ticket. You are one yourself. I am too. Things ought to be simpler between us.

Read it all. There’s a lot more there. And it’s not goopy sentimentality, either. It touches on the core of what it means to be human.

As Corbin avers, I believe there is a connection between the technology we have moved to the center of our consciousness, and this collapse of solidarity, and indeed of the capacity for solidarity. Look at this from one of the country’s top researcher of youth psychology:

Just out: Depression among U.S. teen girls doubled from 2009 to 2019 and was up 74% among teen boys, according to just-released data from the gov’t administered National Survey of Drug Use and Health. What does this mean? pic.twitter.com/H09Pmo7Bss

— Jean Twenge (@jean_twenge) October 29, 2020

Smartphones were introduced in 2007; social media soon followed. Whenever I talk to middle school and high school teachers, I hear the same thing: there is nothing that competes with the power of social media to socialize young people (or rather, un-socialize them) — and it is tearing these kids up inside. 

That’s young people — but what about the elderly woman who leaves her husband because he voted for Trump? What’s her excuse? What about the man in his twenties to cuts his mother off because she voted for Trump? What about the middle-aged man who turns family members against each other by going to holiday gatherings and not shutting his big fat mouth about how the “Demonrats” are going to be the death of us all?

What do we do about a person like this?:

 

Bandy X. Lee isn’t some nobody. She is a Yale University psychiatrist and holder of a master’s of divinity degree from Yale. And she believes that Trump supporters can only be persuaded to abandon their support for the sitting President of the United States by having some immense trauma visited upon them, along the lines of the firebombing of Dresden.

How does someone come to believe that their countrymen need to be treated that way — need to see their cities leveled! — because of their politics? Again, I remind you: this isn’t some fringe nut, but a Yale-trained psychiatrist and religious thinker. This is the kind of elite figure who will usher in soft totalitarianism because she does not think her fellow Americans are simply wrong, but evil.

A country in which people despise their family members and end friendships over politics is a country ripening itself for tyranny. I was talking at church yesterday with a friend who, I think, is going to vote for Biden. So what? I love him as a brother in Christ, and I cherish his friendship. We never talk about politics, and probably won’t again, until the next election rolls around. If the mob ever comes for me, I know he will stand at my side, as I will stand by his. That’s what America should be about. That’s what the America I live in will remain, no matter what happens tomorrow, and in the months and years to come. I will never forsake a friend of a family member over politics.

—

By the way, readers, if you’d like to read a supplement to this blog, check out Daily Dreher, my new (free) Substack newsletter. I’m using it for non-polemical writing — that is, reflecting in a non-argumentative vein on faith, ideas, and smaller things that I can’t get to on this blog. Some of you have been telling me for a while that you miss the quirkiness that used to be in this space. Maybe you’ll find some of that in my daily newsletter. If I get enough readers, I might start charging a modest monthly subscription rate, but for now, it’s free while I decide if I can keep up that writing pace, and you decide if you like it. Again, it’s not a substitute for what you see here, but rather is complementary, just less political and heated.

UPDATE: More Bandy X. Lee from today, on why Trump is worse than Hitler:

The post Hating Your Mama Over Politics appeared first on The American Conservative.

Kamala Harris’s Social(ist) Media

You need to watch this short animation from the Biden-Harris campaign, featuring the voice of Kamala Harris:

There’s a big difference between equality and equity. pic.twitter.com/n3XfQyjLNe

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 1, 2020

The clip is shocking. What she is talking about is — there’s no other way to put this — Communism. No, she’s not talking about Marx, Lenin, and the rest. She’s talking about the need to create a system in which everybody ends up at the same place. In other words, Kamala Harris believes that a socially just system is one in which all outcomes are equal. This is what the so-called “equity” crusaders within academic institutions are after. And this is what the woman who might be elected vice president of the United States — and who, given the frailty of her running mate, will almost certainly go into the 2024 election as the incumbent president — wants for America.

There it is. Watch the clip. She doesn’t believe in equality of opportunity. She believes in equality of outcome. “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.” Her words — and not a gaffe, but something that the Biden-Harris campaign took the time to make into a special video, and tweet.

Quite a vision for America that one has. But again, this is the contemporary Left. Even the devout Trump-hater and Biden voter Andrew Sullivan is shocked:

When I wrote Live Not By Lies, I did not anticipate that the Democrats would openly promote this, not so soon; I thought they would continue pushing through institutions, including Big Business (via Woke Capitalism), but would conceal their aims in the political realm for a bit longer. But 2020 has been surprising in many ways. All Americans believe in equality of opportunity, but the kind of system that we would have to build to guarantee equality of outcome would be tyrannical and unjust. Again, this is the Marxist dream. And now we have the Democratic presidential ticket endorsing the creation of just such a system. People whose natural gifts and willingness to work harder cannot expect to get ahead in Biden-Harris’s America. They must have things taken from them, and opportunities denied, so that everybody can arrive at the same place.

Some are trying to dismiss it, but not James Lindsay, the mathematician and leading anti-woke activist, who early-voted Trump, despite being on the Left, because he has seen the militant illiberalism of the Left up close on campus. His reaction to the Harris clip:

Herein lies the fundamental difference between myself and my friends and colleagues who differ with me on this election. I take them absolutely literally and realize it's completely possible to take literally because it's been happening all around us already for years. https://t.co/6qFKNO1UW5

— James Lindsay, Bd.E. (@ConceptualJames) November 2, 2020

Is this the kind of America you want? Again, I can’t believe that the Democrats are so open about this. If they win the election tomorrow, especially if the Democrats take the Senate as well, the one silver lining (only for me) is that it will boost sales of Live Not By Lies,as conservatives begin to face the future the Left has planned for us, and start to build the deep resistance.

Maybe we will be spared. A reader e-mailed from the West to say that the lines for early voting in his semi-rural area have been astonishing. His county is one of the most Democratic in the US, but he said that the massive voter registrations this season have been primarily from regular people – ranchers, cowboys, construction workers, oil field workers and service workers – who had never bothered voting before. They are mostly registering Independent according to reliable sources he knows. The reader is confident that these people haven’t been counted in the polls as they are a group considered to be non-likely voters.

He mentioned that his wife, a naturalized citizen from China, has voted Democratic for as long as she has been able to vote here. This year, she’s voting for Trump. Why? “This whole year has reminded her too much of the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “She has been horrified watching the events of the summer unfold.”

The reader added that she has been part of a big TV network/newspaper tracking poll. She certainly did not ask to be; they randomly called her first back in the spring primary season. She was afraid to turn them down and wished she had never answered the first call. They call her once a week to ask her who she’s voting for. She has told them consistently that she’s a Biden voter, and she has been careful to answer all the ancillary questions in a “liberal way” so as not to give them any idea there is a problem. But that’s not what she really believes. Rather, she is terrified of getting on a list somewhere as a Trump voter. When the reader asks her why she is lying to the pollsters, her response: “You Americans are so naive and so trusting. Chairman Mao and the Red Guard did exactly this same kind of thing in so many clever ways. You will get on a list somewhere and when the time comes, your life will be over. I will never put my family through what I went through. That is why I came here in the first place — to get away from all that.”

The reader said he was out yesterday doing some work adjacent to where people in his town were lined up to vote, and he overheard what people were chatting about. He said there were lots of people who were clearly service workers, cowboys, and construction types – just the people being reported as new voters. “And I heard them talking mostly about antifa, Portland, transgendered granddaughters being forced to compete with men, Hunter Biden photos, and Joe Biden dementia.” This was constant — and this was going on for a little more than 2 hours.

The reader said that this is happening in a highly Democratic county. He reports there are no Biden signs anywhere on cars, houses or billboards but lots of MAGA signs went up like mushrooms after a summer rain this week.

We will see. After the last-minute Kamala Harris socialist social media outburst, none of us can say we weren’t warned. Vote accordingly. The sunshiny vision that the Democratic Party’s propaganda arm just released brings to mind this sunshiny vision that Chairman Mao’s team released back in the day:

View of a two-color woodcut (by the Chinese Government), entitled ‘Sun, Flowers, Soldiers’ in the original caption, of Communist propaganda, twentieth century. (Photo by Buyenlarge/Getty Images)

—

Folks, I have a new Substack newsletter where I write about more personal things, in a non-polemic style. It’s free — for now, anyway — and if you’d like to check it out, visit here. It’s called Daily Dreher (cue the “daily drear” jokes), and it gets mailed to you — world of wonders! — every dang day!

The post Kamala Harris’s Social(ist) Media appeared first on The American Conservative.

Peggy Noonan Hates Both Choices

The Wall Street Journal columnist didn’t vote for president in 2016, and is not voting for president this year (well, she’s writing in Edmund Burke). Here’s why:

For 20 years this column has had at the back of its mind fear of a terrible and immediate crisis that could befall America from its foes. We have seen Mr. Trump’s crisis management in one that unfurled not over minutes but months. Last February I wrote I had a feeling the 2020 election was being settled then, that Mr. Trump had finally met a problem he couldn’t talk his way out of. I believe that’s what happened: He played down the pandemic, lied, made uninformed claims at briefings that serious people were struggling to keep useful. He produced chaos. The country can’t afford any of that in a crisis that is sudden and severe. He would only be worse, more dangerous, more careless, in a second term.

You look at that White House and you know nobody’s really there inside. It’s a hollow government mostly populated by second- and third-rate people, with the seasoned and competent fired and fled. It’s all so dangerous.

A vote for him is not possible for me.

But why not Biden? He seems normal. But, she says, “normal” is not “normalcy,” and we’re not going to have normalcy for a long time. More:

The Democrats in their current construction are animated and being pushed internally by a progressive left that punches above its weight and numbers, and will continue to do so until it achieves full party dominance. In the next few years, especially if Democrats have the Senate, the new administration looks to become a runaway train with Joe Biden its hapless and reluctant conductor.

The progressive left endorses and pushes for the identity politics that is killing us, an abortion regime way beyond anything that could be called reasonable or civilized and on which it will make no compromise; it opposes charter schools and other forms of public school liberation; it sees the police as the enemy, it demonstrates no distinct fidelity to freedom of speech and, most recently, its declared hopes range from court packing to doing away with the Electoral College and adding states to the union to pick up Senate seats. The left is animated by a spirit of historical vandalism seen most lately in the “1619 Project” and the attitudes it represents.

Read it all, if you have a subscription.

I agree with this diagnosis, though as of right now, two days before the election, I’m planning to vote third party (the American Solidarity Party). There is no way I can vote for Joe Biden; to do so would empower the worst people in America, people who already hold all the high ground in key US institutions. It would be to empower people like this fanatical Boston Globe columnist:

Note well that Renee Graham isn’t some women’s studies professor at a Seven Sisters college. She is a featured columnist at one of the most influential newspapers in America. And she sees no difference between supporters of the sitting US president, and an army of Islamist berserkers who rape, pillage, and murder. If you, like me, read The New York Times and Washington Post daily, you know how the ruling class thinks, and what they have in store for the rest of us. Noonan is right: Biden is going to be the “hapless and reluctant conductor” of this runaway train.

I agree with Noonan’s view that Donald Trump is a bad man who has been a bad president. Unlike with her, it is possible, slightly, that I could vote for him, solely because I deeply fear the Democrats in power, for reasons that all readers of this blog will understand. Because my state’s vote is safely in Trump hands, my presidential vote doesn’t really matter. I have the liberty to vote my conscience instead of my fears, which is why I plan to cast a third-party vote for the American Solidarity Party. (I intend to vote Republican for House and Senate.)

But let me ask you Trump voters: what would you say to me, in my circumstances (that is, here in a safely Trump state), to convince me to vote not third party, but for Trump? Serious question. And let me warn you: if you have nothing to say but insults, not only will I not post your comment, you may find yourself banned. I’m asking for a serious argument from you on the question.

Whoever wins, I expect the next four years to be terrible for America. Things aren’t going to feel “normal” for many years.

UPDATE: A Czech émigré reader emails:

1948 – Václav Benda – Pinochet

I said it before and I am saying it again: this is not the time for occupying moral high ground.

Vaclav Benda, the Catholic dissident, controversially supported Chilean right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, because Pinochet was the only realistic alternative to Communism in that country. That’s what the reader is talking about here. Also, 1948 was the year of the Communist putsch in Czechoslovakia that turned the reader’s homeland into a totalitarian state.

UPDATE.2: From the mailbag:

It seems to me that, given what you have to say about Biden and the Democratic Party, you should boldly vote for Trump and announce that vote on your blog. Unless I am somehow missing what you are saying in your post, that’s what you would recommend your unsafe state readers do. You seem to associate the word “safe” with Trump. Can you say with absolute certainty that Louisiana will go with Trump, and that, due to that fact, you can indulge an idealistic third party vote? I don’t think you can, and I don’t think that, based on polling data, voter registration, or whatever, that anyone can predict anything with absolute certainty.

I voted for Marco Rubio in the primary election in 2016, and I would still much rather have him as president than Trump. But, based on analyses I read after that election, I became convinced that he would have lost the general election decisively. I reluctantly voted for Trump, because he seemed to be such a protean force, and I wasn’t sure which direction he would go. (Do you remember when–at Oxford, I believe–Jimmy Carter told students that he preferred Trump out of all of the Republican candidates, because he had no fixed ideology?) I have already voted for Trump in this election with no hesitation whatsoever. (My ISideWith test results had Trump come in at 75% and Biden at 46%.) At least over these past four years, he has come down decisively on our side. Sure, I’m embarrassed by his silly tweets, I’m disgusted that he never came forth with the “great” healthcare plan (for many years, I have preferred a bare-bones national healthcare plan funded by taxes which allows for private insurance and plug-ins provided as perks by employers) and I, as a Republican, opposed the Republican tax plan which Trump supported. (I believe we need to raise taxes AND reduce spending to deal with the deficit and debt. I think Republicans are stuck in the Reagan Era, which is over. Circumstances have changed, and they require a different approach.) But, overall, it seems to me that Trump has done a decent job against almost impossible odds. Before he could even take office, he was under attack from everyone– from a vengeful John McCain (with his promotion of the spurious Steele Dossier) to the partisan left-wing media conglomerate to crazy, vengeful, out-in-the-cold Never Trumpers (including the fools involved with what would become the Lincoln Project, et al) to, naturally, the Democratic Machine.

Sure, one could argue, I suppose, that it might be best for Trump to lose now, so that a better Republican team (I would like to see Nikki Haley and Tim Scott) could rise up in 2024. But, the damage that could be done between now and then simply boggles the mind.

Yes, I would suggest unsafe state readers vote for Trump.


Another reader writes an excellent letter:

Until the very last second I had cold feet on voting for Trump.  I could have written your blog posts for you, so similar was my thinking.  When you mentioned the American Solidarity Party, I thought I had my out.  But an interaction with my daughter and a run in the woods finally persuaded me that I needed to do something far more difficult, and cast my vote for Trump.  I hope this might help you in your own struggle.

It started with a talk with my 4th grade daughter, who attends the local Christian school.  She mentioned that they aren’t allowed to talk about the election in class; the reason she gave was that the teachers told the students “different people like different candidates and so we don’t want to offend”.  I was a little surprised at this; how are we supposed to stand together on anything in this country if we can’t have reasoned discussions about our differences, and ignore and avoid each others’ perspectives?  With that in mind, I wanted to explain to my daughter why we felt the way we did about the presidential candidates, my wife (who was definitively voting Trump) especially.

I told her there were three main reasons we preferred a Trump presidency over Biden:

1) Trump supports religious freedom more than Biden.  The Leftists driving the Democratic Party are overtly anti-Christian, to the point that they would force believers to deny their faith, violate their consciences, and ultimately destroy the Church from within, in part by forcing religious organizations to hire people with no intention of honoring orthodoxy.  I calibrated this to my fourth grader by saying, “We prefer Trump because he wants to let Christians be Christians, but many of the people who support Biden don’t think religion is as important as politics and they don’t want to allow Christians to do certain things.”

2) Trump has opposed—at least through policy and judicial nominations—abortion, while the Democratic Party and Biden strongly support it.  In fourth-grade terms, “Some people don’t think a baby is really a human being worth protecting and loving while in the womb.  We believe that baby is fully human and fully loved by God.  Biden and the people that support him don’t believe this, and we can’t support that.”

3) Trump is not actively hostile to western institutions, including the role and reality of gender in the human experience, the importance of marriage, and even the family itself.  The people that support Biden are at best ambivalent about these things, and sometimes actively hostile.  While perhaps a minority on the far Left, they have disproportionate power and a huge amount of influence in the public discourse.  To my fourth grader, “Trump isn’t attacking families and marriages, but some of Biden’s supporters think these things are bad and should be done away with, and we have to fight to protect them.”

In my mind, those are the 3 most important reasons why Trump is better.  But that was not enough to warm my cold feet, and I was still contemplating not voting or voting 3rd party.  This was on my mind as I went for a long jog through the woods, praying for guidance as I went.  These runs have a way of clearing and focusing the mind, a form of meditation free from petty distraction and the tyranny of the mind.  One could say the channel to God is clearer during such activities, and I prayed: “Lord, what should I do?”

I thought about my reasons for not voting Trump.  For one, it had to do with having a clear conscience.  I wanted to be able to say, if Trump did something really bad, “I stood on principle and did not vote for a man whose character I do not approve.”  But what does that really say about me?  Am I such an exemplar of all that is holy that the biggest tarnish to my virtue would be casting a vote for Trump?  Would that be the biggest charge levied against me by the Accuser?  Hardly.  I realized with a bit of a shock that this reason for not voting Trump was merely a virtue signal.  ‘Look at me—I’m a good person; I didn’t even vote for Trump!’  This was doubly true of voting for a 3rd party candidate I was 100% positive had no chance of winning.  Why do that?  To show how good I am?  To show my displeasure with the system, rather than working with it as best I could?  Again, this was mere virtue signaling.  Who was I showing, and why?  I didn’t like the answers.

And certainly if I did not vote for Trump because his character and morality disqualifies him, or a 3rd party because other than ’sending a message’ (and signaling my virtue) it was worthless, Biden was no answer, either.  So my options really were vote (for anyone) or don’t vote at all.

So what if I just didn’t vote?  Abstained?  Would this be the truly virtuous route?  Again, I had plausible denial.  “I didn’t vote for the bad man.”  But then…where would I draw the line for when a candidate is so bad that he doesn’t deserve a vote?  Kennedy was all but a folk hero to my parents’ generation, but the more honest accounts that came out long after his death paint a very, very different picture.  To some, George W. Bush was a genocidal war criminal.  Others saw Bill Clinton as the coup de grace of American Presidential Character.  “There is no one righteous, no, not one.”  Should I then abstain from all of my country’s elections?  Again, what would I say to my Creator?  ‘It was bad, but I didn’t have anything to do with it; I’m a good person.  I didn’t vote!’  I believe the Creator would say, “You live in a messy, sloppy, sinful world where even there I am present.  You thought that by doing nothing—by not voting for someone who despite his own wickedness could be my instrument to help protect my church, who despite his own hypocrisy was willing to protect my unborn children, who despite his petty nature would protect the families that worship me—that this would be accredited unto you as some great righteousness?  As though I do not every day use wicked men like you, even in your sin, to accomplish my ends?”

This seemed unlikely.  I don’t view Donald Trump as some great leader, and my opinion of his Christianity, though I will never condemn a man in absolute terms because I do not know his heart and his struggles, is even worse than that.  I don’t like our ridiculous two-party system and the myriad corruption that goes with it. But it is what we have, and there are choices, and I can act within this imperfect system with imperfect candidates, or I can rest on my “virtue” by doing nothing.  And I am not so confident in my virtue that I think that is enough to rest on before my Creator.

I don’t like Trump.  If there were any other candidate with any chance at winning that supported—or at least didn’t disdain—Christian values, I would vote for them.  But he is one of exactly two candidates with any hope of winning the presidency, and the only one whose party is not openly hostile toward the Church.  If I do nothing, I have no right to find respite in my self-perceived virtue as things continue to deteriorate.  I do not believe it is enough, before God or man, to say, “At least I was principled when given a choice to vote for something, and I did nothing.”  I believe the church in this country will continue to decline.  Christianity’s influence will deteriorate.  We will be persecuted.  But if the Persian Cyrus could be an instrument of God’s will as regards the Jews, certainly even Trump can serve God whether or not he follows Him.  If Daniel could faithfully serve Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus “in good faith”, is it really a reflection of my personal virtue to vote for an imperfect man when it benefits my people?  Should I be so shocked and skeptical that the moral will of God could be served by a ‘gentile’, ‘infidel’ ‘king’?

This isn’t some justification or claim that God wants Trump to be president, or commanded me to vote for him.  I am doing my best to vote according to what I think God would have me do, where I am, with what I have.  That’s it.  And God certainly permitted for Trump to be the President, so I find it odd that conservatives often act as though this occurrence is somehow in defiance of God’s will, and that He could not possibly work through this.

And one last area where I must respectfully suggest you are wrong: your vote, blood-red state or not, matters.  I made the same argument you are making in 2016 and withheld my vote.  But in 2020, the media and left apparatus having all but openly sanctioned violence in a disputed election, we can scarce afford a close call, electoral/popular vote split.  If Biden wins, let him do so without controversy.  But I cannot vote for Biden.  Thus, I can virtue signal my vote to a 3rd party, or I can hope that Trump, for the 3 reasons I gave, wins.  But if he wins, for the sake of peace he must win both the electoral and popular vote.  And so, reluctantly, for the sake of preserving the church and protecting the innocent, even though I am in a state Trump will surely win anyway, there I cast my vote.

Your vote does matter, Rod, and you know as well as I do that giving it to a 3rd party candidate will not influence the outcome of this election beyond ensuring the popular vote is closer and giving you some moral ‘security blanket’ on which to claim virtue in the future.  I don’t say that as an insult; I say that because I was thinking the exact same thing.  But I can say that I can stand before my Creator with a clear conscience for my vote, this time.  If we are to be exiled in Babylon, we can still work within the Babylonian system for good.  Thus I implore you to fight against what could be imminent disaster on November 3, should the election’s outcome be cast into doubt.  You and I cannot support Biden and the left, but supporting a 3rd party is little more than putting our self-perceived holiness ahead of the practical reality we’ve been given to work in.  Thus I would urge you to vote for Trump.

Another reader:

Here are 2 reasons for you to vote Trump and not 3rd Party despite LA being safely in the Trump column:

1 – Given the announced and expected rioting by the Left in the event of a Trump win, it is important that it be as clear a win as possible so as to deprive them of fuel for their fires.  So just because he’s going to win LA, your vote still matters in that regard.

2 – Similar to the above, it is important if at all possible for Trump to win the national popular vote to deprive the “down with the Electoral College” bunch of any air as well.  The assault on our institutions is a hallmark of the radical Left and it is important to protect all of them that we can.

Your vote always matters!

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