Rod Dreher's Blog, page 140

Will To Power On The Isle Of Man

Alasdair MacIntyre, from After Virtue:

But protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s rights in the name of someone else’s utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that

protesters can never win an argument; the indignant selfrighteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protesters can never lose an argument either.

From the Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy:

MacIntyre claims that protest and indignation are hallmarks of public “debate” in the modern world. Since no one can ever win an argument – because there’s no agreement about how someone could “win” – anyone can resort to protesting; since no one can ever lose an argument – how can they, if no one can win? – anyone can become indignant if they don’t get their way. If no one can persuade anyone else to do what they want, then only coercion, whether open or hidden (for example, in the form of deception) remains. This is why, MacIntyre says, political arguments are not just interminable but extremely loud and angry, and why modern politics is simply a form of civil war.

Thus “emotivism,” defined by MacIntyre as a fallacious way of arguing, in which subjective feelings are held to be moral truths. MacIntyre said in his 1980s book After Virtue that emotivism is how we debate now, and that ultimately, we risk arguments being settled by irrational force.

So. Here’s a transcript between a talk radio host on Manx Radio (Isle of Man, UK) and a caller:

Stu Peters (SP): Let’s go to line one, I think we’ve got somebody else who wants to have a quick word. Hello, this is Manx Radio.

Jordan Maguire (JM): Hi, my name’s Jordan. I am a black man that lives on the Isle of Man.

SP: OK Jordan.

JM: Yeah, and I’m calling in reference to a post that you made stating “I expect” – is this Stu Peters, sorry?

SP: It is, yeah.

JM: Yeah, it says: “I expect the protest would be in front of the US embassy in Douglas, otherwise an Isle of Man protest about police brutality in America makes no sense except as a virtue signalling snowstorm. In other news, saw this on a graph earlier, in 2018 the US had around 50,000 white on black violent crimes compared with 400,000 black on black and around 550,000 black on white violent crimes.

SP: Yes.

JM: “All lives matter” in capitals. There so many things wrong with this I honestly don’t know where to start but…

SP: Well, no, go ahead. If you…

JM: I haven’t even got to my point. The fact that you’re starting that, insinuating a Manx protest over police brutality is pointless unless it’s in a destination that you deem fit is absurd, first of all.

SP: We’ll why are demonstrating outside of Tynwald?

JM: Why can’t I?

SP: You can demonstrate anywhere you like but it doesn’t make any sense to me, which is the point that I was trying to make on the Manx Forums thread.

JM: Explain why that doesn’t make sense to you.

SP: I don’t understand why people on the Isle of Man are protesting in support of Black Lives Matter in America, which is 3,000 miles away.

JM: Right, ok, so if people are breaking human rights anywhere around the world, that doesn’t make sense to you that we would stand up for it?

SP: But who are you standing…

JM: Let’s think about World War One. The official records show that 8,261 Manx men enlisted in the armed forces, which was 82.3% of the Isle of Man’s male population at the military age. Of these, 1,165 gave their lives and 987 were wounded. As these lives weren’t taken on our soil does it change what they fought for, or the atrocities that they had to endure? And I’m in no way comparing their sacrifices to that or protesters. The location of the war you fight has no bearing on the reasoning or the validity of.

SP: I just…

JM: And I want to understand why you think that, just because lives are being brutalised and oppressed in a country, anywhere around the world not just in America, why it doesn’t matter to you.

SP: Alright, can I speak for a second?

JM: I’d love you to.

SP: OK, I think that what happened to George Floyd is despicable. I think that what that police office did is probably criminal but we’ve got to wait until the courts decide that. But I think that what that man did is that he murdered George Floyd and I think that’s awful. I can understand to a point why people, I can understand very clearly why people in America are protesting about it. I can understand why Black Lives Matter – and American organisation – is protesting about it. But what I can’t understand is why people around the rest of the world are protesting, and specifically in the Isle of Man, why you would have a protest outside of Tynwald about it?

JM: OK, so, when you’re saying “all lives matter” that first of all is just derogatory and ridiculous…

SP: No, it’s not derogatory.

JM: For all lives – listen – for all lives to matter we have to raise the people of all creed, colours, religions to the level that white people’s privilege allows them to be. For all lives to matter, black and other…

SP: I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have Jordan.

JM: Excuse me?

SP: I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have. I’m a white man, you’re a black man you say.

JM: If you believe that then you’re already – this is exactly what white privilege is. I’m not saying that you haven’t, like, endured anything in your life. But you have automatically – the system is built for you to win already. I have to go through everything in my daily life, and I have to go through these things that you don’t see so you don’t think they exist. Or, I kind of believe that you’re an intellectual man to a degree. You’re either extremely ignorant or extremely – I don’t know what you are, but I’m not talking with you any longer…

SP: Well…

JM: With that kind of opinion.

SP: I think…

JM: I hope that you can be saved from your own ignorance and I encourage you to enlighten yourself.

SP: Well…

JM: On issues that people such as myself have to face every single day, and both realise and empathise with the – the world that we live in is far from a [level] playing field….

SP: Can I speak again or are you just going to rant?

JM: Being on this earth. Goodbye.

SP: You’re just going to rant. OK. Well, that was good. Let’s move on, we’ve got somebody else on line two. Hello, this is Late, Live and Unleashed, apparently.

Manx Radio suspended the radio host and is investigating him for racism.

This radio host was just doing his job, trying to get a caller to explain himself. He tried to stick to the argument, despite being abused by this caller. For that, the man’s radio career of over 20 years is now in jeopardy.

So much for Reason. MacIntyre saw it all coming. If you cannot settle an argument, the winner is whoever can assert his will to power most strongly. In this case, at Manx Radio, a white man who contradicts a black man, even if simply for the sake of trying to understand the argument the black man is making, is therefore a racist, or at least close enough to one to be taken off the air.

The identity-politics left is a malicious cult. This is not going to stop anytime soon, until ordinary people start standing up publicly for people like Stu Peters.

This particular case happened in the UK, but you can easily imagine it happening in American media. Every now and then, a young person will ask me what advice I have for someone who is thinking about becoming a journalist. My advice: don’t do it. If you are an honest person — whether you’re liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between — you are going to live in constant fear of inadvertently causing a job-ending offense. You will end up a nervous wreck, or you will end up as a conformist drone, or you will end up jobless.

The post Will To Power On The Isle Of Man appeared first on The American Conservative.

Weimar America’s Soviet Summer

I have been posting a lot about my upcoming book Live Not By Lies, though it won’t be published until September, because events of the past ten days have validated its thesis beyond anything I could have expected. It’s a book that tells Americans — especially American Christians — to prepare themselves for “soft totalitarianism” at the hands of the woke, who are taking over established institutions. It offers lessons from those who endured Soviet, and Soviet bloc, hard totalitarianism. As I was finishing the book this spring, I worried that the thesis might be hard for many Americans to accept.

After all, though The Benedict Option sold pretty well, there are still many American Christians of more or less traditional beliefs who refuse to accept that the social order that has a place for them has come to an end, and that we have entered a time of post-Christian (and anti-Christian) chaos — a time that calls for a disciplined, hunkering-down strategy akin to the early Benedictines. Nobody wants to believe the worst, no matter what the evidence. In The Benedict Option, the “worst” is not persecution, but the steady erosion of Christian belief and practice under pressure from the dominant post-Christian culture. In my view, the happy-clappy optimism of so many US Christians is completely unmerited, and actually a dangerously naive response to the times. A Christian professor friend told me a couple of years ago that The Benedict Option‘s moment hasn’t yet come, because there are millions of conservative Christians who don’t understand, as conservative Christians in academia and media do understand, how hated Christians to the right of the Episcopal Church are. “If Trump loses, the scales will be ripped from their eyes,” he said.

Maybe so. But I’ve been writing a book that makes an even more extreme claim: that conservative Christians (and all other conservatives, though the book is directed at believers) will actually be persecuted, and forced to profess things they don’t believe, or lose their jobs, their social status, and their friends. There won’t be secret police or gulags, but there will be Chinese-style social credit systems and suchlike; this is why the coming totalitarianism will be “soft.” But it will be totalitarian. One sign of a totalitarian regime is the politicization of everything. I thought about that last night when a reader e-mailed me a screenshot of the message from her local cable provider when she went to pay her bill. The cable company wished to inform its customers, at length, about its righteous stance on Black Lives Matter. The reader said, “I just want to pay my bill,” and lamented that suddenly, in the past week, race consciousness is everywhere.

(What she might have missed is that if it weren’t for race consciousness, it would have been queer consciousness. June is Pride month. I thought every month, and every second of every day, is for Pride, but not now. I assume that the Woke chakras will re-align themselves eventually.)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking all spring about how I would handle interviews this fall, when the book is out, and I have to convince potential readers that things really are as bad as all that. My reckoning was that five years from now, it wouldn’t be hard — but I’m not publishing this book in five years; I’ll be publishing it this fall. What would I do?

Then the past two weeks happened. If you, as a conservative, and especially a conservative Christian, don’t understand how quickly the Woke within institutions — including corporations — can and will force you to say and affirm things you don’t believe on pain of being a jobless outcast, you are willfully blind. There is no way to avoid this. Vote for Trump if you think it will help, but the Great Awokening across American institutions has been happening under Trump, and there’s not a thing he can do about it. Identity politics is the ideology driving this totalitarianism. Soon, the only effective resistance we will be able to offer is that prescribed by Solzhenitsyn, in his 1974 essay “Live Not By Lies,” from which I took the title of my book. It’s message is simple, but radical: you may not be able to stop this rotten, dishonest system from taking over, but you do not have to cooperate with it. As Solzhenitsyn said:

And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me.

We on the Right actually have many more options open to us than did the Soviets in 1974, obviously. Ours is still a democracy, after all. But I am confident that the great majority of Americans will conform, to protect their comforts. I have written a book for those who have the courage not to. 

If you still doubt the revolutionary potential of this moment, I invite you to read this interview in the Wall Street Journal, in which Barton Swaim interviews Gary Saul Morson, the professor of Russian literature who teaches at the University of Chicago. They talk about the similarities between America today and Russia as it careened toward the October Revolution. The piece is behind a subscriber paywall, but below, I will post some excerpts.

Swaim begins by comparing these recent riots to the 1992 L.A. riots:

But perhaps the most striking difference is the rationalization, and sometimes full-throated defense, of violence from left-wing elites: the glorification of havoc, the vilification of cops and their middle-class admirers, highfalutin defenses of vandalism. The sense of revolution and class warfare was everywhere this week: the cognoscenti and underclass arrayed against the petty bourgeois shop owners; the elite and those they claim to represent against everybody else.

Gary Saul Morson says he has no special insight regarding police actions and the death of George Floyd. But he does have a provocative thesis about America’s current political moment: “To me it’s astonishingly like late 19th-, early 20th-century Russia, when basically the entire educated class felt you simply had to be against the regime or some sort of revolutionary.”

More:

In late czarist Russia, some political parties and other groups—the Social Democrats, the anarchists, the Marxists—explicitly endorsed terrorism. “The liberal party—the Constitutional Democrats, they called themselves—did not condone terrorism,” Mr. Morson says. “But they refused to condemn it. And indeed they called for the release from prison of all terrorists, who were pledged to continue terrorism right away. . . . A famous line from one of the liberal leaders put it this way: ‘Condemn terrorism? That would be the moral death of the party.’ ”

The lesson seems highly relevant today. “When you’re dragged along into something you don’t really believe yourself—because otherwise you are identified with those evil people, and your primary identity is being a ‘good guy,’ not like those people—you will wind up supporting things you know to be wrong. And unless there is some moral force that will stop it, the slide will accelerate.”

Morson discusses how, in late 19th century Russian culture, to be an “intelligent” (intelligentsia derives from a Russian word) was to be implacably, violently opposed to the ruling order. You might point out to these radicals that they themselves were part of that privileged ruling order. It didn’t feel that way to them. They believed that men with ideas should rule society — and that meant them, and only them. Yuri Slezkine’s recent history The House Of Government tells this story in great detail. Imagine the Yale faculty senate leading a violent revolution, and you’ll get something of it.

Swaim asks the professor:

Is American society, shaped by Protestant Christianity and dominated by a kind of dovish, humanitarian left-liberalism, ever likely to fall into the barbarity of the Russian Revolution? Aren’t we too—I fumble for a word as I formulate the question—soft for that sort of totalizing violence?

“I don’t know,” Mr. Morson answers after a long pause. “I don’t know if that means people won’t go as far as they did in Russia, or if it just means there will be less resistance to it.”

The danger begins, he thinks, when complex social and political problems can’t be debated any longer. “You get into a revolutionary situation because people can’t hear,” he says. “Can there be a dialogue on important questions, or is there only one thing to say about every question? Are people afraid to say, ‘Well, yes, but it’s not quite as simple as that’? . . . When you can’t do that, you’re heading to a one-party state or a dictatorship of some sort. If one party is always wrong and another always right, why not just have the right one?”

This is exactly where we are headed! But it won’t be a Bolshevik system. It will be managerial illiberalism, aided by technology (e.g., a social credit system). One last quote from the piece:

The supposition that America is moving toward anarchy or revolution because we’ve had a week of riots—or three years of bad faith and acrimony, or three decades of polarization—still seems hard to accept. Mr. Morson is careful not to predict the course of events. He uses the phrase “insofar as the Russian example applies” more than once.

But, he says, “we have a major depression, we have terrible fear from the illness, and now we have mass riots in the street, which our leaders do not seem to know how to handle. That’s a very rapid slide from only a year ago. And there’s no reason to think it will slow down. The slide could well continue.”

And history can unfold in unpredictable ways. Who would have guessed 20 years ago, he asks, that the First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee would become passé on the liberal left? “I used to get a laugh from students by quoting a Soviet citizen I talked to once. He said to me, ‘Of course we have freedom of speech. We just don’t allow people to lie.’ That used to get a laugh! They don’t laugh anymore.”

No, they don’t. Read the whole thing, if you can.

In related news, a staff writer at The Atlantic today cheers on what’s happening as like one of the Color Revolutions. They really do believe they’re getting regime change — that a coup is taking place, and that this is a good thing. Notice how that writer, Franklin Foer, speaks of Big Business’s decision to capitulate to the demands of protesters as a sign of revolutionary change.

UPDATE: Ahem.

The post Weimar America’s Soviet Summer appeared first on The American Conservative.

Moralistic Therapeutic Journalism

Here is the psychotic state of discourse at The New York Times. The paper’s staff had to take to their fainting couch with their wubby over the op-ed page publishing a piece by a US Senator, but is presumably unembarrassed to publish this drama queen’s blubbering. Excerpts from the op-ed written by 30-year-old entrepreneurial grievance grifter Chad Sanders:

My book is coming out in a few months, and I don’t know if I’m going to be alive to see it, because I’m a black man.

That’s the first line, and we are already in Onion territory. But wait, there’s more:

Many white people I know are spilling over with guilt and overzealous attempts to offer sympathy. I have been avoiding them as best I can, trying to live, support my black family and friends and execute normal life functions such as working, moving into a new apartment and cooking dinner for my girlfriend.

But brazen as ever, white people who have my phone number are finding a way to drain my time and energy. Some are friends, others old co-workers and acquaintances I’ve intentionally released from my life for the sake of my peace of mind. Every few days I receive a bunch of texts like this one, from last week:

“Hi friend. I just wanted to reach out and let you know I love you and so deeply appreciate you in my life and your stories in the world. And I’m so sorry. This country is deeply broken and sick and racist. I’m sorry. I think I’m tired; meanwhile I’m sleeping in my Snuggie of white privilege. I love you and I’m here to fight and be useful in any way I can be. **Heart emojis**”

Almost every message ends with seven oppressive words — “Don’t feel like you need to respond.”

What does this man, Chad Sanders, want you to do instead? Here are two of his suggestions:

Money: To funds that pay legal fees for black people who are unjustly arrested, imprisoned or killed or to black politicians running for office.

Texts: To your relatives and loved ones telling them you will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.

Read it all. I predict Chad will have a successful career shaking down guilty white liberals. I predict his book will be hailed by a Times reviewer as like something dictated by an Angel of the Lord. But what’s funny is not so much his ridiculous op-ed, but the fact that The New York Times is not embarrassed to publish it. The entire liberal ruling caste is having a gran mal seizure.

The Times had another struggle session town hall meeting today, in which executives admitted that they had sinned and fallen short of the standards of wokeness. From Vice’s report:

[Publisher A.G.] Sulzberger said that his memo functioned as a placeholder communication while they dug into “what had happened.” He turned the question over to [Editorial Page editor James] Bennet, who offered an abject apology.

“First, I just want to say thank you for the chance to answer, address, try to address some of these questions. And before I address this specific one, I just want to begin by just saying I’m very sorry. I’m sorry for the pain that this particular piece has caused. The pain that I acknowledge my leadership of Opinion, I’m responsible for this, has caused. And I’m sorry for that.

“I do think this is a moment for me and for us to interrogate everything about what we do in Opinion, including even the principles, A.G., that you enunciated at the beginning of the conversation. I think if we truly believe in debate and we do, we need to be unafraid about asking ourselves if these principles do fit this era, and what we mean by a wide-ranging debate, if it can result in pieces that our colleagues find so profoundly hurtful. …

My lord, but this is humiliating for everybody involved. I’m old enough to remember when journalists would have laughed at grown-ass men and women who needed coddling for the “pain” of having read something they disagreed with. I’m serious: this is professionally shameful. I recall back in the 1980s, when I was in college, a history professor made a mild joke about the medieval church, and a Christian student stood up, yelled at him, and stormed out. The professor said calmly, “There’s a school on the other side of town for people like her” — meaning the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College. He was right. If you are a college student, you are an adult, and you should be prepared to deal with opinions you don’t like. It is a sign of deep decadence that actual journalists — and not college newspaper writers, but those who work for the premier US journalism institution — have to be told this.

But nobody in authority is telling them this. They’re only Feeling Their Pain. Sulzberger could tell every one of those whiners that if they cannot deal with opinions they dislike, then he will expect their resignations. There are still professional journalists in this country who love to have those jobs.

One of the reasons I became interested, in my college years, in going into professional journalism, as opposed to academia, was for the fun of it. I cared about politics and current events, and I thought it would be much more interesting to engage with them as a journalist rather than an academic. I was a liberal back then, but I read as much conservative opinion journalism as I did liberal, because I found it so exciting to read how writers made their arguments. As a staffer on the college paper, it was fun to hang out with other college journalists. They smoked, drank, cussed, and made fun of everybody and everything. Most of us were smartasses, and even those who weren’t had an appreciation for irreverence. You had to have to do the job.

And now? Forget it. College is a woke seminary, and newspapers are parish newsletters. Why would anybody who respected themselves want to become a mainstream journalist? I have been an op-ed editor in my career, and I tell you, I would resign before I would abase myself like James Bennet did today.

Read the whole Vice piece if you care. And you should care, because I guarantee you some version of this is happening, or will soon happen, at major media institutions all over the country. The Times, like Ivy League colleges, leads the way for its industry. What happens there today happens almost everywhere tomorrow. You may not give a rat’s rear end what they think or report, but the people who make decisions in this country in its institutions very much care. This is not just a problem in journalism, but in academia too: a capitulation of professional integrity and intellectual standards. How can anybody trust the journalism the Times does — not the op-ed stuff, but the news reporting — when at least 300 newsroom employees were so traumatized by a conservative senator’s op-ed that they walked off the job in protest? I’m supposed to trust their news judgment?

Along those lines, read this letter that the black scholar Glenn Loury wrote to administrators at Brown University, where he teaches, in response to their virtue-signaling letter to faculty and staff over the Floyd killing. Excerpt:

I deeply resented the letter. First of all, what makes an administrator (even a highly paid one, with an exalted title) a “leader” of this university? We, the faculty, are the only “leaders” worthy of mention when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-pushing apparatchik thinks? It’s all a bit creepy and unsettling. Why must this university’s senior administration declare, on behalf of the institution as a whole and with one voice, that they unanimously—without any subtle differences of emphasis or nuance—interpret contentious current events through a single lens?

They write sentences such as this: “We have been here before, and in fact have never left.” Really? This is nothing but propaganda. Is it supposed to be self-evident that every death of an “unarmed black man” at the hands of a white person tells the same story? They speak of “deep-rooted systems of oppression; legacies of hate.” No elaboration required here? No specification of where Brown might stand within such a system? No nuance or complexity? Is it obvious that “hate”—as opposed to incompetence, or fear, or cruelty, or poor training, or lack of accountability, or a brutal police culture, or panic, or malfeasance—is what we observed in Minneapolis? We are called upon to “effect change.” Change from what to what, exactly? Evidently, we’re now all charged to promote the policy agenda of the “progressive” wing of American politics. Is this what a university is supposed to be doing?

I must object. This is no reasoned ethical reflection. Rather, it is indoctrination, virtue-signaling, and the transparent currying of favor with our charges. The roster of Brown’s “leaders” who signed this manifesto in lockstep remind me of a Soviet Politburo making some party-line declaration. I can only assume that the point here is to forestall any student protests by declaring the university to be on the Right Side of History.

Read it all. You think this could ever be published in The New York Times? If it ever could, it can’t now. How much better would the Times be if Glenn Loury ran the op-ed section, or even the newsroom?

 

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Fleeing The Collapsing Imperium

I’ve been thinking that the US is in a May 1968 moment, but that’s probably too optimistic. A reader who is a prominent Washingtonian (he identified himself, and I verified it; I’m not using his name to protect him) wrote this morning to say that he and a number of people he know are leaving the city for good in the wake of this past week’s violence. He writes, and I quote with his permission:

I’m out. I’ve lived in this city most of my life, and I’ve loved it. But I’m not lying to myself any more. I can see where this is going. It’s obvious. I don’t want to be here for what happens next. The city has been taken over by extremists who worship conformity and violence. They don’t care how many people they hurt. This is a religious cult. All that matters to them is race theology.

A friend from my neighborhood just got screamed by a high school girl on his street. He’s known her since she was born. He likes her parents. They’ve never had a single problem. Now the girl has decided my friend isn’t sufficiently supportive of Black Lives Matter. So as he paused at a Stop sign this morning at the end of his block, she approached his window and yelled “F*ck you!” right in his face.

There’s a lot of that going on here. Among the many ironies: what they’re doing now is racist. It guarantees a resurgence of white racism, and of intentional segregation. Everyone who thinks about that knows it’s true. No one cares. It’s all so incredibly dark. I don’t want to be around it. I definitely don’t want my kids around it. I’m fleeing, and I’m never coming back.

This reader, who is white, lives in one of the nicer neighborhoods in the city. Thinking of that girl in his neighborhood, I thought of this from Live Not By Lies, about how the Russian Revolution advanced years before actual fighting broke out, when the parents of the privileged refused to stand up to their children:

Most of the revolutionaries came from the privileged classes. Their parents ought to have known that this new political faith their children preached would, if realized, mean the collapse of the social order. Still, they did not reject their children. Writes Slezkine, “The ‘students’ were almost always abetted at home while still in school and almost never damned when they became revolutionaries.” Perhaps the mothers and fathers didn’t want to alienate their sons and daughters. Perhaps they too, after the experience of the terrible famine and the incompetent state’s inability to care for the starving, had lost faith in the system.

It’s happening here now. Trump is our Nicholas II: too weak and indecisive and lacking in credibility to do a damn thing about it.

Meanwhile, I’m hearing that there are conservative Americans in the DC area who are talking about attempting to emigrate to one of the Visegrad countries (Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland). They see no hope anymore here. I am reminded of this piece from Mark Bollobas that I published in 2018. He is the UK-born son of two Hungarians who fled communism in the 1960s and took refuge in Britain. Now, as an adult who lived for a time in America, he has returned to his parents’ home city, Budapest, to raise his own family. He wrote then:

But as a graduate of a US university, I didn’t see the American dream at all. I didn’t see opportunity, I saw neglect. I saw a country which is still the Wild West, full of hucksters getting rich quick on one end of the spectrum, and hero entrepreneurs who did the same on the other. A country where the police are super paranoid and trigger-happy, where life meant nothing, and although everyone went to church in Memphis (buckle of the Bible belt), racism was everywhere. Fear was everywhere. Distrust was everywhere.

Why not settle in his home country, Britain? He had lived and worked in London, but knew that he would never be able to afford to live there. And this:

And culturally, the most important of all, the England of today is so far removed from the England of my youth that it feels like a different world. What makes England great is the nonchalant English attitude to everything. Stiff upper lip. Humor. The genuine lack-of-interest in what other people do, as long as they’re not interfering. The moral strength to play fair, be a good loser, etc.

But over the last few decades this has been eroded by non-English immigrants who have moved to the UK permanently and brought their culture with them, aggressively. Usually the children are far more aggressive than the parents who actually made the move. And the English let this happen, because that’s how they are. Now the politeness is gone.

I ran a bar in Finsbury Park. My schedule was the same. Open at noon, close at midnight. I would go to work at around 10am, and walk home around 2am. You have the same schedule, and you walk past people who share that schedule. In England, 20 years ago, if you did this for a few weeks you’d eventually strike up a conversation, or create a little bond. That couldn’t happen in Finsbury Park because it was full of Somalis, north Africans and others (Abu Hamza was a personal favorite, hawking his vitriolic sermons on CDs to anyone that passed).

They all hated me and looked at me with distrust and disgust. The women walked past in their veils, clothing that sends the message of “f-ck off, don’t dare look at me or talk to me.” I walked those streets for two years and made not one connection. Visitors have come, have brought their culture, and they stick to it (I loved whichever day it was when they say you have to slaughter a goat; blood literally ran in the streets). It is their identity. Meanwhile the beautiful, accepting element of being British is abused, its kind culture allowed Trojan horses of all sorts to settle in.

He continues:

My decision to move back here to Hungary — I say that even though I wasn’t born here — has been reinforced by this fact: Hungary understands that holding on to its cultural identity is essential to its existence as a society we can understand.

Culture changes over time, of course, but it normally does it slowly as we creep towards a more civilized future.

England doesn’t feel more civilized — quite the opposite. It feels more feral. And the UK has just accepted its fate.

The lack of an American culture means Hungarians don’t know what’s missing, because they never had it. But there is a gaping hole in America: something is obviously broken. America is collapsing on itself.

It’s been nine years since I moved back. I can’t count the number of days I’ve thought to myself, or told others, “It’s just great to be here.” It still is.

Read it all. Bollobas has ancestral roots there, though, and can speak the language. He didn’t grow up in Hungary, but culturally, he can relate to the place. If I were in government in one of the Visegrad countries, I would start working on a program to entice emigration from dissatisfied Americans who have something to contribute, in terms of human capital and financial capital, to my country. When I was in Budapest last fall in a group meeting with Viktor Orban, he told us that conservatives should always consider Budapest their home. I expect there will be no small number of Americans who can afford it, and who can work from anywhere online, who will want to know more.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, a white city council member is challenging the people of the city to put up with home invasions and break-ins for the sake of racial change:

If you are a comfortable white person asking to dismantle the police I invite you to reflect: are you willing to stick with it? Will you be calling in three months to ask about garage break-ins? Are you willing to dismantle white supremacy in all systems, including a new system?

— Lisa Bender (@lisabendermpls) June 3, 2020

She, and other members of the city council, say they are going to dismantle the police department. Not reform it — disband it. From an essay by a council member, writing in Time magazine:

We can reimagine what public safety means, what skills we recruit for, and what tools we do and do not need. We can play a role in combating the systems of white supremacy in public safety that the death of black and brown lives has laid bare. We can invest in cultural competency and mental health training, de-escalation and conflict resolution. We can send a city response that that is appropriate to each situation and makes it better. We can resolve confusion over a $20 grocery transaction without drawing a weapon or pulling out handcuffs.

If you are a Minneapolis home or business owner, the handwriting is on the wall.

Meanwhile, the scandal at The New York Times is turning into a watershed for American journalism:

As the controlling mobs of the NYT wield enormous political power via info warfare and thought control, no self-respecting conservative or GOP politician (or their staff) should cooperate in any way with *any* of their articles. Any who do should be shamed. https://t.co/y23iCmf8lQ

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) June 5, 2020

I expect a number of disgusted conservatives to follow suit. Everybody knows that the Times is a liberal paper, but this newsroom coup is turning it into an illiberal left-wing paper. This has been coming for a long time, in both journalism and academia. Some years ago, I published a comment by a conservative academic who said that he is the lone conservative in his department, but he feels safe under the leadership of the old-fashioned liberal who is department head. But when that Boomer generation retires, it’s over. The Millennials and Gen Zers behind them are Jacobins, he said.

The Jacobin generation is taking over the Times now. They will also be consolidating power within other media institutions, under the guise of racial justice. Anyone who is not willing to swear allegiance to the Social Justice left has no future. Do you want to spend your career propagandizing? Similarly with academia: how many ideological re-education programs can you tolerate? How much ideological poisoning of scholarship and teaching are you prepared to submit to? It’s coming.

How many lies are you willing to tell, or assent to, to participate in this rotten system?

What sacrifices are you prepared to make to live in truth, and not by lies?

A lawyer reader told me this morning that the Benedict Option may soon be the Benedict Imperative. I asked him to explain. He responded:

There is a plausible (though not inevitable) scenario where we get a legal and cultural regime that fully adopts critical race theory, the obliteration of any stable definition of the family (this is already happening in the courts everywhere), and that does what it already says it believes to dissenters from the ascendant sexual ethic. All of these things operating at even 30% of capacity (and backed up by a privately imposed social credit like system), would make life increasingly difficult for those who won’t give a pinch of incense to Caesar on these things. Under this scenarios, the small-o orthodox Church and its members would get much smaller and poorer, and BenOp would lose the “option” part, as it would be the only plausible path forward.

I do believe this is coming, which is why I wrote The Benedict Option, and Live Not By Lies. We are rapidly moving to a new political order, a new media order, and a new social order. The story I started this post with — of the prominent Washingtonian leaving the city for good — is a symbol of what Alasdair MacIntyre talks about here:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead…was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.

The imperium is crumbling. What replaces it will be worse, no doubt, but the conditions that made the imperium sustainable no longer obtain.

What does it look like to you, from where you sit this afternoon? What is the future for you and your family?

UPDATE: Thoughtful comment by Wyoming Doc:

I guess I would chime in on this post as a family that has already left the big urban cities behind.

My wife and I lived in one of our largest urban areas for decades. I was a professor of medicine at one of our best medical universities – and my wife, an engineer, was the project manager for one of the largest infrastructure projects in this country.

Then we had kids.

Before the kids ever came, we had noted that all of our neighbor’s kids were on amphetamines – and the parents instead of being ashamed were actually proud of it – it was a badge of honor. We noted that the parks and streets were completely emptied of kids playing; rather, the kids were in their houses playing video games all day. We went to the absolute best pre-schools in our city for our interviews and the first questions asked in ALL THREE – “What gender are you raising your kids?”.

I had impending doom that my career as an academic physician would soon be over (despite having been given 7 teaching awards through the years by the student body) when I was severely chastised by the “diversity dean” that I was not using pronouns correctly. Very soon thereafter, a patient of mine discussed with me that the public school where her 7 year old 2nd grade son was enrolled had actually proceeded with gender transition psychological therapy after diagnosing him with rapid gender dysphoria. They had told neither parent a word – and they found out about it only after 6 months of counseling had already occurred. They had to be notified because the “doctor” had decided the child needed intense hormone therapy. When asked what I thought – I informed her gently that they were setting their family up for a life of tears. She refused the therapy – and the “doctor” turned me in to the “diversity dean” at the university. She decided she had had enough of me – and began making my life miserable.

THIS ALL OCCURRED IN A MAJOR UNIVERSITY IN ONE OF OUR “RED STATES”.

My wife and I decided to leave. We both left our careers that we had worked so hard to achieve. We moved into a very rural area – and have never looked back. Our kids are both thriving. They are very involved in sports and outdoor activites. We are actually heavily involved in the community in our little town – and are very amazed at how completely different are the priorities. As one of the few physicians in town, I know that the use of stimulants is basically non-existent. The kids seem much more robust and healthy than I ever saw back home. My wife and I certainly are orders of magnitude more healthy than we have been since our youth – living out here requires lots of labor – and that has been shown to me to be a very good thing. We grow more than 2/3 of our own food. The neighbors are constantly looking out for one another – and we have never been more involved with our neighbors and all the community activities.

I would tell your readers, do not fear leaving a big urban area. You may be very pleasantly surprised at what you find out in flyover country. At this point – a few years into this – none of my family have any desire whatsoever to go back.

We look at what is going on in our old place – looting, rioting, blood in the streets and just shake our heads. Three times this week I have been informed of old colleagues who have been injured, attacked, or looted in the city. The deluge of physicians leaving urban areas and moving to rural areas has now made the national news several times.

We feel that we are free for the first time in a long time. However, there is great concern for our country. We know we cannot escape – but what we as a nation are doing now is completely unsustainable.

The post Fleeing The Collapsing Imperium appeared first on The American Conservative.

Anne Applebaum’s ‘Collaboration’

Anne Applebaum has a long Atlantic essay comparing Republican leaders who support Donald Trump to Eastern Europeans who collaborated with Soviet-sponsored regimes. She’s not just anybody making these claims. She has written a number of books about the Soviet empire, including Iron Curtain, a great book about the Sovietization of Eastern Europe. I drew on it for my own forthcoming book, Live Not By Lies. Right or wrong, Anne Applebaum is an authority.

She begins by comparing two young German communists who were raised in Russia, in exiled communist families, and who returned to Soviet-controlled East Germany as members of the ruling elite. One became disillusioned and defected; the other became head of the Stasi. What made the difference? Closer to home, she talks about how both Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney had strongly denounced Donald Trump before the 2016 election. Graham ended up becoming one of Trump’s strongest Senate supporters, while Romney is uniquely hated by the president. What accounts for the radically different outcomes?

Applebaum writes:

To the American reader, references to Vichy France, East Germany, fascists, and Communists may seem over-the-top, even ludicrous. But dig a little deeper, and the analogy makes sense. The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin; the point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party, especially those who work most closely with the White House, to the experiences of Frenchmen in 1940, or of East Germans in 1945, or of Czesław Miłosz in 1947. These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or a set of values that are in sharp conflict with their own.

Not even Trump’s supporters can contest this analogy, because the imposition of an alien ideology is precisely what he was calling for all along. Trump’s first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values. Remember: He described America’s capital city, America’s government, America’s congressmen and senators—all democratically elected and chosen by Americans, according to America’s 227-year-old Constitution—as an “establishment” that had profited at the expense of “the people.” “Their victories have not been your victories,” he said. “Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.” Trump was stating, as clearly as he possibly could, that a new set of values was now replacing the old, though of course the nature of those new values was not yet clear.

She goes on to detail the many ways the Trump administration has overturned the old order. She talks about how Trump began his administration by insisting on the truth of something that was easily proven to be a lie: the size of his inauguration crowd. This set a pattern:

These kinds of lies also have a way of building on one another. It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems. The process usually begins slowly, with small changes. Social scientists who have studied the erosion of values and the growth of corruption inside companies have found, for example, that “people are more likely to accept the unethical behavior of others if the behavior develops gradually (along a slippery slope) rather than occurring abruptly,” according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This happens, in part, because most people have a built-in vision of themselves as moral and honest, and that self-image is resistant to change. Once certain behaviors become “normal,” then people stop seeing them as wrong.

This process happens in politics, too. In 1947, the Soviet military administrators in East Germany passed a regulation governing the activity of publishing houses and printers. The decree did not nationalize the printing presses; it merely demanded that their owners apply for licenses, and that they confine their work to books and pamphlets ordered by central planners. Imagine how a law like this—which did not speak of arrests, let alone torture or the Gulag—affected the owner of a printing press in Dresden, a responsible family man with two teenage children and a sickly wife. Following its passage, he had to make a series of seemingly insignificant choices. Would he apply for a license? Of course—he needed it to earn money for his family. Would he agree to confine his business to material ordered by the central planners? Yes to that too—what else was there to print?

After that, other compromises follow. Though he dislikes the Communists—he just wants to stay out of politics—he agrees to print the collected works of Stalin, because if he doesn’t do it, others will. When he is asked by some disaffected friends to print a pamphlet critical of the regime, however, he refuses. Though he wouldn’t go to jail for printing it, his children might not be admitted to university, and his wife might not get her medication; he has to think about their welfare. Meanwhile, all across East Germany, other owners of other printing presses are making similar decisions. And after a while—without anyone being shot or arrested, without anyone feeling any particular pangs of conscience—the only books left to read are the ones approved by the regime.

Keep this thought in mind for a minute. Let me say here that Applebaum’s article is rather long, and I don’t want to quote it at length. I think it’s pretty devastating, though I don’t agree with all of it (and will go into that a bit below). I do not at all think it’s ridiculous or offensive for her to use the Soviet Bloc experience as a lens through which to understand what has been happening in America, politically, these past few years. For one, if I did, I would be a hypocrite. For another, it really does give her some deep insights. I’m not going to quote the parts of her piece that I agree with, because there’s so much there. When I encourage you to read the whole thing, I mean it. It’s really good, and I think she is mostly correct.

A note for those who are just coming to this post from Twitter. As longtime readers know, I was never for Trump, and withheld my vote in 2016, but I was so sick of the GOP Establishment that I did not identify as a Never Trumper. I was willing to give him a shot. I hate to say it, but the Never Trumpers have been mostly vindicated. This is not at all to say that I want the old GOP Establishment back — I emphatically do not! — but it turns out that character really does count. It is the Republican Party’s tragedy that the person who broke the back of the dessicated and intellectually bankrupt old guard was an incompetent sleaze. But here we are. The one thing that makes me hopeful for conservative politics going forward is that after the catastrophe of Trump, there will be no return to the status quo. Was it worth the judges? If you had asked me in January, I would have said, “Maybe so.” Now, in June, after the year we have had, and the way he has utterly failed to rise to the challenges, I would say not.

Back to Applebaum’s essay. Here is one very small defense of GOP “collaborators,” and why their situation is different from their would-be counterparts living under dictatorship. The Republican lawmakers who went along with Trump were responsible to their voters back home. If they had not supported Trump, they would have been primaried. It is true that a morally responsible GOP lawmaker would have sooner resigned, or face defeat, rather than seriously compromise his or her conscience. It does not absolve you to say, “Hey, I was just doing what my voters wanted me to do.” Still, it’s important to remember that if there is moral stain for having collaborated with Donald Trump, the stain is with voters too.

The part of her essay that hits home with me comes in a section in which Applebaum talks about the rationalizations collaborators use for standing with a political leader they know is bad news. This is the part:

My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse. When Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of collaborationist France, took over the Vichy government, he did so in the name of the restoration of a France that he believed had been lost. Pétain had been a fierce critic of the French Republic, and once he was in control, he replaced its famous creed—Liberté, égalité, fraternité, or “Liberty, equality, fraternity”—with a different slogan: Travail, famille, patrie, or “Work, family, fatherland.” Instead of the “false idea of the natural equality of man,” he proposed bringing back “social hierarchy”—order, tradition, and religion. Instead of accepting modernity, Pétain sought to turn back the clock.

By Pétain’s reckoning, collaboration with the Germans was not merely an embarrassing necessity. It was crucial, because it gave patriots the ability to fight the real enemy: the French parliamentarians, socialists, anarchists, Jews, and other assorted leftists and democrats who, he believed, were undermining the nation, robbing it of its vitality, destroying its essence. “Rather Hitler than Blum,” the saying went—Blum having been France’s socialist (and Jewish) prime minister in the late 1930s. One Vichy minister, Pierre Laval, famously declared that he hoped Germany would conquer all of Europe. Otherwise, he asserted, “Bolshevism would tomorrow establish itself everywhere.”

To Americans, this kind of justification should sound very familiar; we have been hearing versions of it since 2016. The existential nature of the threat from “the left” has been spelled out many times. “Our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature,” wrote Michael Anton, in “The Flight 93 Election.” The Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham has warned that “massive demographic changes” threaten us too: “In some parts of the country it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore.” This is the Vichy logic: The nation is dead or dying—so anything you can do to restore it is justified. Whatever criticisms might be made of Trump, whatever harm he has done to democracy and the rule of law, whatever corrupt deals he might make while in the White House—all of these shrink in comparison to the horrific alternative: the liberalism, socialism, moral decadence, demographic change, and cultural degradation that would have been the inevitable result of Hillary Clinton’s presidency.

Now, wait a minute. Let us note that this “Vichy logic” is exactly the logic feminists used to justify sticking with Bill Clinton (because Republicans might end abortion). And it’s how practical politics works. Was it Vichy logic when Louisiana Republican voters in 1991 voted for the crook Edwin W. Edwards because his opponent David Duke was intolerable? I held my nose and voted for EWE, in violation of my conservative beliefs, because I could not bear to think that an unrepentant Klansman could become governor. I know conservatives who plan to vote for Biden this November, and are sick about it, because they cannot bear four more years of Trump.

How do you tell the difference between succumbing to “Vichy logic,” and simply being realistic about the choices in front of you, and choosing the lesser of two evils? If the choice is between Hitler and liberalism, well, that’s no choice at all. But Trump, however bad, isn’t Hitler, or close to it, and it distorts the choice conservatives actually hd, and have, facing them regarding Trump and his opponents.

For Applebaum, the things liberals and progressives demand are normative. It really is true that with Democrats in power, pro-abortion extremism will be government policy. If you think abortion is the extermination of innocent life, then this is a very big deal. Liberals often mock religious conservatives over our concerns about how gay rights is eroding religious liberty, putting “religious liberty” in scare quotes, as if the concerns we have are fake. But they are real, and beyond that, every Democrat in Congress has come out for the Equality Act, which would write sexual orientation and gender identity into US civil rights law. Liberals understandably see this as just, and many have no comprehension of why conservatives disagree that homosexuality and transgenderism are the same thing as race. These are radical transformations of American law and culture.

Also with immigration: it is perfectly normal for a people to be concerned that immigration is changing the character of the culture in ways they don’t like. The Democrats, broadly speaking, are for open borders — and prior to Trump, the GOP was ineffective on the immigration issue. High rates of immigration change countries permanently. This may be a good thing, or a bad thing, or a mixed thing — but it is a really big thing. 

What bothers me about this aspect of Applebaum’s argument is that she lacks any sympathy for the conservative point of view, in the sense that she doesn’t appear to be aware of how radical the left has become on cultural issues. There seems to be no room in her moral imagination to understand how a conservative can despise Trump, but be so afraid of what the Democratic Party and the cultural left are bringing to the country that they would conclude voting for Trump is the lesser evil.

Moreover, Applebaum is a fine writer and an insightful thinker, but she is blind to how liberalism, in its current iteration, strikes many of us on the Right as inclining to soft totalitarianism. Applebaum is married to Radek Sikorski, a prominent Polish liberal, and is no doubt fiercely opposed to the views of the Polish politician Ryszard Legutko. But his book The Demon In Democracy explains this very well. Let me put it like this: she is blind to how establishment liberals like her collaborate with the illiberal left, and in so doing violate the principles they supposedly stand for.

The examples are legion, but I’ll speak about them in the present moment. We are watching right now a fast-moving coup by the illiberal, identity-politics left of American institutions, aided and abetted by liberal establishmentarians who are too afraid to defend liberal principles. We have seen the collapse first on college campuses, where administrations have repeatedly surrendered to emotional demands of protesters. Here, from 2015, is Yale Prof. Nicholas Christakis trying to defend liberalism, using reason, against an illiberal mob. He stood alone. Yale’s administration backed the mob. This is happening across academia, and long has been. It has ramped up massively in this past week. It’s also happening in media, and in corporations. Race-conscious, identity-politics progressivism has finally displaced liberalism — mostly because liberals of Applebaum’s class lacked the courage to stand on principle.

It’s easy for her to see the collaboration of the Republican leadership with the corrupt and illiberal Trump, but she’s blind to the collaboration of her own class with the corruption of liberalism from the identity-politics left. I don’t know Anne Applebaum, and will presume good faith on her part, so I suspect that she is honestly unaware of how ideological her own class is, and how frightening they are to a lot of conservative who have felt pushed by what she calls “Vichy logic” into supporting Trump, simply as self-protection.

Just this morning I heard from a reader who works inside an elite educational institution. Its students come from the ranks of the most well-off Americans. It is a liberal institution, in the best sense. It has not had racial problems. Yet its administration, undergoing the same moral panic that is sweeping the US ruling class now, is considering implementing a strict regimen of ideological education, under the guise of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. He worries about the future of the institution, and the corruption of its mission by identity politics. And he’s right to worry.

Look at how it has corrupted The New York Times. From the transcript of the “town hall meeting” within the newspaper last fall, this question to executive editor Dean Baquet:

Staffer: Hello, I have another question about racism. I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn’t racist. I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country. And I think particularly as we are launching a 1619 Project, I feel like that’s going to open us up to even more criticism from people who are like, “OK, well you’re saying this, and you’re producing this big project about this. But are you guys actually considering this in your daily reporting?”

This should have been an easy question to answer, from the point of view of defending professional journalistic standard. Baquet waffled. Flash-forward to this week, and the shocking turmoil within the newspaper, the premier journalistic institution in America, over its publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s op-ed. The woke younger generation within the paper is in the process of overthrowing the older liberal generation. Baquet and the Times senior leadership are “collaborating,” in the Applebaum sense, with leftists who have no respect for the liberal order. This kind of thing is happening in elite institutions — academic, media, entertainment, corporate — all over America. The George Floyd killing was the catalyst these radicals needed to consolidate what they have been doing for a very long time, thanks to the collaboration of the liberal establishment leadership.

To repeat: I think Applebaum’s overall essay is mostly correct in her criticism of how GOP leaders have collaborated with Trump. The history of totalitarianism really is helpful in illuminating how this works. My objection is that she cannot see how her own left-liberal caste has been long doing the same thing with the illiberal, identity-politics left, and concealing from themselves the sellout of old-fashioned liberalism. My upcoming book Live Not By Lies talks about this. It’s not going to be out until September; until then, read Legutko’s Demon In Democracy, which explains this phenomenon well.

Anyway: read Applebaum’s essay.

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Washington’s Banana Republic

A reader who studies politics as a university scholar writes:

You are missing this one…..Mattis, Esper, Mullen, Milley and now Dempsey (Dempsey!!!….one of the most reserved, reticent and cautious Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in my lifetime). And Allen…to have a former marine general warn that Trump is putting the entire American experiment of liberal democracy in danger?!?! This is not normal. This just does not happen. I can barely wrap my mind around it. There is no parallel in American history for this.

Lisa Murkowski says she thinks Mattis speaks the truth that Trump is a danger to the Constitution….BUT she is uncertain if she will support him….WHAT THE F***?? Imagine a Senator saying they believed a presidential candidate was a danger to religious freedom but they were uncertain if they would vote for them. Seriously?

These are not things military men do lightly. I am not sure many American realize just how insane and utterly unprecedented this is. And I really do not think you appreciate the gravity and nature of the crisis we face at this moment. I think you are largely correct about the larger long term danger from the illiberal left, but you are not grasping the more short term danger of the moment.

From an analysis in today’s New York Times:

“There is a thin line between the military’s tolerance for questionable partisan moves over the past three years and the point where these become intolerable for an apolitical military,” said Douglas E. Lute, a retired three-star Army general who coordinated Afghanistan and Pakistan operations on the National Security Council for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and later became the American ambassador to NATO. “Relatively minor episodes have accumulated imperceptibly, but we are now at a point of where real damage is being done.”

Mr. Trump’s walk to a church near the White House on Monday, with Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, in tow, may have been the moment everything shifted, Mr. Lute said.

“As that team walked across Lafayette Park with the president,” after the heavy-handed clearing of a peaceful demonstration, he said, “they crossed that line.”

More:

One general officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid punishment from his superiors, said on Thursday that he was hoping to make it through another day without having to cite his constitutional obligations to decline an illegal order. He said he would not be surprised if he faced such a dilemma in the coming weeks.

Here is a piece in The Guardian that collects the statements of senior military officers laying down a line in the sand to the Commander in Chief. 

On the other side, a conservative reader, not an official but quite prominent in Republican circles, tells me that he can’t stand Trump, but that this show by military leaders strikes him as “a coup.” Another reader, a decorated veteran, says:

My cynical view of anyone who reaches the highest echelon of the military is that they are politicians who have to fully internalize the ethos of the age to reach and maintain their position. I do understand the worry that using the military to quell civil unrest risks making the military a point of division rather than of unity. That is bad for the military as an institution, and worrisome to those who think in institutional terms. But, I still think that their public statements are dangerous and out of line, unless there are things happening I’m not aware of.

Whichever side you think is right, it really is a staggering thing to think that in the United States of America, military elites (even if out of uniform) are signaling that the authority of the Commander in Chief is uncertain (in the sense that they believe this Commander in Chief cannot be trusted not to abuse it unconstitutionally). This is Third World stuff.

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Weimar America’s Journalistic Elites

Well, this post by a Dartmouth historian is tonic:

If Biden wins, are there any proposals on the table for a national program of mass de-fascism, such as in post-WW II Christian Democratic Europe, given all the political collaborators and the mainstreaming of the fringe in the US? Otherwise, how is it suppose to go away?

— Daniel Steinmetz-Jen (@daniel_dsj2110) June 4, 2020

I’m old enough to remember Harvard Law School professor Mark Tushnet’s 2016 piece in which he said:

The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. Remember, they were the ones who characterized constitutional disputes as culture wars (see Justice Scalia in Romer v. Evans, and the Wikipedia entry for culture wars, which describes conservative activists, not liberals, using the term.) And they had opportunities to reach a cease fire, but rejected them in favor of a scorched earth policy. The earth that was scorched, though, was their own. (No conservatives demonstrated any interest in trading off recognition of LGBT rights for “religious liberty” protections. Only now that they’ve lost the battle over LGBT rights, have they made those protections central – seeing them, I suppose, as a new front in the culture wars. But, again, they’ve already lost the war.). For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.

Meanwhile, at The New York Times, there’s an internal war going on over the op-ed page’s decision to publish Sen. Tom Cotton’s call to deploy the military to suppress riots. Bari Weiss, who works at the Times, characterizes it like this:

The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. (Thread.)

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020

If the answer is yes, it means that the view of more than half of Americans are unacceptable. And perhaps they are. https://t.co/2zltJkLXE3

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) June 4, 2020

It is time — it is past time — for the non-woke among us to take these people seriously when they say that words that hurt people’s feelings (well, certain people’s feelings) are equivalent to violence. The logical endpoint is to criminalize speech, and beyond that, criminalize the people who think the Bad Thoughts. Think about it:

Nothing says white privilege like getting your employer to reconsider printing an op-ed from a sitting United States Senator whose views correspond to a majority of the nation.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) June 4, 2020

Who cares about the media? you think. Who cares about woke campuses? As I keep saying, if you care about your own liberty, and your ability to make a living in this country, you had better pay attention. These are the institutional elites. These are the people who represent the institutional elites. These are people like I write about in Live Not By Lies:

Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

And this:

Propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is. Writes Arendt, “The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movement has the power to drop the iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

In 2019, Zach Goldberg, a political science PhD student at Georgia Tech, did a deep dive on LexisNexis, the world’s largest database of publicly available documents, including media reports. He found that over a nine-year period, the rate of news stories using progressive jargon associated with left-wing critical theory and social justice concepts shot into the stratosphere.

What does this mean? That the mainstream media is framing the general public’s understanding of news and events according to what was until very recently a radical ideology confined to left-wing intellectual elites.

And this:

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

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

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

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

As I point out in the book, Czeslaw Milosz said that the peoples of Eastern Europe woke up one day to find that they were ruled by ideas that heretofore had only been discussed among intellectuals. We have to pay attention to what they say and think. Sociologist James Davison Hunter teaches that in most cases, change comes via elites. They may not originate a revolutionary idea, but the idea doesn’t really go anywhere until it gets buy-in from elites. As Bari Weiss points out in the case of the Times, where do you think the woke journos acquired their woke enlightenment? At universities. Probably at high schools too. From popular culture. Here’s an op-ed running now in the Washington Post calling for the cancellation and/or politicization of police dramas.

At the Philadelphia Inquirer, many on staff are protesting because the paper published an opinion piece about how the destruction of buildings by rioters hurts the city. In the piece itself, the author, a white woman, goes to extraordinary lengths to qualify her argument, saying that lives are more important than buildings. But, she says, riots that burn down buildings leave scars on cities that take a long, long time to heal. It’s a perfectly reasonable and necessary argument. In fact, it was not the op-ed that caused a staff revolt, but the headline:

This headline was considered so egregious that black staffers staged a protest, and wrote this open letter. Excerpts:

It’s no coincidence that communities hurt by systemic racism only see journalists in their neighborhoods when people are shot or buildings burn down. It takes commitment to correct and improve that relationship. It is an insult to our work, our communities, and our neighbors to see that trust destroyed—and makes us that much more likely to face threats and aggression. The carelessness of our leadership makes it harder to do our jobs, and at worst puts our lives at risk.

We’re tired of shouldering the burden of dragging this 200-year-old institution kicking and screaming into a more equitable age. We’re tired of being told of the progress the company has made and being served platitudes about “diversity and inclusion” when we raise our concerns. We’re tired of seeing our words and photos twisted to fit a narrative that does not reflect our reality. We’re tired of being told to show both sides of issues there are no two sides of.

More:

This is not the start of a conversation; this conversation has been started time and time again. We demand action. We demand a plan, with deadlines. We demand full, transparent commitment to changing how we do business. No more “handling internally.” No more quiet corrections. If we are to walk into a better world, we need to do it with our chests forward—acknowledge and accept where we make mistakes, and show how we learn from them. Your embarrassment is not worth more than our humanity.

This, over a three-word headline.

Of course the paper’s editorial leadership has apologized and groveled. Last year, the newspaper’s owners warned their staff that its plunging circulation and collapse in ad sales meant the paper had five years to save itself, or shut down. So now I guess its plan is going to be to capitulate to demands to abandon basic journalism standards of fairness. They’ll be out of business in fewer than five years. Who wants to pay $195 per year to be propagandized?

In a strong piece analyzing the collapse of actual liberalism in journalism, Reason magazine’s Matt Welch — who rejects both Sen. Tom Cotton’s view and Sen. Tom Cotton himself, by the way — writes:

The woke left’s march through the institutions, from experimental liberal arts campuses to the most hallowed journalistic outlets, has been breathtaking in its speed and scope. It’s a generational war, and the GenXers for whom this stuff doesn’t come natural are learning that they have to become fluent in the new language or end up as pariahs in their own newsrooms. The country’s top editors—Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, David Remnick at The New Yorker—discover during moments of staff revolt that their old-timey notions about broad public squares and multi-viewpoint conversations are no longer tolerable.

Outlets that once waved the flag of provocative viewpoint-diversity—Salon, The New Republic, Vice—have long since become barely distinguishable enforcers of a joyless orthodoxy. Just today, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp engaged in ritual self-criticism after getting ripped by the kids for having tweeted, “I’m sorry but ‘abolish the police’ seems like a poorly thought out idea that’s gotten popular with shocking speed.”

As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf observed/predicted, “There is ascendant pressure on journalists to reify positions that are held by a minority of the public and a supermajority of journalists. If it succeeds it will not advance social justice. It will make journalistic institutions that value social justice less influential.” All this can be mortifying to watch.

Here’s what the left-liberal journalist Jesse Singal wrote about the Beauchamp flap:

It’s not a good sign that Zack felt the need to all but apologize for the original tweet. In this case, expressing a position held by 90% of American people of color isn’t enough. He has to be ‘educated,’ made to repent.

This is what is going on in many news organizations. pic.twitter.com/NmAVtS5qWS

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) June 4, 2020

He has to be made to repent.

This is a war of religion. What we are seeing happen in journalism now is the vindication of the neoreactionary essayist Curtis Yarvin’s concept of “the Cathedral,” which he defines as:

And the left is the party of the educational organs, at whose head is the press and universities. This is our 20th-century version of the established church. Here at UR, we sometimes call it the Cathedral — although it is essential to note that, unlike an ordinary organization, it has no central administrator. No, this will not make it easier to deal with.

This rising generation of soft totalitarians within journalism and academia are fueling neoreaction. What was once a fringe view on the Right is going to become more mainstream in reaction to militant left-wing illiberalism. Right-of-center normies are going to be driven to neoreaction as a matter of self-defense. It is going to get very ugly, and faster than many of us thought. The thing is, big journalism has lost its authority over the masses, and only speaks to elites. Yet the elites who pay attention to it, and who insist that their worldview is the only one that has a right to be recognized and heard, are the gatekeepers to the professions. I heard today from someone who works for a big healthcare provider, who passed along a memo announcing an antiracism protest within the institution later this week. Everyone who works there is “encouraged” to join it. Those who don’t, of course, will by their non-participation for any reason whatsoever out themselves as racist, as deplorable, as the kind of people who need to be subjected to programs antifascist deprogramming. The lives and livelihoods of countless people will be affected by what’s coming, and indeed what is already here. This is what it means for classical liberalism to collapse.

One of the Americans I interviewed for my book, a man who came to the US from an Iron Curtain country, wrote to me yesterday and said I’m getting one thing wrong in my analysis: “There will be nothing soft about this totalitarianism.”

The post Weimar America’s Journalistic Elites appeared first on The American Conservative.

Social Media & Soft Totalitarianism

Over the past week, we have been made aware of social media posts shared online of racist or offensive statements attributed to current or incoming Texas A&M students. We have brought all of these posts to the attention of Texas A&M officials.

— Texas A&M University (@TAMU) June 3, 2020

This is absolutely chilling. Have there been racist and offensive tweets by A&M students? No doubt, and shame on them. But what counts as “racist” and “offensive”? No doubt. But what is the line? How can you know you’ve crossed it? People are being called racist for not taking the maximalist BLM position. People are being called racist for not saying anything at all (“White Silence = Violence”). As the reader who pointed this out to me said:

Lots of informants and those wanting to virtue signal, punish the minority opinion, or get with the dominant force in the culture.

Once again, I’m telling you, the people who lived through Soviet-style communism understand what is happening here. Here is an excerpt from Live Not By Lies:

Kamila Bendova sits in her armchair in the Prague apartment where she and her late husband, Václav, used to hold underground seminars to build up the anti-communist dissident movement. It has been thirty years since the fall of communism, but Bendova is not about to lessen her vigilance about threats to freedom. I mention to her that tens of millions of Americans have installed in their houses so-called “smart speakers” that monitor conversations for the sake of making domestic life more convenient. Kamila visibly recoils. The appalled look on her face telegraphs a clear message: How can Americans be so gullible?

To stay free to speak the truth, she tells me, you have to create for yourself a zone of privacy that is inviolate. She reminded me that the secret police had bugged her apartment, and that she and her family had to live with the constant awareness that the government was listening to every sound they made. The idea that anybody would welcome into their home a commercial device that records conversations and transmits them to a third party is horrifying to her. No consumer convenience is worth that risk.

“Information means power,” Kamila says. “We know from our life under the totalitarian regime that if you know something about someone, you can manipulate him or her. You can use it against them. The secret police have evidence of everything like that. They could use it all against you. Anything!”

Do you trust an American university in this current climate to fairly sort out unambiguously racist tweets and social media posts from ones that simply state an opinion on matters pertaining to protests, riots, and the like, that do not conform to progressive dogma? I do not. I absolutely do not.

How far back do these searches by A&M go? A week? A year? What if an incoming student posted something racist or otherwise offensive in high school, but repented? Is A&M going to deny them a college education now? What if they posted something that was perfectly acceptable six months ago, but which is now considered racist? Drew Brees simply reaffirmed his previous stance on not kneeling during the National Anthem, and he was widely trashed as racist (he apologized). Nobody can know

Nor do I want universities policing the private speech of any student, however offensive. Unless the student is calling for specific acts of violence, or unlawfully abusing (slandering, etc.) someone else at the university, why is it the university’s business to hunt for heresy?

That’s what it is: heresy-hunting and inquisition. From Live Not By Lies, these words by the late Sir Roger Scruton, who I interviewed a year ago:

Settling into his farmhouse library in rural Wiltshire, Sir Roger agreed that we are not waging a political battle but are rather engaged in a war of religion. “There is no official line in this, but it all congeals around a set of doctrines which we don’t have any problem in recognizing.”

He explained that in the emerging soft totalitarianism, any thought or behavior that can be identified as excluding members of groups favored by the Left is subject to harsh condemnation. This “official doctrine” is not imposed from above by the regime but rather arises by left-wing consensus from below, along with severe enforcement in the form of witch-hunting and scapegoating.

“If you step out of line, especially if you’re in the area of opinion-forming as a journalist or an academic, then the aim is to prevent your voice from being heard,” said Scruton. “So, you’ll be thrown out of whatever teaching position you have or, like me recently, made the topic of a completely mendacious fabricated interview used to accuse you of all the thoughtcrimes.”

Texas lawmakers ought to demand that Texas A&M officials cease and desist — or if they don’t, that they make clear what the rules are for posting on social media.

Kamila Bendova is right: anything you say, and anything you have said, of which there is a record, can and will be used against you by the powerful. And, we are actually at a point where anything you have not said will be used against you. You will have seen on social media, possibly, the woke advising the other woke to monitor their friends who say nothing, and take note of it.

This is soft totalitarianism. At one university, Texas A&M, students now have to worry that authorities are searching their social media feeds looking for evidence of racism or offensive behavior — evidence that may be used to deny access to the university. And if they find it, where will the smeared student go? Who wants a racist student at their university? See how this works?

And the state never would have had to get involved. This is why it’s soft totalitarianism. There are no gulags. No secret police. But you may still find your future access to university and to employment closed off forever. You must conform, and your silence will not save you. Do you get it now? There is no end to this. Truth is whatever the Party says it is:

There are no surrender papers to sign in the culture wars. You cannot just accept defeat & move on. Progressivism is a transformative religion, it must go forward by its very nature, to help create its desired but impossible fair & equal world. 'There is still much work to do'

— Ed West (@edwest) June 4, 2020

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Woke Capitalism & Soft Totalitarianism

I am slapping my forehead over how the stuff I talk about in my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies is coming true in a big and undeniable way right now. In a section on how Woke Capitalism works, I talk about the extraordinary power held by Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies over speech in the public square. I write:

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

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

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

Well, get this. Alex Berenson is a former New York Times reporter. He is a strong dissenter from the standard public health line on Covid-19. You don’t have to agree with him to believe that he deserves a hearing in a free society. He posted this yesterday. I apologize for the profanity, but I don’t know how to obscure it on his tweet:

Oh fuck me. I can’t believe it. They censored it. pic.twitter.com/GfPEr7OiV2

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 4, 2020

If Amazon is censoring you, that’s pretty much the end of your book. That’s how much power they have. As Berenson points out:

Books you can buy on Amazon right now: pic.twitter.com/cNUR3y704T

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 4, 2020

This is a real outrage. People, look at what is happening!

The irony that I have to direct you to Amazon.com to pre-order Live Not By Lies has not been lost on me. This is the world in which we live.

UPDATE: Amazon has backed down; Berenson’s e-book is now available. Great news!

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Dhimmi Drew Brees Bends The Knee

Yesterday, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees was asked by a journalist if he would be taking a knee during the National Anthem now. In the past, he has declined to. He said:

“I will never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag of the United States of America or our country. Let me just tell what I see or what I feel when the national anthem is played and when I look at the flag of the United States. I envision my two grandfathers, who fought for this country during World War II, one in the Army and one in the Marine Corp. Both risking their lives to protect our country and to try to make our country and this world a better place. So every time I stand with my hand over my heart looking at that flag and singing the national anthem, that’s what I think about. And in many cases, that brings me to tears, thinking about all that has been sacrificed. Not just those in the military, but for that matter, those throughout the civil rights movements of the ‘60s, and all that has been endured by so many people up until this point. And is everything right with our country right now? No, it is not. We still have a long way to go. But I think what you do by standing there and showing respect to the flag with your hand over your heart, is it shows unity. It shows that we are all in this together, we can all do better and that we are all part of the solution.”

Then boom! He became a Crescent City Hitler. The blowback from even his own teammates was intense. He had gone from being their beloved teammate to being their enemy, to judge by their comments.

And now, this from Brees:

I would like to apologize to my friends, teammates, the City of New Orleans, the black community, NFL community and anyone I hurt with my comments yesterday. In speaking with some of you, it breaks my heart to know the pain I have caused.

In an attempt to talk about respect, unity, and solidarity centered around the American flag and the national anthem, I made comments that were insensitive and completely missed the mark on the issues we are facing right now as a country. They lacked awareness and any type of compassion or empathy. Instead, those words have become divisive and hurtful and have misled people into believing that somehow I am an enemy. This could not be further from the truth, and is not an accurate reflection of my heart or my character.

This is where I stand:

I stand with the black community in the fight against systemic racial injustice and police brutality and support the creation of real policy change that will make a difference.

I condemn the years of oppression that have taken place throughout our black communities and still exists today.

I acknowledge that we as Americans, including myself, have not done enough to fight for that equality or to truly understand the struggles and plight of the black community.

I recognize that I am part of the solution and can be a leader for the black community in this movement.

I will never know what it’s like to be a black man or raise black children in America but I will work every day to put myself in those shoes and fight for what is right.

I have ALWAYS been an ally, never an enemy.

I am sick about the way my comments were perceived yesterday, but I take full responsibility and accountability. I recognize that I should do less talking and more listening…and when the black community is talking about their pain, we all need to listen.

For that, I am very sorry and I ask your forgiveness.

That is incredibly dispiriting. If I were Brees, I would retire before allow anybody to bully me into saying something I didn’t believe, or apologizing for holding the flag with such admiration. Brees certainly doesn’t need the money.

I say that as someone who thinks people were wrong to crack on Colin Kaepernick for his kneeling at the National Anthem. Whether I liked him doing it or not, I respected his right to protest. I also respect Drew Brees’s right to keep standing. Now, though, we see that there is only one opinion allowed. If you disagree, then even people who have worked with you for years will call you a racist. Thus, even a very rich and famous athlete can be brought to heel overnight.

I despise this bullying, this coercion. Time to re-up this Les Murray poem:

Demo

by Les Murray

No. Not from me. Never.

Not a step in your march.

not a vowel in your unison,

bray that shifts to bay.

Banners sailing a street river,

power in advance of a vote,

go choke on these quatrain tablets.

I grant you no claim ever,

not if you pushed the Christ Child

as President of Rock Candy Mountain

or yowled for the found Elixir

would your caste expectations snare me.

Superhuman with accusation,

you would conscript me to a world

of people spat on, people hiding

ahead of oncoming poetry.

Whatever class is your screen

I’m from several lower,

To your rigged fashions, I’m pariah.

Nothing a mob does is clean,

not at first, not when slowed to a media,

not when police. The first demos I saw,

before placards, were against me,

alone, for two years, with chants,

every day, with half-conciliatory

needling in between, and aloof

moral cowardice holding skirts away.

I learned your world order then.

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