Rod Dreher's Blog, page 157

Pandemic Virus 17

Hello all. This was a lousy day. My relapse of Epstein-Barr virus (mononucleosis) put me in bed for the entire afternoon. What a strange disease — one that leaves you feeling exhausted after sleeping for five hours. It also makes me foggy sometimes. I worked for hours on a post about the Viktor Orban situation in Hungary, but I haven’t yet finished it because I really want to get this right, but it’s hard to focus. I apologize for not approving comments all day, either. I’ll get to them tonight.

Above is a photo of my wife and daughter watching a movie in our side yard. Nora, my kid, put a bedsheet on the wall, and got a projector. She and her mom are out there watching “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” on a picnic blanket. Girls know how to stay at home, apparently.

How’s it going with you all? Let’s check in.

From Connecticut:

During these challenging times, I am keenly aware of the intersection of my past with these times, dreams past and current realities, but hope most of all . I too dreamt the American Dream: white picket fence, garden, children. In the words of my uncle Jack, “one wife, one job, one home.” Jack worked as a lineman for Bell Telephone. Lived his last days in a doublewide, one of the first featured in Life magazine. In private the family mocked him for his choice. P.S. He left the church close to a million dollars when he died. Uncle Jack Visited his wife in a nursing home daily until her death. Took his mentally ill sister under his wing, a promise he made to his father on his dad’s deathbed, Visited his mother most day during his lunch break. A small compartment built into the wall of his bedroom where holy water was kept in case of need by a priest. A few years ago, desperately wanting to hear the family stories and understand the dark threads which ran generationally through my family, I flew from Connecticut to San Jose to try to make sense of my deeply fractured family, rife with depression –a high gloss white medicine cabinet — as if white became black — from which my mother drew meds to keep her going, to keep her after my father died at 44 leaving leaving her at 38 with five children, no skills and two in diapers. Far away from the bucolic country side of Connecticut. My past followed me. The good, the bad and the indifferent. Raised in the Catholic Church I lived in mortal fear of hell. Through no fault of the Catholic church I had not heard the good news. heard only the rules. if my classmates could not find me the confessional line was a safe bet. What kept me when nothing else did? Awe and wonder in the presence of majesty, sanctity and holiness of the sacraments and liturgy which while I did not understand…. perhaps it was not understanding which helped to keep me. It was Mystery.

Several days after I began writing this, my adult son, husband, I fell ill with the virus. I am writing from my bed. My husband presented with one set of symptoms, middle of the night cough which shook our bed. He went by ambulance to the hospital, was prescribe an inhaler and sent home. Returned today to stand in a long line to be tested at that same hospital. My adult son and I presented with a different set of symptoms: excruciating headaches, aches, fever, chills and gastro. What I had dismissed as flu for my son, allergies for me, these differences were explained by my doctor as variations of the virus. We are not, as of yet anyway, in spite of the endless stream of terrifying images, in spite of our worst fears, not gasping for air. (p.s my husband is 83).

For the past two years My husband and I along with one of our sons have prepared our home to sell in a growing competitive housing market. We planned to list on April 1! So much for that plan. To remain in this house, which we may have to do–housing market bad enough before the pandemic–we will have to consider renting out bedrooms.

I grew up In Tulsa, Oklahoma in a neighborhood where, in the words of one of those neighbor, “We borrow everything from each other except for our husbands. However, as necessary, even them.” I lived in that neighbor’s back yard, stocked with a playhouse, monkey bars, swings. That one woman’s back yard was my childhood. I played from early morning until dinner then back out until called inside from this neighbors’ yard. One year her Christmas card suggested singing John 3:16 to the tune of Silent Night.

My husband and I, along with tremendous help from our oldest son, have spent the last two years preparing our home to sell, The housing market bottomed before the pandemic. Will it go lower? We had planned to list the house April 1. My self-employed husband works full time. When he lost his corporate job he began his own business, something he had always wanted to do. He earned $30,000 the first year. Our family of five did not go hungry thanks to our community of friends who sent anonymous checks. We did not go hungry. If and when we do sell the house we will have to live on what we make on the house. Our adult children live close by and my husband, assuming he still has a job, covers the tri-state. We are tied to this area. How long can he work? where will we go? If we must stay we will have to find a way. Tenants? Maybe. whatever it takes.

My daughter lives in Hoboken New Jersey, works in Manhattan for a non profit. As membership director of the company as well as collector of monthly fees she is the only one in the company bringing in money. There is enough payroll for the next two months.

My family has experienced our share of heartache and loss, illness, broken familial relationships, addiction, and generational mental illness. I cannot help but believe it was those Godly models, “cloud of witnesses,” neighbor, Bible study teachers– one a funky self -taught Brethren, who without benefit of notes, opened and taught straight from her black used King James, no “processed food from Isabell and friends who became my cherished family. Manifestations of God’s grace. Grace which I came to understand through Martin Luther himself a victim of Scrupulosity (a form of OCD) speaking, imagine, all these centuries later, to a fellow sinner and scrupe like me.

It is as if the world we once knew has been ripped into a million pieces and thrown out the window as confetti on a parade of fallen pride. God spreads grace like a five year old spreads peanut butter. I am counting on that.

From Albuquerque, New Mexico:

We live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The officials here, especially the Governor, have been relatively aggressive in imposing restrictions. The statewide closure of non-essential businesses and stay-at-home measures came on March 23, just days after similar measures in New York. At the time, New York had about 15 times as many cases per million residents as New Mexico.

We live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The officials here, especially the Governor, have been relatively aggressive in imposing restrictions. The statewide closure of non-essential businesses and stay-at-home measures came on March 23, just days after similar measures in New York. At the time, New York had about 15 times as many cases per million residents as New Mexico.

On one hand, the fact that our state is moving comparatively quickly gives me hope that our state may suffer less. On the other hand, I am very concerned by the swift neutering of our civil liberties and the economic impact of widespread closures. New Mexico is a petroleum state, highly dependent on oil and gas for state tax revenues, and the recent drop in oil prices is going to devastate the state budget. Combined with the impact of the pandemic, our state is going to be serious economic distress in in the coming months and years.

My family and I have been very fortunate that our circumstances are allowing us to weather this storm. I am an attorney and sole practitioner, without any employees. I don’t have to make payroll or lay anyone off. My practice, representing plaintiffs in injury and insurance matters, is a type where it’s normal to go several months without revenue, and I happened to have had a very lucrative first quarter.

Even before the crisis, my practice was cloud-based, with all files digital and synced to my cloud provider. My full transition to working from home took about 20 minutes. With schools closed, my wife, a teacher, has been able to watch the kids full time.

We are members of an Episcopal church, one of the few in the nation that is growing rather than shrinking, with lots of young families. Our clergy have been extraordinary in creating streaming services and activities, not just on Sunday mornings, but throughout the week. I am a member of the vestry, and we conducted last month’s meeting through Zoom.

I am working to remain humbly grateful for our circumstances and keeping perspective on the inconveniences, knowing what so many are facing today. Your pandemic diaries have been an invaluable aid in this respect.

From Indianapolis:

(Rod, below is a letter I wrote to “Jim”—a fellow congregant of a local Indianapolis Lutheran Church. I had become seriously ill on St. Valentine’s Day and spent nearly four weeks in the hospital. Talk about being a “health compromised” individual! During this entire time, the dreaded coronavirus was a distinct possibility for me. Either I already had the disease or (if not) it posed a very real threat to my life. Now I am comfortably situated in my bedroom and family member keep their distance. I am 66 years old and not nearly as resilient as had been as a young man. Under the right circumstances, the corona virus could kill me. We are not taking any chances to find out one way or another.)

Jim:

One interesting little bit of information gathered from a blood draw during my most recent adventure in the hospital is that I have an A1C of 5.9. 5.9 is ever close to a perfect blood sugar balance as one might get. How this occurred is a mystery to me. As Linda has noted, I have taken to eating cookies by the bucketful. I thought my A1C would have been terrible not so much for the cookies but really for the general turmoil in my health these past few months. So, what do I know about medicine?

I collapsed in the shower on the morning of St. Valentine’s Day. I have no memory of the incident.

One week later, I was admitted into Community Rehab hospital straight from Community East. I was going to be there for two weeks and so I was quite downhearted about my circumstances. Not that what needed to be done would be too difficult. Not that the people were awful. The nurses and therapists were all wonderful. (My shapely and easy on the eyes occupational and physical therapists are two of my favorite people in the world.) No. None of that. The fact was I was going to be away from my family and home.

My record collection wasn’t there. Nor my books. On no account would they allow me to smoke my pipes. They were even stingy in regard to my beloved Diet Coke. But I’d miss Linda most of all. Linda and I have been an “item” since our junior year of high school (1970). We rarely have been apart. Some people think I am missing something in life when I say Linda is my very best friend; but it is all true—Linda is the best thing that ever happened to me. Knowing it was going to be an additional fourteen days before we be together again was a bit dismaying.

A couple of days into my rehab stay, I took a look at the calendar on my laptop and suddenly realized there was an entire week I could not account for. It turns out I have absolutely no memory of that first week. Now Linda has told me of all the events of that week, and I tell you it sounds quite horrifying. I was on a ventilator for two days. At one point, the doctors told Linda she could not go home for the night because there may be “life issues” that might have to be faced that night. Apparently, once I woke up, I was a real terror. I would argue with anyone about anything. Hardly my normal sweet, charming self.

Linda thinks I should be glad I don’t remember that week.

The end of that story is my doctors concluded I had some sort of heart attack and that is why I collapsed in the bathroom.

I was discharged Friday, March 6th. I was one cheerful guy. It was so wonderful to be home. Things settled into my usual routines. Life is good!!! It was then on Wednesday, March 18th, that I had just finished up my usual office tasks. I climbed the first set of stairs to the main floor of our house. Reaching that main floor, I noted to myself that that climb was harder than it should have been. I felt weak and tired. So, I decided to rest for a while and then make that next climb. I covered myself with a blanket and promptly fell asleep.

A few hours later, Linda and Erin grew concerned. Erin took my temperature. It was 105. ER time!

I was greeted in the ER by nurses and doctors all wearing masks and protective gear. The Corona virus had raised its ugly head and everyone coming into the hospital were to be treated as potential carriers. In time, they took me up to a patient room in the oncology wing. The oncology wing being where they were putting all suspected corona suffers. They did the corona virus test on me; but said it was hard knowing when they’d get the results. Could be four days. Could be four weeks.

My fever broke during my stay in the ER; I felt quite better. So, I wanted to go home. My doctor strongly advised against it. I eventually conceded to her advice and agreed to stay; but I clearly indicated my unhappiness with the situation. I have already spent a month in the hospital in 2020 and I had had enough.

Thursday and Friday passed painfully slow. Aside from the cascade of nurses and doctors who poked their noses into my room, there was little for me to do except watch television. (And, yes, daytime TV is as bad as everyone says it is.) Taking my vitals, drawing my blood, and being asked the same questions over and over again were all that broke up the long stretches of empty time. And then came Saturday.

The morning came as it had all the days before. Blood draws. Taking of vitals. Being asked “when was the last time you took a crap?” A small breakfast. Merciful heavens! When I was finally left alone, I began to plan out what to watch on television for the day—a dismal project. At about 9.00a, my primary doctor came in my room and said: “Mr. Dooley, I am determined to get on your good side today. How would you feel about being discharged from the hospital today?”

I had no signs of having the corona virus. Looking at the patterns of the illness in other parts of the world, the hospital was anticipating a huge wave of persons truly sick from the virus in the coming week. They were going to need my bed. I just had to self-isolate once at home.

“I can go for that!”

Linda came and took me home. A big stack of mail was waiting for me; but now was the time for sweet, peaceful sleep. Oh, how great it was to sleep for ten uninterrupted hours.

So, here I am. I have my music and books. Plenty of engaging time to read and write. I am so grateful to be home—even though I have largely confined myself to our bedroom and bathroom. Linda, Erin, Liam and Ellie largely keep their distance for fear they might transfer dome random bug to their “wellness-compromised” family member.

Linda has absolutely forbidden any pipe smoking in our bedroom; so that part has yet to be fulfilled. Many would say “good”. Oh, well. I remain very happy to be home. The cherry on top of this Ice-cream sundae: the hospital called me Monday to tell me my corona virus test came out negative. I do not have or had the corona virus. At least that bullet missed me!

I am not happy when I remind myself that I haven’t seen the inside of Servants of Christ since last August. Yeah, you can watch services online, but it is not the same. Can’t partake of the sacrament. And I miss the people.

Here’s to prayers for healing for me and all suffering under pain and illness. I am thankful for all the prayers given by our SOC family.

Well….probably more than you care to know! Hope all is well for you and yours. Hope all is well for our larger SOC Lutheran family. Please keep in touch.

Yours in Christ,

Mike

From New Jersey:

I’m writing from Northern New Jersey. I live a county away from Bergen, the hardest hit county in the our state. I’m 23, in reasonably good health and shape, but I do have asthma. However, my brother has severe autism and epilepsy, and with the amount of medication he is on, his immune system would likely be unable to combat coronavirus. Furthermore, the hospitals won’t let the family in the hospital to help him be treated; this is the nightmare scenario for our family. So needless to say we are very nervous and taking all the precautions necessary to prevent bringing the virus home. To any other readers who have disabled family members at home that you’re concerned about, I feel for you immensely, and remind you to seek solace and clarity in God and the strengths of your family and friends. That’s how I keep my sanity, though I am not sure how much sanity I will have left when all is said and done.

I’m also currently a college student (I took a 2-year interregnum from college to help care for my brother, and this is the first semester I’ve been back. What a way to continue your education, in the middle of a pandemic). So I fortunately and unfortunately don’t have a job to lose. However, I was banking on working 2 jobs over the summer to pay for school in the fall, so we’ll see how bad this really gets and how long “non-essential” NJ businesses remain closed. Currently my sister and my dad are “essential” employees, but my sister can’t work from home. Fortunately she does pharmaceutical research and is wearing PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) every day, at all times. There are many families in worse situations with people working hospitality or food service, so my prayers go to them.

I am a recent convert to Catholicism, with the help of several friends. Fitting that I was able to find God on the eve of the pandemic, is it not? So I don’t wish to speak with any authority on what “Christians” should be doing or will do. But what I will say is that as a Christian, as long as we nurture our own hearts and our connection to God, and model that for others, and do our charitable works, then we have done all we can to help shape our communities in this time of strife. Rod I hope you get better, and I cannot thank you enough for the content you create. Stay safe and be healthy sir.

Thank you, dear people. Please keep sending in your diaries. I’m at rod – at – amconmag – dot – com. Please put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line, and don’t forget to say from where you write.

The post Pandemic Virus 17 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Christian Cooties Worse Than Covid

With the whole world turned upside down, it may be comforting to know that some things never change — like the hatred some liberal New Yorkers have for conservative Christians:

Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city will keep a close eye on the Christian fundamentalist group operating a field hospital in Central Park, amid growing fears that some New Yorkers could face discrimination and substandard care from the religious organization.

The 60-bed respiratory care unit will handle overflow patients from Mount Sinai, as the hospital grapples with a surge in novel coronavirus cases. Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical nonprofit led by the virulently anti-LGBTQ and Islamaphobic preacher Franklin Graham, will handle operations.

More:

“This is a dangerous religious propaganda machine that uses international medical aid to further their agenda,” said Jacklyn Grace Lacey, a medical anthropologist who has closely tracked the [Samaritan’s Purse] Ebola response. “The medical care they provide is dangerously sub-standard.”

She added that the optics of the group setting up a facility in such an iconic location as Central Park were not a coincidence.

“The Graham family is well trained in how to create a spectacle,” Lacey said. “I am tremendously concerned they will hurt far more of our fellow New Yorkers than they will help.”

The city is about to run out of ventilators, according to Gov. Cuomo, and is in desperate need. But yuck, Evangelicals!

Jonathan Merritt, the liberal Evangelical, gives his imprimatur to Grahamophobia:

None of Samaritan’s Purse’s detractors have argued that the Central Park ward should be shuttered or that the organization be barred from offering care. And no one is casting aspersions on the many courageous health-care professionals who will put their lives at risk when this hospital opens. Most agree with the letter from Mount Sinai staff and doctors—at least one of whom is LGBTQ—that concerns about Samaritan’s Purse, while valid, must be set aside at the moment because “the higher mission at present is to preserve human life.”

To this, I say “yes and.” New Yorkers can admit that Samaritan’s Purse should have a role to play in this vital work, and they can also acknowledge the many valid reasons that might make vulnerable and marginalized residents a little more than nervous.

“A little more than nervous.” This I do not get. Maybe these people are afraid the Graham medical workers will feed the patients Chick-fil-A.

 

The post Christian Cooties Worse Than Covid appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trump’s ‘Emergency’ Golf Carts?

Did you see the new jobless numbers today? Last week, 6.6 million people filed for unemployment. On top of the 3.3 million from the prior week, there are 10 million officially unemployed people in America. All of this happened in a single month! This is unprecedented.

But you know who is going to have a job, at least through this weekend? Golf cart drivers of northern Virginia, in the town that’s home to one of President Trump’s golf resorts:

The Secret Service this week signed a $45,000 contract to rent a fleet of golf carts in Northern Virginia, saying it needed them quickly to protect a “dignitary” in the town of Sterling, home to one of President Trump’s golf clubs, according to federal contracting data.

The contract was signed Monday and took effect Wednesday, records show. The Secret Service paid a West Virginia-registered company, Capitol Golf Cars and Utility Vehicles, to rent 30 carts until the end of September.

The new contract, which the Secret Service described as an “emergency order,” does not mention Trump or the golf club by name. But it closely mirrors past contracts signed by the Secret Service, for agents accompanying Trump to his golf clubs in New Jersey and Florida.

The White House declined to comment Wednesday. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, did not respond to questions.

This must be fake news. Surely the president would not compel the Secret Service to spend $45,000 on renting golf carts to protect him so he can play golf while millions of Americans are suddenly jobless and confined to their houses, left to contemplate their economic ruin. Surely not. Not this president. Because doing that would fulfill every Marxist stereotype of the rich, and a populist right-wing president wouldn’t behave that way — certainly not in an election year.

Right?

The post Trump’s ‘Emergency’ Golf Carts? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Pandemic Diaries 16

Sorry I missed last night — I was wound up from that Louisiana pastor’s service. To make up for my lapse, I offer you the Scots granny that we all need:

Got this update from my wee granny

Farewell, Mrs. T

It’s funny how life online works.  It has been widely and accurately observed that it gives you a sense of false intimacy with others. Of course that is true. But sometimes, the intimacy our online lives give us is real, or at least feels real, in ways that can’t be explained, but can be felt. Or so it seems to me anyway. This is a clumsy wind-up to a post about the death of Hilary Teachout, the wife of my friend Terry Teachout, the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal. She died not of Covid, but from complications from a double lung transplant, for which she and her devoted husband had been waiting for years. Terry wrote on his blog, announcing her death:

Hilary Dyson Teachout, the “Mrs. T” of this blog, suffered throughout the decade and a half of our life together from pulmonary hypertension, a rare and devastating illness that gnawed inexorably at her body without touching her soul. She was smart, funny, generous, and gallant, a perfect companion and the love of my life. Indeed, we fell in love at first sight, a thing I had never thought possible until, at the improbable age of forty-nine, it happened to me, followed in the shortest order that I could manage by a middle age full of shared joy. Alas, Hilary lacked the strength to survive the double-lung transplant that we had hoped would give her more life, and now she is gone.

Loss is the price of love: I knew from the start that I was likely to lose her too soon, though I was lucky beyond belief to have her for far longer than her doctors foresaw. But merely to know such a thing cannot begin to ready us for its coming. Raymond Aron said it: “There is no apprenticeship to misfortune. When it strikes us, we still have everything to learn.” I shall now try to learn the lesson of misfortune in a manner as worthy as possible of my beloved Hilary, who faced death as she faced life, with indomitable courage.

Here’s the thing: I have never met Terry, but have only known him through correspondence and text messaging over the years. And I never exchanged even that much communication with Mrs. T., as Terry called her. But to have been Terry’s reader on his blog and his Twitter feed was to have known this couple as if they were old friends. As Mrs. T.’s conditioned worsened over the past week, Terry let me and his readers know. I would fall asleep at night praying for her, and wake up praying for her. This says exactly nothing about my sanctity, and everything about how much I love these two people, whom I’ve never met.

How strange is that? All I can say is that there are surely lots of people, Terry’s readers, who can say the same thing today, and mean it. The thing about Terry Teachout is that not only is he a fine critic, but he also has in spades something that you don’t often find in critics: a heart overflowing with generosity. I say this as someone who was a critic for part of my career. It’s a profession that can embitter one, because in order to do it well, you have to hone your perceptive and analytical faculties to understand why a piece of art, writing, or performance works, or why it fails to work. Because most of what you will see as a critic misses the mark, and because bad or mediocre work is a lot easier and more fun to review than good or great work, it is far too easy to become nasty, and to revel in the clever dig. When I look back on my own reviews, this is what I most regret.

Terry Teachout won’t have those regrets. It’s not that he’s a pushover as a critic — far from it. It’s that as with Roger Ebert, you sense that when he pans something, he’s not doing it out of pleasure. He genuinely loves music and theater, and music and theater people. You get the idea that he really wants them to excel.

A lot of this is no doubt inborn; judging from his writing and tweeting, he’s a naturally sunny guy, a Midwesterner through and through. But I have to figure that a lot of that comes from the sheer joy he took in being married to Mrs. T. Terry is a man who lived in a state of constant wonder at the gift of Mrs. T., and the opportunity to love her. Following their story over the years, you could see that loving Mrs. T., with her medical condition, took a lot out of Terry, her caregiver. But it was equally clear that the gift of loving her was an exhilarating grace.

Terry once wrote about what he called the “miracle” of their meeting, when they were both forty-nine:

We met at a dinner party and fell in love at first sight. Then I learned that she had an incurable disease with a life expectancy of two years. Then I was stricken with congestive heart failure mere days before what was supposed to be our first date. I called her from the emergency room to break the date. Unfazed, she came to the hospital. We’ve been together ever since. Instead of dying on schedule, she fooled the doctors and lived. Now she needs a life-saving double lung transplant—and we’re counting on our luck to hold one more time.

In 2017, with Mrs. T’s permission, he disclosed her illness to his readers, and used it to educate them about the rare condition from which she suffered, and to talk about the importance of organ donation. Three years ago, Terry wrote about their romance here, on the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary. Excerpt:

To marry in middle age is an adventure in and of itself. Mrs. T and I are both stubborn, settled creatures of long-established habit, and though we quickly made room for each other in our lives, it wasn’t always easy for us to get along. Yet that never seemed to matter, and still doesn’t: I know that from the night we met, I’ve never wanted to share my life with anyone else. She has opened doors in my heart and soul that I didn’t even know existed. Among many, many other things, I have no doubt whatsoever that had we not met, I wouldn’t have found it within myself to start writing for the stage. When I took my first curtain call, she was in the audience, cheering loudly and proudly. She’s been there ever since.

It is a miraculous thing to suddenly find yourself living with a smart, funny, indomitably gallant woman, an everyday miracle that is far too easily taken for granted. I know I do that sometimes, and I hate myself for it, but far more often than not, I’m intensely aware of how lucky I am to have met Mrs. T, and how much luckier I am that she was willing to settle down with me.

When, eleven years ago, the then-future Mrs. T and I trimmed our first Christmas tree together in Connecticut, I made the following observation: “To be happy, not in memory but in the moment, is the shining star on the tree of life.” That is what I am, and she is the person to whom I owe it. Our marriage is the best thing to have happened to me in a life overflowing with good fortune. May it go on and on.

It did, until yesterday — in one sense. But in another, their love is eternal. I don’t mean that in a sentimental way, either. Last week, I told Terry that in reading about their devotion to each other, I’ve thought about Dante in Paradise — how the blessed in eternity are transparent; the light of divinity shines through them like sunlight through clear glass. She did not choose the hell of her suffering in the body, but the way they both met it refined their love. And for we spectators who have despaired, as everyone does at times, of life and of love, the depth and effervescence of Mr. and Mrs. T. cheered us like a deep draft of vintage Champagne. That’s how it was for me, at least. She was God’s gift to him, and through him, to us all.

Here, from Canto XXXI of Paradiso, is Dante’s address to Beatrice, whose sacrifices of love for him brought the pilgrim Dante out of the dark wood, and into the fullness of God’s love and beatitude. I imagine these words in Terry Teachout’s heart when he is reunited with Mrs. T in eternity:

I raised my eyes up there

and saw her, mirroring eternal rays,

to form a crown or aureole around.

 

From that high region where thunder rolls,

no mortal eye could ever be so far —

though sunk beneath the ocean’s utmost depth —

 

as my sight was from Beatrice now.

Yet that meant nothing. For her image came

not blurred or lessened by the space between.

 

‘In you, beloved, my hope grows strong. All this

you bore: To greet me and to make me whole,

you left your footprint in the depth of Hell.

 

The inward strength and grace of everything

I since have see has come to me, I know,

through you, your goodness and your grace and power.

 

Mr. and Mrs. T

The post Farewell, Mrs. T appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Year Without Pascha

In the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church in America (the Diocese of the South), our bishop has issued his directions for Holy Week and Pascha worship. He has effectively cancelled them. That is, the liturgies will go on, but with only a skeleton crew of no more than five people in the church building at a given time — and these must be the same five people throughout the busy Holy Week schedule. There are some details having to do with whether or not the parish is in a mandatory stay-at-home zone, but in both cases, the de facto policy means that for almost the entire parish, there will be no Holy Week or Paschal services.

I can hardly express to you what a blow this is. It would be for any Christian church, but especially in Orthodoxy, when we spend Holy Week in church for a long time, every day. It is an intense time of great holiness and mystery, and the Paschal liturgy is an event of indescribable joy.

In the Year of Our Lord 2020, it will have been taken from us.

Please don’t misread me: I support Bishop Alexander in this. As much as I hate to hear the news, this drastic move seems like the most prudent and compassionate decision. Did you know that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the one built over the site where Jesus died, was buried, and was resurrected, has been closed for the first time since … the Black Plague, in the 14th century? The right way to see this is that we Orthodox Christians are being asked to make an absolutely extraordinary sacrifice for the life of the world — so that this plague which has killed, and will kill, so many, and will have reduced so many to poverty, can be defeated. As the old-school Catholics like to say about sacrifice, we should, “offer it up” as an extreme sharing of Christ’s passion. We will know in a way we never have the meaning of the crucified Jesus’s words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

My fellow Orthodox, in this emergency situation, let’s not be like the Pentecostal pastor in Baton Rouge, who is bringing disgrace and contempt onto the name of Christ by defiantly holding worship services, despite the governor’s legitimate order against large gatherings. They are failing in their duty of love of neighbor, and increasing the suffering of the greater community by potentially incubating and spreading the plague. They are not sacrificing for the community; they are expecting the community to sacrifice for them. And the community will remember that. The greatest witness we can have to the world is to show that we humbly accepted the thing that means the most to us as a Christian body — Pascha — so that lives might be saved, and the world rid of this plague. We can do this for the world. Nobody is asking us to deny our faith, but rather to make an unusual, and unusually painful, sacrifice, to ransom the lives of others.

We can do this. We must do this. And let us think about the deeper lesson here. Learning this morning of the effective cancellation of Holy Week and Pascha really and truly brought home for me how apocalyptic these dark days are. The question that has to be on every Orthodox Christian’s mind — and on the mind of every Christian, period — is, What is God trying to tell us in this? 

Is it a chastisement? A warning? A portent of a time to come when we may be forbidden to go to Church? What?

The Year Without Pascha. My God. After this, let’s never, ever take church for granted again.

UPDATE: This passage from the Gospel of Luke (via Bible Gateway) teaches us how to regard what’s happening now:

Isn’t it right that we make the sacrifice of attendance at our liturgies, even the Paschal liturgy, for the sake of saving lives and healing people?

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Rev. Spell Is A Selfish Showboater

Earlier today, the East Baton Rouge Parish district attorney charged the Rev. Tony Spell of Life Tabernacle Church for violating Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards’s emergency prohibition on large public gatherings:

“He will be held responsible for his reckless and irresponsible decisions that endangered the health of his congregation and our community,” Central Police Chief Roger Corcoran said. “We are facing a public health crisis and expect our community’s leaders to set a positive example and follow the law.”

Despite being accused of the misdemeanor offenses, which carry a maximum punishment of $500 and up to six months in parish jail, Spell said he plans to continue holding services, including on Tuesday night.

“This is an attack on religion. This an attack on our constitutional rights. We have a constitutional right to assemble and to gather and there are no laws that I am breaking.” he said, as his wife, Shaye, hugged him inside the church’s main worship area.

Spell has held large public religious services with his flock despite multiple officials warning of danger to his congregation and the broader community. Medical experts have said that, to blunt the sharp increase in coronavirus cases and related COVID-19 illnesses that could strain the medical system, people should avoid large crowds as much as possible and reduce the spread of disease.

More:

Spell asserted that he is operating under his constitutional rights and under a mandate given to him by Jesus Christ, “who said do not forsake to assemble together.”

Spell added that government authorities were throwing away the nation’s Constitution under a “COVID hoax” that hasn’t had the level of medical toll and death that, he says, experts had initially predicted would happen at this point. He called the fears about the virus that have been propagated were a “politically motivated scheme to shut the doors on America’s churches and we refuse to shut our doors.”

“Yes, we’re gonna have service,” he added, “and if I am arrested, the second man in charge will step in. If he is arrested, the third man in charge will step in. If he is arrested, the thousands of people who are members of this congregation are gonna step in, but you can’t take us all.”

Read it all.

NEW: Gov. Edwards on Pastor Spell, says law enforcement in EBR have been patient. “They have done everything that they could, to try & get him to become compliant, before they took this step today. Maybe this will be the step that gets his attentions & brings him into compliance” pic.twitter.com/lpTwLznQHB

— Lester Duhé (@LesterDuhe) March 31, 2020

Meanwhile, this afternoon, at the White House briefing, President Trump, Dr. Fauci, and Dr. Birx had very bad news. The NYT headlined it like this:

A couple of hours later, Life Tabernacle Church began its evening services. Woody Jenkins, a local Republican politico who headed up Trump’s 2016 campaign in Louisiana, and who operates a newspaper in Central, where the pastor’s church is, has been livestreaming services on his Central City News Facebook page. He promotes the services as patriotic and godly:

 

I listened to the service on Facebook (they tried to videocast it too, but the feed kept jamming up). It was quite a performance. Pastor Spell is a fervid preacher. He slipped in and out of speaking in tongues. Judging from the sound of the singing, there are a lot of people inside that church.

There was a lot of whooping and hollering and ululating and speaking in tongues from the congregation. Pastor Spell acknowledged all the media coverage he has been getting, and portrayed himself as a martyr for Christ. He said that he spent 90 minutes on the phone today talking to Alabama’s Roy Moore, who offered to represent the pastor legally pro bono. Spell said that everyone in the congregation that night is there because they love their children. Addressing all the kids that Life Tabernacle busses in to services, Spell said, “You lookin’ at a pastor who will die for you.”

This to children whose parents have sent them to church, where they may be exposed to a deadly virus.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is a Republican-Party-at-Prayer, white-people kind of church. Like many Pentecostal and charismatic churches, it is racially integrated. I lost the audio feed for a few minutes at one point, but when I rejoined the service, someone — I don’t think it was Spell — was tearing up the room by preaching (shouting, actually) that “racism is of the devil.”

Well, he’s right about that, but so what? I bring it up here because surely there will be people who don’t understand the differences among Christians, and who will think that these must be Trumpy white Evangelicals. They’re not Evangelicals, they’re not all white (though Spell is), and though Trump’s Louisiana state campaign chief is webcasting and promoting these services, Spell said tonight from the stage that they are not gathered in the name of the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party, or anyone but Jesus.

Shouted Spell at one point: “The devil don’t like what’s happening now!”

Actually, I imagine that he’s delighted with it. Tony Spell’s drama is a great gift to the enemies of religious liberty. What they’re doing is not hurting the feelings of liberals. What they’re doing is threatening human life.

Tony Spell and his accomplice Woody Jenkins are making Christians despicable in the eyes of the public, and bringing shame to the name of Jesus Christ. All over this city, believing Christians are staying away from church during this emergency, not because they are ashamed of Jesus (as Spell seemed to allege at one point), but because they accept that this is necessary to arrest the spread of this deadly virus. But not showboating Tony Spell, and his promoter, Woody Jenkins. They are potentially bringing death and suffering onto this community … and for what? So they can play martyrs and patriots? Their congregation is complicit too. To me, it looks like they care more for their opportunity to get worked up emotionally and speak in tongues than they care about the lives of their neighbors, and the work of the doctors, nurses, EMS personnel, and others who are putting their lives on the line to save lives and heal the gravely ill.

If that is what Christianity is, then who would want anything to do with it? Last year, I spent time with people who went to communist prisons because they would not deny Jesus Christ. I talked to a Christian in Moscow whose face is partially paralyzed because of the beatings he took in a Soviet prison. That’s what suffering for Jesus means. These Louisiana Pentecostals are not suffering for Jesus; they are potentially making other people suffer sickness and death so they can live out their idea of following Jesus. If they were only putting themselves in danger, I would think it foolish, but not wicked. But they’re not doing that. They’re putting the entire community in danger. Besides, when some of that congregation comes down with the virus, who is going to be trying to save their lives? Doctors and nurses upon whose professionalism they depend.

I’ve never thought these thoughts but I have to say: listening to this spectacle, I understand why people can come to hate Christians. There is nothing godly about any of what went on at that church tonight, or rather, what is godly about it was overwhelmed by what is ungodly.  That church has drawn national attention, and the pastor is reveling in it. In his sermon tonight, he talked about how the media attention makes it possible for him to preach the Gospel all around the country. Seriously? Does he actually think people will be attracted to Christianity because of this? What nobody will see, because it’s not news, is that the overwhelming majority of Christians in Baton Rouge are obeying the legitimate order of the governor, and sacrificing their religious gathering until such time as the pandemic has passed.

Elsewhere on this night, in this city, and in this state, people with Covid pneumonia are drowning in their own hospital beds, their lungs filling up with fluid. And look at those people, feeling so brave because they’re defying the legitimate order of the governor to temporarily avoid gathering, to try to get this pandemic under control.

Tonight in this city, owners of a food venue where a number of small business owners had their restaurants are dealing with the permanent shutdown of the venue. They can’t see a way to hold on through the next month of shutdown, especially because the landlord is trying to make them pay rent. Think of all the restaurant workers who are jobless tonight because of this virus. Are Tony Spell and Woody Jenkins going to pay their rent and feed their kids? Are they going to take care of all the people who don’t get sick, but who suffer the loss of their businesses and their livelihoods because the state of emergency has to be extended while authorities struggle to arrest the virus?

Selfish, selfish, selfish. Christians of the early church distinguished themselves by self-sacrificially caring for plague victims who had been abandoned by others. The Christians at Life Tabernacle are distinguishing themselves by prolonging the agonies of victims — those who will yet become sick, and those who are made poor by the pandemic. That’s some witness to the world. Again: there is no greater gift to the enemies of religious liberty than a church full of tongues-speaking shouters who demand their rights and spit on their duties of charity.

If the sheriff arrests Tony Spell tomorrow and holds him without bond, don’t you believe for a second that he’s any kind of victim.  Don’t you believe for a second that his arrest is any kind of persecution. I believe that persecution is coming in this country, and when it does, Tony Spell and his congregation’s demand for privileges in a time of unprecedented public health crisis will bear some of the blame.

And so, for that matter, will some ultra-Orthodox Jews of the Greater New York area, who by their selfish actions are showing the same kind of contempt for the wider community that these Baton Rouge Pentecostals are doing. There is never any excuse for anti-Semitism or anti-Christian bigotry, but in a time of mass death from a contagious plague, observant Christians and Orthodox Jews are fools to behave this way. They are going to make life much, much harder for the rest of us religious believers.

UPDATE: The director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security praised the White House briefing today. He said, in part:

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Orwell & SJWs

George Scialabba has a wonderful essay about Orwell in Commonweal. Though Scialabba writes in it about Orwell’s criticism of the right, this passage jumped out:

Might Orwell’s sensitive nose have detected a whiff of cant anywhere on the contemporary left? I suspect he would have cast a baleful eye on identity politics. He would, I think, be dubious about “diversity.” Why do every college and corporation in America have a fleet of “diversity” officers? What is gained by ensuring—at enormous expense—that every student or employee is proud of his/her culture and that every other student or employee respects it? According to Walter Benn Michaels in The Trouble with Diversity, what is gained is the avoidance of class conflict. “The commitment to diversity is at best a distraction and at worst an essentially reactionary position…. We would much rather celebrate cultural diversity than seek to establish economic equality.”

Orwell was moderately obsessed with class. He would probably have noted that the explosive growth of inequality in the United States over the past four decades has closely paralleled the explosive growth of the diversity industry, and would have drawn some conclusions. He might have asked: If there were two societies with the same Gini coefficient, but in one of them, the proportion of billionaires by race and gender matched that of the general population, would that society be morally better than the other? Or: If the ratio of CEO to median employee earnings was the same in two societies, but in one of them the proportion of CEOs by race and gender matched that of the general population, would that society be morally better than the other? I’m pretty sure that most diversity bureaucrats would answer “yes” to both questions, and that Orwell would have answered “no.”

Orwell was fearless, so a tribute to him shouldn’t pull any punches. I think he would suggest that there was something irrational about the way we enforce our most sensitive taboo: the N-word. From the wholesale banning of Huckleberry Finn to the many times teachers and civil servants have been censured, and in one case fired, for using the word “niggardly” (which has no etymological relation to the N-word) to the resignation under pressure recently of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, school committeewoman for using the N-word in a discussion of a proposed high-school course about the N-word, we have often made fools of ourselves and done disadvantaged African Americans no good. As the school superintendent summarized the Cambridge case: the committeewoman “made a point about racist language and used the full N-word instead of the common substitute, ‘N-word.’… Although said in the context of a classroom discussion, and not directed to any student or adult present, the full pronunciation of the word was upsetting to a number of students and adults who were present or who have since heard about the incident.” No one, however, as far as I am aware, has publicly expressed hurt feelings over the fact that the average net worth of African Americans in the Boston area is $8. (Eight, no zeros.) As Benn Michaels observes: “As long as the left continues to worry about [respect], the right won’t have to worry about inequality.”

Read it all.

I wrote earlier today about actually existing conservatism being more of a “folk libertarianism” than anything resembling philosophical conservatism. But what about actually existing liberalism?

The surprising triumph of Joe Biden, the most normie Democrat in America, tells us something about actually existing liberalism. Illiberal progressivism dominates in academia, the media, and in corporate America’s human resources departments. A reader sends in this abstract from a paper published by a Penn professor at the Ivy League university’s Wharton School of Business (Trump’s alma mater!) in which she argues that the state should

forbid identity-based discrimination but permit refusals of service for projects that foster hate toward protected groups, even where the hate-based project is intimately linked to a protected characteristic (as with religious groups that mandate white supremacy). Far from perpetuating discrimination, these refusals instead promote anti-discrimination norms, and they help realize the vision of the morally inflected marketplace that the Article defends.

You could say that Biden’s (not yet assured) victory in the Democratic primaries shows that actually existing liberalism is much less interested in wokeness than in bread-and-butter issues. After all, the more self-consciously woke candidates in the Democratic race didn’t get anywhere. I would like to read it that way. But would Biden actually stand up to any wokeness? After all, this is the man who tweeted:

Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 25, 2020

This is the problem with the Democrats. You might be interested in class issues, and economic equality, and not at all interested in wokeness. But what you’re going to get is wokeness, because that is what the power-holding class in the Democratic Party really cares about. As James Lindsay, the left-liberal professor who does heroic work fighting wokeness, told me in our recent interview:

Of course [Social Justice Warriors] going to find ways to use this crisis to their advantage. They go around inventing problems or dramatically exaggerating or misinterpreting small problems to push their agenda; why wouldn’t they do the same in a situation where there’s so much chaos and thus so much going wrong. My experience so far is that people are really underestimating how much of this there will be and how much of it will be institutionalized while we’re busy doing other things like tending to the sick and dying and trying not to lose our livelihoods and/or join them ourselves.

It’s very important to understand that “Critical Social Justice” isn’t just activism and some academic theories about things. It’s a way of thinking about the world, and that way is rooted in critical theory as it has been applied mostly to identity groups and identity politics. Thus, not only do they think about almost nothing except ways that “systemic power” and “dominant groups” are creating all the problems around us, they’ve more or less forgotten how to think about problems in any other way. The underlying assumption of their Theory–and that’s intentionally capitalized because it means a very specific thing–is that the very fabric of society is built out of unjust systemic power dynamics, and it is their job (as “critical theorists”) to find those, “make them visible,” and then to move on to doing it with the next thing, ideally while teaching other people to do it too. This crisis will be full of opportunities to do that, and they will do it relentlessly. So, it’s not so much a matter of them “finding a way” to use this crisis to their advantage as it is that they don’t really do anything else.

To be honest, I don’t have a lot of confidence in predictions about what valence wokeness (or right-wing culture war themes) will have in this fall’s election, given the economic destruction upon us now. I do have confidence, though, that if the left gets into power, this professional class of woke activists will march triumphantly through the institutions of government, and implement their identity-politics utopianism. Do I think that most Democratic voters do, or would, favor that? No, probably not. I imagine they would be voting Democratic primarily to oust Trump, and secondarily because they are more interested in income inequality. Unfortunately, the SJWs are part of the package. If Orwell were alive today and writing with his superlative critical pen about them, he would struggle to find publication in one of our major liberal journals.

UPDATE:  Just now:

I'm sure Critical Social Justice isn't quietly reorganizing things that might matter because of the pandemic… Or so I keep being told. https://t.co/LEzvjqbu2B

— James Lindsay, staying home (@ConceptualJames) March 31, 2020

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Covid Denialist Crazies

Have you heard of the Covid denialists? I had not until I received a furious e-mail from Wyoming Doc, who has been writing me daily telling me about how he and his team are working themselves to the bone treating the growing influx of Covid patients. He gives me permission to post this here:

I have been made aware of a group of people in America — call them COVID deniers — that are now going around taking videos of empty hospital parking lots, and POOF: we have evidence this is all a huge hoax.  Even more concerning, my sister reports to me this type of thing is getting some play on Fox News.

Well, for the first time in my life — after the Sandy Hook deniers, the Obama Birth Certificate deniers — and all the other crazy that has toxified our discourse, I CAN NOW PERSONALLY TESTIFY these people are well and truly nuts.

Tell these two people I have intubated yesterday that this is a hoax — or better yet, their teenage children. Tell the other 15-20 people we have in the hospital struggling to breathe, but not intubated yet.  Tell it to the very ill positive patients I have that are sitting at home sick as they can be.

Maybe these knuckleheads need to realize that the parking lots are empty because all the procedures and surgeries have been cancelled.

Maybe these morons need to realize that critically ill patients are never dropped off at the front door of the hospitals.

Maybe these imbeciles should be told that every hospital and clinic in America is doing every thing they can to keep people away from hospitals, which are known foci of transmission.

If it is true that Fox News has been giving these cretins a voice, they should be ashamed.  I do not know — I just do not have time to even look at a TV right now.

My initial sense was that Wyoming Doc’s sister is talking about Todd Starnes, who used to be with Fox, but was let go late last year after a guest on his radio show said that Democrats worship Moloch.



Starnes has emerged as a leading Covid denialist. [UPDATE: He vehemently denies this — see below. I am pleased to learn that it isn’t true, and happily retract the claim. — RD] From NBC News, a report about how Starnes tweeted video of no activity outside a Brooklyn hospital, and framed it as a sign that Covid is a hoax:

But the grim realities of hospitals overflowing with patients seeking treatment for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, are not always as visible from the outside, leaving space for bad actors and coronavirus denialists to push dangerous disinformation — and put themselves in harm’s way.

Starnes’ tweet — viewed 1.3 million times — was one of the first and most popular examples of the wider conspiracy theory that spread on social media over the weekend centered on the #FilmYourHospital hashtag, which called for people to go to hospitals and capture what was happening.

NBC News found more than a dozen videos pushing the #FilmYourHospital conspiracy. The videos were mostly recorded outside hospitals in New York City, a region shouldering the brunt of the U.S. outbreak, with more than 66,000 cases and more than 1,200 deaths. A few videos came from other states, including New Jersey, California and Ohio. Shared by far-right conservatives and conspiracy accounts across Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, the videos collectively had been viewed millions of times as of Monday.

The #FilmYourHospital hashtag had been tweeted by more than 5,000 accounts by Monday afternoon, although some people were critical of the conspiracy theory.

Well, it turns out that Covid denialism was actually on Fox News proper. Fox contributor Sarah Carter floated the idea on Fox News on March 30.  Mediate reports:

On Fox News Sunday night, [Carter] appeared on The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton and floated the nuts idea:

“And unfortunately, that’s not happening. You can see it on Twitter, Steve. People are saying, ‘Film your hospital,’ people are driving by their hospitals and they’re not seeing — in the ones that I’m seeing —  they’re not seeing anybody in the parking lots. They’re not seeing anybody drive up. So, people are wondering what’s going inside the hospital. How many people are actually in the hospitals that are suffering from coronavirus, how many ventilators, are the ICUs really being filled, how full are they, what’s happening in my home town? So people have questions and they need answers. And that’s very important. And we should be questioning the numbers all over the world, we should be questioning the stats, and we should be hearing from all doctors. And that’s not saying that what’s happening right now isn’t serious and very real.”

She also did it on Twitter:

Here’s Fox News contributor and Hannity regular Sara Carter flirting with covid trutherism last night. pic.twitter.com/1HI9pRTw0V

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 30, 2020

You can see Carter saying this on the embedded segment here.

To be very clear, this is not the entire Fox News network. It was one Fox regular contributor on one weekend show. But yes, Wyoming Doc is right: Fox should be ashamed to have given a Covid denialist a platform to spread what amounts to enemy propaganda.

UPDATE: Todd Starnes writes:

I must demand an immediate retraction and apology.

You called me a covid denialist. That’s a flat-out lie. I’m really astonished that you would publish something like that.

Please let me know when you’ve retracted the story and posted a public apology.

I am happy to learn that Starnes is not a Covid denialist, and if I have falsely portrayed him as such, I retract it and apologize. Here is the tweet he sent out the other day:


That tweet was retweeted by Covid denialists, and cited as part of their case. I am relieved to read that he does not endorse Covid trutherism, and happy to pass that on to you.

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Coronavirus & Conservatism’s Future

Ross Douthat has an insightful column today about how the coronavirus has tested a certain theory of liberalism and conservatism (though he mostly focuses on conservatism). Excerpts:

Both the crude and sophisticated efforts tended to agree, though, that the supposed conservative mind is more attuned to external threat and internal contamination, more inclined to support authority and hierarchy, and fear subversion and dissent. And so the political responses to the pandemic have put these psychological theories to a very interesting test.

In the coronavirus, America confronts a contaminating force (a deadly disease) that originated in our leading geopolitical rival (an external threat) and that plainly requires a strong, even authoritarian government response. If there was ever a crisis tailored to the conservative mind-set, surely it would be this one, with the main peril being that conservatives would wildly overreact to such a trigger.

But that’s not what happened, as Douthat explains:

A certain kind of conservative personality (a kind that includes more than a few of my own friends) really did seem particularly well attuned to this crisis and ended up out ahead of the conventional wisdom in exactly the way that you would expect a mind-set attuned to risk and danger, shot through with pessimism and inclined to in-group loyalty to be.

People like this nut:

But mostly it’s been following whatever Trump says. Douthat:

At the same time, the behavior of what you might call “normie” Republicans — not Very Online right-wingers or MAGA populists but longtime Fox News and talk-radio consumers — suggests that any such conservative mind-set is easily confounded by other factors, partisanship chief among them. The fact that the virus seemed poised to help Democrats and hurt the Trump administration, the fact that it was being hyped by CNN and played down by Hannity, the fact that Trump himself declined to take it seriously — all of this mattered more to many Republicans than the fear of foreign contamination that the virus theoretically should have activated or the ways in which its progress seemed to confirm certain right-wing priors.

So one might say that the pandemic illustrates the power of partisan mood affiliation over any kind of deeper ideological mind-set. Or relatedly, it illustrates the ways in which under the right circumstances, people can easily swing between different moral intuitions. (This holds for liberals as well as conservatives: A good liberal will be as deferential to authority as any conservative when the authority has the right academic degrees, and as zealous about purity and contamination when it’s their own neighborhood that’s threatened.)

Douthat says that the pandemic crisis has revealed that American conservatism is too heterogeneous a thing to conform to what psychologists identify as a “conservative” mindset. Douthat has a great coinage when he speaks of “an incredibly powerful streak of what you might call folk libertarianism.” I was reading this McKay Coppins piece last night, and of what form of right-wingery this woman instantiates:

Katherine Vincent-Crowson, a 35-year-old self-defense instructor from Slidell, Louisiana, has watched in horror this month as businesses around her city were forced to close by state decree. A devotee of Ayn Rand, Vincent-Crowson told me Louisiana’s shelter-in-place order was a frightening example of government overreach.

“It feels very militaristic,” she said. “I’m just like, ‘What the hell, is this 1940s Germany?’”

But when we spoke, she seemed even more aggravated by the “self-righteous” people on social media who spend their time publicly shaming anyone who isn’t staying locked in their house. “It really reminds me of my kids who tattle on their siblings when they do something bad,” she said. “I’m a libertarian … I don’t really like being told what to do.”

There’s not enough information here to indicate whether this woman is an ideologically pure libertarian or a Folk Libertarian; the fact that she identifies herself as a Randian means she’s probably theoretically woke to doctrinal libertarianism. But in her final line, I hear the voice of so very many of my fellow Southern conservatives. In fact, I think folk libertarianism is the purest expression of contemporary popular American conservatism. It is not a consistent libertarianism. Vincent-Crowson was too young at the time of the Iraq War to have had a meaningful opinion of it, but I guarantee you that folk libertarians in Louisiana had zero sympathy for people who were against that war. Hating Dixie Chicks and other antiwar people — that view would be 100 percent against classical libertarian thought — which is why it is “folk libertarianism” — the unorthodox libertarianism actually practiced by ordinary people. It’s like the syncretic, heretical folk Christianity you find in rural Latin America, or in rusticated pre-Soviet Russia. It’s libertarian-ish, but highly idiosyncratic.

The entire Trump presidency has shown how feeble a grip philosophical conservatism has on the American mind (and, if I’m reading Douthat correctly, the weakness of “psychological conservatism” on the same). You would be much more likely to understand how the American right — the American right that exists outside of think tanks and journals of opinion — thinks about current issues and events by listening to the mercurial meanderings of Donald Trump, and the party line broadcast by Fox News, than by consulting the works of Russell Kirk or any other conservative intellectual.

This is not entirely a bad thing. Kirk himself always taught that conservatism was not an ideology, but rather a way of seeing the world. What counts as properly conservative in 1950 may not be so in 2020, and not because people are hypocrites. Conservatism, understood that way, is somewhat protean and practical, emerging as a particular defense of basic principles.

For example, Kirk once said that conservatives know that institutions are important to conserve, and that the institution most important to conserve is the family. A Kirkian conservative, then, would normally not oppose efforts by the state to pass laws favoring protecting and promoting the family. But a libertarian of the right would oppose this. American conservatism, broadly speaking, has been far, far more embracing of classical liberal principles (which, in its right-wing form, means libertarianism) than it has of philosophical conservatism. This didn’t start with Trump.

Take a look at Kirk’s Ten Principles of Conservatism. The Venn diagram between these and Donald Trump Republicanism would manifest only the faintest crossover. Take, for instance, this first of Kirk’s principles:

First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.  That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.

This word order signifies harmony. There are two aspects or types of order: the inner order of the soul, and the outer order of the commonwealth. Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato taught this doctrine, but even the educated nowadays find it difficult to understand. The problem of order has been a principal concern of conservatives ever since conservative became a term of politics.

Our twentieth-century world has experienced the hideous consequences of the collapse of belief in a moral order. Like the atrocities and disasters of Greece in the fifth century before Christ, the ruin of great nations in our century shows us the pit into which fall societies that mistake clever self-interest, or ingenious social controls, for pleasing alternatives to an oldfangled moral order.

It has been said by liberal intellectuals that the conservative believes all social questions, at heart, to be questions of private morality. Properly understood, this statement is quite true. A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society—whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society—no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be.

Kirk goes on like that. It’s a deep, rich, beautiful list. It’s the reason I continue to call myself a conservative. It is a statement of what conservatives aspire to; we no more achieve them in this world than the Church achieves the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes. The Kirkian principles are important as a statement of ideals. But even as such, it is striking how little they describe what American conservatism has become. I’m not offering a “No True Scotsman” theory of conservatism. American conservatism is whatever the party of the right in America supports at any given moment in history. In my own case, I am very much a Kirkian conservative, in a Christian vein, but I am not Trumpian (though I concede that he has done some good things). Under Trump, American conservatism is authoritarian personality cult + folk libertarianism in power. 

(Similarly, actual existing American liberalism is abandoning liberal principles, and becoming identity-politics soft totalitarianism — the Pink Police State. But that’s another story. I’m talking about actual existing American conservatism here.)

Here’s why it worries me. It’s not really about Trump, but what comes after Trump. To repeat: the Trump presidency, especially in how the president has responded to this unprecedented crisis (with the strong support of his usual followers), has unveiled the feebleness of philosophical conservatism. It’s not conservative at all; it’s just a species of right-wingery. Hear me: I’m not saying that as a criticism, but as a description. As my TAC colleague Emile Doak writes in the Catholic journal Crisis, of the era that has just ended:

Christians are in uncharted political territory. Once a formidable force in our politics, the Religious Right is now effectively irrelevant, undermined as much by its own hypocrisy and short-sightedness as by growing secularism.

Until recently, most conservative Christians have subscribed to a philosophy known as fusionism: a combination of free-market economics, social traditionalism, and foreign-policy interventionism. Yet the fusionist elites in politics and media have consistently proven themselves to be far more concerned with delivering on its libertarian economics at home and hawkishness abroad. They are far less with those pesky “traditional values,” which have received lip service and garnered erratic Court picks over the decades. And that’s to say nothing of the consistency (or lack thereof) between Catholic social teaching and the other two legs of that “conservative” three-legged stool.

(I hope you’ll read all of Emile’s article — in it, he proposes a post-fusionist Christian conservative politics. I’m going to write about it later.)

Let me further stipulate that unlike the Never Trumpers, I am glad that the galoot from Queens demolished the old Republican Party, which had grown decadent — incapable of meaningful change, but only relying on reheated Reaganism. Kirk, who died in 1994, was a devout Reaganite, but in his Ten Principles, writes:

Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.

Change was essential to the Republican Party too. Reagan was the change it needed at the end of the stagnant 1970s. but by the time Trump came along, Reaganism had hardened into dry dogmas. Trumpism wasn’t exactly the change I was hoping for, but it’s the change we got — and it’s not all bad. In particular, Trump’s hostility to globalism is something that I think is properly conservative. I think the virus has ensured that this aspect of Trumpism will long outlast Trump’s presidency.

That said, as a conservative who was not anti-Trump in 2016 as much as I was anti-anti-Trump, I have to concede that the Never Trumpers were more right about him than I was. I could not and would not defend the establishment GOP, as I took the Never Trumpers to be doing, and after Trump was elected (without my vote; I sat out the 2016 presidential election), I hoped for the best from him. The great worry I had was that the country would face an overwhelming crisis, and Trump would not have it in him to rise to the occasion. That has happened.

But as usual, I digress. Anyway, look: here’s what worries me about American conservatism having become a Trumpish cult of personality, plus folk libertarianism. Here is a passage from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. In it, she’s talking about Heinrich Himmler:

He proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that mot people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures [as the rest of the Nazi leadership was], but first and foremost job holders and good family men.

The philistine’s retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, product of the bourgeoisie’s belief in the primacy of private interest. The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worries about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything — belief, honor, dignity — on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives. …

Arendt is talking about the Nazis here, but there was a Bolshevik version of this too. Her book is not about the origins of Nazism, but the origins of totalitarianism, and that includes Soviet totalitarianism. Now, I quote Arendt here because this passage makes me think of what we might be left with after the virus has destroyed our economy and brought 32 percent unemployment (yesterday’s estimate from the St. Louis Fed) to the nation — a higher rate than in the Great Depression.

The United States in 2020 is a much wealthier (in material terms) nation than it was in the advent of the Great Depression. But our stock of social capital is massively depleted. We are already far more atomized than our grandparents and great-grandparents were in the 1930s. World War I destroyed the economies of Germany and Russia, and wrecked the political systems. It led to revolution in Russia, and the weak Weimar Republic in Germany. Germany was a much more advanced nation than Russia, which went from semi-feudal autocracy to one-party dictatorship overnight. It took the decadence of 1920s Weimar — a reaction to the social and psychological traumas of the war — and the advent of the Great Depression to break Germany. The thing to keep in mind is that Hitler’s appeal wasn’t just to the criminals and crazies. He spoke to decent family men who had lost everything, including their sense of belonging, of being part of something greater than themselves.

As regular readers know, I have spent most of the last year studying left-wing totalitarianism, and how it is showing itself in the identity politics of the American left. This project also entails an examination of American society, and how it finds itself (unwittingly) in a pre-totalitarian state. People on the American left cannot imagine that a tyranny of the left threatens us. It does, and I explain why in my forthcoming book. I’m not going to go into that in this post.

But I have to say, people on the American right equally cannot imagine that a tyranny of the right threatens us. I think it does. I don’t think it is as likely as a left-wing tyranny, but it can’t be dismissed as easily as so many of my fellow conservatives wish to. I refer you back to a post I did on the late John Lukacs, the Hungarian-born, self-described “reactionary” historian, who, in a book from the early 2000s, expressed his concern with the rising populism on the right. This is a quote from a 2005 profile Jeet Heer did of him in the Boston Globe:

In conversation, he’s willing to grant praise to a certain form of populism, citing the mass movements that have brought democracy to Central and Eastern Europe. ”The people are often right,” he notes. ”Just think of my country. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a real popular uprising. Although it was defeated it had very salutary consequences in the long run. It was the Stalingrad of international communism. The repression in Hungary afterward was much less. They did not quite restore 100 percent terror. That is why in 1989 the change of the regime came along without bloodshed.”

But even when pressed, Lukacs has difficulty finding any good words for populism, American-style. To him, the rise of right-wing populism here is troubling because it means that the conservatives no longer serve as a shield against the dangers of mass politics. Instead, ”conservative” has come to mean simply ”antiliberal.”

”Nationalism is a very low and cheap common denominator that unites people,” he says. ”It is hatred that unites people. People take satisfaction from the idea that we are good because our enemies are evil. This is a very American syndrome but it is also universally true of mankind.”

”In this country the Republicans are the nationalist party,” he continues. ”That’s why they won the election-on the basis of symbols. I think the importance of economics in people’s political choice of vote is vastly exaggerated. We live in such an age of intellectual stupidity that people use the wrong terms. People think this is a ‘cultural issue’ or a ‘moral issue.’ These are half-truths.”

Although Lukacs has won his share of esteem in a career that spans more than five decades, he now finds himself oddly isolated as someone who criticizes the Republican party from a traditionalist vantage point.

”What is there traditional in George Bush?” he asks with exasperation. ”Nothing. Nothing.”

That was fifteen years ago. This quote stands out to me today:

To him, the rise of right-wing populism here is troubling because it means that the conservatives no longer serve as a shield against the dangers of mass politics. Instead, ”conservative” has come to mean simply ”antiliberal.”

That is far more true today than in 2005, don’t you think? Lukacs, who died last year aged 95, was a strong anti-populist conservative, certainly more than I am. Perhaps he had more faith in institutions than is warranted today. Or perhaps, as a refugee from Nazified Hungary, he saw more deeply into the movements of history than people like me.

Now, think about antiliberal mass politics in a nation in which an atomized people has been impoverished by catastrophe. We will see a left-wing version of this, and we will see a right-wing version of this. The near-total collapse of intellectual liberalism in the face of progressive identity politics, and the ongoing capture of institutions by the progressive, antiliberal left, means that there is no real defense against this on the left. Does anybody really think that Joe Biden is the Democratic future? On the right, Trumpy folk libertarianism — which is going to remain after Trump leaves the scene — is not going to protect us from rightist mass politics of the kind Lukacs and Arendt feared.

I’m a pessimist, as you know, so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we can defeat the virus in relatively short order, and the economy will come roaring back by year’s end. I hope so. Because if not, given that the center is not really holding, what is left to restrain extremism on either the left or the right? I have long believed that what keeps social order in the United States, post-1960s, is material progress — in other words, money. If the money is gone, then what? In that situation — I’m not talking about the fall election, but over the next few years — the left will be all-in for identity-politics authoritarian socialism, and on the right, Kirk’s Ten Conservative Principles will look as antiquated as the Code of Hammurabi.

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