Rod Dreher's Blog, page 122

Liberal Blindness & Race Consciousness

I’ve mentioned in this space on several occasions how much respect I have for the writing of Thomas B. Edsall. He’s a political journalist who tends to base his reporting not on following the horse race, but on deep data dives and academic analyses. Even if you don’t agree with his columns — he’s a liberal — he’s always worth reading. That said, I really disagree with today’s New York Times column by Edsall, whose error is quite typical of liberal opinion, I’m afraid. Let me explain.

In it, Edsall frames our current politics as a struggle between “race liberalism and race conservatism.” What does he mean by this? Well, this:

As African-Americans and other racial minorities increasingly occupy positions of influence and authority in American society, they also face backlash from those on the right whose opposition to ceding power is fierce, whether their opposition is veiled or out in the open. This opposition is now lodged solidly in the contemporary Republican Party, and the two parties regularly confront each other with rising intensity over the issue.

How about that: white people resent black people rising up in society, which explains conservatism today. I know this is received gospel among progressives and liberals, but let’s step back from it for a second.

The assumption running throughout Edsall’s analysis is that the only thing that can explain white resistance to contemporary left-wing racial politics is racism. But there is a mountain of evidence that liberals have to ignore for this explanation to be true. For example, this summer, one of the top-selling books is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, which purports to explain how white people, when they disagree with progressive challenges on racial matters, are really behaving in pathological ways.

Is there any demographic group who would stand for being told that to object to descriptions of them as bad (as a group), and deserving of punishment is a sign of how sick and frightened they are? It is impossible to imagine a book called Black Fragility, or Latino Fragility. The left politicizes and pathologizes the condition of being white, and there is Tom Edsall, blaming whites who don’t agree with this as resentful.

The literature and media of the left these days is filled with condemnations of “whiteness.” Again, the idea that people who see themselves routinely denounced for the color of their skin, and their culture, must accept these racist insults and attempts to disempower and dispossess them, or stand guilty of racism — it’s absurd. But this is how liberals see it.

Edsall writes:

The many sources of frustration for Black Americans are evident in “The Economic State of Black America in 2020,” a report released on Feb. 14 by Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia and vice chair of the Joint Economic Committee.

Among its findings:

Black household income grew from 1980 to 2018 by over $11,000 annually in inflation adjusted dollars, but whites did even better. In 2,018, “for every dollar earned by the typical white household, the typical Black household earned only 59 cents. This is significantly worse than in 2000, when the typical Black household earned about 65 cents for every dollar earned by a White household.”

Racial disparities are largest for the most successful: both the racial pay-gap and the racial wealth gap are “largest for college graduates.” Whites with degrees made $60,000 in 2018 compared with $49,000 for African-Americans.

Less than “half of Black families own their homes (42 percent), compared with nearly three-quarters of white families (73 percent). This is a significant decline from the peak Black homeownership rate of 49 percent in 2004.”

You would have to be hard-hearted not to recognize the suffering of Black America, and not to sympathize with how far behind it is falling. The problem that so many liberals have is that they assume, à la Ibram X. Kendi, that any disparity between blacks and whites can only have been caused by white supremacy.

Take these figures above. Why are black households earning less? Does it have to do with education? Does it have to do with the kinds of professional fields white people tend to go into, versus those that attract black graduates? If blacks aren’t getting the kind of education that prepares them for more lucrative fields, why is that? You could say “racism,” and maybe you would be right. But you should also look at the state of the black family. According to Afro.com’s 2016 breakdown of US Census data:

The percentage of White children under 18 who live with both parents almost doubles that of Black children, according to the data. While 74.3 percent of all White children below the age of 18 live with both parents, only 38.7 percent of African-American minors can say the same.

Instead, more than one-third of all Black children in the United States under the age of 18 live with unmarried mothers—compared to 6.5 percent of White children. The figures reflect a general trend: During the 1960-2016 period, the percentage of children living with only their mother nearly tripled from 8 to 23 percent and the percentage of children living with only their father increased from 1 to 4 percent.

Social scientists have long espoused the benefits for children who live in two-parent homes, including economic, educational, health and other advantages.

There is no government policy that can compensate for the advantages living in an intact family gives a child. But liberals are so afraid of being accused of “blaming the victim” that they refuse to consider this massive factor that could account for the relative lack of black economic progress.

Similarly, on the question of why whites with degrees make more on average than blacks, it might be racism. We have to consider that possibility seriously. But we also should consider the kinds of professions that college educated blacks enter, versus whites. Blacks are notably underrepresented in the ranks of law, medicine, and technology, among the most lucrative professions.

They are also underrepresented in journalism — not a lucrative profession at all, but the one I’m most familiar with. I can tell you that the journalism industry obsesses — the word is not too strong — over the lack of minorities in the field, and tries really hard to recruit them. But you can’t create journalists out of nothing. If black college students aren’t interested in journalism, they won’t study journalism, and won’t go into the field. I haven’t looked at these studies since I left mainstream journalism in 2010, but prior to that, it was well established by studies that for whatever reason, black and Latino households in the US had much lower readership of newspapers. If reading the paper or paying close attention to the news wasn’t a habit in your household, it stands to reason that you are much less likely to consider journalism as a profession.

Why wouldn’t this be true for other professions? I’m just saying that there are probably factors other than racism that account for these distressing figures. And as far as black home ownership, if blacks on the whole are doing poorly economically, of course they’re not going to be able to afford homes. I bet the loss of good working-class factory jobs in outsourcing has put black working class people in the same boat as white working-class people — unable to afford to buy a home. I could be wrong, but if so, that is a structural economic explanation for the home ownership difference, not a racial one.

But liberals today prefer one explanation for every racial difference: white supremacy. This is what Ibram X. Kendi espouses in his wildly popular How To Be Antiracist — but as the black linguist John McWhorter says in his review, this is an absurdly reductionist binary that can’t possibly explain the complexities of the world.

Yet the column of a sophisticated political observer like Tom Edsall seems to assume that it’s axiomatic. He writes:

Fanning the flames of racial animosity lies at the core of Trump’s election strategy, as it did in 2016.

This is incredibly frustrating. I don’t doubt that Trump’s strategy involves taking advantage of white racial anxieties, but it really requires a massive dose of liberal Kool-Aid to blame Republicans for “fanning the flames of racial animosity.” Last week we learned that at Sandia National Laboratories, white executives were subjected to mandatory training that was astonishingly racist.Seriously, follow that link to see the leaked instruction materials. Again, the gaslighting that liberals like Tom Edsall are engaged in is designed to blame whites, and white conservatives, for objecting to their own demonization by the left. From my point of view, the left, especially in the media, are the primary forces “fanning the flames of racial animosity.” I mean, good grief — Edsall writes for a newspaper that published a big, Pulitzer-winning project claiming that the entire foundation of the American republic was based on preserving slavery! Right now, his own paper is promoting a popular podcast whose fundamental premise is that white parents are responsible for the problems in the New York City public education system. The epistemic closure here is just epic.

More from Edsall’s column:

“Race relations and racism have emerged as a focus of American politics in the last twenty years unlike at any time since the Civil Rights movement,” Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, wrote in an email.

He went on:

The lack of progress in the incorporation and equalization of African Americans is the broad background condition, put into ever starker relief in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The rise of white Evangelicals on the Republican side — with white Christian churches being one of the most racially segregated sectors of voluntary associations — has profoundly deepened the racial divide.

Here’s news: black Christian churches are also one of the most racially segregated sectors of voluntary associations too. Are they therefore racist? Of course not. I’ve written here in the past about how different patterns in black and white churchgoing did certainly arise out of segregation, but that today, you can’t blame their persistence on continuing racism. Any white person who has ever worshiped at a black church knows that there is a huge difference in worship style from the comparatively sedate white churches. I went to a black Catholic funeral last year, and was impressed by how gospelly the service was. Though the liturgy was Catholic, the music and the sensibility was strongly black — and that was a beautiful thing to see. In Protestant churches, though, it would be very hard to imagine a black Christian giving up that worship and preaching style for what’s on offer at white churches. Similarly, if you were raised in white Protestant churches, you may find it hard to relate to how black American Christians worship. There’s nothing racist about any of this. It’s not a coincidence that the most integrated churches in America are those in the Pentecostal and charismatic tradition, in which the worship style is far more akin to what is normative in black churches.

In my own case, I have spent my entire adult life as a Christian in either the Catholic or Orthodox churches. There is no way that I could ever be comfortable worshiping at a Protestant church, white or black. I don’t mean that in any negative way about Protestants — it’s just how I have been formed intellectually and otherwise about what worship is.

I think it far more likely that Kitschelt is looking at all-white Evangelical congregations and concluding that ah-ha, they must be keeping blacks out! Prior to the 1970s, that would (alas) not have been an unfair guess, though it still would have been the case that American whites and American blacks, because of historical circumstances — including slavery and Jim Crow — developed very different traditions within Christianity. But today? To say it’s about nothing other than racism is far too simplistic — though that judgment does confirm the liberal narrative about race.

This part of Edsall’s column is indisputable:

Over the past three-plus decades, the Democratic Party has been on the leading edge of change, one step or more ahead of the nation as a whole.

Democrats have become decisively more liberal, especially on cultural issues; more dependent on states on the East and West Coasts; more diverse; more ideologically orthodox, less religious, less white; and in many cases more highly educated.

“The race and religion gap jumps out to me, specifically white Christians vs. everyone else,” Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, wrote in an email describing how the parties have changed in recent decades.

While “the Republican Party doesn’t look terribly different than it did in the 1980s: about 88 percent were white Christians in 1984; in 2018, it’s still 75 percent.”

In contrast, the Democrats have changed radically, Burge continued: “About 68 percent of Democrats were white Christians in 1984, today it’s 38 percent.”

From 1991 to 2018, the share of Democrats who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated has grown from 10 percent to 38 percent. While a majority of Democrats say they believe in God, the party has become the home of nonbelievers.

But here we go again with a liberal double standard:

In an interview with The Times, Robert P. Jones, founder and C.E.O. of the Public Religion Research Institute, described in blunt terms the underlying rationale for the alliance between the Republican Party and white evangelicals: “The new culture war is not abortion or same-sex marriage, the new culture war is about preserving a white, Christian America,” Jones said, adding

That’s what Trump’s really leading with. The “Make America Great Again” thing — the way that was heard by most white evangelical Protestants, white working-class folks, was saying: “I’m going to preserve the composition of the country.”

In an email, Jones wrote

As the Republican Party has continued to remain fairly homogeneous and has organized itself, fueled by decades of deploying the so-called Southern Strategy, around a politics of white racial grievances, the Democratic Party has become the default party for those who do not share those grievances and has come to more closely reflect the changing demographics of the country. As a result, the Democratic coalition, in terms of race and religion, is notably more diverse today than it was when Biden first ran for president in 1988. And issues of religious and racial identity are more salient today in defining the partisan divides.

When people of color want to preserve their neighborhoods, it’s called “fighting gentrification.” Nobody objects when people of color seek political advantage in racial or ethnic terms. But when whites want to do it, it’s “white racial grievances.” For years I’ve been saying in this space that the rising left-wing obsession with identity politics — as opposed to old-fashioned, MLK-style liberalism — is going to call up real demons among white people. You cannot stir, politicize, and hallow racial consciousness among people of color and expect it not to have the same effect on white people.

The British political scientist Eric Kaufmann has written about how it’s perfectly normal to expect white people in the US, as they decline demographically relative to non-whites, to start behaving politically like all other racial groups have. In this 2019 interview with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker, he explained his view. Excerpts:

For all these reasons, Kaufmann—whose book has been hailed by intellectuals such as Andrew Sullivan and Tyler Cowen—believes that politicians must accept and even accommodate white grievances. “If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed,” he writes. “In an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet.” Kaufmann says that “politicians should set [immigration] levels that respect the cultural comfort zone of the median voter,” and he is open to the possibility of long-term refugee camps and a border wall to placate native majorities. He also thinks that liberals should be more tolerant of those who openly express pride in their whiteness.

More:

You write, “If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed. I realize this is very controversial for left-modernists. Yet not only is white group self-interest legitimate, but I maintain that in an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet.” Can you say a little bit more about what specifically you’re arguing for?

Yes. Part of this comes from a view that what’s ultimately behind the rise of right-wing populism are these ethnic-majority grievances, particularly around their decline, and that ultimately this is about nostalgia and attachment to a way of life or to a particular traditional ethnic composition of a nation. Wanting for that not to erode too quickly is the motivation. I think the survey data show that it’s much more about that than about material things, for example, or even fears. It’s about attachment to one’s own group rather than hatred of other groups. This is an important distinction. The survey data from the American National Elections Study show that whites who feel very warmly toward whites are not any more cold toward, say, African-Americans, than whites who aren’t very warm toward whites.

When you say that “white interests” will need to be discussed in politics, I presume you acknowledge that the interests of white people are generally taken into account as much as any group, if not more than other groups. Do you mean explicitly discussed?

There should be an equal treatment of groups in the cultural sphere. There’s no question whites are advantaged economically, politically. I’m not going to dispute that. But in the cultural sphere, on immigration, the group whose numbers have declined, or who experienced a more rapid sense of change and loss due to migration, are the white majority. If, for example, they’re saying, “We would like to have a slower rate of change to enable assimilation to take place,” I think that’s actually a legitimate cultural interest. It doesn’t mean that it should drive policy. I think a moderate group self-interest is fine.

This is seen as toxic, as expressed by a majority group, but when minorities express these interests, that’s seen as quite normal. I think that when it comes to white liberals, there tends to be a double standard, as there is with white conservatives, by the way, when it comes to groups expressing their self-interest.

One more excerpt:

Are you saying that it is in the “self-interest” of white people to have lower immigration rates, or are you saying that if white people perceive that it’s in their interest, they should be able to express that without being shamed for being racist? Or both?

I’m saying that for the conservative members of the white majority who are attached to their group and its historic presence, I think that sense of loss and wanting to slow down that sense of loss is an understandable motivation. The problem is when you bar that from the discussion. It then gets sublimated and expressed in what I think actually are more negative ways, when it comes to racism. I think it’s not very different from African-Americans in Harlem not wanting Harlem to lose its African-American character. It’s a similar cultural loss-protection argument, which is actually not that different from wanting to preserve historic buildings or ways of life. The problem is that then they go toward fear of criminals and terrorism, and immigrants putting pressure on services, and all the things which there’s very little evidence for, and I think are more negative because they actually stigmatize an out-group, which is closer to the definition of racism than simply being attached to one’s own group. Not that that doesn’t carry some risks as well, but I think that it’s more problematic to suppress it for the majority and not for minorities. I think that’s creating a quite negative situation.

You write that “diversity falls flat for many because we’re not all wired the same way.” What do you mean by “wired”?

This gets at political-psychology literature on authoritarianism and conservatism, which shows that between a third and a half of people have a hereditary disposition toward preferring order and security to novelty and change. What that means is that you’ve got members of both the majority and minorities who have that more conservative, order-seeking disposition. The problem we’re in is that when multiculturalism enjoins the majority to be individualistic and post-ethnic, and not to be attached to its groups, and minorities conversely to be attached to their groups, this doesn’t really fit. If you are wired in the conservative, order-seeking member of a majority psychologically, that’s not going to work for you. This is really where I think populism is coming from.

Read the whole interview — it’s really fascinating stuff. This, I would suppose, is what is going on with Edsall, a veteran New York Times journalist who lives in Washington. I don’t know him, but I would estimate that he holds the standard views of cosmopolitan white liberals, which finds it normal for whites not to be attached to their ethnic group (and evil if they are), and also normal, even admirable, for non-whites to be attached to theirs.

Can you not see how imposing this normative framework on American politics in 2020 can blind you to what’s actually happening, and why it’s happening?

There’s a lot more in Edsall’s column, which is pretty wonky (that’s not a criticism). He cites data showing that American politics have become far more racialized than in the past. But again, why is that?

Since 2012, white liberals have gotten woke. NPR reports:

Beginning around 2012, polls show an increasing number of white liberals began adopting more progressive positions on a range of cultural issues. These days, white Democrats (and, in particular, white liberals) are more likely than in decades past to support more liberal immigration policies, embrace racial diversity and uphold affirmative action.

Researchers say this shift among white liberals indicates a seismic transformation in the last five to seven years and not just a blip on one or two survey questions.

“The white liberals of 2016 or even 2014 are very distinguishable from the white liberals of the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s,” said Zach Goldberg, doctoral student at Georgia State University who has been studying the change.

At the same time, the media, which is heavily dominated by liberals, began to reflect this wokeness, and to drive it. That same Zach Goldberg recently published a long piece in Tablet about his findings in this area. Excerpt:

Starting well before Donald Trump’s rise to power, while President Obama was still in office, terms like “microaggression” and “white privilege” were picked up by liberal journalists. These terms went from being obscure fragments of academic jargon to commonplace journalistic language in only a few years—a process that I document here in detail. During this same period, while exotic new phrases were entering the discourse, universally recognizable words like “racism” were being radically redefined. Along with the new language came ideas and beliefs animating a new moral-political framework to apply to public life and American society.

Consider the graph below, which displays the usage of the terms “racist(s)” and “racism” as a percentage of all words in four of the nation’s largest newspapers from (depending on the publication) 1970 through 2019.

 

As Goldberg points out, the media began to redefining our moral and political framework to account for their new views of race. And yet, we get this conclusion in Edsall’s column today:

As never before, Democratic racial liberalism is challenging Republican racial conservatism. The election will not bring this conflict to an end, but the outcome will determine whether the nation moves forward or backward in the struggle to realize the promise of full equality that has been central to the country since its founding.

You see what he did there? I don’t see how anybody can deny that racism exists, and that it is evil. But if you don’t agree with this radical, illiberal-left definition of race and racism, then you are therefore against full equality for black people. Good grief.

And Edsall has the nerve to blame Republicans for “fanning the flames of racial animosity”! The gaslighting is strong with these people. I would refer Edsall back to this December 2017 New York Times column written by Thomas B. Edsall, who said then:

Many Democrats continue to have little understanding of their own role — often inadvertent, an unintended consequence of well-meaning behavior — in creating the conditions that make conservatives willing to support Trump and the party he is leading.

I asked Karen Stenner, the author of “The Authoritarian Dynamic” and no fan of the president, for her explanation of the political dynamic in the current struggle between left and right. She emailed back:

Consider some of the core features of our ideal liberal democracy: absolutely unfettered freedom and diversity; acceptance and promotion of multiculturalism; allowing retention of separate identities; maintenance of separate communities, lifestyles and values; permitting open criticism of leaders, authorities and institutions; unrestrained free expression (of what many will consider offensive/outrageous/unacceptable ideas); strict prohibitions on government intervention in ‘private’ moral choices.

In fact, Stenner argues, these values are the subject of intense debate. They lie at the core of what divides America:

These reflect some of the fundamental fault lines of human conflict and are unlikely ever to be resolved or settled because we can’t just be socialized or educated out of our stances on these issues, as they are the product of deep-seated, largely heritable predispositions that cause us to vary in our preference for and in our ability to cope with freedom and diversity, novelty and complexity, vs oneness and sameness.

Not only are the values that the left takes for granted heatedly disputed in many sections of the country, the way many Democratic partisans assert that their values supplant or transcend traditional beliefs serves to mobilize the right.

Stenner makes the point that

liberal democracy’s allowance of these things inevitably creates conditions of “normative threat,” arousing the classic authoritarian fears about threats to oneness and sameness, which activate those predispositions — about a third of most western populations lean toward authoritarianism — and cause the increased manifestation of racial, moral and political intolerance.

More:

In addition to the economic setbacks experienced in heavily Republican regions of the country, [Eric] Schnurer, himself a liberal, argues that blue America has over the last decade declared war on the “red way of life.”

He makes a case very similar to Stenner’s:

The political, economic, and cultural triumph nationwide of a set of principles and realities essentially alien to large numbers of Americans is viewed as (a) being imposed upon them, and (b) overturning much of what they take for granted in their lives — and I don’t think they’re wrong about that. I think they’ve risen in angry revolt, and now intend to give back to the “elite” in the same terms that they’ve been given to. I don’t think this is good — in fact, I think it’s a very dangerous situation — but I think we need to understand it in order to responsibly address it.

Or, you can just call them a bunch of right-wing racist troglodytes. That seems to be the go-to explanation on the left today. It’s frustrating to see a journalist as careful as Tom Edsall fall into it. For the record, I should say that I believe in the old-fashioned liberal vision, by which people ought to be judged by the content of their character, and under which racially discriminatory barriers to access should be demolished. My disdain for white racial consciousness is why the alt-right calls me a cuck. My disdain for wokeness is why progressives call me a racist. What a weird place to be in, innit?

One more thing: I apologize for the f-bomb below — in fact, I’m going to put the image beneath the jump so you don’t have to see it if you don’t want to — but this old cartoon from Spy magazine characterizes the Democratic Party’s, and liberalism’s, appeal to non-woke whites. Imagine a slightly different version that says, “Can I have your vote so I can enact this view of you into law and public policy?”

 

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Woke Capitalism’s Tired Treads

That image, taken of a screen at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. diversity training session, has been going around social media. It’s for real. Channel 19 in Cleveland reports:

According to the employee who took the photo of the slide, it was presented at the Topeka plant by an area manager and said the slide came from its corporate office in Akron, Ohio.

“If someone wants to wear a BLM shirt in here, then cool. I’m not going to get offended about it. But at the same time, if someone’s not going to be able to wear something that is politically based, even in the farthest stretch of the imagination, that’s discriminatory,” said an employee, under the agreement of anonymity due to fears they could lose their job. “If we’re talking about equality, then it needs to be equality. If not, it’s discrimination.”

Goodyear released the following statement:

“Goodyear is committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful workplace where all of our associates can do their best in a spirit of teamwork. As part of this commitment, we do allow our associates to express their support on racial injustice and other equity issues but ask that they refrain from workplace expressions, verbal or otherwise, in support of political campaigning for any candidate or political party as well as other similar forms of advocacy that fall outside the scope of equity issues.”

What a load of garbage. It’s fine to support things woke people support, but nothing else. I certainly understand keeping MAGA stuff out of the workplace, because that is directly political. But you can’t say Blue Lives Matter or All Lives Matter? The double standard is galling.

So many conservatives still operate under a badly outdated framework that holds Big Business to be fundamentally conservative. The idea, a Randian one, is that Business is the antagonist to Government. Conservatives have long sided naturally with Business.

Well, guess what? Big Business is now on the other side. It is arguably more a threat to conservative values than the state. From Live Not By Lies:

The stereotype that college students leave their liberalism behind on campus when they graduate into the“real world” is badly outdated. In fact, today’s graduates are often taught to bring their social justice ideals withthem and advocate for what is called “corporate social responsibility.” True, nobody has a good word to say for corporate social irresponsibility; like “social justice,” the phrase is a euphemism for a progressive cultural politics.

As author Heather Mac Donald has written, “[G]raduates of the academic victimology complex are remaking the world in their image.” In her 2018 book, The Diversity Delusion, Mac Donald explored how corporate human resources departments function as a social justice commissariat. Nearly 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies have diversity offices she reports, and the corporate mania for “equity, diversity, and inclusion” informs corporate culture at many levels, including hiring, promotion, bonuses, and governing the norms of interaction in the workplace.

Some multinational corporations impose progressive cultural politics on workplaces in more socially conservative countries. Several Polish employees of the national branches of world-renowned corporations told me that they have felt compelled to participate in LGBT activism inside their companies. As Christians, they believed endorsing Pride violated their consciences, but given economic conditions in Poland, they feared refusing to conform would cost them their jobs.

I would be fine with a company policy forbidding people from bringing their politics, or cultural politics, into the workplace, period. But if you’re going to allow it for LGBT advocates and Black Lives Matter activists and allies, you have to be fair. Actually, Big Business doesn’t have to be fair, because nobody is making them.

Does the Human Resources commissariat at Goodyear not understand how resentful policies like this make employees? Who wants to work at a company that polices its employees so unfairly?

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Jacquelyn’s Big Night

I gotta say, this really does warm my cold, cold heart. Do you remember this encounter between Democratic candidate Joe Biden and Jacquelyn, a security guard at The New York Times? It was last December, and the candidate was headed to his editorial board meeting, where he was making the case for why the newspaper should endorse him for the Democratic nomination. They didn’t, but Jacquelyn did. This moment was captured by a Times videographer:

Honored to have won Jacquelyn’s endorsement. pic.twitter.com/tGpNZjXacu

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 20, 2020

Tonight, Jacquelyn (who asked the media not to disclose her last name) will put Joe Biden’s name officially forward for the Democratic nomination. According to the Washington Post:

In an interview with The Washington Post, Jacquelyn said she has followed Biden since he became Barack Obama’s running mate. “I just like Joe. I’ve always liked him,” she said.

She said she finds inspiration in his life story and the tragedies he has endured — the deaths of his first wife and daughter in a December 1972 car accident and of his son to brain cancer in May 2015.

“He’s been through so much. And he doesn’t show it on the outside. He may feel it on the inside — and I’m that type of person,” she said, adding that her outward cheer masks a difficult life, including stints in foster care as a child.

More:

Jacquelyn has watched other Democratic conventions, and she said the idea of nominating Biden is “overwhelming.”

“I never thought I would be in a position to do this,” she said. “I never thought I was worthy enough to do this.”

I just love this. What a wonderful story. God bless Jacquelyn, and good on Joe Biden and his people for giving her this opportunity.

UPDATE: Yes, this:

I'm not a Biden guy, but there's something wonderful and Capra-esque about the New York Times editorial board who made the candidates all come up to their offices and perform being less important to the outcome of the primary than the security guard in their building's elevator. https://t.co/hDzsc3svle

— Zack Stentz (@MuseZack) August 18, 2020

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White Man’s Life Among Asian Students

A reader writes with a fascinating story. I have edited out at his request parts of his letter that could identify him, and publish this with his permission:

I read your post about “The Problem With ‘Nice White Parents”, and I felt moved to share a bit of my own personal history which I think is relevant to the discussion, and which may touch on some aspects of the story that tend to go under-discussed.  (I’m going to talk about what it was like growing up as a white kid in a town largely composed of whites and asians, where it was the white kids who were the relative underachievers.)

I grew up in Arcadia, California in the ’80s and ’90s.  Arcadia is a quiet, comfortable suburb in the San Gabriel Valley immediately east of Los Angeles.  Even when my parents moved there in 1983 (when I was one year old), it was expensive, due in no small part to the reputation of its public schools.  My parents were both attorneys, but even so, they needed considerable financial help from both sets of their parents to afford their house, and they nearly lost it in the late ’80s when the balloon payment came due.  They hung on and stayed in Arcadia largely for me and my sister, because the schools had such a good reputation.

In the 1980s, Arcadia was a mostly white suburb that was rapidly transforming due to a high volume of immigration from Asia, particularly Taiwan.  That transformation continued and accelerated through the 1990s.  Today, Arcadia is a heavily Asian neighborhood.  Specifically, it’s mostly Chinese, with the immigration now mostly coming from mainland China while the Taiwanese old guard gradually moves further east to Walnut, Diamond Bar, and Rowland Heights.

Growing up, I occasionally overheard my parents grousing with other white parents about the Asian newcomers.  Things to the effect of “they make their children study all the time, there’s no balance in their lives, and they’re (unfairly) making our kids look bad by comparison (because we, the white parents, don’t force our children to do homework all day and they, the Chinese parents, do).”

The thing is, when I went to Arcadia High School, I found myself largely surrounded by those Asian kids because I took a lot of honors and advanced placement classes.  I can be more specific than that: mostly Asians; of those, mostly Chinese; of those, mostly Taiwanese; and of those, the very highest achievers were mostly girls.

When I was there, Arcadia High School was certainly not officially segregated in any way, but it was kind of de facto segregated: the honors and advanced placement classes were mostly Asian, with a few white kids, and the regular classes were mostly white with a smattering of other ethnicities (mostly latinos and a few so-called “dumb” Asian kids).  The “prestigious” (read: intellectual) extracurriculars (the debate team, the AP government team, academic decathlon)?  Mostly Asians, a few white kids.  The less prestigious (read: more hands-on) extracurriculars?  Mostly whites and other non-Asians.  I saw both sides because I took both kinds of classes: every honors/AP humanities class I could get my hands on; some honors math and some regular math classes; regular science classes; Speech & Debate team on the one hand, drama and television production on the other hand.  (My parents, incidentally, were horrified that I chose advanced drama in my senior year over the government team.)

I was the only white male National Merit scholar in my graduating class; there were one or two white girls too, I think, but again the vast majority of National Merit scholars in my graduating class were Asian, and the majority of those were girls.  My father half-jokingly referred to me as “The Great White Hope.”  I say this not to brag but to underscore the racial milieu at my high school.

The thing is — I liked it that way!  The Asian kids were an absolute pleasure to be with in my advanced classes.  They thoughtfully participated in class discussions that were often lively and interesting, they never caused any disruption, and they certainly never made me feel like I had to hide or keep quiet in order to avoid bullying.I respected my Asian classmates and enjoyed their company, and if they gave me a run for my money in terms of the grading curve, that was a small price to pay (even a challenge to be relished).  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I ended up marrying a Chinese immigrant.

Not so the white and Latino kids in my regular academic classes, who were at best bored and uninterested, and who at worst would go after you if you made them “look bad” by (heaven forbid) showing interest in the subject matter.  I took advanced classes in large part to get away from those kids.  I had been mercilessly bullied by a gang of white and Latino kids in middle school, and I wanted to get as far away from that as possible; and anyway, given the choice between being surrounded by people who treat your class as a prison term and being surrounded by people who find the subject matter as interesting as you do, what would you choose?

I should add that the extracurricular activities I took that were majority non-Asian were also informally segregated – but not along racial lines!  They were informally segregated between the kids who were motivated and hard-working and those who just wanted to coast.  Some of my fondest high school memories were working late into the night on video production projects with the cream of my television production class: a black guy (one of the only ones at our high school), a Latino guy, a very Jewish guy, and a handful of other average white guys.  There was a mutual respect and esprit de corps among us because we all knew that everyone else in our little group was reliable, competent, and committed to doing an excellent job.

I had white and Asian friends growing up, and looking back on it, my white friends had home lives that were relatively more chaotic than my Asian friends did.  No drugs or crime or domestic abuse or anything like that, but certainly divorce.  My best white friend’s mother had three marriages (he was her son by the first); my other white friend’s mother had five marriages and four children, one by each of the first four husbands (my friend was the first).  Hell, my parents divorced (although they remarried each other around the time I entered high school).  In contrast, all of my Asian friends?  Stably married parents, all of them.  And I can also confirm that my Asian friends generally did study harder and longer after school than my white friends did, because their (the Asians) parents made them.

If this rambling diatribe has a point, it’s that the black/white dichotomy we hear about endlessly in the media misses a lot of important nuance.  And that my experience is consistent with your intuition that culture — specifically, the home culture of the students — matters far more than race when it comes to school atmosphere and success.

What a great letter. I found myself reading along thinking, “That would have been me.” If I had to choose between sending my children to a school where they were the only non-Asian kids, but it was a school like the one the reader attended, or an ordinary all-white school, you’d better believe I’d send my kids to school with the Asians, and be grateful for the opportunity. The kind of values that the kids that the white reader went to school with are the kind of values my parents tried to instill into me, and that I try to do with my kids.

Reading this letter makes me reflect on one of the biggest differences I noticed between myself and the non-Southern friends I made when I moved to DC in 1992, and lived outside of the South for the first time (I was 25). I had not realized until then how deeply my inner life had been shaped by hierarchy, courteous manners, and respect for authority — especially the authority of older people. I thought this was just the way the world was. I’ve mentioned in this place many times before how utterly bizarre and scandalous it was to us kids when, in elementary school, the power company built a nuclear power plant near our town, and suddenly our school was filled with the children of construction workers from up North. These kids referred to adults by their first names! It is impossible to express strongly enough how taboo this was. It would be like high-fiving the Queen of England.

Gestures like that carried within them an entire culture. I don’t want to get into defending traditional Southern culture here, but I just want to say that the way the reader describes the Asian culture he encountered in school resonates deeply with me. Mind you, our schools were not like the one he describes, because not every Southern family was as traditional and as patriarchal as mine was. Still, I get what this reader is saying. Boy, do I get it. My father instilled in us that to behave badly was to dishonor yourself, and to bring dishonor onto the family. Though that culture was declining even back then, that is how we were raised, and I’m grateful for it, despite its problems.

If it puzzles you, reader, why I react so strongly to disorder, well, this is a big part of your answer. I was raised in a family culture that regarded disordered behavior as an outward sign of inward disharmony, and indeed as a moral fault. Mine was a culture that valued authority and authority figures: the pastor, the teacher, the coach, the police officer, and above all, elderly people of any race or class. Nobody reasoned this stuff out; everybody simply knew that if we did not have hierarchy and “respect” (that was the usual word) for these people, we would have nothing. To disrespect these authority figures was ultimately to show yourself to be not worthy of respect. That was the world I grew up in.

We all know the injustices and even cruelty that this Dixie Confucian order allowed, most especially towards black people. In my own history, the people who bullied me in high school were white, and of the social elite. This is not, though, a sign that a traditional authoritarian order is in principle bad, only that it is far from perfect, and like every other human system, needs constant reform. On those occasions when that order sanctioned, usually implicitly, injustice or cruelty, it was being untrue to itself. It ought to have been ashamed of itself.

It would not be unfair to say that that culture — and maybe the Asian culture in which my white reader studied as a kid — is one that places too much value on outward behavior. But when it was working well, that culture ennobled everyone within it, and made us all aristocrats of manners. Poor kids, black and white, sometimes had better manners than well-off white kids — and they won honor for it. In the worldview of my parents, what made a person trashy was not their money or lack of it; it was whether or not they had manners, which is to say, a personal culture that honored honorable conduct: fair play, courtesy, respect for authority (especially elders), chivalry towards women, and so forth.

My parents — to be honest, this was mostly my dad — were relics even in their own time. I am so very grateful that they raised me like this, though it does put me out of step with my own time. I don’t think that’s bad. The reader’s letter, though, makes me wonder what it would be like if I lived as a minority, raising a family, within an Asian community with the same values. I suspect that had, for some reason, my wife and I found ourselves raising our children in suburban Los Angeles, we would have gravitated toward schools and communities that were predominantly Asian, simply because we held similar values, especially on the role of family and communal order. In a pluralistic society like ours, I consider my “tribe” to be the kind of people who may not espouse the same religion as I do, but who value hard work, fairness to others, personal decency, good manners, a general respect for hierarchy and authority, and the other values with which I was raised.

The reader’s letter really does reveal how the standard American racial narrative (black vs. white) makes it hard to see what’s really going on in stories of school, neighborhoods, and racial conflict. And we cannot speak honestly and openly about any of this. I’m grateful that you readers feel that you are safe to share your own experiences in this space, and trust me to keep your identities secret.

The post White Man’s Life Among Asian Students appeared first on The American Conservative.

Marxism Is Obliterating Liberalism

The Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony has written a lucid and penetrating essay about how Marxism manifests itself in our time and place — and how we should meet its challenge.

He begins by pointing out what has been clear to many of us on the Right for a while, but is still not so to most left-liberals:

Institutional liberalism lacks the resources to contend with this threat. Liberalism is being expelled from its former strongholds, and the hegemony of liberal ideas, as we have known it since the 1960s, will end. Anti-Marxist liberals are about to find themselves in much the same situation that has characterized conservatives, nationalists, and Christians for some time now: They are about to find themselves in the opposition.

This means that some brave liberals will soon be waging war on the very institutions they so recently controlled. They will try to build up alternative educational and media platforms in the shadow of the prestigious, wealthy, powerful institutions they have lost. Meanwhile, others will continue to work in the mainstream media, universities, tech companies, philanthropies, and government bureaucracy, learning to keep their liberalism to themselves and to let their colleagues believe that they too are Marxists—just as many conservatives learned long ago how to keep their conservatism to themselves and let their colleagues believe they are liberals.

This is the new reality that is emerging. There is blood in the water and the new Marxists will not rest content with their recent victories. In America, they will press their advantage and try to seize the Democratic Party. They will seek to reduce the Republican Party to a weak imitation of their own new ideology, or to ban it outright as a racist organization. And in other democratic countries, they will attempt to imitate their successes in America. No free nation will be spared this trial. So let us not avert our eyes and tell ourselves that this curse isn’t coming for us. Because it is coming for us.

This, for them, will be new. Joe Biden is the avuncular mainstream liberal who will hold the door open for the army of younger militants to rush through. Biden — avuncular, non-threatening Uncle Joe — is the end of something for liberalism.

In what may be the most practical section of this excellent essay, Hazony points out that anti-Marxist liberals won’t use the label “Marxist” to describe those on the left to hate their values, because they don’t want to be seen as McCarthyite. And the Marxist left doesn’t use Marxist language to refer to itself, preferring other jargon (e.g., “social justice,” “equity”) to describe its ideas. Hazony says these linguistic conventions prevent liberals from seeing the challenge for what it is:

The best way to escape this trap is to recognize the movement presently seeking to overthrow liberalism for what it is: an updated version of Marxism. I do not say this to disparage anyone. I say this because it is true. And because recognizing this truth will help us understand what we are facing.

He then explains, in simple, clear language, the basic framework of Marxist social analysis. It will be clear to any reader that the progressive movements today (e.g., antiracism) are fundamentally Marxist — applied not to economic relations, but to race, gender, and sexual identities.

Hazony says that anti-Marxists like to say that Marxism is a lie, but if that’s true, why is liberal society so vulnerable to it? Because, he says, “Marxism captures certain aspects of the truth that are missing from Enlightenment liberalism.” In particular:

Marx’s principal insight is the recognition that the categories liberals use to construct their theory of political reality (liberty, equality, rights, and consent) are insufficient for understanding the political domain. They are insufficient because the liberal picture of the political world leaves out two phenomena that are, according to Marx, absolutely central to human political experience: The fact that people invariably form cohesive classes or groups; and the fact that these classes or groups invariably oppress or exploit one another, with the state itself functioning as an instrument of the oppressor class.

Hazony explains how liberalism hides this fact from itself, resulting in good liberals believing that they are behaving with perfect rationality and fairness, when in fact they are upholding their own class’s privilege. I’m not going to paste that in here — you really should read his essay — but I will say that this is the aspect of Marxist analysis that has most transformed my own thinking in recent years, and moved me away from right-liberalism (e.g., mainstream Republican Party conservatism) to … well, I’m not sure how to describe it. That’s no doubt because I struggle to think my way through to a new paradigm.

Let me explain, if I can. You longtime readers know that I fell out with the Republican Party around 2008, over the Iraq War and the financial crash. Part of that was mere disgust, but part of it was realizing that big parts of the Republican narrative for explaining the world was not true. It’s what got us into the Iraq War, and what led to the financial crash.

I should say that this was not just the GOP — that is, right-liberal — way of explaining the world, but broadly encompasses the left-liberal way too. JFK was as much a liberal democratic hegemon in his thinking as was George W. Bush. It’s the American way. Moreover, anybody on the Democratic Party left who wants to pin the plutocratic worship of Wall Street on the Republican Party should spend a little time studying the Clinton Administration, and watching the PBS Frontline episode, “The Warning,” about how all the mandarins in Washington in the late Clinton Administration — including Republican leaders — refused to think ill of Wall Street, because it violated their model of the world, and the beneficence of unrestrained capitalism.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I came to understand the world in what can only be called a more Marxist way — that is, in terms of power relationships and class interests, and in how our language conceals these things from us. Once you go down that path, a lot of things become clearer. For example, the kind of talk about how America’s role is to make the world safe for democracy — what most liberals of the left and the right believe unproblematically — becomes rather less gauzy and idealistic when you begin to analyze it through what is actually done in service of that ideal, and who benefits from it.

In a more contemporary vein, a lot of left-liberals (and many right-liberals) despise Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, who is not a liberal. I understand why they hate him. But if you actually go to Central Europe, and spend time in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the picture is not as clear as it looks from so far away. You talk to ordinary people, and you come away with an understanding that what these people are fighting is a kind of Western colonialism.

For example, on my first trip to Hungary, I asked a young Hungarian why people in her country supported Orban. All I knew about his was what I had read in the Western media, and it wasn’t good. She told me a long story about how, after the collapse of communism, Hungarian industrial capacity was sold off to Western bidders. This made Hungary a pawn of rich Westerners. After some time, Hungarians came to believe that they were not in charge of their own fate. Orban spoke to that, and spent a lot of time and money repatriating industrial capacity.

Said the woman, “Did he give control of those industries to his cronies? Yes, you could say that. That should change. The point is, Hungarians were making the decisions for Hungarians, not foreigners. That’s why a lot of people vote for Orban: because we are a small country, and he stands up for us.”

Thinking in a semi-Marxist way puts the efforts of the liberal George Soros, and great villain in Orban’s political cosmology, into a certain light. Soros is revered among liberal elites spending his fortune to inculcate liberal values in the formerly communist countries of Central Europe. To oppose Soros is to oppose liberal democratic values, in their eyes. But that’s not how a lot of Central Europeans see it. They regard Soros as a rich foreigner who is spending lavishly to convince them to surrender the things they value.

Similarly, when I was in Poland last year, I talked to several Catholics who work for the Polish branch of US and European multinationals. They all told me that their office culture mandated celebrations of LGBT Pride Month. These Catholics said that they had no problem treating gay co-workers fairly, but to be made to affirm LGBT Pride violated their consciences. But if they refused, they would be fired, and jobs were hard to come by. They greatly resented Western corporations for behaving like cultural colonizers. And you know, they are correct.

Here’s the problem, though: Marxist analysis is a useful tool, but it cannot be used to explain the world in its entirety. It’s like people who believe that science can explain all things — and anything that cannot be known through science is not true, or not worth knowing. Science is a way of knowing; it is not the only way of knowing. And it is a way of knowing better suited for analyzing some phenomena than others.

If you give yourself over wholly to Marxist analysis, you end up hiding your own self-serving relationship to power. After all, Marxism-Leninism was one great rationalization for Soviet imperialism. Plus, it is far too simplistic to divide the world up into the Exploiters and the Exploited, the Oppressor and the Oppressed. As Orwell showed brilliantly in Animal Farm, it is very easy for the Oppressed to become the Oppressors, because that is, um, human nature. I regard so much of the so-called “antiracism” movement to be nothing more than an attempt to use the language of morality and justice to disempower people of one race on racial grounds alone, and to empower people of another race. There is nothing moral or just about it.

What’s more, Marxist analysis reduces all human relations to power dynamics. It is a lie that exiles love from human existence. And it denies that hierarchies are built into human nature — that we cannot live without them. The best we can manage in this fallen world is to establish hierarchies that provide for human flourishing. Hazony briefly explains why a proper conservative society does that better than any conceivable revolutionary Marxist one. And he notes that actual existing Marxists have never been able to figure out how to reach that utopia, where no one exploits or oppresses anyone else. That’s because it cannot be done.

So, look, I simply want to say that Marxist analysis is something that, like medicine, can be helpful in limited doses, but taken in deep drafts, acts as a powerful poison. If you want to poison a social group — say, an office team — give them a strong dose of Marxist analysis, and turn them on each other to pick out microaggressions and implicit biases. You will end up with sick and paranoid societies like the Central European countries became: polities in which nobody could trust anybody else, and social capital was absent.

I believe that liberalism has failed, for the same reasons Patrick Deneen does. But the reasons why I cannot fully let go of classical liberalism is that a) I don’t want my “classes” to treat others unfairly, and I don’t yet see a plausible form of government under which the disparate peoples in our pluralistic democracy can live together peaceably, and b) I feel certain that without liberalism, people of my class(es) — traditional Christians, most of all — will have no protection at all from the hostile majority. Where I stand — as a disbeliever in the longterm viability of liberalism, but as one who sees no preferable or even workable illiberal alternative in the post-Christian US — is untenable. I get that. This requires more work on my part.

Anyway, back to Hazony. He explains why classical liberalism does not really work absent a pre-political moral ideational structure granted to us by inherited traditions (religious and otherwise). Enlightenment liberalism says that all men are free and equal, but if that’s the case, says Hazony, why can’t anyone who wants to enter the United States? Why can’t anyone who wants to go to Princeton? Why can’t anyone declare that he is actually a woman, and participate fully in women’s athletic competitions? You cannot explain any of this through Reason alone. You have to have recourse to tradition. But liberals believe that traditions are useless inheritances that should not interfere with Reason. Which, says Hazony, is why liberalism is so vulnerable to Marxism:

Thus the endless dance of liberalism and Marxism, which goes like this:

1. Liberals declare that henceforth all will be free and equal, emphasizing that reason (not tradition) will determine the content of each individual’s rights.

2. Marxists, exercising reason, point to many genuine instances of unfreedom and inequality in society, decrying them as oppression and demanding new rights.

3. Liberals, embarrassed by the presence of unfreedom and inequality after having declared that all would be free and equal, adopt some of the Marxists’ demands for new rights.

4. Return to #1 above and repeat.

What to do? Well, read it all. Hazony explains persuasively why left-liberals have no choice but to ally with conservatives against the new Marxists. If they don’t, they will be destroyed. You’ll have to read Hazony to see his argument, but this news today is a perfect example of what he’s talking about:

An English professor at Iowa State University instructed students in her class not to advocate against abortion or the Black Lives Matter movement in any of their writing assignments.

According to Young America’s Foundation, ISU English Professor Chloe Clark stated in her English 250 class syllabus that certain viewpoints are not allowed to be discussed in class or on any assignment.

“GIANT WARNING: any instances of othering that you participate in intentionally (racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, [sic], sorophobia, transphobia, classism, mocking of mental health issues, body shaming, etc) in class are grounds for dismissal from the classroom,” Clark’s syllabus reportedly stated. She says that the same warning applies “for any papers/projects” as well, and tells students that any writing that goes against abortion, gay marriage, and Black Lives matter will not be allowed.

“You cannot choose any topic that takes at its base that one side doesn’t deserve the same basic human rights as you do (ie: no arguments against gay marriage, abortion, Black Lives Matter,etc). I take this seriously,” the syllabus states.

More:

Iowa State University spokeswoman Angie Hunt told Campus Reform that the syllabus did not follow ISU standards and has been corrected.

“The syllabus statement as written was inconsistent with the university’s standards and its commitment to the First Amendment rights of students. After reviewing the issue with the faculty member, the syllabus has been corrected to ensure it is consistent with university policy,” said Hunt. “Moreover, the faculty member is being provided additional information regarding the First Amendment policies of the University.”

Well, that’s good, but you’d have to be a fool to sign up for this professor’s class, especially if you do not share her radical opinions.

Now, consider Hazony’s four-step Dance of Liberals And Marxists in this case. How do liberals resist the Marxist demands? After all, are liberals really in favor of bigotry? (That would be the Marxist line, and it is often very effective.) But to surrender to this professor’s views would be to abandon liberalism. In this case, Iowa State defended the First Amendment, the constitutional expression of a bedrock liberal principle. The more typical case, I believe, is what happened to Prof. Nicholas Christakis, when, back in 2015, he tried to defend liberalism in the face of an angry student mob. They shouted him down, telling him that his attempts to use reason were hurting their feelings. Yale, ultimately, sided with the mob.

For reasons Hazony explains, liberals are going to have to realize that their real enemies are not to the Right, but to the Left. And, to be fair, conservatives and others on the Right need to realize that we are going to have to make common cause with good-faith liberals on these matters, to defend our own liberties.

The post Marxism Is Obliterating Liberalism appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Witness Of The Intellectual Dark Web

Over at the Catholic traditionalist site One Peter Five, Kale Zelden laments with particular grief the condition of the Catholic Church. Excerpts:

A deep and painful problem is that Catholicism in its current form does not speak in any meaningful way to us, nor especially to our children. Just look at the numbers here. And this tweet here captures the reality. Sadly, the church does not seem to be operating in any meaningful way for me, a middle-aged Gen X’er with a wife, a few kids, and a receding hairline. We are in a strange pattern of pretending, a kind of collective lie agreed upon.

He says that when he returned to the Catholic faith as an adult, he thought that the problem with the Church was one of orthodoxy: get rid of the clown masses, heretical sermons, and liturgical abuses, and the problem would be fixed. But this model didn’t account for the bishops who were outwardly orthodox, but who cared more about preserving the outward façade than dealing with inner corruption. More:

We are at an existential crisis in both formal and lay Catholicism. We can go into the threads that weave a genealogy of decline and decay, plenty of time to sort out and apportion blame, but in essence, the Church as we experience it is totally broken. It doesn’t make sense, nor does it help us make sense of the world.

We can’t talk about any of this because of all the various forces that govern speech. Twitter sock-puppets (sorry Grover), commbox heroes, pearl-clutching purity police, guardians of access, the bottleneck of resources, and the ever-present threat of being labeled a “grifter” preclude our ability to have a real discussion.

We need to talk.

We need to go outside our normie-world mechanisms of sense-making. Catholic education is largely in shambles, committed to orthodoxies far afield of anything recognizably faithful.

Zelden, who is writing for a trad audience, goes on to say:

Mind you, I’m not a Modernist, nor am I retro-traditionalist. Those that would prescribe poring over the Summa (again) are not serious about the crisis we find ourselves in. What worked in the 17th century, say, is not likely up to the task in the 21st. Being steeped in the tradition is certainly important, and our heritage is certainly rich, but it will not suffice for our purposes.

In a recent 1P5 piece Brendan Buckley argues that we needed to seek out tradition in our current crisis. I am sympathetic, but only to a point. Merely seeking out tradition is not a method. Though I agree that we must cleave to our tradition, in order for us to develop a successful strategy to weather the coming storms and raise our families and not lose them, we will need to be more creative.

He suggests paying more attention to the intellectuals of the Intellectual Dark Web, most of whom aren’t Catholic, or even Christian, but who, in Zelden’s view, may have insights that faithful orthodox Catholics can use to make the faith more alive in the postmodern world. Read the whole thing. 

I get what he’s talking about. I’ve never been a big reader of Jordan Peterson, but I have found it amazing how that man, who is not a religious believer, has the ability to speak deeply into the crisis of millions of people today, and give them hope. Why can’t the churches do that? I’m not saying, nor do I read Zelden as saying, that the church should mimic Peterson, or any other member of the IDW. But there must be things that these people know that the Church’s leaders have forgotten, or maybe haven’t learned. You don’t have to baptize Jordan Peterson’s philosophy to listen to his long lecture series on the Book of Genesis, and learn a lot from it. Personally, I was amazed by how Peterson had the ability to bring a compelling sense of wonder to the explication of this familiar text.

Why can’t we learn from Peterson’s answer to the question, “Why aren’t there more men in church?”We can.

Why can’t we learn from this short discussion Peterson had about Christianity with Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, and Dave Rubin, an agnostic gay libertarian? We can.

Take a look at Zelden’s whole argument, and tell me what you think. I read it as the cry of a middle-aged orthodox Catholic family man who is trying to figure out how to pass the faith on to his kids in a culture that is, in his phrase, sprinting towards Gomorrah, and has lost patience with the same old stale formulas. It’s the same spirit in which I wrote The Benedict Option. This is the kind of creative-minority thinking I was hoping to inspire.

By the way, the comments under Zelden’s essay are interesting. Some people are like, “How dare you suggest that we have anything to learn outside the Church?!” But others are like this one from someone named Stewart Davies:

This is a most perceptive and, I would opine, brilliant article, because for me, it ‘articulates’ so much of my own inherent, or more accurately, acquired disposition. For much of my life, I would disregard those who, regardless of the substance of what they say, were, (are) not ‘Catholic’. The Catholic Church is invested with he fullness of revealed Truth. Why would anyone with a glimmer of understanding feel the need of an ‘outside input’. But the implosion of the institutional Catholic Church over the last two decades has made me more appreciative of those ‘outside the fold’ who, in these peculiar times, bring to us a view of things that is, inherently, ‘catholic’.

And in all of this, I see the Holy Spirit very much at work. We are embarking upon the the most turbulent, and in fact, decisive times in all of human history. After the unprecedented traumas of the current era, the Church, the Body of Christ, having been betrayed by innumerable Judases, having suffered her own bitter passion, having ascended her own Calvary and been put to death, will, in imitation of Christ, be gloriously resurrected and perfected as the spotless Bride of Christ in readiness for the Bridegroom’s return. Those who are currently ‘outside the sheepfold’ yet now articulate profound insights into humanity’s present spiritual malaise are surely being ‘primed’ by the Holy Spirit to receive the fullness of revealed Truth of which the Catholic Church is the divinely ordained custodian.

Of course as an Orthodox Christian, I don’t believe that the Roman Catholic Church is what Stewart Davies believes it is, but I do share his view — and Zelden’s view, which is a patristic view — that when authentic truth manifests itself outside the Church, it is still God’s truth, and a wise and discerning Christian can profit from it.

The post The Witness Of The Intellectual Dark Web appeared first on The American Conservative.

Lawless In Portland

Postcards from the People’s Republic of Portland:

GRAPHIC: With the streets in downtown Portland occupied by BLM & antifa rioters, a man crashed his car. The mob pulled him out & beat him senseless in front of the passenger. He’s bleeding & unconscious. No police. Video by @livesmattershow. #PortlandRiots pic.twitter.com/jjnt5dUeb8

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 17, 2020

This is the moment immediately before. The mob assaults him and makes him sit in the ground while they search his belongings. When he stands up, they brutally beat him. #PortlandRiots #antifa #BlackLivesMatter Video by @livesmattershow pic.twitter.com/tEzpIz6V9U

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 17, 2020

Earlier: Rioters stand over the unconscious man’s body after they beat him. They pour water on him and shout in support of Black Lives Matter. Antifa street medics are examining him. He’s not responsive. #PortlandRiots #BlackLiveMatter Video @FromKalen. pic.twitter.com/aI5emSRATI

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 17, 2020

The man who was filmed kicking this man’s head when he was already on the ground wore a vest that says “SECURITY.” He’s part of the marauding BLM security at the protests in Portland. These are the people protesters want to replace police with. https://t.co/8YtngC61Mb

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 17, 2020

“We’re just walking down the street. Leave us alone!”

Footage from tonight in Portland showing people from the BLM protest walking around downtown appearing to assault more random white people. #PortlandRiots #BlackLivesMatter Video by @livesmattershow pic.twitter.com/Pmm7jfawDP

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 17, 2020

In no doubt related news, a new CNN poll shows that the Trump-Biden race has significantly narrowed. Biden is now only four points up on Trump among registered voters. More:

Across 15 battleground states, the survey finds Biden has the backing of 49% of registered voters, while Trump lands at 48%.

The pool of battleground states in this poll includes more that Trump carried in 2016 (10) than were won by Hillary Clinton (5), reflecting the reality that the President’s campaign is more on defense than offense across the states. Taken together, though, they represent a more Republican-leaning playing field than the nation as a whole.

The movement in the poll among voters nationwide since June is concentrated among men (they split about evenly in June, but now 56% back Trump, 40% Biden), those between the ages of 35 and 64 (they tilt toward Trump now, but were Biden-leaning in June) and independents (in June, Biden held a 52% to 41% lead, but now it’s a near even 46% Biden to 45% Trump divide).

That’s a poll among registered voters. An ABC/Washington Post poll of likely voters shows that Biden still has a comfortable lead.Maybe that CNN poll is flukey. I’m inclined to think so. But I also expect this race to tighten considerably.

For the record, insofar as I understand the post office controversy, I think it’s appalling, banana republic stuff that Trump says he’s trying to starve the US Postal Service of money to thwart mail-in balloting. But I have to remind you that most people aren’t afraid of a dysfunctional post office. Ordinary people are scared that under Democratic rule, what we see in Portland is going to become the new normal in many other places. My uncle is a gun aficionado, and went to see his local dealer last week. The dealer told him that his most recent big shipment of ammo sold out completely in 18 minutes. A tiny data point, but, I think, an indicative one. I’ve heard the same anecdotes from friends all over the country.

This is primal stuff. There are people who cannot stand Trump, and think he’s a lousy president, but who, having seen the rioting this summer, and the ongoing antifa travesty of lawlessness that is deep-blue Portland, genuinely fear that Democrats in power will spread this stuff. How? By being afraid to tackle it for fear of seeming bigoted and authoritarian. Bill de Blasio’s mayoral regime in New York has been catastrophic for the city. The Democrats’ fecklessness does not make Trump a good president, but it does, for many people, make him seem like less of a risk than the alternative.

If I were betting, I would still say that Biden wins, because so many factors line up against Trump. But the skyrocketing crime and the rioting in the cities are factors that the Democrats can’t control — and which penetrate deeply into the psyches of voters.

UPDATE: Reader The Jones writes:

Rod, I think your citation of the Washington Post is wrong. I know the headline says “Trump blurts out his true motive on mail-in voting,” but it is not at all proven of what you claimed: “Trump says he’s trying to starve the USPS of money to thwart mail-in voting.”

The fact of the matter is that the USPS is ALREADY starving, and the thing being debated (and wrongly reported) is that there is a request for ADDITIONAL funding to change what it means to vote across the country. I am WILDLY in favor of Trump opposing this plan, and I am WILDLY in favor of using every means necessary to keep from changing what “casting a ballot” means. And I was never a Trump fan, either. Even though mail-in elections are POSSIBLE to conduct in a good fashion, I can’t be convinced that we can do this nationwide in just a few months. That’s ridiculous. For example, I personally moved since the last election, but stayed in the same voting precinct. I didn’t change my registration, because before this fiasco, it never would have mattered. If a ballot goes out unsolicited to my old address, I won’t get it. That’s a freaking scandal!

So here’s the issue: As best we can tell, widely distributed and un-solicited mail-in ballots will help – Democrats and almost ensure electoral gains. (Trump is not lying when he says that you won’t see another Republican elected again. This is just an unvarnished repeat of what is common knowledge in DC.)

– Not radically expanding mail-in-ballots will keep things mostly the same, due to the lack of info we have on how November will play out.

– There are also plenty of good middle-ground alternatives, like making “the pandemic” a way to affirmatively request a mail-in ballot, which is fine with conservatives (and even Trump himself).

But the Democrats are not in favor of any of that stuff. Their demands are “all mail” because they know its advantages, and they call it “Voting Rights” issue. Shame on them. Just look at the “ballot harvesting” issue in 2016, and people as “establishment” as Paul Ryan were calling foul on that. With the pandemic as the excuse, that practice is being proposed to go across the country.

So let’s recognize the real “banana-republic” type of stuff going on here: The democrats are trying to change what it means to vote in a way that helps them in an election. Bravo to Trump for opposing that. He’s not hurting democracy here. He’s defending it. The Democrats aren’t LBJ liberals. They’re Hugo Chavez liberals.

So this never-Trumper is now saying: Bravo Trump! And keep fighting.

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Big City Exodus

From the New York Daily News this evening:

New York’s savage summer of violence raged on this weekend with nearly two dozen shootings — four of them fatal — and a deadly beating during a 36-hour citywide tsunami of terror.

Police recorded 23 shooting incidents involving 36 victims between 12:01 a.m. Friday and mid-day Saturday, with an off-duty Department of Corrections officer fatally blasted with 11 bullets over a Queens parking spot and three other victims killed by the gunfire echoing across the city’s boroughs.

The ongoing indifference to human life included the savage beating death of Deshawn Bush, 36, of Brooklyn, during an early morning fight with another man in the West Village.

Businesses are getting out of NYC:

“There’s no reason to do business in New York,” Mr. Weinstein said. “I can do the same volume in Florida in the same square feet as I would have in New York, with my expenses being much less. The idea was that branding and locations were important, but the expense of being in this city has overtaken the marketing group that says you have to be there.”

Even as the city has contained the virus and slowly reopens, there are ominous signs that some national brands are starting to abandon New York. The city is home to many flagship stores, chains and high-profile restaurants that tolerated astronomical rents and other costs because of New York’s global cachet and the reliable onslaught of tourists and commuters.

But New York today looks nothing like it did just a few months ago.

In Manhattan’s major retail corridors, from SoHo to Fifth Avenue to Madison Avenue, once packed sidewalks are now nearly empty. A fraction of the usual army of office workers goes into work every day, and many wealthy residents have left the city for second homes.

Earlier this week in Chicago, there was mass looting, again.  Now the Daily Mail reports that people are leaving Los Angeles. Excerpt:

Junkies and the homeless, many of whom are clearly mentally ill, walk the palm-lined streets like zombies – all just three blocks from multi-million-dollar homes overlooking the Pacific.

Stolen bicycles are piled high on pavements littered with broken syringes.

TV bulletins are filled with horror stories from across the city; of women being attacked during their morning jog or residents returning home to find strangers defecating in their front gardens.

Today, Los Angeles is a city on the brink. ‘For Sale’ signs are seemingly dotted on every suburban street as the middle classes, particularly those with families, flee for the safer suburbs, with many choosing to leave LA altogether.

British-born Danny O’Brien runs Watford Moving & Storage. ‘There is a mass exodus from Hollywood,’ he says.

‘And a lot of it is to do with politics.’ His business is booming. ‘August has already set records and we are only halfway through the month,’ he tells me.

‘People are getting out in droves. Last week I moved a prominent person in the music industry from a $6.5 million [£5 million] mansion above Sunset Boulevard to Nashville.’

More:

The pandemic has made many in Hollywood realise they don’t need to live in LA – or anywhere near it – to keep working.

Talent manager Craig Dorfman has moved to upstate New York. ‘A lot of people in the industry are re-evaluating their lives and saying,

‘You know, I never really loved LA. Where would I like to live? Because I can do what I want to do from anywhere,’ ‘ says Dorfman.

Read it all. 

Let me ask you readers who live in big cities: are you planning to move away? Why? Where are you planning to go?

For you who are planning to stay, tell us why.

I’m not interested in people arguing on this thread. I’m just interested in what people are thinking, and why.

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In Rural Iowa, Reformed And Unafraid

Pastor Kurt Monroe sent me a really informative e-mail today in response to the piece I wrote the other day quoting at length the New York Times story about Iowa Evangelicals (“Cardi B. And The Conservative Christian Island”). I publish this here with his permission:

I’m the pastor of First Christian Reformed Church in Sioux Center, Iowa, and am writing about the NYT article and your recent blog posts. Perhaps it’s too late given the pace of the 2020 news cycle, but you can file it away for the next time Sioux County finds itself in the national spotlight.

I’ve been thinking about writing to you about Sioux Center since I read your first blog post in response to Elizabeth Dias’s article. I saw yesterday that you’ve posted another blog with some input from Sioux County locals, including a Dordt professor, for which I’m grateful. (There are probably about a dozen Dordt profs in my congregation, but [journalism professor Lee] Pitts is not one of them). He’s right, though; journalists don’t get Sioux Center. It is honestly one of the weirdest places in America to understand if you don’t know about it (and the Dutch Reformed history in America) or can’t spend time in it. I’ll try to describe a bit of that weirdness in BenOp terms that you might find interesting.

First of all, Aaron Renn’s most recent “Masculinist” that referred to Doug Wilson’s movement in Moscow, ID as a BenOp community motivated me to communicate to you my conviction that one of the things that prevents journalists from understanding Sioux Center (and Sioux County more broadly) is that it is, broadly speaking, a BenOp community (if it’s possible for a town or county to be such). My family has only lived here for a little over a year (having received the call to the church in Sioux Center from the CRC in largely de-churched upstate Binghamton, NY), but my wife’s family has roots here in Sioux Center for three generations. I knew enough about Sioux Center prior to moving here that this would be a place that has some BenOp attributes already and some BenOp tendencies that could be built upon, shored up, and reinforced.

Here’s a brief description of the BenOp kind of stuff already happening here: 39% of school-aged children in Sioux Center attend Christian schools of the Reformed Kuyperian tradition. I’m guessing that a healthy majority of the public school students and their families attend church at least once every week and most more than that. As an example, when our son was taking driver’s education from the public school, the instructor, as he was explaining the schedule, said, “We don’t drive on Wednesdays so that you can go to youth group.” It was assumed that most of the kids in that room would be attending youth group though I expect roughly 2/3 of the students there were public school students. Certainly no one in the room thought it was odd that the public school’s driver’s education program would arrange its schedule around church activities.

Many families in Sioux Center still eat together, have substantive conversations around the table, and read scripture together as a family as well as individually and at church. If you get invited to someone’s home for dinner in Sioux County you can be almost certain that when everyone is done eating the father will scoot his chair back, retrieve a Bible from a kitchen drawer, and lead the family in devotions. (Folks are becoming a bit more egalitarian: sometimes the mother leads devotions, but it’s still almost always the dad that scoots his chair back and gets the Bible). They don’t do this just because the pastor is over for dinner; they do it all the time. (I know this probably sounds crazy, but it seriously happens. I started chuckling every time we would get invited to people’s homes because it kept happening like it was a liturgical act).

The high school years of Sunday School in the Christian Reformed churches (there are five of them, the smallest of which is around 300 in membership) are devoted to study of the Heidelberg Catechism and Belgic Confession. As Lee Pitts points out, it’s not perfect. All of the problems (hypocrisy, legalism, judgmentalism) that you would expect are present, but by and large they aren’t nearly as bad as you might think (or near as bad as they probably were around thirty years ago). And the BenOp practices and habits I mentioned above aren’t the liturgies and practices of anywhere near every home, but if I were a gambling man I’d put money on it being way more common here than nearly anywhere else in the country.

We also have the same challenges of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and cultural engagement that morphs into mere cultural consumption and conformity to the broader culture that the rest of the Church faces in late modernity. Affluence, comfort, and consumerism are temptations here like they are elsewhere for all American Christians. But there is an honest attempt to create and maintain the kind of thick Christian community that the BenOp calls for along with intentional catechesis and whole-of-life Christian liturgical practices. I’ve spent the last year mostly observing, but I came to Sioux Center assuming that part of my call to pastor a church here was to help continue building and shoring up that kind of BenOp community and then fighting against the temptations and pitfalls that accompany a culture that is so overtly Christian. I am certain that this factors into the inability of Elizabeth Dias (and even Emma Green, who has written about Sioux County in The Atlantic) to understand this place.

Dias was trying to make a political point about Sioux County’s white Evangelicals. But the kind of BenOp Christianity in Sioux County, according to my experiences and conversations here, creates a resilience against the kind of political attitudes Diaz suggests are at work in Sioux County. Dias wanted so badly for Sioux County to fit her preconceived Evangelical box, but it just doesn’t. She expects Sioux County to embrace these feelings of Ana Navarro-Cárdenas in political reverse:

Undoubtedly you can find a lot of Evangelicals who would go to bed happy knowing that Trump and Pence would be there when bad crap happens. Dias did find them, even in Sioux County. (As has been noted, she found her quotes from the most conservative denominations represented in town, each represented by only a small congregation in a town with 5 CRCs, 3 large Reformed Church in America churches, and a joint Spanish-speaking CRC-RCA. Why did she skip over the vast majority, made up of CRC and RCA members, to find her quotes?)

In general, Sioux Center, through the BenOp type habits and practices I mentioned above, actively works to embed in its hearts and minds the broad meaning of the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism:

“Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”

You regularly see people in the grocery store with that phrase from the catechism printed on their T-Shirts. Would the culturally refined world of Elizabeth Dias find that kitschy? Yes. Sioux County residents paint that phrase on the walls of their homes. Also kitschy? Sure. But it’s not insignificant or without real meaning. And it points to one of the most significant emphases of the Reformed tradition: the sovereignty of Christ over all things. In that sense, this Sioux County Reformed brand of Evangelicalism shored up with BenOp community and practice has a resilience against the elevation of the political order and specific politicians to a place of trust (and idolatry) to which other forms of Evangelicalism might be more prone. (I’m thinking especially of the forms of Evangelicalism that don’t have historical roots that precede the Enlightenment and therefore don’t have built-in resistance to autonomy and individualism and so make Christianity almost exclusively about the personal relationship with Jesus at the expense of belonging to, and being accountable to, the church and there Church’s long history of practice and doctrine).

In the end, though, it seems to me that these journalists’ cannot understand the Reformed Evangelicals of Sioux Center (and also wouldn’t understand BenOp style communities of faithful, orthodox Christians of all types) when it comes to politics because they can’t understand people for whom the political order isn’t their ultimate source of meaning and order and the guardian of their personal autonomy. (They can’t understand people for whom personal autonomy isn’t the ultimate telos, for that matter). They can’t understand people whose only comfort and hope lies outside the immanent frame. The reporters themselves don’t look to anything other than themselves and the political order for their salvation and flourishing, and they seem unable to comprehend how anyone else could either. (It could be that the owners of house with “In God We Trust” on the roof, which I drive past every time I go to the grocery store, actually mean that our trust must be placed in God—not in America or politicians).

Of course, within Sioux County the temptation exists to elevate the political order and politicians to an idolatrous place, and some succumb to it. But all of the conversations I’ve had with real people in Sioux County over the past year indicate that Sioux County’s voting habits in the national elections are mostly the coldly calculated, transactional, nose-holding, lesser-of-two-evils activity that Dias says it’s not. A person might disagree with Sioux County residents’ calculations (they might calculate that Trump is the greater threat), but that person would be ignorant if they accused Sioux Center residents in general of the kind of fear-induced enthusiasm for Trump Dias suggests, and they would be stark-raving mad if they thought the average resident of Sioux County capable of the kind of adoration and hope for the Trump-Pence ticket that Ana Navarro-Cárdenas has for the Biden-Harris ticket.

This also means that the residents of Sioux Center don’t view themselves as “besieged white Evangelicals.” That was perhaps the most humorous thing about this whole moment in the national spotlight—that people would come away thinking that Sioux County was hunkered down in fear. I wouldn’t blame anyone who read Dias’s article for coming to that conclusion. She hunted down the folks who could give her the quotes she wanted to lead people to that conclusion.

But if you were to come to Sioux Center you would quickly discover that we carry ourselves in a way that couldn’t be farther from “besieged.” Yes, we know the cultural fight we’re up against as we seek to solidify ourselves against conformity to the Cardi B. anti-culture that comes our way through our screens, but that’s nothing new (is Cardi B. all that different from the Madonna of the 80s and 90s?). We know the task before us, and most are savvy enough to know that presidents and politicians aren’t going to help on that front.

But overall, Sioux County is the most optimistic, upbeat, generous, hopeful place in which I’ve ever lived. It is exactly the opposite, even in 2020, from “besieged” or fearful. Its residents are certainly the most neighborly, open, and trusting I’ve ever encountered, including, as Pitts suggested, a cooperation between the Dutch grandchildren of immigrants and the recent immigrants from Central and South America. It’s not perfect, and we’re not a melted pot yet, but just wait until our children start marrying one another, which has already started.

People here aren’t in favor of open borders (including the members of the Spanish speaking CRC-RCA church), but we’re not anti-immigrant; everyone is too close to their own immigrant story for that. Sioux Center’s civic decisions also manifest a lack of fear and siege mentality. I could give a host of specific details that would make people scratch their heads in wonder at this odd place and how a rural county could be growing like Sioux County is, but I’ll leave it at that general description for now. People in Sioux Center and Sioux County carry themselves not as a besieged people but rather as those who know that Christ is sovereignly reigning over all things—even in 2020—and is coming again to make all things new.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve either got more time or more energy than I thought! I hope that some insight into the workings of what is something of a Reformed BenOp community is helpful.

What a fantastic letter! If you’re ever in Sioux Center, Iowa, go visit the folks at First Christian Reformed. I’ve got to find a way to get out there when we can all travel again.

The post In Rural Iowa, Reformed And Unafraid appeared first on The American Conservative.

Snitching For Social Justice

Law professor Jonathan Turley on the advance of soft totalitarianism at Syracuse University:

The law has always drawn a line between malfeasance and nonfeasance in considering unlawful acts, but Syracuse University is about to eradicate any real distinction in newly proposed rules by Professor Keith Alford, the university first diversity an inclusion officer. Under the new rules, students would be punished for simply witnessing “bias-motivated” incidents and “acts of hate.” The change was demanded by the #NotAgainSU which demanded expulsion for “individuals who witnessed the event or were present, but did not take part.”

Alford sent an email warning that students:

“The Code of Student Conduct has been revised, based on your input, to state that violations of the code that are bias-motivated—including conduct motivated by racism—will be punished more severely. The University also revised the code to make clear when bystanders and accomplices can be held accountable. The code will be prepared and distributed for students to sign in the fall.”

It does not go as far as the student group demanded in requiring expulsion, the rule also does not clearly state how silence or inaction will be judged in any given circumstance. It appears left up to the investigators. That uncertainty will prompt many to guarantee compliance by speaking or acting to avoid even the chance that they might be subjected to a highly damaging bias charge.  The school also warned that new cameras were being installed in “first-floor lounges,” “public areas,” and within residency hall elevators. Thus, any student who failed to immediately act would be observed and presumably at risk of being investigated or charged under the new rule.

More:

The concern raised by the Syracuse rule is that there remains controversies over vague universities standards on bias or race motivated violations including microaggressive language or actions.  Recently, a student writer at Syracuse was sacked for simply questioning the basis for claims of institutional racism. What is viewed as bias-motivated speech for some is viewed as political speech by others. The new rule would suggest that even students who do not agree that an incident is “bias-motivated” must still act to avoid scrutiny or punishment. Students could feel an obligation to prove that they are not racist by immediately and openly opposing such acts, lest they could be next to be accused.

Given the rising concerns over the erosion of free speech on our campuses, the punishing of students for nonfeasance for merely being witnesses or passive adds a new chilling element to speech. It is not just silencing those who now fear expressing their views on campus. It would now require speech and action to avoid possible discipline.  For those students, the new rule creates a “prove you are not a racist” (or biased) burden.

Read it all.

I’m reminded of the leftist writer Freddie de Boer’s 2017 essay “Planet of Cops,” in which he said, in part:

The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.

(To be fair, he also goes after right-wing “cops”…)

Back to Syracuse. Can you imagine? Now you’ll have to report any possible violation to the bias cops to save your own skin. It’s like living in East Germany. Who on earth would want to go to college in such a place? Think about having to prove that even though someone saw you near the scene of a “bias incident,” that you didn’t hear it — this, to keep you from being punished.

Would you want to risk that on your record, for the sake of a Syracuse diploma? Could the Syracuse administration possibly make studying there more fraught with anxiety and neurosis?

Sometimes readers will e-mail me to ask why I focus so much on what happens on campus. Here, from Live Not By Lies, is why:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter.

Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

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

Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”

This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in pre-revolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are

transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.

Here’s why we have to pay close attention to colleges: What happens on campus will eventually reach through all of society, or at least to institutions (e.g., corporations) whose ethos is determined by college graduates. You will sooner or later come to the realization that your fate can be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse theories of power and identity.

How far will it go? Here’s something incredible: Adolph Reed, a black Marxist professor who is one of the country’s foremost political theorists, had his planned speech to the NYC chapter of Democratic Socialists of America cancelled because it wasn’t ideologically correct. From the NYT:

His chosen topic was unsparing: He planned to argue that the left’s intense focus on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black people undermined multiracial organizing, which he sees as key to health and economic justice.

Notices went up. Anger built. How could we invite a man to speak, members asked, who downplays racism in a time of plague and protest? To let him talk, the organization’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus stated, was “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.”

“We cannot be afraid to discuss race and racism because it could get mishandled by racists,” the caucus stated. “That’s cowardly and cedes power to the racial capitalists.”

Amid murmurs that opponents might crash his Zoom talk, Professor Reed and D.S.A. leaders agreed to cancel it, a striking moment as perhaps the nation’s most powerful Socialist organization rejected a Black Marxist professor’s talk because of his views on race.

Deviationist! It’s Snowball‘s fault! Prof. Reed told the Times columnist that some on the left have “a militant objection to thinking analytically.” Read the whole column, and see Prof. Reed’s powerful concluding remarks, to grasp how poisonous, narrow, and inhuman the militant left today has become.

What happens on campus with race politics doesn’t stay on campus.

 

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