Rod Dreher's Blog, page 177

January 28, 2020

The Left Is Ruining Writing

A lot of people have been praising George Packer’s speech upon receiving an award named for Christopher Hitchens. The Hitchens Prize “reflects a commitment to free expression and inquiry, a range and depth of intellect, and a willingness to pursue the truth without regard to personal or professional consequence.” Packer’s speech really was good. The Atlantic has published it.


Excerpts:


As we get further away from his much-too-early death, I find myself missing Christopher more and more. Not so much his company, but his presence as a writer. Some spirit went out of the world of letters with him. And because that’s the world in which I’ve made my life, the only one in which I can imagine a life, I take the loss of this spirit personally. Why is a career like that of Christopher Hitchens not only unlikely but almost unimaginable? Put another way: Why is the current atmosphere inhospitable to it? What are the enemies of writing today?


His answers? One is the problem of “belonging”:


I mean that writers are now expected to identify with a community and to write as its representatives. In a way, this is the opposite of writing to reach other people. When we open a book or click on an article, the first thing we want to know is which group the writer belongs to. The group might be a political faction, an ethnicity or a sexuality, a literary clique. The answer makes reading a lot simpler. It tells us what to expect from the writer’s work, and even what to think of it. Groups save us a lot of trouble by doing our thinking for us.


And then:


Among the enemies of writing, belonging is closely related to fear. It’s strange to say this, but a kind of fear pervades the literary and journalistic worlds I’m familiar with. I don’t mean that editors and writers live in terror of being sent to prison. It’s true that the president calls journalists “enemies of the American people,” and it’s not an easy time to be one, but we’re still free to investigate him. Michael Moore and Robert De Niro can fantasize aloud about punching Donald Trump in the face or hitting him with a bag of excrement, and the only consequence is an online fuss. Nor are Islamist jihadists or white nationalists sticking knives in the backs of poets and philosophers on American city streets. The fear is more subtle and, in a way, more crippling. It’s the fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. It’s the fear of landing on the wrong side of whatever group matters to you. An orthodoxy enforced by social pressure can be more powerful than official ideology, because popular outrage has more weight than the party line.


More:


A friend of mine once heard from a New York publisher that his manuscript was unacceptable because it went against a “consensus” on the subject of race. The idea that publishers exist exactly to shatter a consensus, to provoke new thoughts, to make readers uncomfortable and even unhappy—this idea seemed to have gone dormant at the many houses where my friend’s manuscript was running into trouble. Fortunately, one editor remembered why he had gotten into publishing and summoned the courage to sign the book, which found its way to many readers. But the prevailing winds are blowing cold in the opposite direction. Incidents like this, minor but chilling, happen regularly in institutions whose core purpose is to say things well and truly. If an editorial assistant points out that a line in a draft article will probably detonate an explosion on social media, what is her supervisor going to do—risk the blowup, or kill the sentence? Probably the latter. The notion of keeping the sentence because of the risk, to defy the risk, to push the boundaries of free expression just a few millimeters further out—that notion now seems quaint. So the mob has the final edit.


Read the whole thing. There’s lots more there, and it’s really important.


What Packer fails to do, though, is call out the villains responsible for doing this: the cultural Left.


It is true that writers have to deal with trolls from all over the political spectrum. It’s not pleasant. But right-wing trolls have virtually no chance of destroying a writer’s career, because the kind of people who run media institutions are not susceptible to shaming by the right-wing mob. And good for them! But that is manifestly not the case from mobbing coming from the other side.


There’s a truly disgusting story playing out right now around a new novel, American Dirt, which has just been released to a rapturous reception, including pre-publication blurbs from the likes of Stephen King, and others. It’s the sympathetic story of a Mexican woman and her child who go through a series of harrowing trials as they try to make their way north to America. Except now, one week after its release, which included a million-dollar fanfare by Oprah’s Book Club, novelist Jeanine Cummins’s book has become a scapegoat for Whiteness and all its evils. This tweet from this morning gives you a sense of the madness here:



Actress endorses a book she hasn’t read because another celebrity gave it a stamp of approval, then withdraws endorsement and denounces book she still hasn’t read while praising the mob for correcting her wrongthink. Just another day in America 2020. https://t.co/NOOPfosXqf


— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) January 28, 2020



This Buzzfeed piece brings you up to speed. Basically, Cummins is a white person who wrote about brown people, and if that’s not bad enough, hers is a mediocre book that gets some cultural details wrong. Therefore, she deserves to be cancelled. Seriously, Cummins has overnight been turned into a scapegoat by the Woke mob. According to Buzzfeed:


David Bowles, a Chicano writer and professor, called American Dirt “harmful, appropriating, inaccurate, trauma-porn melodrama” in a withering review. He also took issue with the use of Spanish words in the dialogue, writing, “Actual examples of Spanish are wooden and odd, as if generated by Google Translate and then smoothed slightly by a line editor.”


Others focused on Cummins’ overall writing. New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal questioned the author’s decision to describe skin tones as “berry brown” and “tan as childhood,” and then in one scene, as a woman cries into the shoulder of her sister, the “soft brown curve” of skin, as if to remind the reader that these characters are — in case they’ve forgotten — brown.


Sehgal also pointed to the forced similes and analogies: “[W]hen Lydia finds she is unable to pray, ‘she believes it’s a divine kindness. Like a government furlough, God has deferred her nonessential agencies.'”


I’ve not read the novel, and am unlikely to, but good grief, bad writing is just bad writing — it’s not a political sin, or at least it shouldn’t be.


According to Buzzfeed, Cummins brought this on herself, a little bit, because she once wrote a standard lefty piece about how White People Need To Listen To Nonwhite People, and then five years later, which this book coming out, decided to identify as “Latinx,” because her grandmother was Puerto Rican. Fair enough: it looks like she’s trying to pass for the sake of publicity. Call her out on that, but cancel her?


Here’s what David Bowles, who identifies as Latino (sorry, not going to use that ugly x-word), wrote about it in a NYT op-ed in which he calls the book “confirmation that the publishing industry is broken”:


The telenovela plot is a pastiche of stereotypes and melodramatic tropes of the sort one might expect from an author who did not grow up within Mexican culture, from a massacre at a quinceañera to the inexplicable choice of a relatively wealthy woman to leap onto La Bestia, a gang-controlled train — rather than just take a plane to Canada.


Despite the multiple cultural inaccuracies and Spanish dialogue of Google Translate quality sprinkled throughout, the manuscript was acquired by Flatiron Books for seven figures in a nine-way bidding war. Hailed as a modern-day “The Grapes of Wrath” by the writer Don Winslow, it was heavily promoted for a year, poised to be the book on the immigrant crisis.


But “American Dirt” has now been largely rejected by the very Mexicans and Mexican Americans it was meant to foreground, the “faceless brown mass” Ms. Cummins — who has a Puerto Rican grandmother and identifies as white — sought to humanize.


That “brown mass” includes the people in my Mexican-American community here in South Texas.


The white saviorism is tough for me to swallow, and not just because I’m a Chicano writer critical of “American Dirt.”


No, of course not. What goes unsaid is that Jeanine Cummins got a seven-figure book deal and the imprimatur of Oprah (guaranteeing mega-sales) for writing the book that David Bowles and other resentful writers wish they had written.


That, I feel sure, is at the core of this controversy: resentment. If the publishing industry is “broken” because it throws big money at mediocre books, and those books get a lot of pop culture hype, then the publishing industry has always been broken, and so have the movies. This happens all the time. It is a total cliche that bad blockbuster movies and bad bestselling novels pay the bills so that smaller, better books with a more limited readership can exist. Life is unfair. What can we do?


Every conservative writer of nonfiction sees the bestseller list for our division, and sees Hannity, Limbaugh, and others like them topping the charts, with nothing even close, and thinks, “Why them, and not me?” But then, being conservative, one understands that this is just how life is, and that it is not the fault of these megapopular writers that the masses want to buy what they’re selling, and pay much less attention to the kinds of books that people like us write. In other words, conservative writers understand that hierarchy is built into human nature, and that in a democratic system, where people are free to spend their money on what they want to read, there’s nothing to be done about this, except perhaps to be grateful that people like Limbaugh expanded the audience for conservative titles, and made publishers wake up and realize there was a market for them.


If these umbrage-taking Latinos had any savvy, they would realized that the success of the Cummins book will expand the market for Latino narratives, which is going to help their own careers. Did Elvis Presley “appropriate” black music, and take it into the American mainstream? Of course he did! But he didn’t steal anything — his homage to what he learned from black blues musicians brought their art to a wider world. I discovered classic American bluesmen in college in the 1980s by first listening to Rolling Stones albums from the late Sixties and early Seventies. People who say the Stones, as Englishmen, are guilty of a crime against black culture for making blues-based rock can show themselves out before I put a foot in their backside.


But people are people, and it’s hard to be high-minded when people you believe are less deserving succeed, and you don’t. I lost a friend who was consumed by resentment over the fact that I wrote a book that popularized some of his ideas, and, I can only figure made money on those ideas that his small, niche books didn’t make. It was an extraordinarily ugly falling-out, with vicious and groundless accusations coming from that former friend. That taught me something about the human heart, and if I ever write fiction, I’ll probably appropriate — ha! — the lesson I learned from his disgraceful behavior. He tried to dress it up in the garb of moral righteousness, but it was transparently a case of resentment.


Back to the Cummins book. If it’s a lousy book, she deserves the shots she’s taking. If people are angry at her for getting a big advance for a lousy book, well, instead of griping about her, find out who her agent is and see if the agent will take you on as a client, because they’re doing good work for Jeanine Cummins. In any case, publishers don’t hand out big advances on merit alone. They’re making an investment in how well they thing the book will do in the marketplace. They usually get this wrong. As hard as it is to believe, something like 95 percent of all books do not make back their advance for the authors. It’s true. The economics of publishing are crazy. People assume all the time that I must be rich because I have several published books. Man, it’s not even close. I’m grateful for the success I’ve had, but aside from those rarefied few in the authorial stratosphere, nobody gets rich writing books.


Anyway, look: if you’re going to complain that the system exalts mediocrity and fails to reward merit, well, welcome to the real world. I look forward to your cri de coeur over the fact that the mediocre actor Arnold Schwarzenegger became one of the biggest leading man movie stars of all time, while Wallace Shawn, a much more talented actor, did bit parts in the movies.


Wallace Shawn

Again: life is unfair. Art and literature is especially unfair. People like what they like. One of the most important moments for me as a book writer just starting out was when I sat across from a well-known and extremely successful New York publisher, in her office, and told her that I wanted to write a book about the Catholic sex abuse scandal, which was then all over the news (it was 2002). I made a case for why I, as a practicing Catholic (as I was then), had a particular insight on how the scandal related to other areas of Catholic life, how I had good sources, and so forth. The proposal looked great on paper.


She blew me away with this statement: “People are not going to pay $26.99 to read a book about priests f–king little boys.”


Instantly I knew she was right. My idea, I still believe, would have made a great book. But it was a book with no commercial prospects. Hey, people should have wanted to buy and read such a book, to learn about something terrible that happened, and that a lot of people — good people and bad people — allowed to happen. But I could not argue with the commercial instincts of that publisher. People were willing to pay to read those stories as part of their subscriptions to their newspapers, and a fantastic film, Spotlight, was made about that topic. But notice that Spotlight wasn’t really about priests screwing children; it was about the systems that allowed Boston Catholics and Boston institutions to avert their collective eyes from something happening more or less in plain sight. My point here is that even in 2015, when Spotlight was released, thirteen years after the events it dramatizes happened, we still couldn’t look directly on the horror. I’ve seen Spotlight a couple of times, and revere that movie. But if it were about the scandal directly, I couldn’t take it.


I bring that to the discussion of American Dirt only to say that publishers are driven by an economic bottom line that often mystifies and offends writers. Sometimes publishers get things quite wrong, and overhype certain books, or fail to identify or promote good, even great, ones (the fate of A Confederacy of Dunces is a classic example). To assume that it is always a case of malice or some other form of vice — including racism — is repulsive.


But that’s where these resentful writers are with Jeanine Cummins. It seems that they will not be happy until she is made to suffer. Going forward, how many writers will take the risk of writing about people not like themselves, especially if those characters are part of a recognized Victim™ group? Novelists do this all the time — write about people not like themselves — and sometimes they do it badly. (Ask Catholics how close Dan Brown’s megaselling Da Vinci Code books came to depicting the actual Roman Catholic Church, or reproducing the actual history of the Middle Ages?) Now they would be foolish to dare to do it, because they might get cancelled. Publishers will be much less likely to take a chance on those writers, because if the writers fail to pass muster with the racially-conscious ideological screeners, it could mean death for the book, and their investment.


Even Stephen King, after admirably standing up for the value of artistic merit over demographic representation, chickened out, and confessed his sins against wokeness in a Washington Post op-ed.J.K. Rowling has bigger balls than he does. King blurbed American Dirt too. Will he walk that back in the face of the mob? What about Latina writer Sandra Cisneros, who lavished praise on the book? Here’s a detail-packed NYT story on the controversy. Behold the cowardice:


In the midst of the fallout, some writers who offered blurbs for the book have reconsidered. The Mexican-American poet and novelist Erika L. Sánchez, who had praised it as written with “grace, compassion, and precision,” said in an interview this past week that she wouldn’t have thrown her weight behind the novel had she known it would upset so many in the literary world.


Wow. I wouldn’t have said that I liked the book had I known that all the cool kids would hate the book. What a disgusting, disgusting stance to take. So, look George Packer: this is not the cultural or political Right making it harder to be a writer. This is the Left, weaponizing identity politics and using it to destroy art and artists. You didn’t say it the other night. I hope you will going forward.


And I hope all you leftists and liberals will do so. Nobody cares when a conservative complains about this rotten injustice. Only you have the power to stand up to these bullies.


But look, we had all better prepare to take stands. What these leftist literary crybullies are doing is preparing the way for soft totalitarianism. Here’s a passage from the draft of my forthcoming book on soft totalitarianism, from the chapter about identity politics:


At the core of every totalitarian system is resentment, said [Roger] Scruton.


“Totalitarian ideologies are adopted because they rationalize resentment, and also unite the resentful around a common cause. Totalitarian systems arise when the resentful, having seized power, proceed to abolish the institutions that have conferred power on others: institutions like law, property, and religion which create hierarchies, authorities, and privileges, and which enable individuals to assert sovereignty over their own lives.”


To the resentful these institutions are the cause of inequality and therefore of their own humiliations and failures. In fact, they are the channels through which resentment is drained away. Once institutions of law, property and religion are destroyed – and their destruction is the normal result of totalitarian government – resentment takes up its place immovably, as the ruling principle of the state.”


The totalitarian ideology – whether communist or Nazi – identifies members of a certain class as the enemies of justice, and stokes hatred among the masses for members of that group. Jews, bourgeois people, Catholics, racial minorities – all have been stigmatized and targeted by totalitarians and would-be totalitarians as collectively guilty of crimes against the people. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell created a totalitarian state in which the masses were kept in a constant state of rage and terror over imaginary enemies kept at bay only by the vigilance of authorities.


“Nothing is more comforting to the resentful than the thought that those who possess what they envy possess it unjustly,” Scruton said. “In the worldview of the resentful, success is not a proof of virtue, but on the contrary, a call to retribution. That explains why totalitarian ideologies invariably divide human beings into innocent and guilty groups.”


Resentment is a characteristic found in every society, and within every person’s heart. Resentment rarely comes from nowhere. The grievous suffering of the peasant masses in pre-revolutionary Russia at the hands of imperial elites was not an invention of Lenin. Nor, in our own time and place, is the fact of racism a fiction. Every polity has some who are more powerful than others; this is an ineradicable fact of human nature. Liberal democracy, as a secular working-out of Christianity, established a political framework that attempts to solve conflicts justly, with a respect for both individual dignity and fundamental human equality.


The danger is that the passion of resentment overwhelms all reason, filling one with an overwhelming conviction that justice can and must be achieved — by any means necessary. This is when the totalitarian temptation manifests itself. For those who believe that achieving justice is nothing more than distributing power –Lenin, with his “who, whom” – among social groups, not individuals, then the state’s mission is to take power from the malefactors, and reassign it to the virtuous.


To the communists (and to the Nazis), the qualities and character of individuals were insignificant. The only thing that mattered was their identity as a member of a group. Once this is established, there is no point in reasoning with the wicked in defense of the good. The wicked are presumed guilty not because of what they believe, say, or do; they are guilty because of who they are.


They say Jeanine Cummins is guilty because of the book she wrote. Bull. She’s guilty in their eyes because of who she is. Cummins may or may not have written a good novel, but she doesn’t deserve this. It is wrong. It is evil. And sooner or later, wherever you are, and whatever your profession, it’s probably going to come for you.


UPDATE: Ah, I wrote and published this post before seeing that TAC’s Bob Merry had also written about the topic. Please read it; it’s better than what I have written here. Excerpt from Merry:


What this controversy tells us is that this whole business about cultural appropriation has gotten totally out of control. As the Times puts it,  the controversy “falls into the roiling argument over…how the stories of marginalized people should be told and who should be given the platforms to tell them.”


Let’s parse that sentence a bit. How did we get into a “roiling argument” over “how the stories of marginalized people should be told.” Isn’t that what reviewers do? But reviewers weigh in after a book has been published. What the Times writers, Jennifer Schuessler and Alexandra Alter, seem to be saying is that there is a legitimate debate over who gets to decide how a story is told before any book is published or perhaps even written. How is that even a debate? Who gets to decide? How will their decisions be enforced? How is that even workable?


There’s a tinge of totalitarianism here—an effort through the force of public pressure (which is considerable these days) to infringe upon the artistic impulse.


It’s even worse (the situation) than I thought — and I appreciate how Merry calls out the NYT’s role as cultural gatekeeper here.


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Published on January 28, 2020 08:33

January 27, 2020

The Revolution Comes To The Cornfields

The Revolution comes to a small Midwestern town. Its vector is the local public school. A reader writes:


Over the weekend, my high school son and daughter participated in a show choir competition. The choirs were given a classroom in the host school to serve as a home base. Our home base classroom featured this huge transgender flag that was draped on the ceiling. In an English (reading and journalism) classroom. There was also a “safe space” sign in the classroom. In fact, the safe space signs were everywhere: in every classroom, the cafeteria, the hallways.


My question: What does transgender ideology have to do with English?


My other question: What happens if a teacher would rather not display this sign in his or her classroom?


Note 1: This was at a small-town Midwestern high school, not an urban or coastal school. This is a Trump state.


Note 2: The classroom with the trans flag did not have an American flag. Apparently, this is the new patriotism. This is the new religion.


I also noticed that the rate of cross-dressing high school students among the choir kids was WAY higher than historical trends for actual transgender people, indicating the prevalence of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD). This trans flag doesn’t communicate “You’re welcome in my classroom.” It communicates, “If you ever feel weird, it means that you need hormones and surgery.”


Here are the photos he sent:




That last one is an example of what the writer James Poulos describes as the “Pink Police State”. It’s what you get when “health and safety” override every other consideration. GLSEN, the gay activist group, figured out twenty years ago that if it presented its radical re-education agenda as a “safety” measure, it would be widely adapted in schools. And so it has been.


The reader’s question about dissenting teachers is a good one: what if you said no, I’m not going to allow my classroom to be used for propaganda purposes? I guarantee you that teacher would be stigmatized, and would face professional hostility. She would be accused of creating an “unsafe space,” and of being a bigot. Remember what the leading Democratic presidential candidate tweeted the other day:



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


— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) January 25, 2020



I strongly urge you — I exhort you! — to read this thread from the academic James Lindsay, who has been doing really deep thinking into the social justice mentality. Here’s the opening tweet:



People really don’t seem to understand that Social Justice isn’t just a movement or some quirky ideas that got popular in some quarters. It’s a worldview rooted in both critical theory and postmodernism. It is literally a completely different way to see and interpret the world.


— James Lindsay, an inordinate shit (@ConceptualJames) January 27, 2020



An excerpt of some of what follows:



It is vital for conservatives and old-fashioned liberals to understand the nature of this fight we’re being dragged into. Do you get it? From the Social Justice point of view, to oppose them, or even to question their claims, is to be a heretic bigot. This is not a matter of reason. In fact, reason itself is a tool of oppression to these people. Look:



Whiteness also wants to invalidate your experiences and insights about race under the veneer of detached “empirical” inquiry. It tries to the burden on Black people to “prove” our own oppression rather than holding the oppressors accountable. pic.twitter.com/GyzIIzIcS4


— Jemar Tisby (@JemarTisby) January 24, 2020



Read this post of mine from earlier today about the weaponization of civil rights to demolish every liberty that stands in the way of Social Justice Warriors’ goals. The revolution has made its way into classrooms in Midwestern small towns. There is nowhere to hide from this stuff. We have to fight, and fight hard. But the fight is not just political and legal. After I saw the film A Hidden Life, about the Catholic anti-Nazi martyr Franz Jägerstätter, I realized that this film is precisely the explanation of the Benedict Option, one that will help me get through to people who insist, despite the evidence, that I’m urging people to head for the hills. The evil came to Franz’s remote Austrian mountain village. Nowhere was safe. But when it came, Franz, because he had built himself up in the faith, recognized the evil for what it was, and resisted it in the only way possible to him at that point. Most everybody in that village, one imagines, was a Christian, but only Franz and his family had both the ability to see the ideology for what it truly was, and to find within the strength to stand up to it, even as everyone around him was surrendering to it.


It is the same with us. If your kids’ public or private school has embraced this ideology, you should get them out of it, if you can. If you can’t, then you should be educating them as to why it is a lie, and helping them to find the spiritual resources to resist it. This will not be easy. I imagine that even in small towns, the pressure from the herd to conform is serious. Note well that all of us live in a propaganda environment that acculturates us to accept all of this, and to feel shame if we do not. In Hungary last year, when I interviewed for my forthcoming book a couple who grew up under communism, they told me that their childhoods were filled with propaganda designed to encourage everyone to feel intense shame over any belief or tradition that contradicted socialism. The same thing is happening right here. 


We need the Benedict Option, and we need to fight on political and legal fronts, while we still can. There are plenty of conservatives and Christians who are under the mistaken belief that political and legal victories are enough. They’re wrong. As writer Christopher Caldwell points out in his important new book:


In the quarter-century after Reagan, conservatives lost every battle against the substance of political correctness. … Political correctness was not a joke after all. It was the most comprehensive ideological capture of institutional power in the history of the United States.


… This language of “-bashing” and “-phobia” and “bigotry” and “lies” was new. No longer was the irreconcilability of individuals’ and society’s sexual priorities a tragedy or a disagreement. Recast in the categories of civil rights law, it was a crime, a crime that was being committed against a whole class of people. The customs and traditions in the name of which it was being committed were mere alibis.


… Once social issues could be cast as battles over civil rights, Republicans would lose 100 percent of the time. The agenda of “diversity” advanced when its proponents won elections and when they lost them.


Social Justice Warriors have weaponized Midwestern niceness to conquer the minds of kids, their teachers, and their parents in places you would think would have natural immunity to this insanity. What we must wake up and understand is that the old liberal-democratic arguments based in a familiar defense of traditional liberties are ceasing to work, in part because the culture has been changed, and is changing very fast. When teaching your children — even your corn-fed Midwestern children from prairie villages — that it is okay for them to take cross-sex hormones and surgically alter their bodies because it is a civil rights issue, then you know — you must know — that we have gone through the looking glass.


UPDATE: Well, now look:



Remember when I predicted that Drag Queen Story Hour wouldn’t stay confined to public libraries. Well, here it is: It’s coming to Primary School 118 in Brooklyn — to teach *first-graders* about “gender fluidity.” pic.twitter.com/Zc5rqQSHac


— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) January 28, 2020



Here’s the full screengrab of the announcement. Looks like this is nothing new at this particular school:



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Published on January 27, 2020 10:11

‘Civil Rights’ And Totalitarianism

Let the word go forth:



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


— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) January 25, 2020



This is the most conservative of all the Democratic presidential candidates, note well.


So, as the man says, let’s be clear: if you think it might be a bad idea for biological males to compete against your daughter in the high school women’s sports league, or that biological males do not belong in your daughter’s or wife’s locker room, or even if you dissent from gender ideology at all, as the left-wing feminist J.K. Rowling did publicly late last year — then you are on the same side as Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan, and will deserve the hatred you receive.


This is how left-wing identity politics works today. The Age of Entitlement, Christopher Caldwell’s dark, provocative new book illuminates how the concept of “civil rights” has been weaponized to demolish constitutional principles. If you’ve heard anything about the book, it’s probably something along the lines of this Jonathan Rauch review in the NYT. Excerpts:



In Caldwell’s telling, the Civil Rights Act, which banned many forms of discrimination, was a swindle. Billed as a one-time correction that would end segregation and consign race consciousness to the past, it actually started an endless and escalating campaign of race-conscious social engineering. Imperialistically, civil rights expanded to include “people of color” and immigrants and gays and, in short, anyone who was not native-born, white and straight — all in service of “the task that civil rights laws were meant to carry out — the top-down management of various ethnic, regional and social groups.”


With civil rights as their bulldozer, in Caldwell’s view, progressive movements ran amok. They “could now, through the authority of civil rights law, override every barrier that democracy might seek to erect against them”; the law and rhetoric of civil rights “gave them an iron grip on the levers of state power.”



More:



Perhaps the author should have come up for oxygen when he found himself suggesting that the Southern segregationists were right all along. Reading this overwrought and strangely airless book, one would never imagine a different way of viewing things, one that rejects Caldwell’s ultimatum to “choose between these two orders.” In that view — my own — America has seen multiple refoundings, among them the Jackson era’s populism, the Civil War era’s abolition of slavery, the Progressive era’s governmental reforms and the New Deal era’s economic and welfare interventions. All of them, like the civil rights revolution, sparked tense and sometimes violent clashes between competing views of the Constitution and basic rights, but in my version of history, those tensions proved not only survivable but fruitful, and working through them has been an engine of dynamism and renewal, not destruction and oppression. I worry about the illiberal excesses of identity politics and political correctness, but I think excesses is what they are, and I think they, too, can be worked through. Being a homosexual American now miraculously married to my husband for almost a decade, I can’t help feeling astonished by a history of America since 1964 that finds space for only one paragraph briefly acknowledging the civil rights movement’s social and moral achievements — before hastening back to “But the costs of civil rights were high.”


Perhaps most depressingly, Caldwell’s account, even if one accepts its cramped view of the Constitution and its one-eyed moral bookkeeping, leads nowhere. It proffers no constructive alternative, no plausible policy or path. The author knows perfectly well that there will be no “repeal of the civil rights laws.” He foresees only endless, grinding, negative-sum cultural and political warfare between two intractably opposed “constitutions.” His vision is a dead end. Unfortunately, it also seems to be where American conservatism is going.



Rauch is not wrong in his description of the most controversial part of Caldwell’s book. Caldwell really does see the Civil Rights regime as where things went badly wrong. But Rauch, in my view, doesn’t take on Caldwell’s actual argument, but only asserts that these conflicts “can be worked through.” Boy, is that ever whistling past the graveyard. However, I have to admit that I never would have read a book that claimed the Civil Rights movement went wrong had it not been written by someone I respect as much as I do Christopher Caldwell. I read the book last week, and I’m glad I did, though I doubt I will read a more unsettling book all year.


Why? Because I can’t see where Caldwell’s reasoning is wrong, and with the Democrats and other progressives sacralizing left-wing identity politics by vesting them in the sacred mantle of the Civil Rights movement — kryptonite in US politics — I see no way out of this. Rauch is right: civil rights laws will not be repealed. They are being used now to dispossess anyone and everyone who stands in the way of the progressive juggernaut.


I strongly urge you to read Caldwell’s book, and not to assume that you understand it from reviews. Let me get one thing out of the way now: Caldwell does NOT say that segregation was right. For example, he denounces the Jim Crow South as a confederacy of “sham democracies,” and agrees that its apartheid system had to change. Yet the manner in which the state demolished segregation had dramatic unintended consequences. Caldwell’s argument is more like that of Sir Thomas More in this famous exchange from the Robert Bolt play A Man For All Seasons:


Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law?


More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?


Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!


More: Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.


Caldwell argues that to get at the devil of segregation, we cut down constitutional principles that are now destroying constitutional principles that few people in 1964 imagined would one day be at risk.


Just half a decade into the civil rights revolution, America had something it had never had at the federal level, something the overwhelming majority of its citizens would never have approved: an explicit system of racial preference. Plainly the civil rights acts had wrought a change in the country’s constitutional culture. The innovations of the 1960s had given progressives control over the most important levers of government, control that would endure for as long as the public was afraid of being called racist.


Not just excluded and exploited Southern blacks but all aggrieved minorities now sought to press their claims under this new model of progressive governance. The civil rights model of executive orders, litigation, and court-ordered redress eventually became the basis for resolving every question pitting a newly emergent idea of fairness against old traditions: the persistence of different roles for men and women, the moral standing of homosexuality, the welcome that is due to immigrants, the consideration befitting wheelchair-bound people. Civil rights gradually turned into a license for government to do what the Constitution would not previously have permitted. It moved beyond the context of Jim Crow laws almost immediately, winning what its apostles saw as liberation after liberation.


The civil rights movement was a template. The new system for overthrowing the traditions that hindered black people became the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life, starting with the roles of men and women.


Here’s the core of his argument:


The goal of the civil rights laws, at least as they were understood by a sentimental public, was to short-circuit the sham democracies of the American South, to bring them into conformity with the Constitution. But it turned out to be harder than anticipated to distinguish between the South’s democracy and everybody else’s. If the spirit of the law was to humiliate Southern bigots, the letter of the law put the entire country—all its institutions— under the threat of lawsuits and prosecutions for discrimination.


Not just in law, but in culture too. More:


In the quarter-century after Reagan, conservatives lost every battle against the substance of political correctness. … Political correctness was not a joke after all. It was the most comprehensive ideological capture of institutional power in the history of the United States.


… This language of “-bashing” and “-phobia” and “bigotry” and “lies” was new. No longer was the irreconcilability of individuals’ and society’s sexual priorities a tragedy or a disagreement. Recast in the categories of civil rights law, it was a crime, a crime that was being committed against a whole class of people. The customs and traditions in the name of which it was being committed were mere alibis.


… Once social issues could be cast as battles over civil rights, Republicans would lose 100 percent of the time. The agenda of “diversity” advanced when its proponents won elections and when they lost them. Voters had not yet figured that out. As soon as they did, the old style of democratic politics would be dead.


He’s talking about Trump as what happens when conservative voters finally realize that this “heads liberals win, tails conservatives lose” dynamic is unstoppable.


Here, finally, is why this is such a depressing (but important!) book to read:


Republicans and others who may have been uneasy that the constitutional baby had been thrown out with the segregationist bathwater consoled themselves with a myth: The “good” civil rights movement that the martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., had pursued in the 1960s had, they said, been “hijacked” in the 1970s by a “radical” one of affirmative action, with its quotas and diktats. Once the country came to its senses and rejected this optional, radical regime, it could have the good civil rights regime back. None of that was true. Affirmative action and political correctness were the twin pillars of the second constitution. They were what civil rights was. They were not temporary.





That right there is the conclusion that I was hoping to avoid. How can you not want to avoid it? The Rauch response is an understandable one. It’s based on the logic that:



Segregation was a terrible evil.
Civil Rights laws destroyed segregation.
Therefore, they are unquestionably good.

Segregation really was a terrible evil. And the Civil Rights Act, and subsequent legislation, really did destroy that devil. But now we see the cost of unintended consequences. As I said earlier, Rauch, who as a gay man benefited from the construal of ever-expanding areas of social conflict as a civil rights conflict, does not deal with Caldwell’s core point. I don’t blame him, in a way; if Caldwell is right, then how would we have dispatched segregation? Perhaps if the courts had limited its interpretations of the Civil Rights Act to race alone, and/or they had limited them to destroying laws that discriminated against racial minorities in their statutory language (as opposed to their effect, e.g., “disparate impact”), we would have no problem. But that’s not what happened. So we find ourselves in a situation in which Joe Biden — and, let’s face it, the Democratic Party — claims that transgendered people are the contemporary equivalent of Rosa Parks, and that masculinity and femininity are of no more matter than the color of one’s skin.


One reason this is especially alarming to me is that I’ve spent the past ten days working on a chapter in my forthcoming book about soft totalitarianism that has to do with how liberals have weaponized the Myth of Progress, and a subsequent chapter about left-wing identity politics. Here is an excerpt from my draft manuscript:


In one sense, all politics is identity politics. Individuals come together because they identify with a certain set of ideals or interests, and want to advocate for them in the political arena. To identify as a nationalist, a conservative, a liberal, or a socialist, is to affirm the principles of those philosophies.


That’s not what we mean by identity politics today. In current use, identity politics is a term used to describe the act of forming political alliances around a group that shares a particular characteristic – race, ethnicity, sex, religion, and so forth – and advocating exclusively for that political tribe’s interests, to the exclusion of others. In contemporary academic leftism, the concept of “intersectionality” confederates groups of varied social identities called to unite to fight what they regard as oppression. Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, the originator of the term, defines intersectionality as “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.”


Behind that anodyne description lies an acidic claim, one that is dissolving classical liberal politics, which are based on universal ideals: that the Great Oppressor who must be demonized and defeated for the sake of justice is the White Christian Male. The final solution to the problem of injustice and oppression lies in the overthrow of institutions, practices, and narratives through which White Christian Males exercise domination of all others.


This is straight-up Marxism, resurrected for the dying liberal order of the twenty-first century West. As the late Roger Scruton explained, communism did not inflame the minds of intellectuals and those who followed their lead because the masses rallied to Marx’s economic theories. It drew them because it told them who was to blame for their suffering, and promised them that all their troubles would end once the scapegoat had been sacrificed. Said Scruton, “Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.”


At the core of every totalitarian system is resentment, said Scruton:


Totalitarian ideologies are adopted because they rationalize resentment, and also unite the resentful around a common cause. Totalitarian systems arise when the resentful, having seized power, proceed to abolish the institutions that have conferred power on others: institutions like law, property, and religion which create hierarchies, authorities, and privileges, and which enable individuals to assert sovereignty over their own lives.


To the resentful these institutions are the cause of inequality and therefore of their own humiliations and failures. In fact, they are the channels through which resentment is drained away. Once institutions of law, property and religion are destroyed – and their destruction is the normal result of totalitarian government – resentment takes up its place immovably, as the ruling principle of the state.


The totalitarian ideology – whether communist or Nazi – identifies members of a certain class as the enemies of justice, and stokes hatred among the masses for members of that group. Jews, bourgeois people, Catholics, racial minorities – all have been stigmatized and targeted by totalitarians and would-be totalitarians as collectively guilty of crimes against the people. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell created a totalitarian state in which the masses were kept in a constant state of rage and terror over imaginary enemies kept at bay only by the vigilance of authorities.


“Nothing is more comforting to the resentful than the thought that those who possess what they envy possess it unjustly,” Scruton said. “In the worldview of the resentful, success is not a proof of virtue, but on the contrary, a call to retribution. That explains why totalitarian ideologies invariably divide human beings into innocent and guilty groups.”


Resentment is a characteristic found in every society, and within every person’s heart. Resentment rarely comes from nowhere. The grievous suffering of the peasant masses in pre-revolutionary Russia at the hands of imperial elites was not an invention of Lenin. Nor, in our own time and place, is the fact of racism a fiction. Every polity has some who are more powerful than others; this is an ineradicable fact of human nature. Liberal democracy, as a secular working-out of Christianity, established a political framework that attempts to solve conflicts justly, with a respect for both individual dignity and fundamental human equality.


The danger is that the passion of resentment overwhelms all reason, filling one with an overwhelming conviction that justice can and must be achieved — by any means necessary. This is how the totalitarian temptation manifests itself. For those who believe that achieving justice is nothing more than distributing power –Lenin, with his “who, whom” – among social groups, not individuals, then the state’s mission is to take power from the malefactors, and reassign it to the virtuous.


To the communists (and to the Nazis), the qualities and character of individuals were insignificant. The only thing that mattered was their identity as a member of a group. Once this is established, there is no point in reasoning with the wicked in defense of the good. The wicked are presumed guilty not because of what they believe, say, or do; they are guilty because of who they are.


As we saw in the last chapter, the left applies the concept of “civil rights” to cover any and all minorities within its coalition of the virtuous. In this way, raw, power-seeking identity politics veils itself in the sacred shroud of the Sixties movement.


Here’s one more line from Caldwell’s book, one that directly raises the specter of totalitarianism:


Once bias is held to be part of the “unconscious,” of human nature, there are no areas of human life in which the state’s vigilance is not called for.


This is why, absent strong political and judicial action to protect individual rights, totalitarian mechanisms — government and private — for demolishing resistance to “civil rights,” as defined by progressives, are inevitable. 


You can see why this is so grim and pessimistic. Caldwell deserves credit for courageously forcing us to confront these terrible truths. I sincerely hope that someone can persuasively explain why Christopher Caldwell’s logic and analysis about the rival constitutional regimes (see this excellent City Journal summary) are incorrect. Claiming that he’s wrong because his conclusion is shocking and unpleasant will not suffice. Read The Age of Entitlement for yourself and see what you think.


UPDATE: One thing that is still not widely understood by conservatives — Tucker Carlson being a spectacular and vital exception — is the role that woke capitalism is playing in building and defending this bigoted tyranny. Did you hear about Goldman Sachs’s newest diversity policy? From the NYT, reporting from Davos:





Goldman Sachs’s C.E.O., David Solomon, prompted chatter on Wall Street yesterday about his plan to require I.P.O. clients to have at least one “diverse” board candidate before the bank helped them list in the public markets.


• “We’re not going to take a company public unless there’s at least one diverse board candidate, with a focus on women,” Mr. Solomon told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos.


• The mandate starts July 1 for U.S. and European clients, and starting next year, Goldman will require two diverse board members.








• “We might miss some business, but in the long run, this I think is the best advice for companies that want to drive premium returns for their shareholders over time,” Mr. Solomon added.


It’s a big deal in the I.P.O. world, given that Goldman was the top underwriter of U.S. offerings last year.


And it’s the latest push for diversity within Corporate America, Jeff Green of Bloomberg notes. The money-management firms BlackRock and State Street plan to vote against directors at companies without a female director. And California-based public companies with all-male boards face a $100,000 fine.





As Tucker Carlson pointed out on his show the other night, Goldman excepts itself from this rule, and Goldman is also not applying the rule to China. Watch this three-minute clip. The hypocrisy and bigotry is outrageous:



I have long observed in my own career that when woke white corporate hierarchs push “diversity,” they never, ever offer to resign from their jobs and give them over to minorities. They only want to experience the endorphin rush of virtue while keeping some poor white, cishet, male SOB from getting a fair shot at a job.


The point to take away here is that the coming soft totalitarianism will be driven as much by woke corporate oligarchs as it will be by institutions and officials of the state.


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Published on January 27, 2020 04:50

January 26, 2020

Chinese Zodiac Predicts Year Of Suffering

Amazing comment from “Wyoming Doc,” a physician who reads this blog, about what Terry Mattingly calls a “religion ghost” in the China virus story:


As you know, I am married and have lived for many years with a woman from far inland China – Ningxia province to be exact. As such, I feel I have picked up on quite a bit of their culture and to be able to explain it at least to some degree to Americans.


My wife has a PhD in an advanced science field. She was the lone student picked her year of graduation to represent lowly Ningxia province at Tsinghua University in Beijing – their equal to a place here in the US like MIT. She is about 10,000 times smarter than I am.


Over the years, I have come to realize that their “Food Pyramid” is much different than our own. In their culture, good nutrition comes from eating all kinds of different things placed in one pot – different kinds of meat, vegetables and spices. Chinese food is most definitely not the cuisine at your local buffet. In her homeland, meals were accomplished with all kinds of different “protein” sources — hardly any of which are available readily here — a fact that she laments often. One other thing to realize is that the act of freezing anything instantly reduces that thing’s nutritional value to zero in Chinese eyes. Their culture is absolutely allergic to the freezer. The refrigerator is not far behind. Freshness in anything is paramount. Accordingly, when I was in China — you could smell the outdoor markets from about 6 blocks away. Never mind the bats — this cannot be sanitary for anything. All kinds of meat just laying out in the sun — stinking to high heaven. But that is the way it has been done there for thousands of years.


My wife continues this tradition here today — nothing is frozen — fresh meat and food is picked up every day from either the grocery store or preferably the local farmers. I would also like to alert any and all with ears — that much of “Chinese herbal medicine” has everything to do with what Americans would consider very peculiar choices. Please be aware of this when you go and buy anything made of powder in a Chinese drug store. For example, a common “herbal” remedy for the common cold is dessicated powdered snake testicles in small little pills. You have been warned.


We have just had all our neighbors over for Chinese New Year last night — about 20 guests in all. My wife is a phenomenal cook — and spent the whole week making dumplings and noodles made from scratch out of rice shipped from her home province Ningxia. Rice from this province is considered the best rice in the world to the Chinese palate. Add this to the multiple dozens of meat and vegetable dishes and you can only imagine – good times had by all. Their New Year is basically our Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter all wrapped up into one.


Now I am going to get to the part of this whole past few days that has really bugged me and made me hesitate to write this comment. As usual, I have heard not a word about any of what I am about to write in the American media — and I believe it to be profoundly germane to the suffering currently going on in mainland China.


The Chinese people are still very, very attached to their ancient Zodiac. Much much more than our Zodiac affects our lives here. This includes my wife — a woman with a PhD from one of the top universities in the world. This stuff really still matters to her. We had to visit a fortune teller — 91 year old Mr Su — straight out of Hollywood central casting for a Charlie Chan movie — to determine our wedding date and year — whether I, a horse, was compatible with her, a dragon — and what animal our children should be — they ended up being sheep — a winning combo for all, etc. etc. etc. Mr. Su and his tea leaves have played a profound part in our lives. And this plays a profound part in the lives of billions of Chinese — especially those from more rural areas. To some degree in their hearts they really believe this stuff — despite the decades Chairman Mao spent trying to strangle it.


All most Americans are aware of is that this is The Year of the Rat — starting last night. This is true — and determined by a rotating 12 year cycle of animals — sheep, monkey, snake, dog, etc. What most Americans do not know is that there are two other cycles going at the same time — one of earth elements (5 in total) — fire, gold, water, etc — and one called the Celestial Tree — of which I have little idea to explain other than there are 10 of them. Last night actually started the Year of the Golden Rat and then some extra words related to the Celestial Tree which I think do not translate to English very well.


Why is this important? Let me share this anecdote. My wife told me back in November — that starting on JAN 25 — the year of suffering will begin. It is not uncommon in these years for the New Year not to be celebrated either by choice or by force — and that bad things can really get started. She stated this as a matter of fact. In multiple times in thousands of years of Chinese history — this particular Zodiac year has been a turning point and not for the good.


Apparently this combo of these three Zodiac cycles that began last night is snake-eyes — it is the most ominous and foreboding of any year. I know as a rational human being not to believe this stuff — and I do feel my wife feels the same way at least to some degree — but I worry about the Chinese people, and how this kind of thing can rapidly spiral into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Very strange and unexpected things can happen in times of mass delusion.


Readers, note well that Wyoming Doc is not saying that astrology is real. He’s saying that a billion Chinese people believe their astrological system discloses a dimension of reality, and will act on that essentially religious belief. What they do with it, who knows? But I really appreciate the doctor telling me this fascinating social fact about Chinese culture, and I hope that some of you readers can shed more light on it, and what it might mean for how the Chinese people respond to this crisis.


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Published on January 26, 2020 17:59

Blame The Bat Soup Eaters!

Holy crap on a crapstick! No wonder everybody’s getting sick!



To be clear, nobody knows for sure that it came from eating bats, but that is a working theory now. Still, good grief!


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Published on January 26, 2020 07:00

January 25, 2020

The Billy Graham Of Weimar America


My 12 step meeting is literally next door to Masterpiece Cake Shop (of anti-gay fame) so as an act of resistance I always choose to take up their best parking spaces. It’s the little things…

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Published on January 25, 2020 13:52

January 24, 2020

Everybody Is Kung Flu Fighting

Tweets from a Harvard epidemiologist:



HOLY MOTHER OF GOD – the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad – never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating… #WuhanCoronovirus #CoronavirusOutbreak pic.twitter.com/6mmxIHL9Ue


— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 25, 2020



 


More:


8/ … SUMMARY: so what does this mean for the world??? We are now faced with the most virulent virus

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Published on January 24, 2020 23:21

Trump Marches For Life

A friend who was at the March For Life, and who knows nothing about President Trump’s walk-on/walk-off music, was flabbergasted that they were playing “House Of The Rising Sun” — about a New Orleans whorehouse — and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” to welcome and send off the president. Why these songs, at the March For Life?


Because Trump’s gonna Trump, no matter where he is. He goes about a lot of things clunkily, but he often manages to do the right thing anyway. It’s weird that he would show up at the March For Life using his standard music, which is really inappropriate, but the massively more important — and quintessentially Trumpy fact is that Trump was the first US president to speak to marchers, ever.


My view of his appearance today is that of the Baptist theologian Denny Burk:



When the president was running for office, I didn’t believe his promises about working to end abortion-on-demand. Today he became the first U.S. President to address the @March_for_Life. I’ve never been more grateful to be wrong about something.


/1 https://t.co/1tjJZHK1L3


— Denny Burk (@DennyBurk) January 24, 2020



Here is a link to the transcript of Trump’s March For Life speech. Excerpt:


All of us here understand an eternal truth: Every child is a precious and sacred gift from God. Together, we must protect, cherish, and defend the dignity and the sanctity of every human life.


When we see the image of a baby in the womb, we glimpse the majesty of God’s creation. When we hold a newborn in our arms, we know the endless love that each child brings to a family. When we watch a child grow, we see the splendor that radiates from each human soul. One life changes the world – from my family, and I can tell you, I send love, and I send great, great love – and from the first day in office, I have taken historic action to support America’s families and to protect the unborn.


And during my first week in office, I reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy and we issued a landmark pro-life rule to govern the use of Title X taxpayer funding. I notified Congress that I would veto any legislation that weakens pro-life policy or that encourages the destruction of human life.


Read it all.


I regret to say that you will not find a single national Democratic politician — certainly none of the Democratic presidential candidates — who could or would say the first lines in the passage I quoted above. Until today, you couldn’t even find a Republican president willing to come out and stand with the marchers. They addressed them by audio or video hookup.


Some of my fellow prolife friends are concerned that the prolife cause will suffer by being associated with Trump. It’s partly because of Trump’s particular controversy, but also because they believe — rightly — that the fight for the rights of the unborn ought to be above partisan politics. Yes, it should be — but we all know that prolife Democrats are extremely scarce. I’m lucky that the governor of Louisiana, John Bel Edwards, is one; it has a lot to do with why I was able to vote for him both times. But come on, let’s be honest: the Democratic Party is in the main uncompromisingly pro-abortion party.


I’m proud to be from the same state as another pro-life Democrat. According to the Washington Post:




Louisiana state Sen. Katrina Jackson, a Democrat, also will address the crowd, saying that while she disagrees with Trump on policies and is discouraged by his insults of people, she is “ecstatic” that a president will attend the march.






“We finally have a sitting president at the March for Life,” she said. “It doesn’t make him the face of it. It sets a precedent for future presidents to speak. It’s my prayer the president’s attendance doesn’t make it look partisan.”




 


More from that WaPo piece, by Michelle Boorstein:




Daniel K. Williams, a historian at the University of West Georgia who has written a book on the antiabortion movement, noted that the March for Life founder, the late Nellie Gray, was a pro-labor Democrat who worked in the Johnson administration. In the decades that followed, the abortion issue has become more partisan, he said.






“What we’re seeing is an exacerbation of partisan divides on both sides,” Williams said. “The activists of the 1970s would not have foreseen the pro-life movement be so aligned with one party.”




In the 1980s, Williams said, about one-third of Republican senators favored abortion rights, and surveys showed that a majority of Republican voters favored abortion rights. Today, nearly every Republican member of Congress is opposed to abortion rights. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey this week found 84 percent of Democrats identified as “pro-choice,” while 68 percent of Republicans identified as “pro-life.”




Read it all.


I don’t like that the prolife movement is almost entirely a GOP thing, but nobody forced Democratic lawmakers to abandon the unborn. Clearly state lawmakers like Gov. Edwards and Rep. Jackson have not done so, but when he signed the heartbeat bill last year — a bill written by a Louisiana Democrat! — John Bel Edwards torpedoed any chance that he would have a national political career.


So, I am genuinely surprised that Donald Trump has been so good on prolife issues, and that he came to the March For Life today. And if people worry that the march is becoming too associated with Republican politics, then they should not fault Trump for it, but should redouble efforts to get more Democrats to get involved. The fact that the prolife cause is seen as a Republican thing now is because with honorable exceptions like Gov. Edwards and Rep. Jackson, Republicans are almost the only ones who will stand with prolifers.


The president’s appearance at today’s march really does make things starker heading into November’s election, does it not?


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Published on January 24, 2020 12:51

Ice-Rink Robespierres


When you realize Trump is going to get re-elected. pic.twitter.com/Bb00ISFgqw


— Josiah Neeley

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Published on January 24, 2020 11:50

January 23, 2020

Breaking: Anglican Man Bites Dog

We are not used to seeing headlines like this about the Church of England:



 


Story in The Guardian:


The Church of England has stated that sex belongs only within heterosexual marriage, and that sex in gay or straight civil partnerships “falls short of God’s purpose for human beings”.


Bishops have issued pastoral guidance in response to the recent introduction to mixed-sex civil partnerships, which says: “For Christians, marriage – that is, the lifelong union between a man and a woman, contracted with the making of vows – remains the proper context for sexual activity.”


The church “seeks to uphold that standard” in its approach to civil partnerships, and “to affirm the value of committed, sexually abstinent friendships” within such partnerships.


It adds: “Sexual relationships outside heterosexual marriage are regarded as falling short of God’s purpose for human beings.”


A marvel! This is from the Church of England. The old girl is still capable of surprises. Good for the bishops. That’s stronger than I would have expected (and, as the Catholic UK reader who sent that item to me said, stronger than what one would expect these days from the Pope). Ah, but there is dissent:


Linda Woodhead, a professor in the department of politics, philosophy and religion at Lancaster University, said: “The C of E is unable to get over its fixation on homosexuality, which is driving the the national church into a position more like a fundamentalist sect and does not speak to the vast majority of younger people today.”


A “fundamentalist sect,” for believing what all Christian churches have believed for nearly 2,000 years, and what most Anglicans in the world today believe. If anybody here is a fundamentalist sect, it’s the liberal Anglicans.


The sad fact is, for a variety of reasons, all Christian churches, wherever they land on the morality and theology spectrum, are having trouble connecting with young people today. But it is a special conceit of progressive Christians that if only they make themselves more like the world, especially on sexual matters, the young will beat a path to their doors. How’s that working out for the Episcopal Church, the main American branch of world Anglicanism, which has gone super-progressive, and is still declining: average age, 57. 


It is also funny that progressive Christians within the various churches have been the ones who have put homosexuality front and center, and loudly — yet blame church conservatives for being obsessed with the matter, simply because they refuse to abandon Scripture and Tradition. I think of the older Baby Boomer priest at my Catholic parish in Fort Lauderdale, 1995-98, who preached at least two sermons on the evils of homophobia, and how the Church is so hung up about homosexuality. In 13 years of faithfully attending mass on Sundays and holy days, the only time I ever heard homosexuality spoken of from the pulpit was from this old dude banging on about how unhealthily obsessed the Church was over homosexuality.


It’s kind of like this:


“Good evening, I would like to order the rib eye, medium rare.”


“I’m sorry, sir, this is a seafood restaurant. We don’t serve steak.”


“But I want the rib eye.”


“Sir, this is a seafood restaurant.”


“Did you not hear me, waiter? I said I wanted beef. Bring me a steak!”


“Sir, I beg your pardon, but I cannot do that. We only have fish and shellfish.”


“BRING ME A STEAK! I came here tonight hungry. Steak is what I want. What is wrong with you that you will not let me have what I want to eat?”


“We have been here for a long time, sir, and have always been a seafood restaurant. Perhaps you would be happier, sir, at the steakhouse on the next block.”


“This is where I wanted to eat tonight, and I am entitled to steak! Why do you hate me so much that you would deny me what I want? Isn’t the customer always right?”


“Sir, here is our menu. Look, right here on these pages. There is fish, and there is shellfish. There is no beef anywhere on this menu. No beef, sir! You cannot have beef because it is not on the menu. There is no beef in this restaurant. We are a seafood restaurant, sir. If you do not wish to enjoy seafood, then you should dine elsewhere this evening. I cannot bring you a steak. That is final.”


“Waiter, I just don’t understand why you so obsessed with steak.”


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Published on January 23, 2020 20:45

Rod Dreher's Blog

Rod Dreher
Rod Dreher isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.
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