Rod Dreher's Blog, page 171

A Traitor To His Woke Class

Hello readers, I’ve been driving all day. I have to be at a party shortly — wedding tomorrow, pre-wedding bash tonight — so I’m not going to have time to approve all the day’s comments till later. I do want to add this amazing letter I received from a reader. I know his real name, and have checked him out online — he is who he claims to be. I have omitted some details to protect him. He writes:

I recently saw a video of your talk at the national conservatism conference about communist dissidents in the 20th century and the growing totalitarianism of the pink police state today.

You are one of the few writers I’ve come across who is consistently tracking “persecutorial progressivism” and treating it seriously. I think many conservatives, people of faith, as well as apolitical Americans in general have been dismissive of woke capitalism and snowflakes as just another media fad, or something that is only happening at universities where college kids do what college kids have always done since the 1960s. This dismissiveness is naive.

For me to make the point I am trying to make, it is important to share my biography. I ask that you keep me and personally identifying details anonymous.

My name is [name] and I am a graduate student [details omitted.] I grew up in rural [heartland America], am “white,” and was the first in my family to attend a four-year university.

My father lost his factory job during the recession to outsourcing but was re-hired temporarily to teach the new Chinese workers how to do the job that he just lost. He lived for several consecutive months in China over the course of two years. This experience has profoundly shaped my political worldview, in retrospect.

I was a Christian, and a Republican, until I came out of the closet when I was 21. Like many who have just left the closet, I took a hard left. For most of my 20’s I identified as “progressive,” and I even worked on a statewide Democratic campaign for [deleted].

I am now 30-years-old, I just moved to [deleted].

Near the end of 2014, at [an elite East Coast university], I started noticing people speaking disparagingly about rural people, conservative Christians, and college-uneducated whites (sometimes all three at the same time). These comments would make me bristle when I first heard them. Now these comments are in every social and professional setting I find myself in (I don’t mean to sound like this is all that people talk about, but I haven’t been to a social event or in an academic setting in the past 6 years where this two-minutes-hate doesn’t come up where two or more are gathered).

This phenomenon of socially-sanctioned and celebrated classism made me want to start screenwriting. I originally wanted to make tv series and movies about the people I grew up with in the midwest in a similar way that Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner wrote about the south. Today I don’t see a realistic way forward for me professionally or creatively, in the current media landscape.

Unfortunately it has moved beyond the regular two-minutes-hate against “the deplorables” at social events. Now, at least in academia and the media, anyone who doesn’t preach the entire orthodoxy of progressivism is seen as toxic, complicit in the evils of whiteness and the patriarchy, and on the wrong side of history.

This has real professional and social consequences.

I started noticing this shift towards totalitarianism amongst my friends and colleagues in 2016, and it terrified me. At first it was a few vocal “woke” rogues who were de-platforming or “cancelling” people, but now it is ubiquitous. I’m not talking about twitter, but real life. Cancellations are happening at universities all across the country, but aren’t making the news. I’ve seen people excommunicated at [my university] and in social groups in [major American city], and I assume many often don’t even know it happened to them, or why. Now, in virtually every upper-crust media or academic setting I’ve been in people only talk about politics and media, through the lens of gender, race, colonialism, and watered-down marxism. It is not acceptable to like a movie that has too many white people in it, or too many men, for example. If I admitted to a colleague that I liked “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” I would most certainly be cancelled. Cancellation isn’t something flippant, it is the deprivation of livelihood, respect, and a role in society.

I have so many stories, none of which would be surprising to you. I am very glad that you mentioned in your speech that you have been interviewing people who survived communism, and that they seem to be the only ones seeing the rise of progressive totalitarianism today. This is an incredibly astute observation, but I have no doubt that there are many people like me in America who would find this observation obvious. Some of us are already living in it. If others who are experiencing it are like me, then they are entrenched (read: trapped) in liberal institutions and performing extraordinary levels of preference falsification, not unlike Havel’s “greengrocer,” or Czeslaw Milosz’s “Ketman.”

This doublethink is incredibly isolating. I have secretly disavowed progressivism and the democratic party, but nobody would ever know. Over the past three years I have secretly read dozens of books by conservative intellectuals (including The Benedict Option) and Soviet dissidents. My life as it currently is would be ruined if people knew I am a Republican with my own small — but growing — conservative library. My landlord here in [major coastal city], who is a friend-of-a-friend, surely would not let me renew my current lease if she knew I had books on conservative intellectual history and soviet dissident literature not just for creative research but because they are my most valuable possessions.

This intellectual isolation has done something beautiful for my life, however. I have reconnected with my entire extended family, who are all conservative and Christian. My parents, sister, grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins all know that I am a secret conservative (meaning: anti-communist, unabashedly American, a free-thinker). I will forever remember my family embracing me around our kitchen table this past Thanksgiving as I failed to fight back tears while sharing the level of hostility that I have been witnessing on the coasts against people like us. I have comfort knowing that I have a family back home, and I pray that other people in my circumstance have a family to embrace.

I don’t know what my next steps will be creatively and professionally.

I sent the reader my edited version back to ask his approval to publish it. He sent me approval, and added:

I read over your interview notes with the Soviet emigre — wow. I completely agree with her about everything she says about academia, cancelling/unpersonning, and American culture. It is illuminating to see her comparisons to the USSR, especially her mother and father’s experience. Sobering to read her prediction about how it will take several generations to overcome. Given her experience she’s probably not far-off.

I have a feeling that this little book of mine is going to occasion a lot of people like this finding each other.

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The Sacred Roger Scruton

Whatever you are doing right now, please stop and read Mark Dooley’s remembrance of his friend Roger Scruton at his life’s end. Excerpt:

As we spoke that weekend, neither Roger nor I had any sense that he was so close to death.  Indeed, he was convinced that he was edging closer to remission, and that we ought to plan books and interviews for his YouTube channel.  And yet, I was struck by how he repeatedly insisted that his life’s work had been a spiritual endeavour.  In all the time I had known him, he had rarely used that word.  Was he saying that his copious writings were somehow quasi-religious, or that they offered a mystical vision of the world?  In hindsight, I think he was using it synonymously with another term he regularly employed: the sacred.  In my books on Scruton, I consistently emphasised this theme of the sacred which has featured, either directly or implicitly, since his earliest works on aesthetics and architecture.  But what does he mean by it?  The best insight is offered in an essay from 1986, entitled ‘The Philosopher on Dover Beach’: ‘[T]he free being is incarnate, and to see human life as a vehicle for freedom – to see a face where the scientist sees flesh and bone – is to recognise that this, at least, is sacred, that this small piece of earthly matter is not to be treated as a means to our purposes, but as an end in itself’.

When we lovingly behold another person, or when we contemplate an artwork, listen to music or marvel at a beautiful building, we experience something that transcends its material constraints.  That ‘something’ is not separable from the material or biological order which contains it.  But every time we gaze into the eyes of a loved one, or whenever we savour our favourite symphony or pray at a beautiful shrine, we encounter ‘personality and freedom’ shining forth from what is ‘contingent, dependent and commonplace’.  We see the fabric of the world perforated by light from another sphere.  In this point of intersection of the timeless with time, we catch glimpses of the transcendental and receive intimations of the infinite.

Scruton spent his life denouncing attempts in philosophy, politics and culture, to ‘desacralize’ or ‘depersonalize’ the world.  If you really wish to understand his trenchant opposition to left-wing politics, or radical philosophy, or modernist art, you must see it as a prophetic call to oppose those who would ‘dismiss the sacred from our view of things’, and put in its place ‘a presumptuous ignorance fortified by science’.  In everything he wrote, his principal aim was to show that through love and art, religion, music, hunting and wine, we see and experience something which science can’t explain, but which is no less real for all of that.  Think, for example, of a smiling child.  Science explains the smile in a purely mechanical sense, whereas we understand it as something quite different.  It is a revelation of innocence, beauty and love – a revelation of the free person that is mingled with her flesh.  In short, when you look at people as mere objects, you see that Darwin was right.  But when ‘you look on them as free beings, you see that the most important thing about them has no place in Darwin’s theory’.

Scruton’s idea of the sacred, or the transcendental, did not amount to a religious philosophy.  But it did suggest that there is a deep mystery at the core of human experience.  We love the person that is revealed through the flesh, but which cannot be reduced to it.  We kneel before the statue the Pieta, recognising that it is only stone, but still seeing in it a sublime response to a pivotal feature of the human predicament.  Likewise, our homes, temples and institutions, and even the physical environment itself, are, from the scientific perspective, nothing more than the materials of which they are comprised.  And yet, from the perspective of those living on the surface of the world, they are endowed with ‘freedom, translucency and moral presence’.  They offer security, consolation and reassurance.  They invoke feelings of awe, respect and, on occasion, even worship.  That is because ‘the meaning we find in the human person exists also, in heightened and more awesome form, outside us, in places times and artefacts, in a shrine, gathering, a place of pilgrimage or prayer’.

Please read the whole thing. And read Roger’s book. Pray for the peace of his soul. Cherish the gift to us all that was this great man’s life.

 

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Clarissa’s Soviet Story

I’m in the editing and rewriting stage of Live Not By Lies now, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk yesterday with a woman I’ll call “Clarissa,” whose stories were so good that I’m weaving them into the book’s narrative.

Clarissa is a college professor who emigrated to the US from Russia as a young woman, a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. She is yet another ex-Soviet bloc person who is extremely anxious about the emergence of soft totalitarianism here. Of course she can’t use her real name, because she fears professional retaliation. It should tell us something that not a single academic from a former communist country that I interviewed for this book was willing to speak using their own name — this, in the Land of the Free. Why not? Because they were afraid of facing professional consequences for speaking out against identity politics and the “social justice” regime. Below, some quotes from our interview:

I have the feeling of extreme frustration. Our stories of people in the former Soviet space are constantly dismissed. I have no idea why. I think it happens because people still think that the ideas that existed in the Soviet Union are basically good – that it was the execution that was at times excessive. My father says what happened to us was not about the economic system. The economic system was just an excuse. This could happen anywhere – even under capitalism.

—

Totalitarianism is something that takes away from people the unbearable burden of freedom. It allows many people to hound and persecute with impunity. That is pleasant in many senses. There was a practice in the Soviet Union where people would be told to get together in groups at work and write letters to the newspaper to denounce famous poets or artists. We see that today in Twitter. People love that because it allows a little person to completely destroy somebody who has done something great.

This is very human. Once you have removed any moral or religious obstacles to that behavior, what’s to stop anybody?

—

When I was nine years old, I had a teacher of Russian literature. I really admired her. What we didn’t know was that her father was a high ranking KGB officer. He found out that a little girl in our class, Masha, was attending church with her parents, and not only that, but was singing in the choir. The teacher one day pulled that little girl out in the class and for an hour unleashed a torrent of abuse on this child. For what? The feeling of power of persecuting that child in front of the rest of us. This is not happening right now in the US, but it’s conceivable.

—

(On American vulnerability to totalitarianism)

It’s American exceptionalism. You all think you’re such special people that you’re going to do it right. If socialism comes here, don’t worry, we’ll make it happen in the correct way. Not true! Ten years ago if you had told me I would be seeing this in the US, I would have laughed in your face. But now it’s happening. I’m seeing it happening to my friends. It’s like their minds are disintegrating.

—

Once your religion is taken away, you still have a need for an overarching moral law. You’re going to look for it somewhere else, even outside religion. We’re seeing it now with this identity politics. … In the Soviet Union when I was young, cynicism was everywhere. Nobody believed in anything. Everybody just went through the motions. I used to think that cynicism was the worst thing in the world. It’s not. The worst thing in the world is the lack of cynicism and critical difference, and accepting everything uncritically. These people today, they really believe all this woke ideology. And that’s what’s really scary

I have a friend who is very woke. The woke ideology is the belief is that if somebody departs from the dogma, even by an inch, that person is an evil, hate-filled bigot. When I disagree with her, I can see that she genuinely can’t comprehend that I disagree with her. She knows I’m a good person, but here I am disagreeing with her. She can’t understand it. And she’s an educated person! A college professor.

The intellectuals are playing a dangerous game. They think they can control it. They think that once their ideas are imposed on society, they can control it. That’s ludicrous. They’re going to be the first ones the system turns on, because as intellectuals, they can be the first ones to spot the flaws in the system.

Nobody is going to be safe. Nobody can pledge enough allegiance to this kind of system to protect themselves.

—

I mentor early career academics. I used to enjoy it, but not anymore. These graduate students are not producing scholarship. They’re just turning in collections of woke slogans. I don’t even know what to do with that. When we start talking to the younger academics, they don’t understand what we want for them. They were taught this way, and they’re reproducing it. I see this from students who come to college. It seems like all they get in the schools is dogma. They are blank slates. They have no real knowledge of anything – they just repeat slogans, and when you ask them to explain it, they turn blank.

In the Soviet Union, when you were a student and assigned to write a paper, you knew that the thing to do was to go straight to the correct books in the library and copy the relevant articles, word for word, with no deviations. That was your paper. When my family left, we arrived in Canada, and I entered the university there. When I was assigned my first paper, I found it impossible to believe that the teacher really did want me to think for myself. It was an incredible feeling! To think about something, and to say what I really thought about it! It was so weird, but so liberating.

Now, I’m seeing young people who are just like we were in the Soviet Union. They are afraid to think for themselves. They only want to know what the “right” answer is, and repeat it. It’s depressing.

—

The problem is that many people still associate totalitarianism with an all-powerful state, and if it doesn’t come from the state, it’s not totalitarianism. What we’re dealing with now is not coming from the state. None of us are afraid that the government is going to send secret police and take us to the dungeon. That’s not going to happen. No. We’re afraid of being humiliated and deprived of a living. Of being a pariah, of being marginalized, unpersonned, cancelled. You don’t need the government for that, especially in the age of social media. It wasn’t the government hounding those Covington Catholic boys, or J.K. Rowling.

Voting for someone [as a protest against political correctness] is wonderful, but the government cannot solve this problem.

—

Since I started going to church a couple of years ago, I began to understand what was taken from us. I feel incredibly angry that we were deprived of something that’s such a huge part of our culture and civilization, that it taken from us. I take my little girl to church and Sunday school. I want my child to know this so she doesn’t have to discover it in her forties, and feel clumsy.

—

I wish we had some form of a secret handshake [on my campus]. I know a couple of other professors on campus who I suspect are one of us. But everybody is so closeted, it’s impossible to talk about it.

We have this bias response team that prowls the campus looking for signs of non-compliance, and to justify their existence. We had the same thing in the Soviet Union. Right now they’re on campus, but eventually, they’re going to be in every workplace. If you have everybody in your workplace trained in diversity, then you can treat your workers however you like, and nobody will care.

(On the culture created by diversity and sensitivity training in the workplace)

All your co-workers are enemies. Either they can get you in trouble, or they are out to destroy you with an accusation. It destroys all sorts of uncontrollable communities – friendship, families, church communities. When you set people against each other, they are much easier to control. This is what it was like under totalitarianism.

—

I hope in this book you can convey a sense of urgency. If you think you can hide from this, and not have to confront it, you’re dreaming. This is coming for everybody. This is coming soon, and people have to think about it now. If you know how you’re going to respond when the persecution comes, you will be in a better position to react to it.

There will be more in Live Not By Lies, out in early September. By the way, I’m going to be traveling today to a weekend wedding, so comments approval is going to be delayed.

By the way, here is a link to Clarissa’s blog, if you’re interested. Here’s a post from a previous blog of hers, about her father’s life as a closeted Christian in the USSR.

Here’s a Clarissa post on teaching a class on totalitarianism. Excerpt:

The wall-to-wall propaganda that characterizes this new totalitarianism isn’t state-sponsored either. It’s disseminated solely through corporate channels. Traditional politicians are squeezed out by TV and social media stars who represent this new form of power. The complete dependence of their popularity on Twitter and Instagram means they will do absolutely anything to avoid being deplatformed. It’s no longer about courting rich donors to donate to your campaign. Now it’s all about being a funny enough clown that attracts hits and likes to enrich the owners of these platforms.

Every day, the power of these giant corporations to unearth a tweet or a like on a tweet that can sink absolutely anybody grows. There is no need for a state to keep a dossier of kompromat (compromising material) on each citizen. This process has been completely corporatized. And the worst part is that people who are wielding this sort of coercive power honestly see themselves as powerless victims who have to defend themselves from coercion.

You know, since I started writing this post, I went to look up the blog entry I posted from my first interview with Clarissa, a year or so ago. I couldn’t find it, except in my notes for the book. I wonder if I ever posted it. Sorry if you’ve already seen it, but I suspect I forgot to put it on the site. Here’s the text:

Just got off the phone with a Soviet-born academic who teaches in a small state university in the American heartland. She blogs under the name “Clarissa,” but I got her real name, and checked her out. She’s REALLY excited about this book, and told me she would be a source, and introduce me to the emigre community. She’s teaching a class on totalitarianism this semester, and is unnerved to have discovered that every single one of her students thinks that socialism is a good thing.

“I teach in the heart of America, in what a lot of people think of as the Bible Belt, and this is how they think,” she said.

She got her PhD at a top American university (I checked this out), and said that it was a constant struggle there to be heard. Whenever Marxist topics would come up, she would talk about her experience in the USSR, and people would shout her down. “You wouldn’t believe the rage in their faces,” she said. “They did not want to hear it.”

She said that when she talks to her parents and tells her about things she’s seeing as an American academic, within academia, they’re shocked. They keep saying, “It’s like we had it back in the Soviet Union!”

She has learned to be very, very careful about what she says among her colleagues. She knows that nobody wants to hear it, and now she’s afraid of being identified and punished. She said, “I have to live my intellectual and spiritual life underground. I stay silent about so many things with my colleagues because I know that they would honestly and sincerely see me as some kind of monster because of the things I believe, which are in no way radical.”

Yesterday a tenured academic she knows in California wrote to her to say that he withdrew from publication a paper he had written that very mildly criticizes woke dogma (she didn’t say what it was) within the academy, because he lost his nerve. He’s tenured, so he wasn’t afraid of losing his job. He was afraid of becoming a pariah — of his friends turning their backs on him because of his views, and others being afraid to take his side out of fear that they would be seen as tainted.

“To be honest, I wouldn’t want anybody at work to know I read your blog,” she said.

She also said that she can’t stand Trump, but has come to see him as the only obstacle between herself and total progressive madness. “It’s the most frustrating thing!” she said, her voice rising. I told her I agreed with her, and we laughed about that.

The diversity commissars have everybody terrified at her university, she said. Recently the chief diversity officer publicly identified her as “transphobic.” Why? Because a student asked her about use of the term “Latinx.” It came up in class, and as a Spanish speaker, she mentioned that many Spanish speakers hate the term. For this, she was identified as “transphobic” by the diversity office. She said that she didn’t even express an opinion about the term, only noted that it’s not popular among Spanish speakers. So now she’s on the watch list.

Here’s something really interesting: she said that one of her research interests is how multinational corporations undermine the nation-state. She said that wokeness in corporate America is a weapon used by white-collar professionals to weed out competitors for increasingly scarce jobs. She said, “People find ideological purity tests useful to weed out people who compete for jobs you cover. Progressive forces are completely allied with globalist capitalism.”

She also said that people have no idea how vulnerable they are to this mindset, because of social media. “You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow. You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works. This is why people like me are so upset today. I’m so glad you’re writing this book. Thank you for calling me and letting me vent.”

Remember to check out Clarissa’s blog. I hope she’ll tell more Soviet stories, and talk about how they relate to what’s going on in contemporary American academic culture, and beyond.

If you’re interested, here’s the speech on the topic that I gave in Rome earlier this month:

The post Clarissa’s Soviet Story appeared first on The American Conservative.

Steven Spielberg’s Weimar America

If you grew up in the 1980s, Steven Spielberg’s movies articulated the American dream. It has come to this with one of his children. Excerpts:

Steven Spielberg’s daughter Mikaela has launched a new career as an adult entertainer, The Sun can reveal.

In an exclusive interview Mikaela Spielberg, 23, who was adopted as a baby by the legendary film director and his wife Kate Capshaw, told how she has already started self producing solo porn videos – and says she would love to land a job as a dancer in a strip club once she obtains her sex worker license.

More:

Mikaela, who speaks to her parents regularly, broke the news to them via FaceTime at the weekend and said they were “intrigued” but “not upset”.

Describing herself as a “sexual creature” she told The Sun: “I got really tired of not being able to capitalize on my body and frankly, I got really tired of being told to hate my body.

“And I also just got tired of working day to day in a way that wasn’t satisfying my soul.

“I feel like doing this kind of work, I’m able to ‘satisfy’ other people, but that feels good because it’s not in a way that makes me feel violated.”

The mind boggles. It goes on:

She wrote: “I just launched my self produced adult entertainment career. Safe, sane, consensual is the goal y’all.

“My body, my life, my income, my choice. I owe not a single person my autonomy or virtue just because of a name.”

She admits that she was sexually abused, though not by anyone in her family, and concedes that she has “borderline personality disorder.”

Of her childhood, Mlle Spielberg, 23, says, “I was spoiled, but responsibly.” Which is about the most rich-girl thing anyone can say these days, I guess.

The American dream, 2020. She calls her new life as a porn star “empowering,” and says that when she broke the news to her parents last weekend, they were “intrigued” but “not upset.”

Those poor people, the Spielbergs. She shames her family. My guess is that they are really upset, and doing their best not to alienate their crazy, self-destructive kid.

Still, what a parable about Weimar America: Steven Spielberg’s daughter, with every privilege in the world, turns herself into a porn star.

This afternoon, I received a long, detailed e-mail from a young man who is not religious — in fact, he left the Christianity of his youth when he came out as gay — and who is working in Spielberg’s industry. He is deeply closeted as a conservative. In fact, the deep and constant spite he encounters daily for people like his family has driven him to the Right. I have asked him for permission to share his e-mail, with his name (I checked him out online — he is legit) and identifying details removed. It’s an incredible story. A man like that has to live outwardly as Havel’s greengrocer (he compared himself to that figure — the man who has to put a “Workers of the World, Unite” sign in his shop window to avoid trouble, even though he hates communism); meanwhile, Mikaela Spielberg masturbates on camera to please masturbating scumbags, and she will no doubt be celebrated.

This is a sick, sick culture, and it deserves to be destroyed.

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The Laïcité Of Bernie

After last night’s debate, I think we all need to start getting used to the fact that the Democratic nominee will be an elderly socialist. Look, anything could happen between now and then, but the moderates are going to tear each other up, split the vote, and hand the thing to Bernie. Any thought that Bloomberg would have a shot at taking Bernie out ought to have gone up in flames last night, when Warren scorched him hard on sexual harassment and NDAs. There aren’t really any good answers to these questions, from a Bloomberg point of view, but there are worse answers than others. He gave worse answers, and looked extremely unready to run for president.

I have conservative Christian friends who are planning to vote for Bernie. They prefer his rectitude to Trump’s corruption, and though they aren’t socialists, they prefer Bernie’s radicalism to whatever Trump stands for. They know that Bernie is ardently pro-choice and pro-LGBT, but they’re counting on his greater interest in economics and class to occupy a President Sanders than pushing wokeness.

I don’t buy it. To a Christian conservative like me, the only reason to vote for Trump is — well, two closely related reasons. First, it’s the conservative federal judges that come with a Republican president. As I’ve written before here, all indications are that the country is inexorably moving towards secular liberalism. And, as we know, the Millennials and Zoomers are far less “liberal” in the sense that they are tolerant of speech and actions that they don’t like. Twenty years from now, people like me and my tribe will have to depend on federal judges with a robust and expansive view of First Amendment liberties as our last line of protection from an activist progressive president and Congress.

The second reason, which is really just part of the first reason, is to forestall the coming persecutorial progressivism for as long as we can.

There is zero reason to hope that a Sanders administration would be kinder and gentler on social issues. Bernie is a doctrinaire leftist. I don’t think he thinks much at all about religious people, but to the extent that he does, I believe he has all the bog-standard leftist opinions about us. A reader points to Terry Mattingly’s 2017 column on Sen. Sanders opening up on Russell Vought, a Southern Baptist Trump nominee to the federal bureaucracy. Excerpt:

Sanders questioned a Vought article about a Wheaton College controversy, in which a professor made headlines with her claims that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. As a former Wheaton professor, Vought argued that salvation was found through Jesus – period.

Thus, Sanders said: “You wrote, ‘Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, His Son and they stand condemned.’ Do you believe that that statement is Islamophobic?”

The nominee repeated his defense of this ancient Christian doctrine. Sanders kept asking if Vought believed that Muslims “stand condemned.”

Once again, Vought said: “Senator, I’m a Christian …”

Sanders shouted him down: “I understand you are a Christian! But this country is made of people who are not. … Do you think that people who are not Christians are going to be condemned?” Sanders concluded that he would reject Vought because, “this nominee is really not someone who this country is supposed to be about.”

Afterwards, Sanders drew criticism from those arguing that – rather than defending tolerance – he had attacked Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which says “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

Meanwhile, a similar controversy was unfolding in England, where Tim Farron – leader of the Liberal Democrats – resigned after waves of questions about his personal, evangelical beliefs about sexual morality. He had already taken political stands backing abortion and gay marriage.

Finally, Farron released a statement noting: “I seem to be the subject of suspicion because of what I believe in and whom my faith is in. … We are kidding ourselves if we think we are living in a tolerant liberal society.”

TMatt links to this essay from the time by Ismail Royer, a Muslim, defending Vought against Sanders’s attack. Excerpt:

I am a Muslim and thus obviously disagree with Vought that my theology is deficient. Rather, I believe his theology is deficient. I believe that Jesus is not God himself but a prophet of God, and I believe that worshipping Jesus alongside God amounts to polytheism. I worship, as Joseph did, the one and unitary God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the triune God of the Nicene Creed. I do not apologize for this belief.

Nor should Vought apologize for his. His statements were not crude bigotry, but a passionate defense of his creed entirely within the realm of discourse of reasonable, civilized men and women. America is a land incredibly rich in diverse cultures, religions, and shades of opinion. Mature adults, confident in the truth and reasonableness of their own beliefs, are capable of functioning, and indeed flourishing, alongside those who believe differently. No one enjoys hearing his deeply held religious beliefs contradicted or belittled, but demanding to be “safe” from hearing contrary opinions is simply bad citizenship.

To be sure, if a candidate for public office were found to be so strident in his beliefs as to render him incapable of discharging his duties impartially to the detriment of the public good, then such beliefs would certainly be relevant to the decision to appoint him. But that does not seem to be the case here. Taken out of context, and to the sensitive ear of those unaccustomed to religious discourse about absolute truths, Vought’s statement that Muslims are “condemned” sounds harsh. As noted, however, it was part of a broader theological argument. Nowhere does he conclude that Muslims should be hated or treated differently from non-Muslims.

Exactly right. I run into liberals from time to time who, if we end up talking about fundamentalist Christians, challenge me if I defend them. It’s always some version of, “Don’t you understand that they think Christians like you are going to hell?” My response is always some version of, “I don’t care, as long as they don’t do anything to put me there.”

Leftists like Sanders usually can’t grasp any way of understanding religion that is not tame and universalist. They see it as a threat to the public order if it’s not. An American law professor teaching in France told me something really helpful, regarding the different ways American constitutional law and French constitutional law regard the concept of religious liberty. In America, we think of the separation of church and state as something that protects the church from the state; in France, they believe it protects the state from the church. This is why the French have a policy called laïcité, which relegates religion to private observance, in a much more strict and aggressive way than in America.

I believe that Sanders, if he becomes president, will govern according to a reflexive laïcité. It is already common on the American left to define “religious liberty” as the freedom to go to worship on your faith’s holy days, but leave it there. To be clear, I think that no Democratic candidate would be any different on this issue — which is why I cannot see voting for a candidate of a party so hostile to religious believers. Still, that exchange between Sanders and Vought was so crystal-clear, and Sanders was so vituperative, that there really cannot be any serious doubt about where he stands, and how he will treat religious believers in his administration’s policy.

I can understand why even conservative religious believers would believe that four more years of Trump would be worse than anything President Sanders (and the judges he appoints) would dole out to traditionalists. I think they’re wrong, but I can see their point of view. They ought to at least be honest, and not base their hope on the idea that Bernie will be too distracted by the stuff he cares about, economics and health care, to pay much attention to the intersection of religion and public life. He personally may not, but you can be sure that the people he appoints certainly will.

Jake Tapper followed up with Bernie later, and got an incoherent defense out of him. Watch below. Sanders says Americans are free to believe what they want, but not to be government officials if they hold those beliefs. If you are a religious person — especially a conservative religious person — and this doesn’t unnerve you, I don’t know what to tell you:

The post The Laïcité Of Bernie appeared first on The American Conservative.

Persecutorial Progressivism

Here’s a good piece by Yoram Hazony and Chris De Muth defending their recent National Conservatism conference in Rome, and specifically attacking the Tories for throwing under the bus an MP who spoke at it. Excerpts:

It is disturbing indeed that a legitimate public conference, convened to discuss the history, political philosophy, and current relevance of the idea of the nation state, can be twisted into a weapon for “cancelling” British conservatives who participated in good faith—thereby shutting down the possibility of respectful discussion of these topics in the UK.

Of course, the Conservative Party claimed that it was taking this action “in light of the views of some of those in attendance.” And it is certainly true that there are bad actors on the European and American right.

As conference organizers, it is our job to ensure that our growing movement of national conservatives is not hijacked by political racialists and anti-Semites or by anti-democratic agitators. That is our policy and practice, which we have pursued aggressively. As is evident from a simple Google search, the Edmund Burke Foundation and its conferences have been repeatedly and viciously attacked by alt-Right publications and figures for excluding racialists and anti-Semites from our events.

Does this mean that we have excluded everyone that the Guardian and Buzzfeed would have liked? Obviously not. But we are unwilling give the leftist media, which despises conservatives, a veto over who gets to speak at our conferences.

Instead, we have done our own research and exercised our own judgment.

More:

What have we found? Among other things, we agree with Douglas Murray, in his report from the Rome conference, that in British public discourse, “governments and parties are being called ‘far-right’ when they are not, and whole countries and movements are being anathemised when they will—must, in fact—be partners in the years ahead.”

And take a look at “Among the National Conservatives,” a moving essay by the celebrated American conservative intellectual Rod Dreher, which describes his two days of meeting European conservatives in Rome. Dreher, too, found that the conference participants were simply “normal” conservatives—a picture diametrically opposed to the one presented in the UK media and adopted by the Tories.

The Conservative Party’s dependence on the leftist media to decide for them who is a legitimate conservative—and who is a racialist or an anti-Semite—must come to an end. The Tories are now governing an independent country. Independent Britain will need friends and admirers and allies in other countries. It cannot afford to discard these friends and allies every time the Guardian decides to say that someone is “far Right” or “anti-Semitic.”

Read it all.

Yoram and Chris are correct. The Tories just repeated their earlier mistake, when they cast off Sir Roger Scruton for no good reason, only because a left-wing British magazine falsely accused him. I did not meet everyone at this conference. If I had, and had known their back stories, it is possible that I would have met someone I consider to be unsavory. But then, had this been a large gathering of the Tory Party, or the GOP, or of any organization on the Left, the same thing would have happened! For that matter, if you attend a church of any size, every Sunday you’re under the roof with at least one person you think is pretty icky, or at least you would if you knew their sins.

If the Rome conference really were about normalizing anti-Semites, then yes, concern would have been valid. But that was not remotely what this conference was. As I wrote in the piece Yoram cites, I was really moved to meet so many people — especially young people — from around Europe, who were friendly and normal, and who care a lot about their countries, and in some cases, their faith. In a way, I was kind of like the New Hampshire Democrat who went to the Trump rally, despite being warned about how horrible the MAGA people are, and found that they were just ordinary, friendly people. I didn’t expect anything bad from the Rome event, given that Yoram Hazony was a principal organizer, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover how personable everybody was. It was another reminder that you honest to God cannot trust the media to tell you the truth about the European Right. If I had read the UK papers, I would have thought this was the SA meeting at a Munich beer hall, or something.

Yoram and Chris’s piece puts me in mind of my trip to Bucknell University this week. Yesterday I returned home from an evening at the central Pennsylvania liberal arts college. I really enjoyed my time there, talking to conservative students and professors, all of whom seem to be an embattled minority on campus. I won’t write any details about what I heard here, though I invited the students I talked to to write me if they wanted to go into detail publicly. I can say, though, that I didn’t hear simply broad complaints about a climate of hostility. I heard very specific complaints. One conservative student leader told me that some students who write for the campus conservative newspaper write under pseudonyms because they fear retaliation from their professors. I was told by two different people, separately, that a leader of the campus Democratic Socialists of America had publicly announced a list of Bucknell professors that, in his view, needed to be fired for ideological reasons.

Prof. Alf Siewers, my host, was on that list, according to one student. Yesterday in the airport, I found this interview with him about a book he and a Bucknell colleague edited of scholarly essays examining the totalitarian legacy of the Bolshevik revolution. Siewers said that he and his colleague faced opposition on campus to the 2017 symposium out of which the book grew:

It’s interesting because on campus the faculty on the left opposed the symposium. When we announced this on campus, we had immediate push back from some colleagues in the history department who are more radically oriented and also some colleagues elsewhere on campus who have a positive view of Marxist-Leninism to one degree or another in the sense that the Bolshevik revolution was part of a progressive narrative of history reaching towards greater social justice and who accept, from my perspective, the good Lenin/bad Stalin narrative.  But their views were not derived from the kind of in-depth scholarship that our speakers practiced.

A lot of recent scholarship, a lot of scholarship based on materials from Soviet archives once those became available and open, really gives the lie to that good Lenin/bad Stalin narrative. That small but vocal handful of colleagues who objected to the symposium really in my view bought into that more superficial older view, which was never really justified by scholarship anyway, but it has certainly been superseded as scholarship has gone more deeply into these issues. 100 years later, we should be able to have a clear perspective on this, and I think that the speakers that we brought offered that.

Still, we were accused of organizing an ideological anti-communist program, and unfortunately very few of our colleagues in history or other related areas showed up for the Symposium.  There were a few colleagues who did, to their credit, and one in history actually help moderate one of the sessions, which was great.

But I think maybe the saddest thing about all that is people just not showing up to hear scholars with whom they disagree, without,  to my mind really understanding what the scholar’s work is about, based on the critical emails that we were getting from colleagues objecting to the symposium. It would be nice to think that people would be willing to show up, and, if they had disagreements with the scholars, and we’re talking about serious scholars now, to be able to have a discussion with them and try to make reasonable objections in a civil way during the Q & A would be a great model for the students. Unfortunately that seems to be a difficult thing to pull off today in academia generally.

This is consistent with what I heard yesterday, both from students and professors. It sounds like an incredibly demoralizing atmosphere, in the same category as what Hazony and De Muth describe: left-wing people demonizing anything to the right of themselves that they don’t like. David French, a former free speech litigator, writes about how campus free speech victories in court have not alleviated the sense of siege conservatives feel on some campuses.I heard from several conservative Bucknell students who are genuinely afraid of their left-wing professors, believing that their grades depend on not dissenting from the party line. Is this really true? Obviously I can’t prove it based on conversations, and maybe they can’t prove it either. But it’s important that students feel this way. The fact that they have this anxiety, even if groundless, is a concerning sign. Conor Friedersdorf wrote a good piece the other day about a new study at UNC-Chapel Hill reporting that conservatives students there really do self-censor. Anecdotally, I heard anecdotally that this goes on at Bucknell. 

In one of the meetings I had with students, an undergraduate man engaged me in conversation. He didn’t use the word, but he seemed pretty clearly to be an actual neoreactionary. We talked about Mencius Moldbug, and other figures. He doesn’t have a lot of regard for mainstream conservatives — and based on our conversation, he has real intellectual grounding in neoreactionary thought. A couple of things he said made me realize that his politics aren’t mine, and couldn’t be mine. But he’s the one I’m thinking about this morning.

That guy was one of the first people I talked to at Bucknell. It’s interesting to think about everything else I heard on this visit, in light of his conclusions about right-wing resistance. Why is that conversation I had with the young neoreactionary front to mind? Because assuming that what the conservatives there told me is fair and accurate — caveat! — in the face of the systemic left-wing radicalism of the university (both in many of the faculty and the students), the ordinary resistance from normie conservatism seems so feeble. Hey, I’m definitely a normie conservative, though as a conservative who is not a Republican, can’t stand the GOP establishment, and dislikes Trump, I’m in some sort of weird fringe of normieness!

But I’m wondering this morning: why? Why identify as conservative? What, exactly, is there left to conserve?

Don’t worry, I’m not getting red-pilled anytime soon. But that conversation with the neoreactionary made me reflect on how the neoreactionary view of the current situation is probably more accurate than the conservative view. Here’s what I mean:

The classical liberal tradition is in tatters, at least on some campuses. Students and faculty told me about how ordinary standards of discourse have in some cases been hollowed out by the radical left, and subordinated to identity-politics leftism. The transmission of knowledge has become ideological indoctrination. These are familiar complaints on the Right, but to hear these young people talking about specific examples, and what it is like to be a conservative on campus, was really discouraging. It’s all well and good to tell kids to suck it up, buttercup, and be prepared to take grief for their views. Nobody is entitled to avoid criticism. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the After my talk, a man from the community — a physician — told me about how his daughter had worked after college at a highly respected think tank, doing analytical writing on sexual orientation and gender identity issues — from a point of view critical of the progressive line. She’s moved on to other work now, but was warned by people outside that think tank that having her name associated with those positions will hurt her career forevermore. The left, entrenched in academia, really will make you pay a price for crimethought.

I’ve had a couple of conversations lately with academics who tell me that “diversity, inclusion, and equity” statements have been adopted by their departments or universities as part of the hiring process. It’s a loyalty oath, swearing allegiance to a highly politicized point of view that has nothing at all to do with teaching or scholarship. These professors see it as a way that faculties and institutions weed out the ideologically unreliable — the dissenter types who might cause them trouble, by, I dunno, holding academic symposia to examine the historical legacy of Bolshevik totalitarianism.

True confession: I don’t know much about neoreactionary thought, besides a passing familiarity with Moldbug. I tried reading him, but found his style to be frustratingly elliptical. Besides, too many of the neoreactionaries get sucked into the dark hole of politicizing race; I want no part of that. However, one of his neoreactionary concepts that I think is completely, irrefutable true is his idea of the Cathedral. That’s the term he uses for the network of institutions — universities, media, corporations, and others — that informally regulate what we can and cannot talk about. The term “cathedral” is brilliant, because it does two things: it frames the views of the progressive-egalitarian establishment as a pseudo-religion, and it signals that religion’s authority (a cathedral is the bishop’s church). It might sound like conspiracy theory to you, but it’s not. Moldbug has pointed out that it’s not organized. It’s a self-defined and self-regulating system through which elites form society to their ends. The Cathedral would anathematize academics who wanted to talk about the crimes of the Bolsheviks. The Cathedral would impose confession and penance upon a Tory party member who spoke at a conference of which the Cathedral disapproves. That kind of thing.

Here is another example of the Cathedral in action. A Soviet-born US academic, one of the sources of my forthcoming book, writes this morning to say:

Yesterday I spoke with my sister. She’s not in academia. She’s an entrepreneur, a hot-shot business woman, very successful. She called me to rant about how this woke rot is conquering the world of business. It’s now becoming pretty much obligatory to list your pronouns in business correspondence, and she says it’s getting to the place where you will become a pariah in business circles if you don’t. She routinely speaks to people like herself, owners of multi-million dollar businesses, CEOs of successful companies who confess to her in private that they routinely self-censor and are terrified of linking to any story on their LinkedIn profiles that isn’t completely woke.

I understand why people want to believe that this won’t touch them but they are in for a rude awakening.

(This is like the case that rocked the software development community Stack Exchange, which fired a moderator for declining to use preferred pronouns. Increasingly, you are going to have to accept that lie and obey its commands if you want to work in industry.)

In my study this past year of the Russian revolution, and of Marxism in eastern Europe, I have gained a real understanding of Marxism-Leninism as a pseudo-religion. This is not the place to expand on it; I wrote in more detail about it in this post. Obviously the Bolsheviks would have denied that theirs was any kind of religion. But it was a political religion to the marrow. Moldbug’s “Cathedral” concept illuminates the nature of progressivism, and progressive systems, in our liberal democratic society. It helps us to see that it really does operate like a religion: believing it possesses ultimate truths, has the authority to separate humanity into sheep and goats, and believes the true faith must be guarded and imposed by an enlightened clerical elite (professors, journalists, woke capitalists) who work within structures and institutions.

It is impossible to argue that political conservatives can be counted on to fight the Cathedral. They are more interested in political power, but fail to understand that the more important power is cultural. This is why despite Republican presidencies, and Republican control of Congress, society keeps moving left. Even when they have to stand in the back or along the sides of the nave, the Republicans are in the Cathedral. Trump is not really a threat to the Cathedral, because he’s a barbarian who just wandered into it, and doesn’t have the brains or the discipline to give it a good sacking. A smart, disciplined leader like Viktor Orban is much more of a threat to the Cathedral. The Tories, by disciplining their MP who spoke at the national conservatism conference, reaffirmed their bona fides as paid-up members of the Cathedral.

The point I’m getting to in this long ramble is this: as long as the Cathedral holds power, there will be no stopping the leftward movement of the culture, and the gutting of tradition, especially religious tradition, and of traditional liberties. As you know, I have a book coming out this fall talking about the emergence of what I call “soft totalitarianism.” Talking to students and professors at Bucknell, especially the neoreactionary student, compels me to think about how useless organized conservatism is in stopping any of this, at least in America.

Do not read this as me embracing neoreaction. I don’t. To be honest, I haven’t thought about it hard enough. I suspect the core of my resistance is the fact that I am, by conviction and temperament, a Christian Democrat — fundamentally a classical liberal who believes that the Good is, and should be, defined by Christianity, though with generous provision for dissenters. This good piece in Dissent, about right-wing anti-liberals, gets to the heart of why I am reluctant to embrace the more philosophically robust version of the political Right. But notice this excerpt in a discussion of Andrew Willard Jones’s book about medieval politics:

Even reframed in this way, the book remains revealing, for Jones is admirably unwilling to sand off the rough edges of his material. Thirteenth-century France was what the historian R. I. Moore dubbed a “persecuting society.” Although Jones doesn’t use this language, his account reinforces Moore’s suggestion that this society’s various forms of repression were part of a systematic and coherent edifice. Jones particularly stresses that the ferocious efforts to extirpate heresy throughout the century—most notoriously, the massacring of the Cathars of southern France—were inextricable from the broader effort to impose civil order. Within the logic of the system, heresy became synonymous with rebellion and vice versa; merely to live as a Cathar was by definition an act of violence against the social order. Nor was Louis IX markedly friendlier to the infidel than to the heretic. Resisting the temptation to write off the king’s anti-Jewish measures as a regrettable sideshow to his bureaucratic reforms, Jones insists that they were “integral to the rest of the program.” And the fact that the king spent much of his reign on crusade against the Muslims was hardly accidental, for in this world “the legitimate use of force becomes identical to holy war,” meaning that in practice “the drift of all sustained conflict . . . was toward crusade.”

Was the Most Christian Kingdom therefore an oppressive theocracy? “The answer is no,” Jones writes, because “the overriding logic of this understanding is the logic of peace, not that of violence.” Whereas modern social thought assumes a foundational conflict of interests, this world took peace as the baseline, so that coercive force was “legitimate only as a reaction to violence, only when directed at restoring the peace.” This becomes rather less comforting when we recall that any departure from orthodoxy constituted “violence” by definition, and that deviants could therefore be understood as “rebels against peace itself.”

Reader, does this not describe the world that woke progressives are bringing into existence in the territories they control — the universities, first of all, and then the media, and increasingly, corporations?

In the Cathedral’s religion, dissent from wokeness is heresy, and a form of violence. Progressive society is a persecuting society! Talk to conservatives who have to live and work within colleges and universities that have refashioned themselves as Cathedral seminaries.

I see no way around that conclusion. The Left has abandoned liberalism, and is becoming quite illiberal. The liberal Right — Republicans, normie conservatives, conservative churches, et alia — does little or nothing to fight it, or at least is not effective in fighting it (though they’re sure effective in fundraising off the fight). The National Conservative conference brought together small-d democrats of the Right who want to fight it within the bounds of liberal democracy — and the Tories horsewhipped their own heretic who showed up to speak there.

Which brings us back to where we started. People of the Right are faced with the systematic repression of the things they care about, and of themselves, by a pseudo-religious system that treats them as heretics who deserve persecution. There is increasingly no place for religious or cultural conservatives within the Cathedral. This is what I mean by an emerging “soft totalitarianism” — if you don’t bend the knee to whatever the progressives have come up with five minutes ago, you will be exiled. We are well on our way to a persecuting society run by the Left. I firmly believe that.

I do not want a persecuting society run by the Right, however. Unlike some fanatics of the anti-liberal Right, I want Jewish children to sleep in peace, knowing that the Pope’s agents are not going to break in and seize their children. But unlike some fanatics of the anti-liberal Left seizing children from parents for the sake of gender transition.You know as well as I do who has all the power in this society. Pius IX is dead and gone; the new popes of the Cathedral are imposing progressivist integralism on us.

In the end, I can’t think of a model of society that is more suited to peaceable co-existence than liberalism. But liberalism is going far off the rails, morphing into persecutorial progressivism — and the established Right has no idea how to stop it. The established Right is either about negotiating the terms of our surrender, or, in Trump’s case, 90 percent about performative bluster, without much effective follow-through.

This is why I focus so much on St. Benedict, and the Benedict Option. I see no real hope in politics; I do see hope, and positive work, in building up communities of deep resistance, capable of withstanding whatever comes. This does not mean that I counsel withdrawal from politics. Far from it! We have to stay involved as much as we can, if only to work to ensure the least-bad outcomes. But if the only political options on the table are a persecutorial society of the Left, or a persecutorial society of the Right, where does a Christian stand? I’m asking genuinely.

UPDATE: I should say that I left Bucknell feeling way more a part of Sohrab Ahmari’s camp. I don’t think David French’s defense of classical liberalism is going to be able to hold off the persecutorial progressives. That said, I don’t see that the Ahmarist Right has anything plausible to offer as a substitute for decadent liberalism. I might be wrong.

UPDATE.2: Good, challenging comment from C.L.H. Daniels:

[quoting RD:] Talking to students and professors at Bucknell, especially the neoreactionary student, compels me to think about how useless organized conservatism is in stopping any of this, at least in America.

MattInVA has been shouting this from the rooftops in your comment section for years now, and in my opinion he is right.

I think there is a real generational divide on the right, and in society generally. People like yourself and David French grew up in a time when liberalism, and also Christianity, were a strong influence on society. The principles of both were part of the underpinning of society even though they were decaying even then. People like Matt and I on the other hand grew up during the 90’s and came of age in the turbulent aughts. Most people probably remember the 90’s as something of a golden age, but in hindsight it was all meaninglessness and ennui papered over by economic prosperity and the rampant consumerism and hedonism that this enabled, while underneath veneer the termites were busy hollowing everything out. When the crash came, the veil was torn away and the basic nihilism of our society was rendered plain. Those who’d spent beyond their means in order to pretend that all was well lost everything. When you make materialism your lodestar, to what do you turn when prosperity fails?

It is of course dangerous to generalize too much, but I suspect that my generation is far more radical and far less nostalgic about the heyday of liberalism than you and your Generation X cohort are, to say nothing of the navel-gazing Boomers, and that is in part because we have grown up with the legacy of institutional and cultural decay bequeathed to us by those self-same Boomers. Those chickens really came home to roost for us in ways that they didn’t for the Xers. The American Dream, to us, has always been an empty platitude, a lie that is exposed every day by the basic realities with which we must contend. A place where anyone can do or become anything? Don’t make me laugh. I’m no fan of the left’s theories of structural racism, but there is some truth to the idea that we are all of us subject to forces much larger than ourselves. As the Boomers decided not only to allow but to encourage power to be concentrated in nearly all areas of society (economic, political and cultural), those of us not directly benefiting from that concentration (which is to say most of us) increasingly found that our so-called liberty was a liberty in name only. Sure, I am technically free to open a retail business in my hometown, but if there’s a Walmart fifteen minutes away, what’s the point? My business is nearly certain to fail against that kind of competition. Similarly, I can vote for whoever I want, in theory. But the structural concentration of political power into parties that are increasingly polarized and ideologically policed means that my choices are usually between bad and worse. Freedom of speech? What good does that do me when vast and remorseless cultural mechanisms will clank into action to cancel me if I express wrongthink? This isn’t liberty, it’s oligarchy that’s pretending not to be. The left at least has recognized much of this for years now. A lot of conservatives only just now seem to be waking up to it. Meanwhile our erstwhile overlords seem to be increasingly willing to do away with even the pretense that they’re anything other than our rightful rulers by some secular version of divine right.

Matt is a reactionary. I too am a reactionary in my own way, though I’d hesitate to classify myself under any particular ideological label because I don’t know of one that fits. I am, in any case, far more sympathetic to the idea that we ought to burn it all down and start over than I am to French-ist arguments about democratic incrementalism. Gangrene has set in; to save the patient now requires drastic measures. Matt once said something that stuck with me about how we could really use a stretch of “purifying warlordism”. As far as cures for decadence go, I can think of few better. In short, I have no faith at all in our institutions. They’ve been conspicuously failing and actively making things worse for my entire life. Why on earth would I look to them to resolve our problems? From where I sit they’re a big part of those problems, in which case they can hardly be the solution, can they? Year after year, election after election, it doesn’t matter who we send to Washington, nothing ever changes. As a young man, first I placed my faith in Barack Obama to fulfill his promises to bring change to Washington. He would be our savior. He turned out to be an avatar of the status quo. I got older and evolved on some issues. I also undoubtedly grew more cynical. I voted for Sanders, and when he was undermined by the establishment, I turned to the other disruptor at hand. Trump has done some genuinely good things, but it’s not nearly enough, and the scale and scope of opposition to his goals has made it clear just how undemocratic and corrupt our institutions actually are; a man with even an ounce more shame than Trump has would have been utterly destroyed by now. Looking to them for the change we need is a fool’s errand. They are beyond reform. They’ll chew up and spit out any and every reformer who naively engages with them in good faith. Instead we ought to bury them right alongside the Boomers, when they finally relinquish their increasingly febrile grip on power.

So when you look around and see how radical and angry a lot of young people seem to be, understand that they don’t have the same connection to a better past that you do. All they’ve ever known is a sort of slow-motion ruin in which things can indefinitely grow worse but never seem to get better, and in which no institution seems trustworthy or capable of making things better, and usually make them worse instead. The betrayal of the rest of us by our elites is a fact of life, one that is so obvious as to be unremarkable. Joe Biden, using his political connections to enrich his son? Don’t make me yawn. He’s just like the rest of them. It’s the rare honest politician that is the thing to be remarked upon, which is one reason, for better or worse, why Bernie is so popular. Rightly or wrongly, people believe him to be sincere in ways that they don’t ascribe to other politicians due to his decades-long consistency and contrary refusal to go along to get along.

If you hope to nurture a seed of renewal through the Benedict Option, then remember that it is all-consuming fire that paves the way for new growth in dying forests where a sapling would otherwise be choked out. Perhaps it is my generation that will be the flood against which you hope to prepare. You go and be the salt and the light. I prefer fire and flame.

That is an incredible last line. Terrifying to me, but incredibly powerful.

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Pocahontas Scalps Bloomberg

When the history of the 2020 Democratic primary race is written, this will be the moment when Michael Bloomberg’s campaign blew up on the launch pad — or rather, was blown up by Elizabeth Warren, who destroyed him. As presidential debates go, this is about as brutal as the end of a Tarantino movie:

Warren was really good tonight. She won’t win this thing, but Warren as Bernie’s No. 2 would be formidable. Joe Biden was an afterthought. He has exactly one line of attack: “I’m the only one on this stage who did this vice-presidential thing, and that senatorial thing.” Buttigieg clearly has a big future in Democratic politics, but this is not his year. Amy Klobuchar showed her limits tonight. She hates hates hates Buttigieg, and she sounded bitter when attacking him.

Hard to believe that Sanders got away again without serious attack. After tonight, with his big lead in the polls, I think he’s going to be the nominee. He’s tapping into an energy that nobody else has. He’s trying to change the system, and everybody knows that he’s serious. I wouldn’t vote for him because of his policies — not a democratic socialist here! — but he’s got integrity and consistency, and I can see why Democratic primary voters would be jazzed by him. He’s like Trump in that he is so different from the rest of the pack. Can he beat Trump? Sure he could. I don’t think it’s likely, but he could pull it off. It’ll be a hell of a race.

Tonight’s big news, though, is the total fizz-out of Bloomberg. Several people on Twitter tonight made some version of the remark that he’s used to speaking to Davos crowds, and before audiences where everybody lauds him, and nobody criticizes him. He was clearly not ready for a primetime presidential debate. Pocahontas scalped him clean.

Oh yeah, this quote from her set the tone:

“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians,” Ms. Warren said. “And no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.”

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Classics Suicide At Oxford?

I put this as an appendage to the Yale Blinds Itself post, but I also want to make it a separate post.

At Oxford University — Oxford! — the Classics faculty is proposing to remove Homer and Virgil from the basic Classics course. Excerpt:

The Oxford Student has been notified about a proposal by the Classics faculty to remove the study of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid from the Mods syllabus, a decision which has surprised many across the faculty.

This proposal forms part of a series of reforms aimed to modernise the first stage of the Classics degree, known as Moderations (Mods), which take place during Hilary term of second year for all students taking Classics courses across the university.

The Mods course, which is assessed by a set of ten exams at the end of Hilary, has been increasingly criticised in recent years, due to the attainment gaps found between male and female candidates, as well as between candidates who have studied Latin and/or Greek to A-Level (Course I) and those who have not (Course II).

If this goes through, you will be able to graduate from Oxford with a Classics degree, without having read the Iliad or the Aeneid. That, on the theory that girls will get higher scores, and we will all be better egalitarians.

“That’s so stupid!” says my 13-year-old daughter, who, in her classical Christian school, has already read the Iliad, the Aeneid, AND the Odyssey. Her school, Sequitur Classical Academy, is not a gifted-and-talented school. It’s a Christian school that follows a classical curriculum. These are ordinary kids reading these great works — and loving them. It’s not a rich school with elevated tuition, either. There are no frills there — but the education you get is incredible.

But see, the Iliad and the Aeneid are too hard for female undergraduates at Oxford. So says the Classics faculty.

This really is a kind of suicide, isn’t it? The egalitarian darkness that is overtaking our top institutions, the ones that have traditionally been the caretakers of intellectual and cultural tradition. Mark my words: in the near future, classical Christian schools will be like the Benedictine monasteries of the early Middle Ages: almost the only places where the intellectual and cultural heritage of the West will be cherished and passed on.

If you have a classical Christian school in your area, and have the means to send your children there, by all means do. The rest of the world is losing its collective mind. Classical Christian schools are keeping their heads — and their souls.

What is classical Christian education? So glad you asked. The CiRCE Institute is happy to explain.

If you are a graduate of a once-great college or university that is turning its back on the heritage of the West, please redirect your donations from the college to a classical Christian school. Our little school, Sequitur, doesn’t even have its own building. It’s making do thanks to the generosity of Istrouma Baptist Church, which lets the school use its Sunday school classrooms. That school is run as a labor of love, and on the dedication of its teachers and staff to the mission of classical education. I know there are schools like it all around the country that could use your help. Now is the time for Christians who care about this tradition to rally to these schools, to fortify them as bastions of light and learning through this present darkness. Somebody is going to have to re-seed our universities when the elites’ ideological madness and civilizational self-hatred eventually burns out.

UPDATE: Reader Jonah R. says:

 According to a classicist on Twitter, they aren’t eliminating Homer and Virgil. They’re just proposing to move them from “Mods,” the first stage of the Classics degree, to “Greats,” the second part of the course. I’d suggest trying to clarify that with the good people of Oxford before believing that Homer and Virgil are going down the memory hole.

That seems to be true. From the Daily Mail‘s report, just posted:

Students who study classics at Oxford call the first two years of their lessons Mods while the two final years of the degree are known as the Greats.

Homer and Virgil are part of exams taken at the end of the Mods and if the plans are approved, the great writers could still be studied in students later years.

That’s meaningfully different. Please, readers, post updates if you see any.

UPDATE.2: Good comment by Andy Crouch:

Rod, with all respect for the classical education your children are getting in translation, which on the whole is a great thing, the issue here seems to be about the sequencing of when students encounter the epic poets in the original language. (Not that your kids couldn’t handle the original language—I taught our son and daughter about a college year’s worth of Greek and Latin respectively when they were in late elementary school—motivated students are totally capable of learning the languages at that stage.)

It does sound from the Oxford Student story that it would be possible to avoid doing a paper on Homer and Vergil during the “Greats” sequence, which seems like a missed opportunity educationally. That being said, I majored in classics at an Ivy League university in the 1980s without ever reading Vergil in the original language (by focusing almost all my studies on the Greek side of the curriculum). And I would venture to say that I still got a very rigorous and serious education (I’ll never forget reading Aristotle with the scholar who published the definitive English translation of his works, and that was just one of many extraordinary courses I got to take, both in the original languages and in translation, as part of my major).

The real story here is not some jettisoning of the classical patrimony (and speaking of patrimony, one reason my daughter is not following in my footsteps as a classics major is the relentless misogyny—there’s no other word for it—of the classical world). Rather the reality is that rigorous majors / concentrations / degrees in the humanities are struggling to attract and retain students; that certain programs do seem to discourage women from applying and continuing (my wife, a physicist, studies this problem in her own field and has pioneered interventions that successfully mitigate it); and that certain schooling backgrounds (especially elite / private schools, or “public” schools in the UK system) give students a running start on “success” that puts them ahead of their peers in a way that can discourage less privileged students from considering the program. None of these are problems entirely unique to classics, and it’s not wrong for educators to try creative solutions to address them.

For what it’s worth, at the university where I studied classics and where my daughter is reading Homer (in Greek) this very semester, classics is more vibrant and popular a major today than it was when I was there, while still being as rigorous as it was in my student days.

UPDATE.3: I’m still not sure how big a deal this is, probably because I don’t fully understand the Oxford system. This on the record quote makes it sound like a pretty big deal:

Jan Preiss, a second-year Classicist at New College, and the President of the Oxford Latinitas Project, has set up a petition to prevent the proposal from being considered further.

In an interview with The Oxford Student, Preiss stated, “Removing Homer and Virgil would be a terrible and fatal mistake. {The proposal} would mean that firstly, Oxford would be producing Classicists who have never read Homer and never read Virgil, who are the central authors of the Classical tradition and most of Classical literature, in one way or another, looks back to Homer and interacts with the Iliad. Removing it would be a shame because Homer has been the foundation of the classical tradition since antiquity and it is impossible to understand what comes after him without studying him first”

“One of the big issues is that these reforms are marketed as ones that will increase access, but the proposal {to remove Homer and Virgil} would go completely against this because it will effectively mean that there will be people coming to Oxford with previous knowledge of Homer and Virgil… but no one else will be taught Homer or Virgil until Greats (the second part of the course) and that is only if they choose it as a paper. It would put the latter group at a disadvantage in trying to understand the literary canon and this disadvantage would carry through Mods and possibly beyond.”

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Yale Blinds Itself

Yale University continues to shit on its own patrimony for the sake of wokeness. Heather Mac Donald writes:

For decades, Yale offered a two-semester introductory sequence on the history of Western art. The fall semester spanned the ancient Middle East to the early Renaissance; the spring semester picked up from the High Renaissance through the present. Many Yale students were fortunate enough to take one or both of these classes while the late Vincent Scully was still teaching them; I was among those lucky students. Scully was a titanic, galvanizing presence, combining charismatic enthusiasm with encyclopedic knowledge. When the lights went down in the lecture hall, the large screen behind him, on which slides were projected, became the stage on which the mesmerizing saga of stylistic evolution played out. How did the austere geometry of Cycladic icons bloom into the full-bodied grandeur of the Acropolis’s Caryatids? Why were the rational symmetries of the Greek temple, blazing under Mediterranean light, replaced by the wild vertical outcroppings of the Gothic cathedral? What expressive possibilities were opened up by Giotto’s fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel?

Such questions, under Scully’s tutelage, became urgent and central to an understanding of human experience. Trips to the Yale Art Gallery supplemented his lectures, where it was hoped that in writing about an object in the collection, students would follow John Ruskin’s admonition that the “greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.” I chose to analyze Corot’s The Harbor at La Rochelle, being particularly taken by the red cap of a stevedore, one of the few jewel colors in a landscape of silken silvers and transparent sky blues.

She goes on:

Scully’s fall semester introductory art history course has been my anchor to the past, providing visual grounding in the development of Western civilization, around which it is possible to develop a broader sense of history.

But now, Yale is ending the course, for transparently false reasons of baroque wokeness, as Mac Donald writes. Yale claims it doesn’t want to privilege European art — but there are many non-European art courses at the university. More:

Barringer promises that the replacement surveys will subject European art to a variety of deconstructive readings designed to pull that tradition down from its alleged pedestal. The new classes will consider Western art in relation to “questions of gender, class, and ‘race,’” he told the Daily News in an email, carefully putting scare quotes around “race” to signal his adherence to the creed that race is a social construct. The new courses will discuss the involvement of Western art with capitalism. Most intriguingly, the relationship between Western art and climate change will be a “key theme,” he wrote.

Barringer’s proposed deconstruction of Western art illustrates a central feature of modern academia: The hermeneutics of suspicion (Paul Ricoeur’s term for the demystifying impulse that took over the humanities in the late 20 century) applies only to the Western canon. Western academics continue to interpret non-Western traditions with sympathy and respect; those interpreters seek to faithfully convey the intentions of non-Western creators and to help students understand what makes non-Western works great. So, while the replacement European art survey courses will, in Marissa Bass’s words, “challenge, rethink, and rewrite” art historical narratives, the department will not be cancelling its Buddhist art and architecture class due to the low representation of female artists and architects, nor will it “interrogate” (as High Theory puts it) African arts and cultures for their relationship to genocidal tribal warfare, or Aztec art and architecture for their relationship to murderous misogyny.

Read it all. 

This is about Yale University’s faculty deciding that it hates the West. There really is no other way to explain this.

What an extraordinary thing. Has there ever been a civilization whose elites turned on it in quite this way? The Soviets and their minions in Europe all but destroyed education by making most of it serve Marxism-Leninism, but if I understand it correctly, that was generally something imposed on university faculties. This is chosen. Yale is one of the richest universities in the world. Nobody is making it trash the West like this.

You might be thinking: “Don’t like it? Don’t send your kid to Yale.” That would be terribly naive. First, here’s Hannah Arendt, from 1951’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, talking about the cultural decay that paved the way for totalitarianism:

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 here’s Czeslaw Milosz, from The Captive Mind, which was published the same year:

It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.

His point: what happens in the universities, and wherever intellectual elites gather to do their work, eventually has massive impact on the rest of society.

Yale — rightly or wrongly — is a leading institution in American academic life. What it does today, others will do tomorrow (The New York Times serves the same function in American journalism). Yale is teaching the children of American elites to hate their civilization and the people who built it.

Somehow, we have to isolate the toxin, to keep it from infecting the rest of us. And we have to build institutions that will, like the early Benedictine monasteries, keep the traditions and knowledge of our civilization alive through the darkness now descending.

There have to be young people who know what’s happening to them, what’s being taken from them. Mac Donald writes:

Once word got out that this year would be the curtain call for the two introductory Western art courses, students stampeded to enroll.

I’m thinking this morning of an undergraduate I met last night at Bucknell. She talked about how she went to her anthropology class on one of the days of the Kavanaugh hearings, and the professor spent the day ranting about what a miserable white privileged sexist SOB Brett Kavanaugh was. The undergrad said to me, “I asked what any of this had to do with anthropology, and the teacher didn’t say anything.” She went on to say that she’s paying for an education, not pointless political ranting from professors.

Are people at Yale paying for an education? Or are they paying for credentialism that allows them access to the American elite? Why would you want to be part of a class and subculture so filled with hatred toward what is beautiful, and what is one’s own? These American educational elites are pathological.

Again, Arendt:

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.

Something is happening. Re-read what the Soviet emigre academic wrote me yesterday. This is going beyond the kind of complaints that conservatives have been making about academia since Allan Bloom’s book in the 1980s. There’s something even more deeply sinister here.

UPDATE: Get this — at Oxford, the Classics faculty is proposing to remove Homer and Virgil from the basic Classics course. Excerpt:

The Oxford Student has been notified about a proposal by the Classics faculty to remove the study of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid from the Mods syllabus, a decision which has surprised many across the faculty.

This proposal forms part of a series of reforms aimed to modernise the first stage of the Classics degree, known as Moderations (Mods), which take place during Hilary term of second year for all students taking Classics courses across the university.

The Mods course, which is assessed by a set of ten exams at the end of Hilary, has been increasingly criticised in recent years, due to the attainment gaps found between male and female candidates, as well as between candidates who have studied Latin and/or Greek to A-Level (Course I) and those who have not (Course II).

If this goes through, you will be able to graduate from Oxford with a Classics degree, without having read the Iliad or the Aeneid. That, on the theory that girls will get higher scores, and we will all be better egalitarians.

“That’s so stupid!” says my 13-year-old daughter, who, in her classical Christian school, has already read the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the Odyssey.

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Postcard From Pre-Totalitarian America

Last year, I spoke to a Soviet-born scholar who teaches in an American public university. I’m using a quote from our discussion in my forthcoming (September) book, Live Not By Lies. This morning, she sent me this e-mail, which I reproduce here with her permission:

I know from your blog that the work on your new book is going well and I’m glad because, boy, it’s so needed. I’m observing some disturbing developments on my campus, and we are really not one of those wokester schools for spoiled brats one normally associates with this kind of thing.

This academic year I’ve had an opportunity to work with some early-career academics. These are newly-minted PhDs that are in their first year on the tenure-track. What’s really scary is that they sincerely believe all the woke dogma. Older people – those in their forties, fifties or sixties – might parrot the woke mantras because it’s what everybody in academia does and you have to survive. But the younger generation actually believes it all. Transwomen are women, black students fail calculus because there are no calc profs who “look like them,” ‘whiteness’ is the most oppressive thing in the world, the US is the most evil country in history, anybody who votes Republican is a racist, everybody who goes to church is a bigot but the hijab is deeply liberating. I gently mocked some of this stuff (like we normally do among older academics), and two of the younger academics in the group I supervise actually cried. Because they believe all this so deeply, and I’d even say fanatically, that they couldn’t comprehend why I wasn’t taking it seriously.

The fanatical glimmer in their eyes really scared me.

Back in the USSR in the 1970s and the 1980s nobody believed the dogma. People repeated the ideological mantras for cynical reasons, to get advanced in their careers or get food packages. Many did it to protect their kids. But nobody sincerely believed. That is what ultimately saved us. As soon as the regime weakened a bit, it was doomed because there were no sincere believers any more. Everybody who did take the dogma seriously belonged to the generation of my great-grandparents.

In the US, though, the generation of the fanatical believers is only now growing up and coming into its prime. We’ll have to wait until their grandkids grow up to see a generation that will be so fed up with the dogma that it will embrace freedom of thought and expression. But that’s a long way away in the future.

I’m mentoring a group of young scholars in the Humanities to help them do research, and I’m starting to hate this task. Young scholars almost without exception think that scholarship is entirely about repeating woke slogans completely uncritically. Again, this is different from the USSR where scholars peppered their writing with the slogans but always took great pride in trying to sneak in some real thinking and real analysis behind the required ideological drivel. Every Soviet scholar starting from the 1970s was a dissident at heart because everybody knew that the ideology was rotten.

All of this is sad and very scary. I never thought I’d experience anything worse, anything more intellectually stifling than the USSR of its last two decades of existence. But now I do see something worse.

The book you are writing is very important, and I hope that many people hear your message.

Folks, Americans are extremely naive about what’s coming. We just cannot imagine that people who burst into tears in the face of gentle mockery of their political beliefs can ever come to power. They are already in power, in the sense that they have mesmerized leaders of American institutions. I’m telling you, that 2015 showdown on Yale’s campus between Prof. Nicholas Christakis and the shrieking students was profoundly symbolic. Christakis used the techniques of discursive reason to try to establish contact with these young people. None of it mattered. They yelled and cursed and sobbed. The fact that he disagreed with them, they took as an assault on their person.

And Yale University caved to them! 

This stuff is so outrageous that we can’t wrap our minds around how these people will ever come to rule us. Listen to what these people who grew up under communism are saying! 

Nadine Gordimer said:

“All the young are candidates for the solutions of communism or fascism when there are no alternatives to despair or dissipation.”

The religion of social justice is rushing in to fill the vacuum. Nice liberals, and nice conservatives, cannot allow themselves to think of where this might go. Solzhenitsyn knew better:

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

So did Dr. Silvester Krcmery, a Slovak Catholic lay leader in the underground church, who suffered isolation and torture in a communist prison for his faith and resistance. In the memoir he wrote after communism’s fall, Krcmery warned future generations that the past could be prelude to the future if they were not vigilant:

We are so often naive in our thinking. We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible. We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented. This, at first, is quite inconspicuous. However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.

Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, said these factors in German and Russian society made them susceptible to Nazism and Bolshevism, respectively:

Loneliness
Social Atomization
Loss of Faith In Hierarchies And Institutions
The Desire To Transgress And Destroy
 Indifference to Truth, and the Willingness To Believe Useful Lies
A Mania for Ideology
A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise
The Politicization of Everything

If you think we’re not going on full-tilt on these things, you aren’t paying attention.

UPDATE: Some people seem to think that the Arendt list is somehow faulting the Left. It’s not, at least not intentionally. She said these factors were present in both Germany, which went to the hard right, and Russia, which went to the hard left. I think these factors are present in our society, period. Some of them are stronger on the Left, it is true, but I think they’re all simply present. Is loneliness a Right or a Left thing? Is social atomization?

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