Rod Dreher's Blog, page 106

Solidarity? In America?

In his latest column, David Brooks talks about a new book by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing, about American social decline. Brooks writes:

Putnam and Garrett take the data from diverse spheres and produce different versions of the same chart, which is an inverted U. Until the late 1960s, American life was improving across a range of measures. Since then, it’s a story of decay.

Why did all these different things happen in unison and then suddenly turn around all at once? Maybe economic change drove everything? But no, the timing is off. Economic inequality widened a bit later than most of the other trends. Maybe it was political dysfunction? Nope. That, too, happened a bit later.

The crucial change was in mind-set and culture. As Putnam and Garrett write: “The story of the American experiment in the twentieth century is one of a long upswing toward increasing solidarity, followed by a steep downturn into increasing individualism. From ‘I’ to ‘we’ and back again to ‘I’.”

The use of that word “solidarity” reminded me of something I wanted to share with you. I’ve been agonizing for a while over my presidential vote this November. When I looked at the Louisiana ballot, I was surprised to see the American Solidarity Party candidates — Brian Carroll and his running mate Amar Patel — on the presidential line. There are several people I know somewhat and respect — Leah Libresco, Fordham professor Charlie Camosy, Tara Thieke — who are enthusiasts for the ASP, and even active in the party. I checked out their platform the other night. Excerpts from it:

Life

Our party is founded on an unwavering commitment to defend life and to promote policies that safeguard the intrinsic dignity of the human person from conception until natural death. To this end, we advocate legal protections for vulnerable persons, as well as laws that facilitate authentic human freedom and ensure that all people have access to everything they need to thrive. Our whole-life approach guides the entire platform below, including subsequent segments on the right to a social safety net, criminal justice, and foreign policy.

Federal and state governments must enact constitutional and legal measures establishing the right to life from conception until natural death. These measures specifically include a constitutional amendment clarifying that there is no right to abortion, as well as laws that prohibit or restrict abortion. Because human life begins at conception, the intentional destruction of human embryos in any context must end.

Federal, state, and local governments must end taxpayer funding of organizations that provide, promote, or facilitate abortions, and of health-care plans that include abortion coverage. Such funding should be redirected to organizations that promote healthy pregnancies and prenatal care.

Federal and state governments must end capital punishment in light of its disproportionate use against those with fewer legal resources, the impossibility of reversal, and the existence of alternative ways to ensure protection for the rest of society.

We support efforts to help prevent the tragedy of suicide, including universal access to affordable mental-health care and the destigmatization of mental illness. Assisted suicide and euthanasia are a violation of disability rights, medical ethics, and human dignity, and must be prohibited in every state.

Federal and state governments should collaborate to guarantee universal healthcare by diverse means, including single-payer initiatives, direct subsidization of provider networks, subsidized education for medical professionals willing to work in rural areas, support for cost-sharing programs and mutual aid societies, home care grants, simplified regulation, and the easing of restrictions on the importation of prescription drugs.

Health policy must include protections for those with preexisting, chronic, and terminal conditions. We must include those who have no means to save for an emergency, people at every stage of life from prenatal care to hospice care, and people who find themselves in need of medical assistance while away from their home network.

Since the United States has the worst health outcomes of any developed country in proportion to the amount of money it spends, the federal government needs to negotiate pricing to end corporate exploitation of the captive audience of patients.

More:

Family

The natural family, founded on the marriage of one man and one woman, is the fundamental unit and basis of every human society. Family breakdown is a key contributor to widespread social problems in this country. In order to promote stable families, it is in the interest of the state to support marriage recognized as the exclusive union of one man and one woman for life. At the same time, we recognize that the state must support the needs of people—especially children, as well as the elderly and disabled—in families of all kinds.

States should repeal policies that penalize couples for getting married or that encourage divorce. At the same time, such reforms should not come at the cost of helping single parents.

States must repeal no-fault divorce laws, which effectively undermine the permanence of marriage. At the same time, it is vital to continue efforts to prevent and prosecute domestic violence.

In opposition to the commodification of children and the reproductive process, gestational surrogacy contracts and sperm banks should be prohibited. Adoption and fostering should be encouraged as a redemptive alternative, but with the understanding that the separation of children from their biological parents is never the primary goal.

Federal and state governments should allow public funding for services that promote stable, healthy marriages and the flourishing of children, even when such services are provided by religious institutions with religious values.

Pregnancy, childbirth, and neonatal care should all be fully covered by all healthcare plans so that no family need worry about the expenses of bringing a child into the world.

Workplace accommodations for parents, including paid parental leave, flexible scheduling, and affordable child care should be available to as many families as possible. Further, no family should be forced to have two full-time incomes just to survive, and thus policies subsidizing child care by parents staying at home should be enacted. Funding and services should also be provided to encourage families to care for elderly and disabled family members at home without being impoverished by lost income. This could include preferential housing options, tax credits, and respite care.

We reject the idea that surgical or hormonal treatment to circumvent the natural, healthy development and function of the body is necessary health care. In particular, we vigorously defend the right of parents to protect their minor children from such treatment. We call for legislation prohibiting any form of gender reassignment surgery on children.

To create a more pro-family culture and strengthen the social fabric of neighborhoods, we favor efforts to make public spaces child-friendly, encourage outdoor play, and reform legal and administrative practices that unfairly penalize parents for giving children a reasonable degree of independence.

And:

Economics

The American Solidarity Party believes that political economy (economics) is a branch of political ethics, and therefore rejects models of economic behavior that undermine human dignity with greed and naked self-interest. We advocate for an economic system which focuses on creating a society of wide-spread ownership (sometimes referred to as “distributism”) rather than having the effect of degrading the human person as a cog in the machine.

Our goal is to create conditions which allow single-income families to support themselves with dignity.

We support policies that encourage the formation and strengthening of labor unions. Efforts by private entities to use public power to prevent union activities or to retaliate against workers who organize for their rights ought to be resisted at every level.

We call for the repeal of corporate welfare policies, for shifting the tax system to target unearned income and reckless financiers, and for changing regulations to benefit small and locally-owned businesses rather than multinational corporations. Economic rentiers and speculators who produce nothing but only take from workers through gimmicks allowed by corrupt relationships with public power need to pay their fair share through taxes on land, capital gains, and financial transactions.

We will work to restore the requirement that corporations must serve a public good in order to be granted the benefit of limited liability. We support the prohibition of corporate bylaws and the repeal of state legislation requiring shareholder profit to trump considerations such as employee wellbeing and environmental protection.

To deprive workers of their wages is a “sin that cries out to heaven.” The Department of Labor must investigate all cases of wage theft and fraud in a swift manner.

We support mechanisms that allow workers to share in the ownership and management of their production, such as trade guilds, cooperatives, and employee stock ownership programs. Rather than consigning workers to wage slavery under far-away masters, such ownership models respect their essential dignity.

Industrial policy and economic incentives need to be re-ordered to place human dignity first and to recognize that the family is the basic unit of economic production. We are committed to policies that emphasize local production, family-owned businesses, and cooperative ownership structures. Measures that prevent large corporations from passing on their transportation costs to local communities will help re-energize local production and local enterprises.

The bloated, “too big to fail,” multinational economic concerns which dominate the economic landscape need to be brought to heel and concerted antitrust action must be taken to break up the oligarchies that use their private power to corruptly influence public governance.

The monopolistic power of corporations, especially in the area of patent and copyright law, allows them to price-gouge workers and families. We call for a restructuring of intellectual property laws to encourage innovation rather than rent-seeking.

We support and encourage measures which allow local communities to limit the power of outside interests in managing their land. Tenant unions, community land trusts, and community-oriented development are to be supported in the effort to ensure the availability of affordable and inclusive housing. Allowing local communities more flexibility will allow for more diverse and innovative solutions to local problems rather than imposing them from a far-off central authority.

We advocate for social safety nets that adequately provide for the material needs of the most vulnerable in society. These programs need to also help the most vulnerable find a path out of poverty by providing them with the tools they need in order to fully participate in their communities with dignity, and not trap them as subsidized labor for private interests.

To restore long-term solvency to the Social Security trust fund, we call for an end to the FICA tax cap.

Unemployment benefits need to include the option of allowing beneficiaries to take their benefits in the form of start-up capital to start or purchase businesses or create cooperative enterprises that help them to escape poverty on their own terms.

Natural monopolies and the common inheritance of the natural world need to be closely managed and protected by the public and not surrendered for a pittance to private greed. Our support of private property rights does not mean that we should surrender our common property into the hands of private oligarchs. Policies that deliver citizens their fair share of our common wealth and inheritance of natural resources are to be encouraged in the form of a citizen’s dividend and baby bonds.

Predatory practices which care more for stockholder value than human life must cease. We call for community-oriented lending practices and mutual aid organizations to replace predatory lending agents that target poor people and working-class communities. We must reject a financial system based on saddling workers with debt and interest payments that merely fuel consumerism and instead embrace one that encourages productive activity.

We call for student loans to be dischargeable in bankruptcy.

Read the entire American Solidarity Party platform. 

I don’t agree with 100 percent of the platform, but when I finished, I thought: for the first time in my life, I have the opportunity to cast a presidential vote for a candidate and a party whose principles I believe in, instead of like every other time, voting against the worse of two candidates from parties that mostly leave this Christian conservative cold. What an unusual and pleasant feeling. From what I can tell, the American Solidarity Party is basically a US version of a European Christian Democratic Party.

Are you thinking of voting third party this year? If so, which party, and why?

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Amy Coney Barrett & The Groveling Greeks

According to The Blaze, the college sorority to which Amy Coney Barrett belonged, Kappa Delta, sent out recently a timid acknowledgement that one of its members had been nominated to the US Supreme Court. The original September 28 tweet read:

KD alumna Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to serve on the Supreme Court. While we do not take a stand on political appointments, we recognize Judge Coney Barrett’s significant accomplishment. We acknowledge our members have a variety of views and a right to their own beliefs.

Super-cringey, but okay. But the women of Kappa Delta then had a gran mal woke seizure, and released this:

 

That is beyond pathetic. First, the fact that they did it under internal progressive pressure, and second — more interestingly — that they adopted a version of the standard Guilty Bourgeois White People jargon for confessing their sins against wokeness. We always need to have a more diverse group at all tables to make decisions in a more holistic, inclusive manner. Translation: we grant a veto over all our actions to progressives within the organization, especially progressives of color.

The Kappa Delta apology brings to mine these lines that an academic friend sent to me a couple of weeks back, to accompany a similar example of groveling before wokeness:

John McWhorter calls it the smell of urine: all these white people peeing their pants hoping they won’t be called racist. This disposition of fear is how institutions get destroyed.

Take a look at the KD website. Here is the page for “Some Notable Kappa Deltas”. Know who isn’t there? A nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States.

KD is big on “building confidence.” They devote a whole page on their website to it. They say:

Confidence is central to the Kappa Delta experience. Our mission is to provide experiences that build confidence in women and inspire them to action through the power of lifelong friendship. With a focus on values, Kappa Delta offers women the confidence to excel academically, develop leadership skills, become responsible citizens and take action in the world.

You don’t have to like Amy Coney Barrett, but good grief, she is incredibly accomplished. But now, according to Kappa Delta’s leadership, simply acknowledging that is taboo.

KD urges its members to “take the Confidence Pledge”:

Ha! Unless you are a conservative, in which case you are a non-person to Kappa Delta.

What a bunch of frauds. “I will not undermine other’s self-confidence. When speaking to or about other women, my words will be supportive and empowering.” Liars. You are nothing but a pack of liberal Mean Girls.

Let this be another reminder of the soft totalitarianism that the Left is bringing to our common life. Remember, a totalitarian society is one in which a) there is only one acceptable political line, and b) everything in life is political. Being snubbed by the Mean Girls in your sorority is not the same as being sent to the gulag, obviously, but it is a reminder that to the Left, everything is a battlefield. They will kick and scream and curse until they have unpersonned everybody who deviates even slightly from the party line. This incident with Amy Coney Barrett is one more example about how wokeness has become normalized in elite American life. Kappa Delta describes itself thus:

A national organization for women, Kappa Delta Sorority provides experiences that build confidence in women and inspire them to action through the power of lifelong friendship. With a focus on values, Kappa Delta offers women the confidence to excel academically, develop leadership skills, become responsible citizens and take action in the world.

Uh-huh. The sorority demonstrates that to be a leader in this new world, you have to be a total conformist to the left-wing line, and grovel when you fail to do so. In the Confidence Pledge, KDs say: “I will not give in to the pressure to fit society’s stereotypes.” They really do believe that, I bet. Behold the courageous non-conformists of the Kappa Delta National Council, white bourgeois queen bees who are ashamed of their sister Amy Coney Barrett. She ought to return the favor.

Kappa Delta’s National Council (KappaDelta.org)

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Woke Totalitarianism: Stan Richards’ Case

You might have seen that Amy Coney Barrett was dragged briefly on the Left for using the term “sexual preference” in her testimony, to refer to gay people. She later apologized, saying that she didn’t mean anything negative by it. In Commentary, Noah Rothman details — with many examples — how the phrase was perfectly kosher with the media and academia until the moment they could use it to criticize Judge Barrett as a homophobe. Rothman continues:

We should not mince words. What we’re witnessing is a concerted, perhaps even coordinated, effort to manufacture an allegation of bigotry from whole cloth and to force previously neutral language to comport with that accusation. And all to assault the character of one politically inconvenient woman.

This is retroactive conditioning on a grand scale. Before Tuesday, this was a term that most well-meaning people used within perfectly explicable context to convey their commitment to tolerance and egalitarianism. But now, with a Supreme Court seat on the line, it is being perverted to mean the precise opposite of tolerance.

If the goal here were a fuller understanding of the gay community’s sensitivities, we would not be witnessing an inquisition. Barrett’s critics would be educating her rather than accusing her. But this is not a good-faith display on the part of the theatrically incensed—it is a nakedly opportunistic fabrication. And we are all expected to subordinate what we know to be true to the party line. That is totalitarianism, and our moral obligation to oppose its encroachment on every facet of public and private life is as good an argument as any for Judge Barrett’s confirmation.

An acclaimed liberal black writer tweeted yesterday:

I sincerely didn’t know “sexual preference” was considered problematic until I heard The Daily today. I’ve also heard it argued that it’s insulting to render orientation as innate, as tho one would choose differently if one could. There’s just got to be some grace in all this.

— Thomas Chatterton Williams

‘A Book Worth Its Weight In Gold’

In this blog post I will talk about three really good reviews of Live Not By Lies that I want to share with you. The first is Sohrab Ahmari’s very kind take in First Things. Here’s how it begins:

In 1951, security forces in communist Czechoslovakia arrested ­Silvester Krčméry—and as they were taking him away, he burst out laughing. The young physician knew what he was about to face: years behind bars, shattering ­physical and mental torture, the loss of his professional career. Yet he also ­believed that “there could not be anything more beautiful than to lay down [his] life for God.” Hence, the joyous laughter that befuddled the police.

He was a disciple of the Jesuit dissident Tomislav Kolaković. Foreseeing a Red takeover, Kolaković launched an underground Catholic resistance network while World War II still raged. He called it “the Family.” As a leading member, Krčméry spent years girding himself for that knock on the door. He memorized large chunks of the Bible. His preparation served him well, preserving his faith and sustaining his spirit.

I’m so glad Sohrab led with the story of Silvester Krčmery! He and the priest Father Vlado Jukl, along with the secretly ordained bishop (later cardinal) Jan Chryzostom Korec, were the three pillars of the underground church. He was a young physician when they first hauled him off to prison, laughing. He never, ever gave up. When he was released after thirteen years, he quietly set himself to evangelizing and building up the underground Catholic church.

František Mikloško was one of those drawn to the underground church by the example of these heroes. From Live Not By Lies:

Mikloško started university in Bratislava in 1966, and met the recently released prisoners Krčméry and Jukl. He was in the first small community the two Kolaković disciples founded at the university. Christians like Krčméry and Jukl brought not only their expertise in Christian resistance to a new generation but also the testimony of their character. They were like electromagnets with a powerful draw to young idealists.

“It’s like in the Bible, the parable of ten righteous people,” says Mikloško. “True, in Slovakia, there were many more than ten righteous people. But ten would have been enough. You can build a whole country on ten righteous people who are like pillars, like monuments.”

These early converts spread the word about the community to other towns in Slovakia, just as the Kolaković generation had done. Soon there were hundreds of young believers, sustained by prayer meetings, samizdat, and one another’s fellowship.

“Finally, in 1988, the secret police called me in and said, ‘Mr. Mikloško, this is it. If you all don’t stop what you’re doing, you will force us to act,’” he says. “But by then, there were so many people, and the network was so large, that they couldn’t stop it.”

You see what personal heroism and sanctity can do? It spreads like the holy fire in the Cathedral of the Holy Sepulchre on Pascha, leaping from heart to heart, setting them aflame.

The second is from Stephen Morris on the traditionalist Catholic website One Peter Five. I think it’s possible that nobody has ever written a more favorable review of any of my books, ever. Excerpts:

Part one of LNBL offers a historical overview of how we got here, as it serves as a wake-up call to conservative Christians who think that we can somehow avoid this Pink Dawn through presidential elections, supreme court appointments, and by harkening back to our constitutional rights and freedoms. We cannot underestimate a rival that won the culture war, controls education, and now has the tyrannical overreach of big tech; this makes todays college campus radicals tomorrows political, cultural and corporate leaders. But the bigger mistake is for us to believe that we are facing merely an ideological opponent. Dreher persuasively argues that radical progressivism is actually a rival religion, replete with dogmas, purity codes and of course, an inquisitorial thirst for heretic-hunting. And this sets the table for part two of the LNBL, which locates traditional Christians in the cross hairs of this rabid progressivism.

As a reviewer, the joy of being wrong with LNBL was that I was expecting a battle plan for the coming Pink Dawn; instead I got a battle plan within a spiritual classic. Through extensive travel and interviews with Christian survivors of Communism, Dreher mines the spiritual treasures that can only be illuminated by the most unspeakable hardships. These chapters in themselves make the book worth its weight in gold as they illuminate and affirm the profound value the Christian tradition places on suffering. And this is critical because for the most part, Christians today are poorly catechized practitioners of a “Christianity without tears,” a form of therapeutic deism which will crumble in the face of actual threat. Dreher shares many strategies tried and tested in the underground churches of Eastern Europe to prepare us for travail, so as not fall prey to the trap of admiring Jesus when what He demands are followers. The kind of Christian we will be in the time of testing depends on the type of Christian we are today.

More:

This is a book of impressive scope, as Dreher successfully wears many hats: theologian, political theorist, sociologist, historian, but most importantly, prophet. Sometimes a book speaks to our times; and surely this is rare enough. Even rarer is when a book speaks to our present and our future at once. In LNBL, we are fortunate to have one of those extraordinary accomplishments in our midst. Don’t just read it: read it, and then buy a copy for each Christian in your life who thirsts to remain faithful to the deposit of faith—especially your pastor.

Read it all.

That last line reminds me of a meme that a friend sent me overnight:

That image on bottom is from a film about the life and death of Father Ignacy Skorupka, a Catholic priest from Poland who died in 1920, leading soldiers of the Polish Army in battle against the Soviet Red Army.

Harsh, but true. On one of the interviews I did this week, someone asked me if the churches were ready for what’s coming. Absolutely not, I said. Most priests and pastors, in my judgment, don’t have a clue. Maybe they don’t really want to know, either, because their preparation has not been for ministry in a time like this. We are living through the time prophesied by young Father Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, in 1969: a time when churches would lose their people, their wealth, their status, and be reduced to a shadow of their former selves, with only a true-believing remnant remaining.

As I explain in The Benedict Option, and bring home with force in Live Not By Lies, the Christian churches are being tried in in ways that we have not seen, at least in the United States. Churches that are nothing more than chaplaincies to the Woke won’t make it. Churches that are prosperity gospellers, or in some sense the religious auxiliary to bourgeois life will not survive. Churches that are led by those who see their ministry as essentially keeping the heard calm as it is led to the (spiritual) slaughter are a clear and present danger to the faithful. Churches in which the congregation prefers not to be led by men of God who preach a bold message of repentance and preparation for hard times, but who would rather be told comforting lies — they’re going to go down. Mark my words. Look at that meme above: if your church is like the people on top, flee, and try to find one led by a priest like the one on the bottom. Whether you are a priest, pastor, or layman in your church, try to be like that fighting priest. I’m saying this to myself too; I have a lot of repenting to do from my own sins and spiritual apathy.

Let me repeat something I’ve said before: do not wait for your pastor or priest to lead on this. In 1940s Slovakia, some of the Catholic bishops thought Father Tomislav Kolaković was being an alarmist by warning Catholic students that communism was going to rule Czechoslovakia after World War II, and that the church had better prepare for persecution. They were rather clericalist, and fretted that the priest was giving too much responsibility to the laity. Father K. went about his business anyway, organizing students and preparing them — and thank God for it! Under communism, Father K.’s “Family” became the backbone of the Slovak underground church.

That meme about clergy is powerful, but a similar meme could be made about the laity. The laity on top would be those who are tattooed Christian hipsters desperate to be “relevant” to the culture, or MAGAheads eager to be fed with stale political pieties. The laity on the bottom (the laity we need) would be people like Yuri Sipko, Alexander Ogorodnikov, Silvo Krčmery, and the other Christian dissidents I profiled in Live Not By Lies.

In his long, thoughtful, somewhat critical review for ArcDigital, Justin Lee mentions the people who write me off as alarmist:

The combination of cancel culture with real political violence over the past months has startled people from all walks of political life into consciousness that something terrible is brewing. But most of Dreher’s critics seem perversely capable of indifference as the evidence mounts—as corporate America punishes states like Indiana for reaffirming federal law protecting religious freedom, as countless people are fired for holding views that were consensus or innocuous only a few years ago, as the federal government seeks to force nuns to purchase abortifacients, as Supreme Court rulings like Obergefell and Bostock threaten the dismantling of religious schools and charities (as does the Equality Act, universally supported by Democrats), as the country experiences waves of anti-Catholic and anti-Hasidic violence, as states use transgender rights as a pretense to diminish the rights of parents, as diners are assailed by white mobs and forced to pay obeisance to Black Lives Matter, and as Democrats routinely subject judicial nominees to religious tests for office.

Some critics, especially those in the church, prefer to keep their heads in the sand because to acknowledge our dire circumstances means to acknowledge their own complicity, the many ways they themselves profit from the dictatorship of lies. For others it may mean coming to terms with the imbecility of denying the threat of left-wing soft totalitarianism while melting down in public over the “actual, this-is-not-a-drill, honest-to-God-literal fascism” of Der Trumpen Führer.

Of course, there are also those who consciously lie about reality because they actually want the pink police state to come into its own. These are those for whom the “truth” is whatever narrative they believe will help them acquire power. Such people craft their public discourse according to what Dreher calls the Law of Merited Impossibility: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.” For example, those who promised that religious schools will never have their funding or accreditation threatened because of their commitment to traditional sexual ethics reneged the moment it became possible to do so.

That’s right. But Lee criticizes the book — fairly, I concede — for downplaying the dangers of totalitarianism from the Right:

Dreher is keen to scrutinize how the left destroys cultural memory in order to “reframe” history in ways that enable the implementation of its political will (e.g., The 1619 Project). One of the clearest statements of this strategy comes from a Hungarian teacher who grew up under communism: “I think they [today’s progressives] really believe that if they erase all memory of the past, and turn everyone into newborn babies, then they can write whatever they want on that blank slate. If you think about it, it’s not so easy to manipulate people who know who they are, rooted in tradition.” Although this is obviously true, Dreher seems less interested in the ways the populist right also undermines cultural memory.

Donald J. Trump is many things, but a lover of culture and history he is not. I can’t imagine there is a single monument he wouldn’t bulldoze and replace with some gilt monstrosity stamped with his phallic imprimatur. Insofar as the right embraces Trump’s impulsivity, gleeful know-nothingism, capitalist bombast, and privileging of loyalty over honesty, it participates in the same destruction of cultural memory as the left, and increases the nation’s vulnerability to totalitarian control.

To be fair, Dreher does acknowledge that “Trump’s exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting.” But this is the only passage in the book where Trump is mentioned, and even here the focus is on the left. From that sentence, Dreher continues: “But how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist identity politics. Loyalty to an ideology over expertise is no less disturbing than loyalty to a personality.” Again, this is obviously true, but we should not underestimate the extent to which Trump’s misbehavior sanctions the same from the left.

That’s a fair criticism. The reason I kept my focus on the Left in the book, and only mentioned Trump once, is because I genuinely believe the Left poses a far greater threat. Why? Two reasons: first, it really does control all the institutional high ground. As Bari Weiss writes in her terrific new essay in the Jewish magazine Tablet:

Over the past few decades and with increasing velocity over the last several years, a determined young cohort has captured nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life. Rather than the institutions shaping them, they have reshaped the institutions. You don’t need the majority inside an institution to espouse these views. You only need them to remain silent, cowed by a fearless and zealous minority who can smear them as racists if they dare disagree.

There is simply nothing like it on the Right. Had we seen Trump, a man of undeniably authoritarian impulses, move towards consolidating his power in a totalitarian way, I would have written a very different book. In fact, he is a shambling mess who hasn’t gotten much accomplished. I see nothing on the American Right that can remotely compare to the power of the Left over institutional life, and the imaginations of the power elites — and that, readers, is what is going to determine our future.

Second, the Millennials and Generation Z are much less religious, far more socially liberal, and significantly less tolerant of First Amendment freedoms than are their elders. They represent the future. It’s simply not plausible that a totalitarian Right could take power. I had to make editorial decisions with this book, because I couldn’t write past a certain length. Worrying about the totalitarian Right seemed to be a real stretch.

Nevertheless, I agree with Lee here:

But there is a danger more grave than hypocrisy or persecution that Christians must take measure of, for it is a spiritual danger. As I observe Antifa, BLM, and the #resistance movement, it is clear that many people are longing for something to strive against. They need some battle in their lives in order to give it meaning, to make them feel a part of something greater than themselves. So they blow the threat of Trump and “fascism” out of proportion; they invent dragons out of lizards so they can feel like brave knights. I worry that a similar dynamic exists with much Christian fear of left totalitarianism. It is exciting to have fearful enemies. It is also revivifying. There is thus always a temptation to hyperbolize our fight. I believe that no reasonable assessment of American culture can deny that the church in America is now facing the greatest material threat in its history on this land. But I also believe that undue focus on that threat can lead to idolatry. If the church derives meaning from the battle against soft totalitarianism, it is losing that battle. As Dreher notes, totalitarianism politicizes everything; all of life is interpreted through the lens of dialectical struggle. The church should resist at all costs the temptation to define itself through a negation of the political left. The church’s identity is in Christ and Christ alone.

Great point. Those conservative Christians who seem to believe that Trumpiness is next to godliness, and that the church is little more than Lib-Owners At Prayer, are doing more to harm the church than anything coming from a Social Justice Warrior. I tell this story in Live Not By Lies:

Both come up in my conversation with Paweł Skibiński, one of Poland’s leading historians, and the head ofWarsaw’s Museum of John Paul II Collection. We are talking about what Karol Wojtyła, the great anti-communist pope, has to teach us about resisting the new soft totalitarianism.

When the Nazis invaded Poland, they knew they could subdue the country by superior force of arms. ButHitler’s plan for Poland was to destroy the Poles as a people. To do that, the Nazis needed to destroy the two things that gave the Polish their identity: their shared Catholic faith and their sense of themselves as a nation.

Before he entered seminary in 1943, Wojtyła was an actor in Krakow. He and his theatrical comrades knew that the survival of the Polish nation depended on keeping alive its cultural memory in the face of forced forgetting.

They wrote and performed plays—Wojtyła himself authored three of them—about Polish national history, and Catholic Christianity. They performed these plays in secret for clandestine audiences. Had the Gestapo discovered the truth, the players and their audiences would have been sent to prison camps or shot.

Not every member of the anti-totalitarian resistance carries a rifle. Rifles would have been mostly useless against the German army. The persistence of cultural memory was the greatest weapon the Poles had to resist Nazi totalitarianism, and the Soviet kind, which seized the nation in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat.

It’s not hard to imagine some hot-headed Polish patriot thinking that actors and playwrights weren’t doing their part in the Polish resistance, because they weren’t taking up arms against the Nazis. Maybe an analogue to our society is Christians who believe that the battle is really political. What the imaginary Polish patriot would not have recognized is that the resistance work Wojtyla and the others were doing was deep and necessary. Similarly, I think about a point a Christian friend made to me yesterday: there are lots of rich Christians who pour millions into political causes, but who do nothing for cultural strategies. My kids go to a classical Christian school here in Baton Rouge that does an incredible job on a sub-shoestring budget. This past weekend, my 14 year old daughter was reading Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s Confessions for her Sequitur classes. This is profoundly important work of preserving civilizational memory — but few if any Christian patrons help these schools. They would rather throw their money at cheap, tinselly political showmen … and then they wonder why so many young people walk away from Christianity, wondering what the point is.

Sorry for going off point. Anyway, read Justin Lee’s review. He’s very positive about Live Not By Lies; I only highlighted his criticism because I thought it was important to address.

UPDATE: I’m told by a continental European reader of Live Not By Lies that you Europeans can order it from The Book Depository (an Amazon subsidiary) in the UK, and have it delivered to you for free.

UPDATE.2: Wow, Father Andrew Stephen Damick, an Orthodox priest who is definitely the kind of cleric on the bottom of that meme, just posted Part One of his lengthy interview with Your Working Boy about living as a Christian in this post-Christian world:

INTRODUCING THE ORTHODOX ENGAGEMENT PODCAST on @ancientfaith!

LISTEN TO EPISODE #1: https://t.co/NlYuqN0jnW

For the debut episode of Orthodox Engagement, Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick interviews best-selling author and journalist @roddreher, covering his journey from… 1/4 pic.twitter.com/M9g3Q9i1Q7

— Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick (@FrAndrewSDamick) October 15, 2020

The post ‘A Book Worth Its Weight In Gold’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Shhh! Don’t Talk About Hunter Biden

The New York Post had a big scoop today:

Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads.

An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

Read it all — there are screenshots, and a louche photo of a shirtless Hunter taken from the hard drive.

The story might have been a one-day affair — except for Twitter and Facebook interfered to keep people from sharing it. Pete Spiliakos says it succinctly:

That a politician has a failson engaged in influence peddling is not particularly interesting or new or likely to change many votes.

That the tech oligarchs are colluding to cover for that politician is sinister.

— Peter Spiliakos (@petespiliakos) October 14, 2020

It’s crazy. Maybe the story is weak, or has problems. Fine! Write about that. But for pity’s sake, don’t try to suppress the thing. Look at this:

 

“Unsafe”? For the Biden campaign, maybe, given that Hunter Biden says (for example, in this ABC Nightline interview) that he never talked to his father about Burisma business. Facebook muted the story on its platform. 

This really is outrageous. You can say that Twitter and Facebook are private companies, and that therefore they have a right to do this. I think that is true as a matter of law — but should it be? They operate more like public utilities than newspapers. Leaving aside the legality of this move, think about what it says that the two most powerful social media companies have taken it upon themselves to censor a major newspaper’s story about a presidential candidate’s allegedly corrupt son, just weeks before the election? Do you not see how dangerous this is, given the power of social media over our discourse?

Twitter and Facebook crossed a line. They showed their true colors today. When the election is over, Congress is going to have to have some serious discussions about regulating them in the interest of free speech and fairness.

In Live Not By Lies, I write about how Big Tech, including social media giants, work against free speech and free thought. Here, I’m talking about data mining:

Why should corporations and institutions not use the information they harvest to manufacture consent to some beliefs and ideologies and to manipulate the public into rejecting others?

In recent years, the most obvious interventions have come from social media companies deplatforming users for violating terms of service. Twitter and Facebook routinely boot users who violate its standards, such as promoting violence, sharing pornography, and the like. YouTube, which has two billion active users, has demonetized users who made money from their channels but who crossed the line with content YouTube deemed offensive. To be fair to these platform managers, there really are vile people who want to use these networks to advocate for evil things.

But who decides what crosses the line? Facebook bans what it calls “expression that . . . has the potential to intimidate, exclude or silence others.” To call that a capacious definition is an understatement. Twitter boots users who “misgender” or “deadname” transgendered people. Calling Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce,” or using masculine pronouns when referring to the transgendered celebrity, is grounds for removal.

To be sure, being kicked off of social media isn’t like being sent to Siberia. But companies like PayPal have used the guidance of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center to make it impossible for certain right-of-center individuals and organizations—including the mainstream religious-liberty law advocates Alliance Defending Freedom—to use its services.Though the bank issued a general denial when asked, JPMorgan Chase has been credibly accused of closing the accounts of an activist it associates with the alt-right. In 2018, Citigroup and Bank of America announced plans to stop doing some business with gun manufacturers.

It is not at all difficult to imagine that banks, retailers, and service providers that have access to the kind of consumer data extracted by surveillance capitalists would decide to punish individuals affiliated with political, religious, or cultural groups those firms deem to be antisocial. Silicon Valley is well known to be far to the left on social and cultural issues, a veritable mecca of the cult of social justice. Social justice warriors are known for the spiteful disdain they hold for classically liberal values like free speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty. These are the kinds of people who will be making decisions about access to digital life and to commerce.

The rising generation of corporate leaders take pride in their progressive awareness and activism. Twenty-first century capitalism is not only all in for surveillance, it is also very woke.

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

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

Big Tech is not your friend. Today we saw this with brutal clarity with Facebook and Twitter’s moves. What are we not seeing?

UPDATE: Whatever happens to Trump on Election Day, let us hope and pray that the GOP holds the Senate:

.@Twitter @jack this is not nearly good enough. In fact, it’s a joke. It’s downright insulting. I will ask you – and @Facebook – to give an explanation UNDER OATH to the Senate subcommittee I chair. These are potential violations of election law, and that’s a crime https://t.co/Rylva8UJv9

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) October 15, 2020

UPDATE.2: Big Tech pulling out all the stops this week. From the Wall Street Journal:

As a documentary, “What Killed Michael Brown?” has everything going for it. Its subject is timely, about the pre-George Floyd killing of Michael Brown by a police officer that set off riots in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

It’s written and narrated by Shelby Steele, the prominent African-American scholar at the Hoover Institution, and directed by his filmmaker son, Eli Steele. Its subject—race relations—is a major fault line in this year’s presidential election, one reason the Steeles scheduled their film for release on Oct. 16. Our columnist Jason Rileywrote about the film on Wednesday.

One problem: “What Killed Michael Brown?” doesn’t fit the dominant narrative of white police officers killing young black men because of systemic racism. As a result, says the younger Mr. Steele, Amazon rejected it for its streaming service. “We were canceled, plain and simple.”

In an email, Amazon informed the Steeles that their film is “not eligible for publishing” because it “doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations.” Amazon went on to say it “will not be accepting resubmission of this title and this decision may not be appealed.”

On their website — whatkilledmichaelbrown.com — the Steeles offer other options for people looking to watch their documentary. But it’s sadly telling about elite political conformity that an intelligent film that gives voice to a variety of people, almost all black, who would otherwise not be heard is somehow deemed unfit for polite company. As Eli Steele puts it, “When Amazon rejected us they also silenced these voices and that is the great sin of a company that professes to be diverse and inclusive.”

The post Shhh! Don’t Talk About Hunter Biden appeared first on The American Conservative.

Have We Been Checkmated?

This e-mail came in this morning from a reader who is a speech pathologist. He asked me not to use his name. He’s talking about an online seminar I was part of at Notre Dame yesterday, about Carter Snead’s new book about law, anthropology, and the body. The reader writes:

I watched the seminar/conversation yesterday after seeing you mention it on your blog, and first of all I have to admit I haven’t read the book in question. However, I don’t understand the point at all. It is all very good to argue things stemming from natural law, and the concept of the body, but the opposition doesn’t care.

I think that with the left’s control of, and redefinition of language, that pretending that there will be a ‘correction’ is ridiculous. The main thing I walked away from is that Notre Dame is full of intellectuals who have no idea what is going on in the world. Your most recent work is full of accounts of either self-censorship or anonymity from people who fear for their professional credentials. As I’ve mentioned on your comments before, the British Stammering Association wouldn’t run my graduate survey because it was heteronormative.

I lived in China for seven years, and I do not find anything in Live Not By Lies pessimistic or exaggerated, at least from the excerpts you have posted. I felt that the attitude of optimism and the sophistry of the questions being asked made no sense in a world where medical associations are literally being asked to provide transgender treatments that are untested and have serious side effects to children. A world where a Pulitzer prize was awarded to a fake history project. A world where Disney literally thanked the political repression division of the Xinjiang government in the PRC.

Ideas matter, but the ideas that matter do not appear to be the ideas bouncing around Notre Dame’s ethics department. Honestly, do use the Russian history analogies you are so fond of, the staff of Notre Dame are the old liberals of the 1840s who are unaware that the battle is over, and their side already lost, compared to the absolutely destructive principles of the Nihilists.

Anyway I was going to raise that question, namely even if the SCOTUS is ‘conservative’ what does it matter when behavioral health and medicine are completely in the hands of the enemy?

Well, I think that’s a too-harsh judgment on Snead’s book, which is both good and important, but the reader really isn’t talking about the book itself. If I understand him, he’s claiming that the intellectual work is in vain, because the left, which controls biomedical and other institutions, doesn’t care about arguments.

I’d say he’s onto something, though I do think it’s important to do the intellectual work, even if it probably matters less today than it once did. It matters to speak the truth, even if few people are willing to hear it, at least in this time and place.

That said, the reader is stating bluntly a painful reality about our emotive culture. I can’t stress strongly enough how important that campus showdown at Yale in 2015 was, between Prof. Nicholas Christakis and a social justice student mob. Here’s a clip of it. You see Prof. Christakis trying to engage the students respectfully and rationally. They won’t have it. They shriek at him, they curse at him, they assert their supposed woundedness over his disagreeing with them, etc. And, as we know, Yale University as an institution ultimately backed the mob.

The Woke control the means of cultural production, and exercise that control in creepy ways sometimes. Yesterday in the Amy Coney Barrett hearings, Sen. Mazie Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, was aggrieved because ACB used the word “sexual preference” to refer to homosexuality. That is offensive! said Our Mazie.

Is it? News to me. Lo, look what happened next:

As recently as last month, Webster’s Dictionary included a definition of “preference” as “orientation” or “sexual preference.” TODAY they changed it and added the word “offensive.”

Insane – I just checked through Wayback Machine and it’s real.

(via @ThorSvensonn & @chadfelixg) pic.twitter.com/oOq1SNtCP2

— Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) October 14, 2020

Yesterday in this blog’s comments, a Virginia reader from Poland pointed out that one of the things people who lived under communism are seeing now that unnerves them is the way the rules change, and language changes, seemingly overnight — with edicts handed down from invisible authorities, edicts that everyone has to obey, or else. Who decided that it was offensive to use the phrase “sexual preference”? Don’t ask, just obey, or stand accused of bigotry, of creating a hostile work environment, of making others feel unsafe, or whatever else they need to say to get rid of you.

The reader says that “the battle is over,” and that it’s a waste of time to have discussions like my colleagues and I had under Notre Dame’s auspices yesterday. Again, I don’t think it’s a waste of time at all, but I do think the battle is largely over, and now conservatives and old-fashioned liberals have to continue the fight through guerrilla actions, so to speak. I think it’s important to ask, though, how scholars, intellectuals, and (for lack of a better word) culture-producers are going to do their work in the face of massive institutional and cultural opposition. Snead’s new book examines bioethics and anthropology as they play out in law governing abortion, assisted reproduction, and end-of-life issues (e.g., euthanasia). It all centers around what it means to be a person, and the meaning of the body. Snead is a Catholic, but the word “God” doesn’t appear in his book; it’s more or less a natural law argument for treating the body in a non-instrumental way in the law.

Most of the philosophical questions he raises in the book could be applied to the issues surrounding transgenderism. If an academic writer did so, and wrote from a position of arguing that transgenderism is in any way not ideal, would he even be published? Would these conversations even be possible? If not, how can scholars carry on this work?

As I was working on this post, another letter came in, this from an academic. He gives me permission to post it, as long as I hide his name and details about his institutional affiliation:

Yesterday I finished reading Live Not By Lies. I am with those who say it is a very important book — the right book at the right time. Hopefully it serves as a wake-up call for some people. Its advice to cultivate small cells of trusted individuals comports with advice that is put out by the better survivalist and prepper literature. That parallel, like so many other things, should be illustrative of the reality of the threat we face. It seems that the book is doing very well, and I’m glad to hear that — you deserve for it to do well for the important work you’re doing, and hopefully that means it’s reaching more people.

Here’s my own brush with soft totalitarianism. To date, mine has been extremely mild:

I work in academia, in [a technical] department of probably one of the most conservative universities in the country. But even here, the signs of soft totalitarianism have been creeping in. Over the summer, our department’s university senate representative forwarded to us a senate resolution to pledge open support for Black Lives Matter and for racial demonstrations on campus, as well as having “conversations about race” in the classroom. Given that the college dean (who, along with most of the university administrators, has taken to signing her emails with her preferred pronouns) had just sent out an email telling people to read books about white guilt and white fragility, and to seek out another faculty member to be an “accountability buddy” (setting aside the racial insanity, that kind of third-grader language addressed to a group of university faculty is insulting) about race, it was pretty clear that “conversations about race” meant trashing white people and exalting everyone else — except, perhaps, the large number of Chinese students and faculty since Asians do well, so who cares about them. I ignored the email and never contacted anyone about being an “accountability buddy,” nor did anyone ever contact me.

In any case, when our senate representative forwarded that resolution to me, I decided right then and there that my integrity meant more to me than my job, and sent a reply saying, “Opposed. I don’t support disruptive demonstrations, and I’ll teach [science and engineering] in my classes, not political propaganda.” He never responded, and I’ve never heard anything more about it. I never even heard whether that senate resolution passed or not. It seems that for now taking a principled stand hasn’t cost me anything, but I doubt that will continue forever, because the trend of wokeness just keeps accelerating. But I remain committed to choosing my principles over my job whenever I’m forced to make that decision. Though if Biden wins, I suspect the next front that totalitarianism advances on will be political rather than from my job.

To that last point, I do want to raise a couple of disagreements I have with your positions. First, I agree with those who have said that you’ve “underplayed your hand” and may be naive in your confidence that the soft totalitarianism won’t turn hard. No one can predict the future, so you might be right, but I think you’re underestimating the probability that it could turn hard and the speed with which it could occur. Consider that this year, the left proved, through institutional, political, and media support of Antifa and BLM, that they are perfectly willing to destroy people’s property, livelihoods, and even to kill them (through surrogates of criminals and street thugs) if they think it will advance their political agendas. Prominent leftist voices have openly called for violence against their political enemies. No matter how that internal dynamic plays out — whether the institution succeeds in suppressing the violent dissidents, continues using them as shock troops, or gets devoured by them French Revolution-style — in every scenario, the case remains that those in power hate with a white-hot hate and are perfectly willing to employ violence to achieve their ends.

All of that considered, my second point of disagreement with your is your position with respect to the coming election. I speak as someone who is not a fan of Donald Trump, who wishes a thousand times over that we could have a president with Pence’s demeanor instead (Pence was superb in his debate with Harris) — when I say that  to hold your views and yet think it defensible that someone could cast a vote for Biden is bizarre and incomprehensible, possibly born out of an irrational animosity for Trump the man. A Biden administration (by which, let us be honest, we really mean a Harris administration) will do everything in its power to accelerate all the totalitarian trends you have identified.

You are correct to say that politics will not save us from our current situation, but you have also correctly said that engaging in politics is nonetheless an important rearguard action, if nothing else. Trump may not have the power to stop all the cultural trends destroying our civilization, but at least under his administration, the federal government’s ability to put its thumb on the scale in support of leftist conquest has been significantly curtailed, and we have won some important victories. To say that it could be principled to vote for an administration that is almost certain to initiate various kinds of crackdowns — whether hard or soft — on right-leaning dissidents, whereas its opposition will do at least something to slow leftist conquest — well, I can’t understand it, no matter how much of a vulgar loudmouth Trump is.

Need to post this now and prepare for my next interview. Discuss.

The post Have We Been Checkmated? appeared first on The American Conservative.

On Telling The Truth & Making Money

For years I have recommended Aaron Renn’s great newsletter The Masculinist, which you can subscribe to (for free!) here. I was startled this morning to see that in the new one, he talks a lot about … me. Excerpts:

I’ve studied the book of 2 Timothy, and actually wrote my own thematic commentary on it that some of you provided feedback on a while back. Thanks so much for that. I decided not to publish it due to my intent to remain in the genre of cultural commentary rather than Bible teaching.

But I do want to highlight one rather depressing passage from that book, where Paul writes (2 Tim 4:3-4), “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.”

I would argue that’s an apt description of the American church today.

There’s a saying, “Tell lies to people who want lies and you’ll get rich; tell the truth to people who want the truth and you’ll make a living; tell the truth to people who want lies and you’ll go broke.”

In America today, and frankly in much of the church, the desire for lies is common. That’s probably an extreme way to put it. Perhaps nobody actually sits down and says he wants to be lied to. But definitely there are many, many things we all dearly want to be true. If someone provides an even semi-plausible case for them, we’re often very likely to seize upon it. Most of us like to be flattered as well, so teachings that flatter our vanity or suggest that our desires are good are also likely to be embraced.

In some cases, money and institutional interests are at stake more than the desires of the average person. These powerfully shape how people preach or argue on many topics. As Upton Sinclair famously put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

He goes on:

People who attempt to sell the less popular idea that there might be some conflict between Christianity and culture do less well.

We can see this by looking at perhaps the most successful person selling this latter message today, Rod Dreher.

Dreher has a new book out soon called Live Not by Lies that I plan to review, either here or elsewhere. But for now, I’ll just note that Dreher has a very big audience. I can get a good sense of how big someone’s readership is by how much traffic I get on my site when he links to me. Dreher’s links generate incredible traffic. The only person who has ever sent me more traffic by linking to me is Andrew Sullivan back in his blogging heyday.

Dreher also has the ability to move markets with his recommendations. His interview with J.D. Vance about Hillbilly Elegy crashed the servers at The American Conservative and seems to have been the triggering event which sent that book rocketing to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.  Last fall he touted an off-Broadway play called Heroes of the Fourth Turning. There were plenty of tickets available when he did it. (I know because I bought some). But shortly after his recco the play sold out, then ended up having its run extended, and later was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. And as I have mentioned before, his recommendation is what turned this newsletter from a failure into a success.

Yet, as near as I can tell, Dreher financially appears to be, as the quip above has it, making a living. He certainly does not appear to be rich.

Well, that’s certainly true. I am doing alright, but rich? Very far from it, as anybody who sees my house can tell. Pre-Covid, I traveled a lot to Europe, but that was always on somebody else’s dime: publishers paying me to come over and promote translations of my work. Anybody can be a European traveler if they don’t have to pay for plane tickets and hotel rooms.

More Renn:

But that doesn’t seem to be the whole story. Contrast him with, say, Jonah Goldberg. Jonah Goldberg is at the center of the Conservatism, Inc. institutional world. Until recently, he was at the National Review making about $200,000/year. In addition to what they were paying him, he held (and still holds) a fellowship at AEI called the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty, which hedge fund manager Cliff Asness  to the tune of $2.4 million dollars just for him. After leaving the National Review, Goldberg and two collaborators raised $6 million to start their own publication called The Dispatch.  He also appears to charge $10-20,000 as a speaking fee. Despite the coronavirus, he has at least two events scheduled in October. Goldberg has a sizable audience, though I doubt bigger than Dreher. But his message is sympatico with the conservative establishment class.

Dreher also used to work at the National Review, when he was writing things like Crunchy Cons. Since then, he’s been pushed towards the periphery of conservatism as his writing changed and is now working for the scrappy outsider magazine The American Conservative, founded by dissidents who opposed the Iraq War. He does not appear to hold any fellowships or affiliations at any other Conservatism, Inc. institutions. Social conservatism is very unpopular in Conservatism, Inc (far more unpopular than is generally known).

Nevertheless, plenty of social conservatives have acquired additional think tank money gigs, including Ross Douthat and Michael Brendan Dougherty (at AEI), and George Weigel and Peter Wehner (at EPPC). But I don’t know of anything like that for Dreher. I also haven’t seen anything indicating that wealthy conservative donors are backing any projects of his. And Dreher’s speaking fees appear to be only half of Goldberg’s at $5-10,000, which is ridiculously low. Nobody charges less than $5000 per appearance. I suspect Dreher has far fewer paid speaking engagements than Goldberg too.

Relative to his large audience and influence at the individual level, Dreher is practically an outcast.

Why is that? Chief among the reasons has to be that Dreher is putting out a message that religious and politically conservative leaders don’t want to hear. Pope Francis himself appears to not like the Benedict Option. Most of the Evangelical commentariat seemed to puke on it too. Both the political and religious conservative donor class don’t want to hear it either, other than those few backing TAC.

Sociologist Peter Berger said, “Ideas don’t succeed in history because of their inherent truthfulness, but rather because of their connection to very powerful institutions and interests.”

Rod Dreher’s pessimistic message about the state of the world and the church, his investigations and commentary on the Catholic abuse scandals, etc. do not serve any powerful institutional or financial interests.  In fact, they are either implicit or explicit indictments of those institutions and their leaders, which failed in important ways to accomplishing their purported mission.

Fortunately for Rod, there are enough individuals who sense that all is not well to constitute a readership and a career for him. But he seems to be cut off from the kinds of institutional support that would give his ideas traction in the real world and cause Christians to start mobilizing to respond to the situation in which we find ourselves. Much more than money, I suspect this is what frustrates Rod – that ideas like the Benedict Option end up institutionally marginalized and largely unimplemented.  (Events appears to be moving ahead at an even faster rate than Dreher’s pessimism, so perhaps he’ll become more accepted with his new book, which appears to be getting better reviews than the last one).

Read the entire thing by signing up for The Masculinist here (in this issue, Renn writes about a lot more than Your Working Boy). Renn’s punchy newsletter is unmissable for any Christian men who care about what it means to be faithful in this post-Christian culture.

I appreciate his words about me, and confess that I have never really thought about things that way. I’ve been at TAC since the summer of 2011, and have been, and am, quite happy here.  I don’t make remotely the money that Renn reports that Jonah Goldberg made at NR, but TAC is a much smaller magazine (see, this is why we really do depend on donors). The best thing about being a writer for TAC is that nobody has ever told me what I could and could not write here. I cherish that freedom, especially in an era in which magazines and newspapers are becoming more timid. If you value this kind of thing too, please consider donating. TAC does not have the access to deep-pocketed donors within the conservative mainstream. Seriously, every little bit helps.

Renn is right about my speaking fee, which is $5,000, but I’ve taken less during Covidtide. I’m not represented by any agency (though that should change), so I have no idea what I’m worth as a speaker. The whole money thing embarrasses me, to be honest — to my career’s detriment, no doubt. I also have no think tank side gigs (and let me be clear: I don’t think there is a thing wrong with people like my pals Douthat and MBD, and anybody else, taking them, as long as they can maintain their distinct voices — which I’m sure they can, as neither one of those men strike me as the kind of writer willing to pull punches to please the powerful). Not sure why that is; maybe I’m just not that interesting to them, or maybe Renn is right that the messages I stand behind don’t serve the interests of powerful institutions. If it’s the latter, too bad. I’m doing fine. I am grateful that I have an excellent literary agent who has negotiated strong book advances for me, and a publisher, Sentinel, that offers fantastic support. I have nothing to complain about. If I could double my income, but lost the ability to write what I think, it wouldn’t be worth it to me.

Along those lines, I did a video interview yesterday with my friend the Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony. He began the interview in an unusual way. He recalled the first time we met, back in 2010 at Oxford, and a conversation we had about religious faith (he’s a observant Jew). He said that I talked to him then about my experience of losing my Catholic faith (this happened in 2005) after investigating the Church scandal. This story, he said, had stayed with him over the past decade, and he invited me to share it again.

I did, then Yoram asked me if that experience had anything to do with Live Not By Lies. I didn’t know what to say, and surely answered badly. It was only after the interview was over that I had l’esprit d’escalier, and realized what I should have said. Yoram’s question was rather insightful, and caught me off guard.

The truth is, I did learn from that experience. Back in the summer of 2001, when I first started writing about the scandal (this was half a year before Boston broke big), the brave victim’s advocate Father Tom Doyle told me privately after an interview that he could tell that I was a serious Catholic, and that I should know that if I continued on this path of investigation, I would “go to places darker than you can imagine.” I thanked Father Tom for his warning, but told him that as a journalist, as a Catholic, and as a new father, I felt that I had no moral choice but to do this. He told me that he would support me all the way, in whatever way he could, but that I should be aware that this was going to be hard.

I had no idea what to expect. I assumed that having all the arguments for Catholicism clear in my head would be sufficient protection. It was not. I won’t elaborate on all the filth and corruption and lies upon lies that I had to wade through. We all know about it now. Most of it I was never able to write about — most notably, the fact that I knew what then-Cardinal McCarrick had done, but I could not find documents or get any of my sources to go on the record. McCarrick even had a prominent conservative (closeted) try to talk my boss at NR into taking me off the story, but to his very great credit he would not. It didn’t matter — without documents or people willing to go on the record, there was no story. Yet I knew that the Cardinal was an evil SOB. And, as we later would learn, so did the Vatican.

Well, I finally broke under all the pressure, and found myself unable to believe in the Catholic faith. It simply did not seem plausible to me anymore that my eternal salvation depended on being in relationship with the Roman see. I don’t want to argue about it here — so don’t start. It’s important, though, for all religious leaders and religious people to understand that the plausibility structure of religion is so, so important. Someone, can’t remember who, was telling me this the other day in relation to the new scandal in the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Whoever it was said that it’s not seeing wicked people in churches that hurts them as much as it is seeing wicked people emerge, and to continue to thrive, unpunished by church leaders. Eventually people may find it implausible to believe what the church or religion claims for itself. Nobody has the time or the capability to fully investigate all religions. I know very little about Scientology, for example, but from what I do know, it is wholly implausible, and I can’t take it seriously.

It became like that for me with the Catholic Church. When a particular priest — Father Christopher Clay — with whom my wife and I had become friendly turned out to be a liar about his true status, something snapped in us. After four years of these unmaskings, that was the breaking point. We ceased to be able to trust any of it.

I told Yoram that we went to the Orthodox Church because as Catholics, we believed that the Orthodox had valid sacraments, but we did not intend to convert. Yet we did. But, I told him, I have tried to be a very different kind of Orthodox than I was a Catholic. I have had to own my own intellectual arrogance as a Catholic — that was on me, not the Catholic Church — and the pride I took in being Catholic, and in winning the favor of Catholic bishops and prominent figures for my loyalty to and defense of Catholic principles and the Catholic Church in my pre-scandal writing.

The scandal was a test of whether or not I cared more about standing by the truth, however painful, or defending lies for the sake of preserving comfort and status. I came through it on the right side, but also destroyed spiritually. The thing I’ve learned — and this is what I wish I had thought to tell Yoram — is that we should never, ever presume that things cannot get very bad, and that we have the strength to resist anything. If I had been able to receive Father Tom Doyle’s warning with sufficient gravity, I would have prepared myself better spiritually for that kind of combat. Around 2004, about a year and a half before I lost my Catholic faith, a friend said to me that I was so angry about the corruption that I was going to lose my ability to believe in the Catholic faith. I told them I didn’t think so, but anyway, how can a person of integrity not be yelling their head off at this filth?

Well, they were right. I do not regret one bit yelling my head off at the filth, but I do regret allowing my passions to unhorse me. Had I been better prepared spiritually, I would have handled that more responsibly. It’s not a mistake I can allow myself to make in Orthodoxy. I have also worked to stay out of Church politics, because I don’t trust myself not to let my passions run away with me. If I found out that there were children being abused, you’d better believe that I would speak out. But mostly, getting wrapped up in church politics is a dead end for me.

I am grateful for the excruciating pain of the dark night I went through from 2002-2006, only because God forced me to change. And I found Orthodox Christianity, which has been a tremendous blessing. I do regret the brokenness that brought me to Orthodoxy, and wish that my conversion had been “cleaner.” But here we are.

The point I wish I had thought to make to Yoram was this one: always stand up for the truth, and refuse to live by lies, but think hard, and prepare well, for the cost of doing so. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Preparation isn’t just a matter of thinking things through. If you do not have a strong spiritual life — and I didn’t when I went into this work, though I thought I did — then you won’t make it. I had honestly thought that I would be able to suffer persecution for my Catholic faith; I had not at all prepared for the possibility of suffering a form of it from within the Catholic faith. My hero in all this is the late Father Paul Mankowski, SJ, a priest who knew far more about the filth in the Church than I ever did, and who told the truth every chance he could. But he was unshakable in his faith. I want to be the kind of Christian he was. You should want to be too, whatever your confession.

Anyway, to go back to Aaron Renn’s piece, this is not the way to get rich. But that’s not the point, is it? I say the harsh things I say about Christian life in contemporary America — in The Benedict Option, in Live Not By Lies, and on this blog — not because it is to my financial advantage to do so, but because I believe the message is true, and important. Nothing matters more to me than the faith, and passing it on to my children, and my children’s children. We in the American church — all of us: Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox — are washing away like sandcastles at high tide. It is happening, and few people want to see it, because they don’t want to take responsibility for dealing with the hard realities. At the end of my life, I hope I can say that I did my part with the opportunities God gave me. What else is there?

I thank you readers who have supported my work through your donations to TAC and by buying my books. I could not do this without you. I really couldn’t. We are all in this together. And please support the work of writers like Aaron Renn, and others who say difficult but necessary things that the marketplace doesn’t necessarily reward.

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Archbishop Knifes Bishop

News from the Catholic Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska. Late last year, Bishop James Conley announced that he was taking a medical leave of absence to get treatment for depression and anxiety. Archbishop George Lucas of Omaha took over as temporary apostolic administrator, until Conley returned.

Well, Conley is back — but Lucas has done something dastardly. A reader sent me this document that Archbishop Lucas passed around to priests:

 

Whoa! He makes Conley out to be fragile and broken. “Comfortable in familiar surroundings,” going to spend time with Mother, and so forth. I am reliably told by a Catholic source that this is not true about Conley’s condition — that after treatment, he’s recovered.

The reader who sent that to me writes:

Bishop Conley took a brave stand in getting himself the help he needed when he did. Despite being ready to return to the saddle , Archbishop Lucas appears to be doing his all to stop him. Not content with running the bishop down to his clergy in his absence, he’s now writing around to insinuate that Conley is a shattered man, when nothing could be further from the truth.

He’s even gone to the nuncio to try to block him ever getting back to work, even with a clean bill of health. It seems he thinks that being frank about struggling with a mental health issue is a disqualifying offense — perhaps he’d prefer bishops in pain just do the decent thing and drink themselves to death in silence.

It seems that, at least in Lucas’s estimation, there’s no road back for people who ask for help — what a great example to set at a time when priests are already ducking the nuncio’s calls and they can’t find people willing to be a bishop.

Of course, a cynic might note Lucas would be first in line to pick a replacement, and can probably bank on the nuncio siding with him as the local archbishop. What’s one less good bishop after all?

UPDATE: A number of you have said that the judgment of the reader on Abp Lucas is not fair based only on the text provided. I read the Lucas letter like the reader did, and I know the reader as a reliable source. Nevertheless, it is possible that the reader is (and I am) being unjust toward Abp Lucas. I look forward to hearing from more people in Lincoln who have direct knowledge of the matter.

I should also say that I like Bishop Conley, though I believe he did not handle the scandal in Lincoln very well. He did not cause it — it was something he inherited — but he didn’t deal with it rightly. Nevertheless, I believe him to be a good man, and I don’t like to see him suffer.

UPDATE.2: Plus, I hate to see a man in power who admitted he needed help, and got it, made to look like a weakling. Maybe I’m overinterpreting this. It looks bad to me, though.

UPDATE.3: Father Damien Zuerlein comments:

Wow. You should know Archbishop Lucas before you make such judgements against him. That letter is simply the way Archbishop Lucas speaks and he truly means no harm in what he is saying. Do you really think this man is power hungry or that he is a bad bishop? I think you owe him an apology. I am a priest of the Archdiocese of Omaha and while I have not always agreed with the decisions that the Archbishop has made, he has always made them in the best interest of the Church and not for some personal agenda. I think he would quickly turn the diocese back over to Conley once he is given permission to do so. You should remove this post.

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News From Walter Duranty’s Paper

You might have missed Bret Stephens’s evisceration, in the pages of The New York Times, of The 1619 Project. It was respectful, in the sense that a pious gourmand prays over his meal before he devours it. Excerpts:

Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we’re supposed to report and comment on the political and cultural issues of the day, not become the issue itself.

As fresh concerns make clear, on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.

More:

These two flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” writes Silverstein.

Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing? On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?

Monocausality — whether it’s the clash of economic classes, the hidden hand of the market, or white supremacy and its consequences — has always been a seductive way of looking at the world. It has always been a simplistic one, too. The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.

This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.

It should have been enough for the project to serve as curator for a range of erudite and interesting voices, with ample room for contrary takes. Instead, virtually every writer in the project seems to sing from the same song sheet, alienating other potential supporters of the project and polarizing national debate.

Stephens says, “The 1619 Project is a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around,” and concludes, “Through its overreach, the 1619 Project has given critics of The Times a gift.”

Read it all. It was a thorough repudiation of the celebrated project. Given the Jacobin atmosphere in the Times newsroom, Stephens has real stones to write that, and so does whoever runs the editorial page these days for running it. Someone, can’t remember who, said on Twitter that Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger must have been really pissed off over the criticism of The 1619 Project if he signed off on such a rebuke in the pages of the paper. Maybe. He ought to be. The 1619 Project, as Stephens proves, was nothing but left-wing agitprop.

Well. Today Times executive editor Dean Baquet came out swinging on behalf of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning matriarch of the project, issuing this statement:

“Work that boldly challenges prevailing views”? Please. The 1619 Project says exactly what America’s liberal and corporate elites want to hear. Besides, if the Times published an editorial package claiming space aliens built the pyramids, that would be boldly challenging prevailing views too (but the National Enquirer beat them to the story in the 1970s).

Baquet must have been under enormous pressure to make that statement. But it comes at a cost to his reputation. The essayist Wesley Yang tweeted:

 

Yep. The 1619 Project tells an ideologically appealing falsehood. It’s corrupting. And it’s a sign of decline towards something nasty. As I write in Live Not By Lies, Hannah Arendt saw this kind of thing — propaganda, and the willingness to believe useful lies — as a bellwether of totalitarianism:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.”

For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

Here’s an important example of this happening in our time and place. In 2019, The New York Times, the world’s most influential newspaper, launched the “1619 Project,” a massive attempt to “reframe” (the Times’s word) American history by displacing the 1776 Declaration of Independence as the traditional founding of the United States, replacing it with the year the first African slaves arrived in North America.

No serious person denies the importance of slavery in US history. But that’s not the point of the 1619 Project. Its goal is to revise America’s national identity by making race hatred central to the nation’s foundational myth. Despite the project’s core claim (that the patriots fought the American Revolution to preserve slavery) having been thoroughly debunked, journalism’s elite saw fit to award the project’s director a Pulitzer Prize for her contribution.

Equipped with this matchless imprimatur of establishment respectability, the 1619 Project, which has already been taught in forty-five hundred classrooms,16 will find its way into many more.

Dean Baquet was faced with a powerful argument by one of his newspaper’s own columnists, revealing without a shadow of a doubt that The 1619 Project was based on a lie — but he still defended it. The mask and gloves really are off at Mr. Duranty’s paper. 

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The Eyes Of Dorota Kravjanska

Great letter from a reader, who gives me permission to post it as long as I take his name out:

My name is [deleted], and I’m a young professional living in Boston, who was absolutely blown away by how compelling I found Live Not by Lies. I graduated an Ivy League university a couple years ago and had always assumed I would be a minority given my political/religious affiliations in liberal circles, but the past six or so months have truly astounded me in terms of people I thought were reasonable fully buying into lies as well as the total lack of normality that they support.

I can think of a woman I work with (Evangelical background from [the South]) who I had previously held very frank and honest conversations with, who I can best describe as having been radicalized. She went home for the initial COVID work from home and then returned a completely different person. She has put gender pronouns in every single email, Zoom call and Skype message and joined the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity team with gusto. Now, she only talks about BLM and reducing the number of straight, white men in hiring and has essentially disowned her family and her background. What is bizarre to me is that she’s urged me to join those types of committees as well, assuming that I’ve changed too. I’ve decided to keep my distance and not buy into the series of lies and divisive content that those views propagate.

On a more profound note, one line from your book in particular (from when you spoke to Krizka) has stuck with me, “The secular liberal idea of freedom so popular in the West, and among many in his postcommunist generation is a lie. That is, the concept that real freedom is found by liberating the self from all binding commitments (to God, to marriage, to family), and by increasing worldly comforts–that is a road that leads to hell.”

It made me remember my favorite passage from Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven, condemning

“our obsession with sex, violence, and the pornography of “making it”; our addictive dependence on drugs, “entertainment,” and the evening news; our impatience with anything that limits our sovereign freedom of choice, especially with the constraints of marital and familial ties, our preference for “nonbinding commitments”; our third-rate educational system; our third-rate morality; our refusal to draw a distinction between right and wrong, lest we “impose” our morality on others and thus invite others to “impose” their morality on us; our reluctance to judge and be judged; our indifference to future generations, as evidenced by our willingness to saddle them with a huge national debt, an overgrown arsenal of destruction, and a deteriorating environment; our inhospitable attitude to the newcomers born into our midst; our unstated assumption, which underlies so much of the propaganda for unlimited abortion, that only those children born for success ought to be allowed to be born at all.”

I know you likely won’t be surprised by this (I’m a regular reader of your blog), but I think it’s worth mentioning just how atomized and disconnected from any sense of our culture, history and society the young elite class of our country are. My father always says, “You never learn who people truly are until you hear them speak when they think they’re among their own”. I can tell you firsthand: almost every single top Ivy League grad (working in investment banking, consulting, etc.) prizes nonbinding commitments above all, is obsessed with individualistic morality and sex, and has utter contempt for those with traditional lifestyles and closely-held views of right and wrong. Not that this makes them happy! You would not believe the rates of psychoactive drug prescriptions among this group of people and how deeply unhappy their lifestyles make them. I pray that those among this group who I consider friends eventually see the errors of their ways, but I don’t have much hope. All major societal institutions are telling them they are right and just.

Another reader writes about the “Living With The Body” post from earlier, saying that he teaches in a public high school, and recently led a discussion about a debate between two thinkers:

Virtually all of my students were all in when it came to expressive individualism.  Even when I pressed them on the contradictions of the ideology and how it leads to absurdities, they clung to it.  The word that comes to mind is “stubborn.”  Even the Christian kids–who lead evangelical Christian groups on campus–couldn’t see the absurdity.  Expressive individualism was to them like saying “the sky is blue.”  Reminds me of that viral youtube video a while back where the interviewer got college educated young adults to claim with a straight face that they’d call him a 6 ft5 Chinese woman (the interviewer looked around 5ft 8 or so and was a white dude) if he identified as such.

I think we have our work cut out for us.  I try to do my part, but it feels like holding back a tsunami.

Living not by lies is going to require the ability to see through our own culture’s central myth. The Boston reader cited the story of Timo Križka from Live Not By Lies , and how the young photographer, a member of the first Slovak generation raised after communism, discovered something powerful when he set out to interview and to photograph elderly people who had endured communist prisons for their faith:

From his interviews with former Christian prisoners, Križka also learned something important about himself.

He had always thought that suffering was something to be escaped. Yet he never understood why the easier and freer his professional and personal life became, his happiness did not commensurately increase. His generation was the first one since the Second World War to know liberty—so why did he feel so anxious and never satisfied?

These meetings with elderly dissidents revealed a life-giving truth to the seeker. It was the same truth it took Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn a tour through the hell of the Soviet gulag to learn.

“Accepting suffering is the beginning of our liberation,” he says. “Suffering can be the source of great strength. It gives us the power to resist. It is a gift from God that invites us to change. To start a revolution against the oppression. But for me, the oppressor was no longer the totalitarian communist regime. It’s not even the progressive liberal state. Meeting these hidden heroes started a revolution against the greatest totalitarian ruler of all: myself.”

All those rich, successful, miserable people in Boston don’t know as much about the secret of a good life as a poor elderly Slovak pensioner who had everything taken from her.

The photo above is of Dorota Kravjanska, one of the Slovak prisoners of conscience Timo photographed and interviewed for his extraordinary book Light In Darkness. I did the companion English text for him, with the help of Google Translate. I hope that the success of Live Not By Lies will inspire an American publisher to bring out a US edition of this incredible work by a brilliant young Slovak photographer.

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