Rod Dreher's Blog, page 189

Tucker Vs. Vulture Capitalists

Watch that 11-minute segment from Tucker Carlson, ripping the spine right out of the back of billionaire hedge fund leader (and major GOP donor) Paul Singer. Carlson begins by talking about “vulture capitalism,” an aggressive strategy in which hedge fund managers buy up debt, or a stake in a company, then demand repayment, or force it to sell. Greg Palast wrote back in 2012 about how Mitt Romney’s hedge fund did that; Singer is also mentioned in Palast’s piece as a leader in this kind of capitalism. Carlson says this is not the free enterprise that we all learned about. It’s so bad that the UK banned it. Carlson says:

It couldn’t be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in the United States? The short answer: Because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our political process. Singer himself was the second largest donor to the Republican Party in 2016. He’s given millions to a super-PAC that supports Republican senators. You may never have heard of Paul Singer — which tells you a lot in itself — but in Washington, he’s rock-star famous. And that is why he is almost certainly paying a lower effective tax rate than your average fireman, just in case you were still wondering if our system is rigged. Oh yeah, it is.

Carlson sent producers to the small town of Sidney, Nebraska, which was headquarters of the sporting goods giant Cabela’s. Cabela’s was doing well economically

Sidney, Nebraska. Headquarters of Cabela’s. Cabela was quite profitable, but Paul Singer’s hedge fund saw a potential for profit. Singer bought a stake in Cabela’s, and forced it to merge with Bass Pro Shops. Singer doubled his money in one week, making about $100 million.  Cabela’s closed its Sidney headquarters. It was the town’s main employer, and lost nearly 2,000 jobs. Property values collapsed. People who could leave, did. Those who couldn’t are now living in the ruins of what was once a good town.

Cabela’s was profitable. It was not a distressed business. But Paul Singer, a billionaire three times over, saw money to be made there, and swooped in for his fortune. To hell with the people of Sidney, Nebraska.

At the end of the segment, Carlson says he reached out to Ben Sasse, one of Nebraska’s Republican senators, asking for a comment about what happened to Sidney. Sasse said nothing. Carlson said in researching the story, he found not one public word from Sasse about the fate of Sidney. But he did find that Sasse got the maximum contribution possible from Singer for his 2014 Senate run.

Here is a piece from a CNBC story in May, about a speech Singer gave to a Republican audience:

Republican megadonor and hedge fund executive Paul Singer went into attack mode at a dinner honoring Education Secretary Betsy DeVos this week, targeting what he described as a rising threat of socialism within the Democratic Party.

The comments offered a glimpse into the mentality of a powerful GOP donor as he decides how he’s going to contribute to the 2020 election. Singer is a billionaire and the founder of Elliott Management.

Singer, speaking at the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner on Wednesday, warned conservatives that policies pushed by Democratic presidential candidates pose a risk to U.S. economic growth under President Donald Trump.

“Yet despite all this, socialism is on the march again,” said Singer, who is chairman of the conservative think tank.

“They call it socialism, but it is more accurately described as left-wing statism lubricated by showers of free stuff promised by politicians who believe that money comes from a printing press rather than the productive efforts of businesspeople and workers,” he added.

“The productive efforts of businesspeople and workers”? The gall of that man, after what he did to the people of Sidney.

More from the CNBC story:

During the 2016 presidential election, Singer was a vocal opponent of then-candidate Trump and, a year earlier, was the financier of a conservative website that hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on the business executive-turned-Republican nominee for president.

Since Trump became president, Singer has donated to super PACs and committees that back the commander in chief. In October 2018, he spent $1 million on Future45, a super PAC dedicated to helping Trump, according to Federal Election Commission records. He also gave more than $500,000 to the Republican National Committee last cycle, which has put its resources into helping members of congress and reelecting the president.

Let me tell you something else about Republican megadonor Paul Singer. Here’s a clip from a 2016 story about how he took over candidate Marco Rubio’s finance operation in an effort to stop Trump:

Singer, who has a gay son, is part of a group of conservative Wall Street hedge fund managers who are vocal supporters of gay rights. In 2011, Singer and other donors urged Republican state senators in New York to support the passage of same-sex marriage legislation, raising vast sums money for their re-election. In 2012, he launched the American Unity super PAC for pro-gay rights Republican donors, and in 2013, the adjacent American Unity Fund, an advocacy and lobbying non-profit. The group aimed to spend $40 million this election cycle. “The Republican Party can be more of a big tent and this issue is part of that,” Singer told the New York Times in 2013.

In 2014, a few months after the Obergefell ruling, I attended a meeting with key GOP staffers from both the House and Senate side. I asked them what the Republicans in Congress were planning to do to protect religious liberty in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. The answer: nothing. It wasn’t on their agenda.

Why aren’t Congressional Republicans talking about religious liberty now, when it has come under fierce attack by liberals? I bet it has a lot to do with why Ben Sasse won’t say boo about what happened to his constituents in Sidney.

We should’t say that the GOP has done nothing. It’s just not true. It’s important that they are killing bad bills, like the Equality Act. And, my sources who pay attention to this stuff tell me that the party has done good things on much smaller bills. Plus, the Trump administration has been solid at the agency level. It’s neither fair nor correct to say that the GOP doesn’t care. If they weren’t in charge of the Senate, things would look much worse for religious liberty. That’s not nothing.

But religious liberty is not a priority for the Republicans, and they won’t expend real political capital to defend it. Consider this in light of the fact that the Republican Party has done nothing to restrain this kind of exploitative capitalism. To the contrary, it empowers vultures like Paul Singer who prey on defenseless people like the people of Sidney, while giving speeches about the dangers of socialism to conservative elites back on the East Coast. No wonder ordinary Republican voters were happy to see Trump upend the party’s establishment. The sad thing is, Trump won’t do anything to rein in the Paul Singers either. He just doesn’t have it in him, or the focus to get it done.

At some point though — sooner rather than later, I think — socially and religiously conservative folks are going to wonder if the economic cost of supporting the Party of Paul Singer outweighs any benefit from keeping the anti-Christian Democrats away from power. How important is religious liberty to the people of Sidney, who saw their town destroyed by the greed of a Republican Party megadonor? Maybe a lot — I don’t know them, obviously, but I’m betting that they’re church people — but to keep voting for the Paul Singer Republicans is a big damn ask. Tucker Carlson reports that the town went 80 percent for Trump in 2016. Will it in 2020? This is conservative, heartland America. And let’s face it: it has been betrayed.

This morning I’m finishing the chapter in my forthcoming book on the coming soft totalitarianism. This particular chapter has to do with the importance of watching what elites, intellectual and otherwise, say and do. It is jaw-dropping to read about how deaf and blind the Russian elites — in the state, in the aristocracy, and in the church — were to the suffering of the Russian people in the late imperial era. Some voices arose from inside elite circles, urging reform for the sake of saving the system. They were ignored. The Tsar and his closest advisers believed that doubling down on autocracy, and the Way We’ve Always Done Things, was the path forward. You see where that got him, and Russia. The revolution swept Russia’s conservative elites away — and turned the country into a prison camp for 70 years.

In this chapter, I discuss how Russian radicalism was confined to the intellectuals for the longest time, but the failures of the system — especially in response to a catastrophic 1891 famine — made more and more people start to think that the Marxists might have a point. In her great book The Origins Of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, explaining how conditions in both Germany and Russia paved the way for one-party rule, says that when people quit believing in institutions and traditional hierarchies, the road to totalitarianism becomes a lot clearer. When the leaders of those institutions and hierarchies — including the leadership class of capitalist institutions — reveal themselves to be untrustworthy, ordinary people won’t defend them when they come under attack, and may even join the attack themselves.

Again, Donald Trump is not going to take on the vulture capitalists. But the Republican Party had better find some candidates who will, while there is still time. The other day I wrote here about the parallels between the culture of pre-revolutionary Russia, and our own. Something is coming. And if it arrives, people like Paul Singer, and the party that does his bidding, will be wondering how on earth it happened to them. But the people out in Sidney, Nebraska, whose town was destroyed for the sake of filling Paul Singer’s pockets, and all those people in the heartland who have been devastated by the opioid epidemic, and the despair that fuels it — they won’t wonder. They won’t wonder at all.

It should not be the case that with the exception of Josh Hawley — who is off to a good start, but who needs to begin speaking in specifics — the only national politicians talking seriously about this stuff are Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and the party of open borders, abortion-is-a-sacrament, Drag Queen Story Hour, and transgenders in your kids’ locker room. Why is that? What is it going to take to wake up the Republican mandarins and make them see what’s happening in the country, before it’s too late for them, and for the rest of us?

I hope Tucker Carlson runs for president in 2024.

The post Tucker Vs. Vulture Capitalists appeared first on The American Conservative.

SJW Shock Troops Of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 classic The Origins Of Totalitarianism, reflects on an attitude among the elites that paved the way for Nazism and Communism:

In other words, the elites sided with the mob, because of Social Justice. And they didn’t even care that they were endorsing histories that were false. All history was false, right? If there is no heaven, where all the injustices of our mortal lives will be reckoned with, and all that is crooked will be made straight, then the demands of Social Justice require that we accept any lie, and affirm any practice, that evens the scales.

Sound familiar? She could be writing about university administrators, or big-city newspaper editors. I’m serious. The capitulations of elites in universities and media to the demands of the mob are a sign. Something is being prepared, whether they know it or not.

The post SJW Shock Troops Of Totalitarianism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Amanda Marcotte’s Trigglypuff Christmas

When I was a little kid, my father used to delight my sister and me by singing this ditty:

Maw and Paw went to the circus;

Paw got hit with a rolling pin.

Maw and Paw got even with the circus

They bought tickets, but they didn’t go in!

That came to mind when I read this Amanda Marcotte essay about how she’s allowed Donald Trump to steal her Christmas joy, such as it was. Excerpts:

I’m an atheist, and have been at least my whole adult life. So the concept of Christmas as a religious holiday has never had any hold on me. But for believers and non-believers alike in this country, it’s always been more of a secular holiday, at least in the United States. It’s  about celebrating family togetherness and a larger sense of the nation coming together in the spirit of joy and generosity.

But all that feels like a lie in Trump’s America.

Oh boy. It’s showtime at the Prytania! More:

For me, it’s personal. My family is mostly a bunch of Trump voters, sucked up into a vortex of propaganda and lies, unable even to admit basic facts about the world that run contrary to what their tribal politics dictate. That sort of thing is stressful on a normal day, but makes a mockery of the idea of familial love and harmony.

This isn’t a matter of political differences that can be set aside for the sake of the holiday. This is about not being able to make merry with people who think nothing of voting for a man who is on tape bragging about sexual assault, a man who cheats in elections and runs concentration camps on the border. A man whose racism has inspired a wave of terrorist violence, including in my hometown of El Paso, Texas.

To be sure, my partner and I had already, for the sake of our sanity, given up visiting relatives back in Texas for the holidays.

And all the kinfolks back in El Paso be like, “Make Bloody Marys ’cause we ALL WANT ONE!”

It goes on:

Family is a touchy subject and the spirit of communal joy seems like a joke. The only thing left is the materialism of the season. Which, to be fair, seems to be going full force. The pull of capitalism is such that, unless you can plead poverty, the annual round of gift exchanges will go on no matter how much the nation appears to be collapsing around us. Gift baskets, I have discovered, are the saving grace of the person who has to put the bare minimum into Christmas but whose heart is not in it. And unlike the  often baffling gifts people give you when they try to guess at what you might like, getting a box of cookies is usually pretty welcome.

I can sense the shaming, criticism and condescension coming my way, let me be clear: I am not a joyless person.

She’s a joyless person.

Read it all. 

Maybe she should call up Elie Mystal and Trigglypuff to see if they want to meet up on December 25 and drink baijiu-and-Sprite cocktails, and listen to “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” on tape loop all day long. Bet all those horrible Texas Trumpers down in El Paso are just real sorry not to be seeing Amanda.

Can you imagine letting a politician live so completely inside your head that you end up hating on Christmas? Miss Marcotte’s most recent book is titled Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself. I think we see the problem here, folks.

The post Amanda Marcotte’s Trigglypuff Christmas appeared first on The American Conservative.

When Opioids Come For Your Kids

The New York Times yesterday published a gripping story about how opioid addiction afflicted the lives of an astonishing number of graduates of the high school Class of 2000 in a small Ohio town. I rag on the Times all the time for its liberal bias, but this is the kind of gut-wrenching journalism that justifies my subscription. Here’s a screengrab:

Folks like to think that these things only happen to Other People — that it’s possible to build a wall high enough to keep this stuff out. Well, is there a social wall higher than that built by the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities of New York? Ha’aretz reports that opioid addiction is a significant probelm there. Excerpts:

Although Yehudah Benjamin understands the need for some families to shelter their children from being exposed to drugs, he points out that addiction does not stop at even “the most religious background.”

Looking back at her children’s experience with addiction, Sarah Benjamin believes that those who turn to drugs do so out of deep pain, often stemming from a sense of isolation or lack of connection. “When people are in pain, they do what they can to ease the pain,” she says. “You’d have to live in a cave not to know [drugs] exist.”

It is that same pain that drove Elana “Ellie” Forman to addiction, starting at her Orthodox high school in Teaneck, New Jersey. “A lot of it was fear,” the 25-year-old recalls. “I didn’t feel like I fit in, I didn’t feel connected to my peers at the time, so I was nervous about high school.”

Regular therapy sessions didn’t improve things, and at college she developed an eating disorder and started smoking weed, taking prescription pills and using cocaine. “Anything that anyone would offer me, if they told me it was going to make me feel better — I would take it,” she says.

Forman defines her state of mind at the time as a “spiritual void. I felt like I wasn’t pretty enough, or I wasn’t good enough, or I wasn’t going to achieve anything with my life. It’s a lack of spiritual connection to the universe, to other people, to a higher power. It’s just a disconnect.”

After a few years, Forman reached breaking point and decided to seek help. “I wasn’t functioning sober, I wasn’t functioning when I was high, and I was either going to get help or I was going to kill myself,” she recalls. “I just impulsively texted my parents and I was like, ‘I’m doing drugs, I need help.’”

It took about two months until she checked herself into rehab. But Forman’s parents, Lianne and Etiel, had immediately gone to work, trying to find other families in the same situation, professionals or “anybody who could give us an idea of what we were dealing with,” recounts Lianne.

“We kind of struggled to find anybody else who was dealing with this, and that’s when it occurred to us: People just don’t talk about this,” she says. “Obviously, given national statistics, there’s no way there weren’t other families dealing with the same issue.”

More:

“Giving them the tools [to deal with refusing drugs],” Behrman says, “doesn’t mean they’re going to try it out.” However, he also argues that being an Orthodox Jew could contribute to prevention. The more an individual has strong roots in their community and doesn’t feel a sense of detachment, the lesser the chances of their turning to drugs, he believes.

“We have a great support system in the Orthodox community,” Behrman says. “We have large families, with uncles and aunts who can be supportive. But there is also a downside to that: When a kid [in a family] of 10 becomes addicted to drugs, he exposes nine siblings and 50 cousins to it.”

For Kasriel Benjamin, seeing other family members suffer from addiction may have been a key risk factor.

“Kasriel couldn’t have had more personal experience with drug use and what it does to a family,” his mother Sarah says. “He knew, and he still overdosed and died.”

Read it all.

What Behrman says about the strength of a close-knit, religious community strikes me as true, but, as he also says, there are downsides. I think, though, that the closeness and the religiosity doesn’t make any difference if people within the community are too ashamed to talk about it.

I dunno, the older I get, the more I see how common it is for people to create psychological and social barriers so they don’t have to confront serious problems. I think about how my late sister, who heroically fought cancer for 19 months, and her husband never once talked about the possibility that she might die — this, even though she was almost skeletal at the time of her sudden passing from a burst blood clot. This is the downside of her strength of character: they were both afraid that if they admitted the possibility she might die, that everything would fall apart. It has been almost ten years since her cancer diagnosis, and the more distance we travel between now and then, the more I recognize how much our family system had internalized the idea that if we followed the rules and stayed close to each other, really bad things wouldn’t happen to us. Cancer, of course, is not drug addiction, but I think that we were all living in a kind of fantasy world about being able to control the world.

Over the Thanksgiving break, I ran into a friend who was home for the holiday. She is a prosecutor in a rural county. I asked her how she liked her job, as I hadn’t seen her since she took it. She said it’s a real challenge. What has amazed her is coming face to face with the realities of poverty, the collapse of family structures, and addiction. She had not realized until taking this job the extent to which middle-class people wall off this reality. She told me the most difficult thing is seeing the little children of these wrecked people who show up in court for trial, and realizing that absent a miracle, there is no way that those kids are going to break free of the appalling gravity of their parents’ derelict culture.

The thing is, all it takes is a serious drug addiction to shatter the illusion of middle-class stability. And, as the Orthodox Jews in the Ha’aretz story say, being religious and conservative is no guarantee.

Has anything like this happened to you or to your family? If so, what do you wish you had done differently to deal with it? What did you do right? It has not hit my family, thank God, but it’s everywhere, and I want to know this stuff now, so that I can protect my family, and not sit complacently behind a wall of illusions.

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Religious Liberty And ‘White Nationalism’

One doesn’t expect much in the way of fairness in a Rolling Stone article about Evangelicalism, so there shouldn’t be any surprises in this one, titled “The Christian Right Worships Donald Trump”. We know well that there are a huge number of white Evangelicals who adore Trump, but the headline — which the piece’s author, Alex Morris, almost certainly didn’t write — is wildly misleading, making no distinction between Evangelicals and non-Evangelical conservative Christians, or between Evangelicals who are cheerleaders for Trump, and those who support him unenthusiastically, but because he’s better on the issues they most care about than Democrats are.

The article says more about its author, a progressive Evangelical from a conservative Evangelical family in Alabama, than it does about the state of Christian political thought on the Right. The last section of the piece recalls a painful conversation with family members back home (who consented to being recorded) talking about politics and Trump. Morris plainly loves these people, and is understandably vexed by their political and theological beliefs. As a religious conservative who is not nor ever has been Evangelical, I find some of what they say to be weird (e.g., that Christians shouldn’t care about the environment because Jesus is coming soon: “Alex, the Earth is going to be all burned up anyway,” my aunt says quietly. “It’s in the Bible.”). But I agree with some of it, e.g., “I don’t think he’s godly, Alex,” my aunt tells me. … “But with the abortion issue and the gay-rights issue, Trump’s on biblical ground with his views. I appreciate that about him.”).

Morris’s mom sent him an Evangelical book about the Apocalypse, and says, “If you want to know what the religious right thinks, read this book.” Well, I have no doubt that quite a few conservative Evangelicals and charismatics believe that stuff, and that every religious conservative Mrs. Morris knows believes that stuff. But you simply cannot say that every Trump-voting Christian conservative in America believes it. If you are a reader of Rolling Stone, and you come away from this piece thinking that you have learned the recipe for the secret sauce of Trump-supporting Christians.

I appreciate how painful this topic is for Alex Morris. This graf struck me:

I was in my early twenties, living in London, when my mother called to inform me that if I did not cast my absentee ballot for George W. Bush, I could not possibly be a real Christian. She was adamant, unyielding. So entwined had the policies of the Republican Party become with her faith that it seemed to me she could no longer untangle them.

That is nuts. No wonder the younger Morris reacted so strongly against this Republican-Party-at-prayer definition of the church! Readers should understand, however, that this is the reality for only some conservative Christians.

Again, though, you don’t go to Rolling Stone looking for insight about the complex reasons for why Christian conservatives vote for a man like Trump. I would not have bothered commenting on the article, which is really not much more than its author’s deconversion story away from conservative Evangelicalism … except for the remarks in it by Gregory Thornbury.

Until 2017, Thornbury was president of The King’s College, a conservative Evangelical liberal arts school based in Manhattan. Thornbury, an ordained Southern Baptist pastor, left the college in 2018; I don’t know why, and have not been able to find anything online that explains it. He now works as an arts fundraiser in New York, and in his public statements has moved rather significantly to the theological left. He is, in a word, woke.

Believe me, I have Evangelical friends who can’t stand Donald Trump, and who are anguished by what the Trump era’s politics have done and are doing to their churches. I respect them for the stances they’ve taken, and they know what doing so entails: accepting the fact that Democrats, if they come to power, will push for legislation and policies that are bad for the pro-life cause, and bad for religious liberty. Among my anti-Trump Evangelical friends, the belief is that Trump is even worse for the country and for the church, and they are conscience-bound to oppose him. I believe that honorable Christians can take that stance, and that honorable Christians can side with Trump. I also believe there are terrible reasons for Christians to support or oppose Trump.

Here, from the Rolling Stone story, is one of them:

“The white nationalism of fundamentalism was sleeping there like a latent gene, and it just came roaring back with a vengeance,” says Thornbury. In Trump’s America, “ ‘religious liberty’ is code for protection of white, Western cultural heritage.”

That leftist cant infuriates me, especially because it comes from a person who, until recently, was leader of a conservative Evangelical institution, which gives it a lot of credibility in the eyes of the Left — this, despite the fact that it is a shocking lie, and a malicious slander. I wanted to make sure Thornbury hadn’t been misquoted before I wrote about it, so I posted this on Twitter:

@greg_thornbury, do you believe that all of us who have demonstrated concern for the erosion of religious liberty are white nationalists? Because that sure seems to be what you said. Please clarify.

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) December 3, 2019

Thornbury responded:

1st, if I/you/we have not had a serious discussion w/ s/o like @andrehenry or @lisasharper a/b how white nationalism affects POC, please start there. 2nd, I believe it is insidious – dangerous like an odorless toxic gas – if we think we haven’t been affected by it, check again

— Gregory Thornbury (@greg_thornbury) December 3, 2019

Are all concerns about religious liberty individually part of this milieu? No. Take giving #RealityWinner her Bible back in jail for being a patriot. Who’s speaking up for her? I’m saying that the concerns in the aggregate tend to underscore a relatively narrow set of concerns…

— Gregory Thornbury (@greg_thornbury) December 3, 2019

…that are of concern to the white conservative community. My point was that this is the key to explain $funding$ to the people & institutions who talk about these matters, often very selectively. My mind has been changed on these matters by talking to POC.

— Gregory Thornbury (@greg_thornbury) December 3, 2019

 

If you’d like to talk about these matters somewhere other than Twitter, let’s do it with POC who think on these matters in the room/on the call. Hope this helps. I won’t be on Twitter much for the rest of tonight / tomorrow due to work, but I hope you’re well & in good heart.

— Gregory Thornbury (@greg_thornbury) December 3, 2019

No, let’s not. What’s the point? He’s a grown man, the former president of a college. He has to have people of color around him to explain and defend his views on religious liberty? Who does that? Seems to me that Thornbury is invoking them here as talismans to ward off a hard (for him) question that has nothing at all to do with race. Maybe he knows that he made a big mistake here with his religious liberty remark, and he’s trying to shield himself from criticism by dragging persons of color into the argument.

Of course “white nationalism” affects persons of color — but that is not what I asked. Thornbury told a national magazine that “religious liberty” is a code word for white nationalism. Period. And when I asked him about it, he obfuscated. He surely must know, deep down, that he has slandered good people here, and spoken a baldfaced lie. That’s why he’s trying to turn this into a racial issue, when it is not.

The religious liberty questions that motivate conservative Christian voters all have to do with the clash between LGBT rights and religious liberty. Note well: I’m not saying those are the only religious liberty questions in the public square today (ask Muslims about the travel ban, for example). I’m saying that these are the religious liberty issues that drive conservative Christian political support for Trump. Race has nothing whatsoever to do with any of it. The gay rights vs. religious liberty court battles ahead are going to affect black, Latino, and Asian churches and religious institutions as much as they will affect white ones.

Moreover, it is appalling, just appalling, to characterize the work of religious liberty-focused public interest law firms like Alliance Defending Freedom and Becket (which advocates for non-Christian plaintiffs too) as a smokescreen for white nationalism. In Holt v. Hobbs (2015), a Becket lawyer won a Supreme Court victory on behalf of the religious liberty of a black Muslim inmate. Where’s the white nationalism there? ADF, which represents Christian clients exclusively, won a religious liberty case last year for former Atlanta fire chief Kelvin Cochran … who is black. Where’s the white nationalism there?

It doesn’t exist.

Go to the Alliance Defending Freedom website, and search its cases from top to bottom. You will find zero evidence of white nationalism. Same at the Becket site. These are the top lawyers on the front lines of religious liberty legal battles. To be clear, their cases don’t all revolve around the gay rights issue. The point is, there is no white nationalism anywhere in their work. What Thornbury said is a disgusting smear. In his tweeted answers to me, he wrote,  “My point was that this is the key to explain $funding$ to the people & institutions who talk about these matters, often very selectively.” There are no more prominent institutions that “talk about these matters” than ADF and Becket. Does Thornbury seriously expect people to believe that people who give to those non-profit public interest law firms do so to advance the cause of white nationalism?

Maybe Thornbury, as a college president, had a problem with potential TKC donors on this front. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that he did. But even if that were true, by what right does he trash everyone who works for and donates on behalf of religious liberty, including Catholics? One of the most articulate, committed, and brilliant institutional advocates for religious liberty is Sherif Girgis, who is a Catholic of Egyptian parentage. This guy is the servant of white nationalism? Really?

If Thornbury wants to say that “religious liberty” is a code word for “homophobia” — that’s the usual charge from the Left — I would say that he’s wrong, but at least it would make logical sense from a certain perspective. But that’s not what he said. He said it’s “white nationalism.”

If he wants to say that white Evangelicalism has a “white nationalism” problem, I would need to know more about the specifics of the charge before I said he’s right or wrong about that — he might well have a point. Others have made the same charge. It seems clear to me that a lot of white Evangelicalism is tied up in an unhealthy way with nationalism, but that’s not the same thing as racialism. But again, that’s not what he said. He told Rolling Stone magazine that “‘religious liberty’ is code for protection of white, Western cultural heritage.”

Just like that, every one of us Christians — fundamentalists, charismatics, Evangelicals, Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Orthodox, all of us — concerned about the state forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to fund something that violates their conscience, or worried about small-town florists like Barronelle Stutzman being driven out of business and financially ruined because she wouldn’t do flowers for a gay wedding, or fearing for the accreditation of Christian colleges that hold to Biblical orthodoxy on sexual orientation and gender identity matters — and who vote on that, or who direct our charitable giving to organizations and institutions who share our concerns? Hey, we’re all closeted Richard Spencers, according to the recent past president of The King’s College.

Am I making too big a deal of this? Maybe. But I know that Thornbury’s words are going to be weaponized by progressives to justify their relentless and unprincipled crusade against the First Amendment guarantee of religious liberty — “Even a former conservative Evangelical college president admits that…” — and to smear we who stand up for that bedrock constitutional freedom as racists or racist-adjacent. If he wants to tear down the college that he led by trashing its financial supporters — “Who is an evangelical college president going to talk to, to raise $10 million a year? Right-wing crazy people” he told the magazine — that’s his business, and the school’s, though I feel sorry for the current leadership of King’s, which will now have to live and work in New York City with the stigma of its recent past president saying that the school is a pet cause for rich conservative lunatics. The few people I know who are associated with TKC are not in the Trump universe by conviction, or anything else. One of its more prominent professors is Anthony Bradley, a black scholar who denounced my Benedict Option book as a tool of white supremacy, or some idiotic thing like that. If rich right-wing crazy people are pouring money into The King’s College to fund Trumpism, it seems to me that they’re not getting much of a return on investment.

If Thornbury wants to allege that conservative Evangelicalism has lost its mind and its soul by supporting Trump, that’s fine — it’s not a hard argument to make, but at this point, neither is it a novel one. The Rolling Stone piece offers nothing that we haven’t read a thousand other places by now. But “‘religious liberty is code for protection of white, Western cultural heritage'”?! Look, Thornbury’s old friend Russell Moore is paid by the Southern Baptist Convention to lobby and advocate for religious liberty, as head of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Does Thornbury really believe that Russell Moore — Russell Moore, for pity’s sake! — is in any way, shape, or form a white nationalist dupe?

Get woke, go crazy, I guess. I don’t know what Thornbury stands to gain with any of this, though I suppose nothing launders the C.V. of a conservative Evangelical now working as an arts fundraiser in New York City like going on record denouncing your old church community, and the people who called you friend, as a pack of Jesus-freak crypto-Kluckers. His leaving The King’s College, whether it was voluntary or he was pushed out, must have been some kind of ultra-bitter parting of the ways.

UPDATE: A couple of readers, in the comments, have objected to Thornbury’s indicating that wanting to preserve “Western cultural heritage” is immoral. It was a weird thing for the former president of a liberal arts college to say. I went to the King’s College website to see what they’re teaching there out of the Western cultural tradition. It looks like a good school. Here are some screenshots:

It all looks pretty great to me. Here is a liberal arts college in one of the great cities of the West, giving its undergraduate students a solid background in Western thought and culture. Why is this wrong? What does any of this have to do with religious liberty?

If Thornbury believes that there’s something racist  with wanting to protect “Western cultural heritage” (which, prior to America in the 20th century, is white by definition, because Africans and Asians weren’t in the West in significant numbers), well, then it’s probably best that he doesn’t run a liberal arts college.

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‘See How You Like This, Bigot’

I received an interesting e-mail over the weekend. I share a portion of it with you with the sender’s permission. Let me sum it up before we get to the end of it, which I’ll quote.

The reader, a white male Millennial, said he was raised in a secular left environment, by liberal Boomers. Mom was an activist, dad was into the counterculture. Six marriages between them. They divorced when the reader was seven; he grew up shuttling between their homes.

He grew up thinking that “organized religion” was the cause of most of the world’s problems, and that specifically, Christian Republicans were the most to blame. Though white, he comes from a mixed-race clan, and grew up with one foot in the black community.

He studied education in college, and said that many of the materials they studied were preoccupied with “white privilege” and woke ideology. He didn’t think it was a problem, because it conformed to the view of the world that he’d been raised with. He ended up in the social work field, which was ideologically the same.

In college, he converted to Christianity, which radically changed some of his values. He now identifies as a conservative, though he has never voted Republican in a presidential race. He says he’s “kind of confused politically” because of all this.

He says that he’s growing increasingly angry by the relentless wokeness in popular culture. He gave a couple of recent examples of having a strong reaction at the overt liberal messaging in TV shows he and his wife watched. He says they talked about it, and she convinced him that the liberal messaging was based somewhat in reality (e.g., racism and sexism really do exist). What surprised him was how “black and white” his thinking has become on these topics, as a result of being on the defensive all the time against the overwhelming progressive messaging he sees.

The reader concludes:

I certainly feel like the progressive ideology is being forced down my throat at every turn. I have unfollowed basically everyone on social media and stopped using it except for work purposes because the stuff people posted made me like them less (both on the left and right). I can’t count how many times I have heard people make flippant comments about the taint white men and the patriarchy have left on our society. I don’t feel like I can express my thoughts about any polarizing topic because I will be dismissed due to my sex and skin color. It really is maddening. In many ways I align with left social principles (care for the poor, minorities, women) but more and more I feel like to support anything on the left is to support something that sees me and people like me as the problem and therefore of less value than other human beings.

I don’t know what to do with this. I certainly don’t want to be “pro-white, pro-male” in some sort of political manner, but I do feel like the left is forcing me into a corner I don’t want to be in. Of course, I recognize I don’t have to let that happen to me, and I don’t want to just sit here and say I’m helplessly being polarized by the rhetoric coming from the left. I won’t ever go down the alt-right road. I don’t want to watch shows and movies and feel so sensitive to what seems like a political agenda or start disliking friends who are left leaning and that I may even agree with about a lot of things! Even if they aren’t militant, I still feel threatened. I have a friend who is letting her 8 year old present as the opposite gender. She announced it on Facebook and got showered with praise. I have said nothing. How can I? I’m just a hater and bigot, right? I have some serious concerns about all of that, but I would be wasting my breath and inviting a lot of stress into my life if I confronted that.

I’m not sure how to conclude this which is why I just ranted a little right there. I’m not completely sure why I’m even writing this to you. I’m probably going to vote for Trump in 2020, so maybe this is about that in some way. I think he is a disaster of a human being and president, but you know, he doesn’t hate me and everything I stand for. I didn’t think the left did even as recently as 2016, but I don’t know what else to think based on their rhetoric and actions. But it’s deeper than just who I vote for. It’s permeating my whole life. I can’t even enjoy a good tv show without getting all fired up about some perceived propaganda. I say perceived because I think I’m looking for it more than I did in the past. In some ways I’m frustrated with myself even.

Boy oh boy, is this ever true. And it’s invisible to so very many on the Left, because like this reader before his religious conversion, their worldview is completely normal. This must be what it was like to be a leftist, or a racial or religious minority prior to the 1960s and 1970s. I mean, the Sixties came from somewhere. The most interesting literature of the 1950s came from writers who were struggling against the conformism of the Eisenhower era.

But now, the Left is the cultural establishment. To watch many TV shows and movies as a social or political conservative is to be acutely aware of the propagandizing element. Or not: I think most people I know who identify as conservative absorb a lot of this stuff without even thinking about it. If, like me, you have a household that is not plugged in to cable TV, and that maintains significant distance from popular culture (though we watch movies and TV in our family, my wife and I heavily curate it), you see it more acutely. I’ve told the story in this space in the past about how going from watching eight to ten movies each week as a professional film critic, to watching maybe three or four a month after I changed jobs following the birth of my first child, forced an unexpected awareness of how much I had become numb to a lot of this messaging, simply by virtue of frequent exposure to it. Even though I was at the time a cultural, religious, and political conservative, and was a lot more “woke” in that way than most, immersing myself in popular culture simply to do my job changed my way of seeing the world. It’s a lesson I made sure to remember as I raised my children.

The reader’s story about how the overwhelming, increasingly militant progressivism of popular culture, and how that is replicated in the lives of many people he knows, rings true to me — as does his frustration with himself over having developed reactionary instincts out of self-defense. I think this is becoming common. Last month here in Louisiana, a few days before our state election, I asked my mom who she thought would win the elections in our home parish. She said she had no idea, because nobody talks about that stuff anymore. She said that for most of her life, people were willing to talk about politics, and were able to do so without getting angry about it, most of the time. Not anymore. Most people just don’t talk about it at all unless they already know that the people to whom they’re talking already agree with them. The idea is that it’s simply too risky to talk about politics — even local politics, which aren’t ideological at all — because you never know when somebody might blow up.

That’s how I’ve lived for years, as a matter of prudence, but it really astonished me to hear that it has taken hold in my rural hometown. The reader’s letter made me think about how much I cherish the friendship I have with liberals like Jon F and Franklin Evans, who disagree with my views on many things, but who value our friendship more than they value making political points (and I regard them the same way). Still, my sense is that people who can do that are becoming much fewer in American life. My mom’s anecdote is not data, but it tells me that the spirit of intense polarization is becoming quite common now, even coming to dominate places where you wouldn’t expect it.

In 2017, Gallup found that nearly 2/3 of Americans who identify with a political party say that they would not want their children to marry someone of the opposite political party. My first thought at that data was, “That’s ridiculous.” Then I thought about how political “mixed marriages” would introduce an element of conflict into family gatherings that nobody really wants. Yeah, it’s stupid, but this is the world we have created for ourselves.

I don’t want to make a “pox on both your houses” point, though, because I don’t think that reflects the world as it is. To be clear, it is certainly true that people on both sides of the political divide demonize their opponents. And this is wrong! “They did it first!” is not an excuse. That said, what the reader sees is that in our popular culture, wokeness is the dominant ideology, and it is preached constantly. I subscribe to The New York Times and read it daily. It’s the parish newsletter of the Church of Wokeness. If the Times was your only source of news, you would think that white male heterosexual Christians were the source of evil in the modern world. I exaggerate only slightly. You’ll recall, maybe, the leaked transcript of the Times‘s internal town meeting earlier this year, in which the unnamed staffer challenged executive editor Dean Baquet, telling him that racism is in everything about American life, and that the Times ought to bring the racial angle into everything it covers. I’d bet my paycheck that the person saying that is a Millennial or Zoomer. The important thing about that exchange is that Baquet — a black man, a Boomer, and a lifelong journalist — did not challenge the assertion at all.

This is really important. Baquet behaved like university administrators behave when confronted by progressive militants on campus. For whatever reason or reasons, they cave to the illiberal left, who turn up the extremism and the emotionalism. Now, the reader who sent me that letter concedes that there are truthful and important things that the Left has to say, and that it can be important that their perspective gets an airing in popular culture. But he has become much less willing to hear it because the Left is also so shrill and extreme and relentless about demonizing people like him that he feels pushed into a reactionary stance that does not come naturally to him, simply as a matter of self-respect and self-defense.

Again, I get that, and share a lot of that myself. For example, it ought to be possible to talk seriously about the problems of police treatment of black Americans without having to take the stance that all police officers are racist scum who see their jobs as maintaining white supremacy. It ought to be possible to talk about how yes, LGBT people have to deal with some discrimination, without having to take the position that anything view less extreme than the militant activists’ opinions is “hate,” and must be suppressed. It ought to be possible to talk about the real problem of global warming without taking the idiotic Greta Thunberg view that, as she stated this past weekend in a syndicated op-ed that bore her byline, “Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all.”

Once again, we see the same thing on the Right, with the hardcore Trump supporters saying that any criticism of Trump from the Right is a manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome, or Orange Man Bad-ism. But we’re not talking about ideological policing among the Right here. We’re talking about something massively more influential.

I don’t see an answer here, and I expect most liberal readers to deny the thing, or to admit it, but to resort to whataboutism in an effort to dismiss it. Still, it is worth talking about, because this dynamic is close to the heart of our social disintegration. You have in this letter the testimony of a young man who was raised a liberal, in a mixed-race family, and who acknowledges that the Left has some important and truthful insights to offer, and that conservatives need to hear. But he is also finding himself increasingly unwilling to hear them, because they come as part of a broader message that demonizes people like him. He has been pushed to the point where he is disinclined even to open his mind to any of this, because to do so, he feels that he has to buy the entire vicious narrative — a narrative that, in his view, is racist, sexist, and anti-religious, and, if it keeps growing, is going to make life in America for people like him unlivable.

In his must-read recent book about the cult of social justice, The Madness of Crowds, the UK gay conservative Douglas Murray writes, in a passage criticizing pro-LGBT advocacy journalism:

Perhaps it requires someone who is gay to say this, but there are times when such ‘news’ reporting doesn’t feel like news reporting at all. Rather it seems that some type of message is being sent out either to the public or to people whom the media believe to be in positions of power. This goes beyond ‘This will be good for you’ and nearer to the realm of ‘See how you like this, bigot.’ There are days when you wonder how heterosexuals feel about the growing insistence with which gay stories are crow-barred into any and all areas of news.

Yes, exactly. This is what the reader is saying to me, not only about news reporting, but about popular culture. Woke cultural politics are crow-barred into any and all areas of news and entertainment. And it’s radicalizing to the Right people who don’t want to be.

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The Russian Twilight Of Late Imperial America

“You know what they say about Russia,” said my Moscow translator and guide. “Once you’ve been here, you’re going to come back. You can’t get it out of your head.”

I’ve been home from Russia for about a month, and I’m starting to understand what he means. Or rather, I don’t understand it (yet), but I feel it, and feel it with more strength the more distance there is between me and that country.

This weekend I’ve been reading, for my research purposes, The Icon and the Axe, James Billington’s revered 1966 history of Russian culture. Billington was a distinguished Russia scholar and Librarian of Congress from 1987 until his retirement in 2015. He died last year at 89. It has been a revelation to read in his work about the culture of Russia between 1890 and the 1917 revolution. It seems eerily like our own in some pretty fundamental ways. I want to tell you a little bit about this.

According to Billington, in the 1890s, younger Russian elites became frustrated with the country’s long struggle towards constitutional liberalism, especially when the reactionary Tsar Alexander III took over from his assassinated father, a (relative) liberal who had ended serfdom. The new generation of intellectuals and artists moved into two different directions: dialectical materialism (that is, Marxism, whose leading exponent at the time was Gyorgi Plekhanov), and transcendental idealism, along the lines of the visionary Christian thinker Vladimir Soloviev. Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, wanted to revitalize society through working-class revolution. Soloviev, an Orthodox Christian, but one strongly influenced by Western Christianity, sought social renaissance through a return to a kind of religious mysticism.

Writes Billington, “The materialists claimed to be the heirs to the traditions of the iconoclastic Sixties [1860s] ; the idealists claimed to be developing the traditions of Dostoevsky’s aesthetic and religious reaction to iconoclasm.” What drove them was  “the exasperation of a new student generation with the subjectivism, pessimism, and introspection of the age of small deeds.” Writes Billington, the “new radicals of both right and left” were both seeking “some new philosophic bedrock on which to stand.”

Reading this, I thought about how old-fashioned liberalism in our own polity is in decline, and how the younger generations on both the Left and the Right want something more radical. I shouldn’t have to say this, but I’ll do it: obviously there are massive differences between a liberal constitutional republic, as the US has been since its founding, and an autocracy, as Russia always had been. The parallel, though, is that in 1890s Russia, the kind of people who were young liberals a generation earlier were now becoming young radicals. In the US, all the ideological energy among the young is with increasingly illiberal versions of Left and Right. We may all miss liberalism once it’s gone, but it’s hard to find convinced, persuasive defenders today.

(One important aspect of our own situation is that the liberal elites who run the institutions, especially academic and media, often cave to left-wing illiberalism, showing that they don’t have the courage of their professed convictions. And yet, they are worried to death about right-wing illiberalism! I don’t blame them for their concern, given what they say they believe, but their blindness to their weakness on their own left flank also blinds them to a force — leftist illiberalism — that drives the same thing on the Right. I was listening today to an NPR host talk about the baffling menace of right-wing illiberalism, and wanted to shout, “You moron, you don’t even understand how you people are oxygen to its fire!”)

Anyway, back to Russia. Billington says that three forces shaped Russian culture and society from 1890 until the 1917 Revolution and just beyond: Prometheanism, sensualism, and apocalypticism.

Prometheanism, the author says, is “the belief that man – when truly aware of his true powers – is capable of totally transforming the world in which he lives.” The intellectual and artistic elites really did believe that anything was possible through the exercise of man’s will, through the use of science and technology. Orthodox Christianity was a dry husk. In St. Petersburg, an intellectual movement known as “God-building” arose. It was a form of the social gospel, transferring the “God-seeking” of Christianity to concrete action on earth, and to revolution. The God-Builders figured out that religion, in which they didn’t believe, was a powerful force for change. Instead of God, they began worshipping the People, and, like the Jacobins before them, tried to create a humanistic pseudo-religion. Anatoly Lunacharsky, one of their leaders (and later a Soviet official), taught that Marxists should think of their project in explicitly religious terms. (As I blogged not long ago, in talking about Yuri Slezkine’s recent history of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks, materialists to the marrow, all thought in quasi-religious ways.) Maxim Gorky wrote in his 1908 novel A Confession this prayer to “the almighty, immortal people!”:

“Thou art my God and the creator of all gods. … And there shall be no other gods in the world but thee, for thou art the one God that creates miracles!”

Lenin hated all religion, and thought that any talk of religion weakened the Marxist position. The God-Builders’ thought didn’t survive the Revolution. Still, it is interesting to think of God-Building as a version of the this-worldly Social Gospel of progressive Christianity, or of the human-centered Moralistic Therapeutic Deism common even in non-progressive churches, or of any of the new forms of self-generated spirituality arising among the post-Christian generation. (The religion writer Tara Isabella Burton has a good book coming out next year about this spirituality, which is extremely diverse, but united by the shared belief that religion is something Man generates within himself to meet his felt spiritual needs, including a desire for transcendence.)

Billington says along with this Promethean idealism of the early 20th century came “a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture.” He says that “the increasing preoccupation with sexual matters was a logical development of the romantic preoccupation with the will that had become characteristic of the emancipated aristocratic intelligentsia.”

In other words, in the first half of the 19th century, liberal Russian aristocrats had drunk deeply of European Romanticism, which emphasized individual passion and experience over abstract rationalism. It makes sense that they would turn to the individual’s sexual experiences as a source of wisdom and spiritual revival. The abolition of censorship in Russia after 1905 opened the door to erotic literature. There began to appear among intellectual and social elites the idea that utopia would come into being through sexual permissiveness. As Billington points out, Rasputin was totally debauched, but the aristocrats who murdered him were possibly even more sexually corrupt.

The dominant role that sensualism of our own age, and the role pornography, widely distributed and easily available on the Internet, plays in advancing it, hardly needs to be established. It is interesting, though, to think of how Silicon Valley — the epicenter of 21st century Prometheanism — is ruled by a fantastically wealthy elite that is also notably debauched (see Emily Chang’s Vanity Fair piece, “Inside Silicon Valley’s Secret, Orgiastic Dark Side”). It is not difficult to see the parallels between the Prometheanism and sensualism of pre-revolutionary Russian culture, and our own Homo Deus techno-utopianism.

Here’s something different, though. The “the third ideological current of the age” was apocalypticism – and, at the 1917 revolution, the most relevant of all. Yes, religious apocalypticism was strong with the Orthodox peasantry, but a different kind of apocalypticism entranced elites. It’s stunning to read this august historian writing about the enthusiasm of Russian artists and intellectuals of that era for Satan. The devil was the ultimate Romantic, self-willed figure, after all, giving the sensualism — the sexual permissiveness, and the general craving for sensual experience, a strong grounding in the demonic.

Billington writes:

“This sense of the satanic presence led to a brooding and apocalyptic mentality. Apocalypticism, the third key characteristic of the era, was in many ways the by-product of the unresolved psychological tension between the other two: Prometheanism and sensualism. How, after all, can one reconcile great expectations with petty preoccupations? an intellectual belief in a coming utopia and a simultaneous personal involvement in debauchery? One way of holding on to both commitments was to convince oneself with a certain amount of Schadenfreude that apocalyptical change was in the offing, that the sensualism of today forebodes the transformation of tomorrow. As Diaghilev put it during the revolutionary year of 1905 (in a toast delivered in connection with the exhibit of three thousand Russian historical portraits which he organized at the Tauride Palace):

“We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, without fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.”

Diaghilev, a renown Russian art critic (and founder of the Ballets Russe), had spent the previous summer going through old Russian palaces and aristocratic mansions selecting canvases for the exhibition. That experience, plus his awareness of what was going on in the country — mass upheaval in 1905 caused a significant weakening of Tsarist autocracy — taught Diaghilev that something truly revolutionary was on its way. It is characteristic of the time, and of the faith people then had in Progress, that Diaghilev, in giving that toast at a banquet at Moscow’s Hotel Metropol, was certain that it was bound to be something great.

What he, and Russia, got was the Bolshevik yoke — state-induced famine, the gulag archipelago, the Terror, the destruction of country. But they didn’t know that was coming. Billington says that many intellectuals welcomed the Revolution as the advent of a New Jerusalem. Andrei Bely even wrote a novel celebrating the Revolution, and titled it, Christ Is Risen — the traditional exclamation at Orthodox Easter services, and through the Paschal season.

Billington emphasizes that the late imperial period’s obsession with Prometheanism and sensualism was “essentially anti-Christian.” Mind you, he’s writing as a scholar of history and culture, not as a Christian polemicist. It’s simply true. And our own 21st-century American obsession with the same since at least the 1960s is a sign that we have passed into the post-Christian period. Again and again, I say unto you: the secular prophet Philip Rieff got it all right in his book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which came out the same years at The Icon And The Axe. Rieff knew that Christianity, as the narrative that bound and inspired the West, was over — and that the Sexual Revolution, which was just beginning, thanks in large part to the technological innovation of the birth control pill, was the handwriting on the wall declaring the new order.

Billington says that Prometheanism and sensualism were equally strong in Europe, but apocalypticism was a Russian thing. He writes:

Each of the three attitudes of the age was an extension of an idea already present among the anguished aristocratic philosophers of the nineteenth century: Prometheanism made explicit the transfer from God to man of the title to dominion over the external world; sensualism brought to the surface their secret fascination with the world of immediate physiological satisfaction and with its demonic patron; apocalypticism represented an agonizing, often masochistic clinging to the Judeo-Christian idea of retribution by those unable to believe in salvation.

Historian Yuri Slezkine writes powerfully about that final point, in his book The House Of Government. He quotes from Bolshevik sources, writing in the pre-revolutionary period, talking about the coming revolution as an apocalypse that will settle accounts with the rich through apocalyptic violence.

In our situation, what we lack at the present moment is a strong apocalypticism. It’s certainly present to some degree. Pop Christianity goes through periodic ruminations on End Times prophetic scenarios. For Evangelicals, it was the best-selling Late Great Planet Earth in the 1970s, and the Left Behind series in the 1990s. For Catholics, the abiding interest in visions of the Virgin Mary (e.g., Medjugorje) both stokes and expresses this sentiment. More recently, my own Benedict Option is apocalyptic, not in a Jesus-is-coming way, and certainly not in prophesying epochal violence, but rather in diagnosing an end to the Christian era parallel to the demise of paganism in fourth-century Rome. It’s a gentle apocalypse, but from a spiritual point of view, an apocalypse it certainly is. History is not determined in advance, which is why I propose that a Christianity that has been preserved through the long night of decline and decay can provide the seeds of resurrection. In fact, if post-communist Russia is going to have a chance at thriving, it’s going to have to go deep into its Orthodox Christian roots.

Still, Christian apocalypticism has not reached a fever pitch, or had any meaningful political expressions, not that I can see. Secular apocalypticism is present among the more extreme environmental activists. I think the cult of Social Justice is “an agonizing, often masochistic clinging to the Judeo-Christian idea of retribution” by those who are unable to believe in forgiveness, or to believe in a world to come in which God will deliver ultimate justice. If you have seen the Sexual Revolution, and the women’s movement, and the Civil Rights movement, and you have observed that people remain broken and unhappy, you can either rethink your premises in light of human fallibility, or you can double down. If you cannot or will not believe in some version of the Judeo-Christian idea of Original Sin, and insist, despite experience and evidence, that Man is born good, but corrupted by society, then the only path left to you is to get radical about punishing the evildoers whose presence among us prevents Utopia.

It is clear to me that progressivism is moving more and more towards social-justice apocalypticism, but until reading that passage in Billington today, I had not quite made the connection that the hysteria of the SJWs is connected inextricably to the inability of homo Deus, and homo coitus, to bring about the New Jerusalem in this life. I intuited the connection, but Billington knitted together the reading I’ve been doing about the pseudo-religious dimension of the Bolshevik revolution with the exalted stance we moderns take toward technology, sexuality, and the choosing individual.

What event or events do you think would raise apocalypticism — religious and secular — to the same level of influence that Prometheanism and sensualism have in our society today? A sustained period of catastrophic weather, and resulting mass suffering, that can be plausibly connected to global warming could do it. A deadly global pandemic might. So could a new Great Depression. My point is, apocalypticism is present but latent — for now. The book I’m working on, which doesn’t yet have a title, is intended to make conservatives (and others) aware of the present dangers of slipping into a soft version of the totalitarianism that overtook Russia, and the countries it occupied after the Second World War. The Bolsheviks didn’t come from nowhere.

It was amazing to me, though by now it shouldn’t be, to realize that we haven’t learned a damn thing from the history of the 20th century. It is hard to imagine anybody of Diaghilev’s stature making that kind of toast today, but then again, there might be some tech billionaire sitting at a dinner party in Mountain View tonight, raising his glass to the Brave New World being born from the Valley’s creative destruction.

Yeah, I haven’t been able to get Russia out of my head, all right.

 

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Leftists Attack The ‘1619 Project’

In the “Idea Laundering” post the other day, I mentioned an excellent interview on the World Socialist Web Site with Princeton historian James McPherson, one of the top Civil War scholars in the nation, in which McPherson tore apart The New York Times‘s ballyhooed “1619 Project.” That project, as regular readers will recall, is a massive effort by the newspaper to “reframe” (its word) the American founding around slavery. In the interview, McPherson basically argued that the project’s claims are woke nonsense. Excerpt:

Q. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead writer and leader of the 1619 Project, includes a statement in her essay—and I would say that this is the thesis of the project—that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”

A. Yes, I saw that too. It does not make very much sense to me. I suppose she’s using DNA metaphorically. She argues that racism is the central theme of American history. It is certainly part of the history. But again, I think it lacks context, lacks perspective on the entire course of slavery and how slavery began and how slavery in the United States was hardly unique. And racial convictions, or “anti-other” convictions, have been central to many societies.

But the idea that racism is a permanent condition, well that’s just not true. And it also doesn’t account for the countervailing tendencies in American history as well. Because opposition to slavery, and opposition to racism, has also been an important theme in American history.

The WSWS has published a second interview with a leading US historian, Brown University emeritus professor Gordon Wood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the American Revolution. He’s even tougher on the 1619 Project than Prof. McPherson. Excerpts:

Q. Let me begin by asking you your initial reaction to the 1619 Project. When did you learn about it?

A. Well, I was surprised when I opened my Sunday New York Times in August and found the magazine containing the project. I had no warning about this. I read the first essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which alleges that the Revolution occurred primarily because of the Americans’ desire to save their slaves. She claims the British were on the warpath against the slave trade and slavery and that rebellion was the only hope for American slavery. This made the American Revolution out to be like the Civil War, where the South seceded to save and protect slavery, and that the Americans 70 years earlier revolted to protect their institution of slavery. I just couldn’t believe this.

I was surprised, as many other people were, by the scope of this thing, especially since it’s going to become the basis for high school education and has the authority of the New York Times behind it, and yet it is so wrong in so many ways.

More:

Q. Can you discuss the relationship between the American Revolution and the institution of slavery?

A. One of the things that I have emphasized in my writing is how many southerners and northerners in 1776 thought slavery was on its last legs and that it would naturally die away. You can find quotation after quotation from people seriously thinking that slavery was going to wither away in several decades. Now we know they couldn’t have been more wrong. But they lived with illusions and were so wrong about so many things. We may be living with illusions too. One of the big lessons of history is to realize how the past doesn’t know its future. We know how the story turned out, and we somehow assume they should know what we know, but they don’t, of course. They don’t know their future any more than we know our future, and so many of them thought that slavery would die away, and at first there was considerable evidence that that was indeed the case.

At the time of the Revolution, the Virginians had more slaves than they knew what to do with, so they were eager to end the international slave trade. But the Georgians and the South Carolinians weren’t ready to do that yet. That was one of the compromises that came out of the Constitutional Convention. The Deep South was given 20 years to import more slaves, but most Americans were confident that the despicable transatlantic slave trade was definitely going to end in 1808.

Q. Under the Jefferson administration?

A. Yes, it was set in the Constitution at 20 years, but everyone knew this would be ended because nearly everyone knew that this was a barbaric thing, importing people and so on. Many thought that ending the slave trade would set slavery itself on the road to extinction. Of course, they were wrong.

I think the important point to make about slavery is that it had existed for thousands of years without substantial criticism, and it existed all over the New World. It also existed elsewhere in the world. Western Europe had already more or less done away with slavery. Perhaps there was nothing elsewhere comparable to the plantation slavery that existed in the New World, but slavery was widely prevalent in Africa and Asia. There is still slavery today in the world.

And it existed in all of these places without substantial criticism. Then suddenly in the middle of the 18th century you begin to get some isolated Quakers coming out against it. But it’s the American Revolution that makes it a problem for the world. And the first real anti-slave movement takes place in North America. So this is what’s missed by these essays in the 1619 Project.

Wood says that “slavery grows stronger after the Revolution, but it’s concentrated in the South,” but something radical happened in the North after the Revolution: there, “the massive movement against slavery was unprecedented in the history of the world. So to somehow turn this around and make the Revolution a means of preserving slavery is strange and contrary to the evidence.”

One more quote from the interview:

Q. The 1619 Project claims basically that nothing has ever gotten any better. That it’s as bad now as it was during slavery, and instead what you’re describing is a very changed world…

A. Imagine the inequalities that existed before the Revolution. Not just in wealth—I mean, we have that now—but in the way in which people were treated. Consider the huge number of people who were servants of some kind. I just think that people need to know just how bad the Ancién Regime was. In France, we always had this Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities view of the society, with a nobleman riding through the village and running over children and so on. But similar kinds of brutalities and cruelties existed in the English-speaking world in the way common people were treated. In England, there must have been 200 capital crimes on the books. Consequently, juries became somewhat reluctant to convict to hanging a person for stealing a handkerchief. So the convict was sent as a bonded servant to the colonies, 50,000 of them. And then when the American Revolution occurs, Australia becomes the replacement.

I don’t think people realize just what a cruel and brutal world existed in the Ancién Regime, in the premodern societies of the West, not just for slaves, but for lots of people who were considered the mean or lowly sort. And they don’t appreciate what a radical message is involved in declaring that all men are created equal and what that message means for our obsession with education, and the implications of that for our society.

I hope you will read the whole thing. Wood is defending the radicalism of the American Revolution. His socialist interviewer, Tom Mackaman, underscores that point, saying that the American Revolution was certainly not a socialist revolution, but in its time, represented a world-historical step forward in humanity’s liberation.

WSWS published a third interview with a professional historian, James Oakes of New York University, who thinks The 1619 Project is what you get when “neo-liberalism” meets “liberal guilt.” More:

Q. The formulation that behind debates over race are struggles over power struck me in relationship to the present as well, and in particular the promotion by the 1619 Project of racialist politics, which is certainly once again a cornerstone of the Democratic Party.

A. Here I agree with my friend Adolph Reed [black political scientist at Penn — RD]. Identity is very much the ideology of the professional-managerial class. They prefer to talk about identity over capitalism and the inequities of capitalism. We have an atrocious wealth gap in this country. It’s not a black-white wealth gap. It’s a wealth gap. But if you keep rephrasing it as black-white, and shift it off to a racial argument, you undermine the possibility of building a working-class coalition, which by definition would be disproportionately black, disproportionately female, disproportionately Latino, and still probably majority white. That’s the kind of working-class coalition that identity politics tends to erase.

More:

Q. Can you address the role of identity politics on the campus? How is it to try to do so serious work under these conditions?

A. Well, my sense is that among graduate students the identitarians stay away from me, and they badger the students who are interested in political and economic history. They have a sense of their own superiority. The political historians tend to feel besieged.

The reflection of identity politics in the curriculum is the primacy of cultural history. There was a time, a long, long time ago, when a “diverse history faculty” meant that you had an economic historian, a political historian, a social historian, a historian of the American Revolution, of the Civil War, and so on. And now a diverse history faculty means a women’s historian, a gay historian, a Chinese-American historian, a Latino historian. So it’s a completely different kind of diversity.

On a global scale the benefit of this has been tremendous. We have more—and we should have more—African history, Latin American history, Asian history, than we ever have. Within US history it has produced narrow faculties in which everybody is basically writing the same thing. And so you don’t bump into the economic historian at the mailbox and say “Is it true that all the wealth came from slavery,” and have them say, “that’s ridiculous,” and explain why it can’t be true.

Q. Another aspect of the way the 1619 Project presents history is to imply that it is a uniquely American phenomenon, leaving out the long history of chattel slavery, the history of slavery in the Caribbean.

A. And they erase Africa from the African slave trade. They claim that Africans were stolen and kidnapped from Africa. Well, they were purchased by these kidnappers in Africa. Everybody’s hands were dirty. And this is another aspect of the tendency to reify race because you’re attempting to isolate a racial group that was also complicit. This is conspicuous only because the obsession with complicity is so overwhelming in the political culture right now, but also as reflected in the 1619 Project. Hypocrisy and complicity are basically the two great attacks. Again, not a critique of capitalism. It’s a critique of hypocrisy and complicity. Here I agree with Genovese, who once said that “hypocrites are a dime a dozen.” Hypocrisy doesn’t interest me as a critique, nor does complicity.

By now it ought to be clear why the World Socialist Web Site is savaging The 1619 Project. But if you’re still missing the point, here’s the WSWS editorial that explains it. Excerpt:

Despite the pretense of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race.

More:

Hannah-Jones does not view Lincoln as “the Great Emancipator,” as the freed slaves called him in the 1860s, but as a garden-variety racist who held “black people [as] the obstacle to national unity.” The author simply disregards Lincoln’s own words—for example, the Gettysburg Address and the magisterial Second Inaugural Address—as well as the books written by historians such as Eric Foner, James McPherson, Allen  Guelzo, David Donald, Ronald C. White, Stephen Oates, Richard Carwardine and many others that demonstrate Lincoln’s emergence as a revolutionary leader fully committed to the destruction of slavery.

But an honest portrayal of Lincoln would contradict Hannah-Jones’ claims that “black Americans fought back alone” to “make America a democracy.” So too would a single solitary mention, anywhere in the magazine, of the 2.2 million Union soldiers who fought and the 365,000 who died to end slavery.

Boom! Thank you for mentioning the Union dead, whose sacrifice for the defeat of the Confederacy is demeaned and dismissed by the Times ideologues.

Heaven knows that I’m no socialist, but it’s clear that they correctly understand that the woke left’s obsession with identity politics, and the total capitulation of liberal institutions (like the media, and universities) to left-wing identity politics, makes it much harder to build the kind of coalitions necessary to defeat what they see as capitalist exploitation. In fact, in his interview, Oakes, a top historian of 19th Century America, talks about how in the years before the Civil War, the Democratic Party in the North, in an effort to hold on to power, embraced racism in a strong way. If they broke with the Southern Democrats, they would lose national power … but if they endorsed slavery, they would alienate their voters. So they tried to split the difference by affirming racist views and policies, while not endorsing slavery.

Did you know this? I did not. In fact, in all three interviews, I learned things about American history that I had not known. I’m grateful to the WSWS for having the fortitude to seek these scholars out for interviews. Mind you, these three men are at the top of their field, so you have to wonder why no mainstream journalists bothered to reach out to them to get their takes on the 1619 Project — especially given that they explain in detail why its premises and conclusions are so absurd.

To be fair, conservative journalists (like me) could have done this, and now that I’ve seen the excellent work Tom Mackaman has produced from his interviews, I’m kicking myself for not coming up with the idea myself. I wonder why no other conservative journalists did? (If they did, then I apologize — I’m not aware of it.) Thinking about this, I suspect there is a certain demoralization here, or, less pejoratively, prudence. If any conservative publications addressed the 1619 Project when it debuted, they denounced it as an identitarian ideological project (I certainly did), but may also have figured that it was pointless to go after it further, as nobody inclined to believe in the Project’s mission and claims would pay the slightest attention to criticism from the Right.

That’s not an excuse, but it is, I think, an explanation. What’s more, I suspect that a certain fatalism has settled in among conservatives on these matters — that is, a feeling that identity politics ideology has captured the institutions so thoroughly that fighting back can seem futile.

For liberal journalists and commenters, it’s easier to understand why they wouldn’t think to search out the opinions of leading historians who criticize The 1619 Project: because either they agree with the Project, or they don’t want to be seen disagreeing with it. Just today I was talking with a friend about the WSWS essays, and told him that the 1619 Project, which he had not seen, was an attempt by the Times to say that slavery is at the core of the American founding. My friend said that even if the trio of scholars is correct about the fatal flaws in the Project, it is no bad thing for us to spend more time thinking and talking about slavery.

I strongly objected. I think this is emotivist and therapeutic. For one thing, is there any topic in American history that we talk about more than slavery and the Civil War? This is understandable, as along with the Founding, the Civil War, which resolved the slavery question, is the central event of US history. Our two most consequential presidents are Washington and Lincoln, because of that. But how we think about slavery, especially in historical context, matters immensely. As Orwell and others who wrote about 20th century totalitarianism said, whoever controls a culture’s collective memory controls the culture. The New York Times is sending the 1619 Project material all over the country, to high schools. It is an identity politics project, and it matters that this is how the Founding of America is going to be learned and remembered by a new generation. These interviews explain why.

The socialists who put out WSWS understand that something vital for their movement is at stake here. If identity politics, and not class conflict (as Marxists say) becomes the standard by which we understand the American founding, then socialism will not get very far in America. To be sure, many, and maybe even most, contemporary American socialists also accept without objection all the usual identity politics stances. (The late Italian political theorist Augusto Del Noce had an explanation for this, saying, in essence, that the failure of Marxist economics by the 1960s caused a new generation of leftist to take up cultural politics instead.) I don’t see how on earth these identity-politics socialists are going to put together the kind of class-based political coalition that can win out over capital. Capitalists know this too, which is no doubt why they’re so heavily invested in “diversity, inclusion and equity.”

My guess too is that the socialists who run that website might have figured that being on the Left might have gained them more credibility among left-liberals, and shielded them from the kind of attacks conservative critics of the 1619 Project would have received. Well, surprise! Here’s one of the responses to the socialists’ challenge from 1619 Project founder and director Nikole Hannah-Jones:

Trump supporters have never harassed me and insulted my intelligence as much as white men claiming to be socialists. You all have truly revealed yourselves for the anti-black folks you really are.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) November 27, 2019

Anyway, look, by all means read the three interviews on the radical website. Lots there to think about — things you wouldn’t have heard or read in our woke liberal media. I wonder if the leadership of the Times will bother to read these interviews. And please, you think too about what small magazines and websites bring to our public debate and discourse. They — we — sometimes see things invisible to the mainstream, and say things that are taboo to them.

The post Leftists Attack The ‘1619 Project’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

News From Real-Life Benedict Options

François Nollé, with the French edition of “The Benedict Option”

A year and a half ago, when I spoke at the annual Journées Paysannes conference in France — the JPs are a national association of French Catholic agrarians — I met a young man named François Nollé. He and his wife Blandine lived with a handful of other laity to settle into La Bénisson-Dieu (Blessed By God), an “eco-hamlet,” or small settlement, in which the residents lived out their faith, and in particular, the teachings of Pope Francis in his ecological encyclical Laudato Si. The idea is to build a community of prayer, education, and service integrated more holistically into the local environment. The local ordinary, the Bishop of Lyon, granted them permission to take over the remains of a 12th century abbey, and build an experimental faith community there in the countryside northwest of Lyon. “We are now 10 homes on the site, about 15 adults and about 30 children,” François says. And they have opened a school for the kids.

Here’s my interview with François Nollé.

RD: How did Le Bénisson-Dieu get started?

FN: At the origin of our project, there are three families. My wife and I knew the other two families for a long time, but they did not know each other. The path towards the foundation of a Christian eco-hamlet was different for each family.

For me, it goes back a long way: I can say that my parents were anti-conformist, and at the same time profoundly Catholic. They did not belong to a well-defined environment, and went beyond the right-left, conservative-progressive cleavage; that made me interpret the world without some bias and a priori. In addition, my mother also fed and cared for me according to Hildegarde of Bingen’s medicine, raising my attention to nature and how to respect her. After my re-conversion through charismatic Catholic movements, and during my studies, I gave up this lifestyle received during my childhood, adopting the lifestyle of the consumer and individualistic society, which rebounded on the way I practiced my Catholic faith.

A determinant event, allowing a deepening of my re-conversion, was my marriage with Blandine in 2011 and the wait for our first child. My wife then fell very ill, with a cyst in the throat filled with water and fat like an orange. The allopathic doctors told us that they could do nothing before childbirth, the puncture of the cyst being impossible. But Blandine clearly could not give birth in her feverish state of constant fatigue. We had then, on a council of friends, to turn to naturopathic medicines, and went to see, full of suspicion, an iridologist (method of diagnosis via the iris) and chromatherapist (method of care through colored lights projected on certain areas of the skin).

We thought we were dealing with a charlatan, but were forced to reconsider by our experience. This doctor diagnosed a bowel and circulatory problem due to, among other things, cow’s milk intolerance, and advised Blandine to change her diet. After the chromatherapy session, the cyst resolved itself in two weeks. What impressed us was the fact that this doctor did not seek first to eliminate the symptoms of the disease, but that he sought the cause; and that he took into account for that the totality of the human person. We did not change the diet immediately, and the cyst came back. A second effective session of chromatherapy sounded the death knell of our old way of life.

We began by modifying our diet, putting into practice the advices of Hildegarde of Bingen, for ourselves, and also for our children. Blandine then followed a naturopathic training for two years, to learn how to treat us more naturally. And so, little by little, we gradually changed the whole of our habits and our way of life: the way of dressing, the household and cosmetic products we used, the way of educating and teaching our children, the political life and the spiritual life that we practiced. In short, we asked each aspect of our way of life to find out what consequences, beneficial or harmful, they could have on ourselves, others, nature, and our relationship to God. We then felt a strong need for coherence, which we did not find in Paris, where we lived.

It was then that in 2015, we discovered the existence, via the movement of the Colibris initiated for 40 years by Pierre Rahbi (a non-Christian philosopher farmer who made emerge the ecological movement in the civil society), of eco-villages that sought to re-found society from below, and in which ecology was both human and environmental. We took a free training course they offered to help found “oasis”, as they call it: communal and ecological living spaces in the middle of the individualist and capitalist desert. We thought it was great, but church in the center of these eco-villages was lacking. At the same time, the encyclical Laudato Si was published by Pope Francis, and allowed us to unify all our research by the idea of integral ecology, which means that, by analogy, all aspects of a way of life are interrelated. The conjunction of the discovery of eco-villages and the publication of the encyclical gave us the impetus to found what we call a Christian eco-hamlet, which is a kind of synthesis between the initiatives of the Colibris and the integral ecology of Pope Francis.

In parallel with our path, two friendly families experienced similar things, from a bodily point of view (various diseases), political and intellectual (the great marches against “marriage for all” in France, and the intense reflections that followed) and spiritual (their marriage). These various events have gradually made them change paradigms and ways of life. We gathered at Christmas 2015 to give birth to a common charter, and sent it to all the bishops of France, to propose to them to set up this church project in their diocese. We have received many favorable, encouraging answers, and suggestions of places to settle.

We chose La Bénisson-Dieu, a small village in the heart of France, close to the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Paray-le-Monial), and whose name alone is an evangelical program. “La Bénisson-Dieu”, the name of our village, means literally “Blessed be God” or “Blessed by God”. It’s built around an old Cistercian monastery, the “Blessing of God” abbey, founded by Saint Bernard in 1138, of which there remains only the church; the rest was destroyed after the French Revolution. The diocese of Lyon owns four houses in the village, which will be used, when they are renovated in an ecological way, as homes for people in difficulty. We did not want to found a project by isolating ourselves totally from society, but we wanted to integrate an already existing village to revitalize it from the inside. We have been living in the village since August 2016, having bought houses there, and since then, other families and friends have joined us to live with us. Everyone has found a job in the area, while keeping time for the life of this small Cistercian ecological family community.

A community child by the Cistercian church

 When you say that you and your wife Blandine were seeking more “coherence” than you found in Paris, what do you mean?

In Paris, we felt that we could not make our different lifestyles cohere.

First, we felt too much distance between our urban way of life and the contact with nature we were looking for; in large cities, there are too many intermediaries between man and nature. And the urban jungle is no more livable than the Amazon jungle; especially for our children. We had to return to something more balanced, which for us was the village of a few hundred inhabitants, where nature and culture can interact in a more harmonious way.

Secondly, we experienced a break between the Sunday Mass and the rest of the week: we had the impression that our Sunday celebrations were totally abstract and uncorrelated to what we lived every day, and that the parish community had a community only in name. We aspired to find a true Christian community, which supports itself on a daily basis, and for which Sunday Mass would be the recapitulation of all that has been lived together during the week.

These two points required to start from scratch, to rebuild a village and parish community that corresponds to our aspirations. And that’s what we’re trying to experience now with the other nine homes in our eco-hamlet!

Country lane near the village (Olga Valeska)

What is a typical day like in your community?

I will describe a typical week rather than a typical day at La Bénisson-Dieu. Every morning, at 6:30 am, those who can meet for a time of Eucharist adoration, then for Lauds at 7 am. Then, from Monday to Friday, those who work outside the village go about their business. At 8:15 am, the schoolchildren leave by horse-drawn cart for the school we opened last September, which is located in the nearby village, three kilometres from La Bénisson-Dieu. Some of us give one afternoon a week to teach lessons to the schoolchildren at the school, in addition to the teacher who takes care of it full-time.

Once a week, mothers meet to pray and reflect together on their children’s education. On Friday mornings, those who heat with wood go to the forest to cut wood. On Saturday afternoons, we organize participatory workshops at each other’s homes. On Saturday evenings, we meet for a worship vigil or a game night. On Sunday midday, we often have a shared meal together; then we pray Vespers at 5:30 pm.

Every two weeks, we meet for a village council, in order to take together the decisions that concern us all. In addition to that, there are all the unorganized moments when we help the old neighbor whose tree collapsed on her henhouse, when we look after the children of a family that is sick, or a couple that needs to meet in pairs, when we share the harvest from our gardens, when we can fruits and vegetables together for the winter. In short, a normal village life!

Olga Valeska

What advice would you give to people who are interested in doing something like La Bénnison Dieu in their own lives? What are the conceptual barriers within themselves that they have to overcome? What are the practical ones?

To change your lifestyle, the most necessary quality is patience: it is impossible to change all your habits at once, and you will encounter many disappointments. But it is worth it.

I think that the most difficult conceptual barrier to overcome is the fear of living in community. It is easy to see the disadvantages and possible abuses, especially with the abuses of authority and sexual abuse that have taken place in the new “charismatic” communities. But on the other hand, we do not see the disadvantages and excesses of the individualistic and consumerist society. And once you have tasted the kindness of being able to provide services between neighbors, of being able to have a good time every day, of being able to count on each other, of being able to spontaneously share meals, believe me, you can no longer do without them. We try to protect ourselves against the excesses of new communities by not pooling finances, and by preserving the intimacy and autonomy of each family; but at the same time we reject contemporary individualism, which prevents people from developing ties of dependence between themselves, which is what they are meant to do, however!

The most difficult practical barrier to overcome is, in my opinion, the fear of losing one’s material, psychological and spiritual comfort. However, here again, we only see the disadvantages of a simpler and more sober life, and we do not see all the advantages. My current life allows me to practice the Christian virtues much more than any prayer group I have ever attended in the big cities!

There is also a form of spirituality that is a great obstacle to life change, and that consists in thinking that the spiritual life is totally independent of the life we lead every day. For example, we think it is quite possible and compatible to work in a company that commits social and environmental crimes while being Catholic: what matters is to pray and go to Mass, and so spirituality is totally detached from concrete life; but who does not see that going to Mass while making the world less good is not compatible? Our religion is the only religion of the incarnation; what we do every day is fundamental in God’s plan of salvation. It is the whole social doctrine of the Church that must be rediscovered and put into practice in order to achieve true coherence in our spirituality.

In talking to people about the Benedict Option, I find that some people say that the Benedict Option cannot work unless everybody can do the same thing. Not everybody can move to a small French village and live in community with other families (they say); therefore, the Benedict Option is unrealistic. What do you say to that?

It is for this reason that I like the legend of the Hummingbird, which I remind for those who do not know it: there was a forest fire in the Amazon, and the animals of the jungle watched, appalled, their living environment was choked by smoke — except for a small hummingbird, which was struggling to go back and forth between the river and the blaze, to deposit his little drop of water there. The other animals began to mock him by telling him that what he was doing was useless. The hummingbird answered: “Yes, but I am doing my part.” After that, all the animals started to work, and put out the fire together.

Of course, things will only really change when the majority of us change; but that is no excuse not to start; because what will make others change is you, who through your change of lifestyle, will attract and inspire others to do the same. Change from below is transmitted as a virus, and must function as an epidemic.

Moreover, the quantity paradigm is not necessarily the best indicator: saints are far from being the majority in the world, and yet they are the ones who transform the world the most, in an invisible way. We must follow their example, renouncing the idea that we are to be the savior of the world (there is a certain Jesus who has already assumed this role), and doing things to our measure, locally.

View of the church

We must be aware that a change in lifestyle is possible everywhere, even (and especially!) in the city (although it is more difficult in the city, in my opinion). In France, there are eco-hamlets, eco-villages, eco-neighborhoods, as diverse and varied as the people who launched these projects. The basis of such a project is obviously the fact of finding a simpler, more sober, and more convivial life. The most difficult thing is to find other people with whom to live this conversion; because the issue is first and foremost a community one, and not just about environmental performance. Nine out of 10 projects fail because of what is called the “human factor”. Finding a strong and balanced group is much more difficult than finding a place or money for projects. It is possible for you to experience what we are experiencing where you are, but it requires so many changes in habits, and such resistance to the pressure of the surrounding society, that sometimes the simplest thing is to leave and recreate something from scratch elsewhere.

Finally, there are several ways to change things; I see three main ways: from below, from the middle, or from above. From below, it is all the small human communities that are formed to make a difference locally, to their full potential. From the middle, it is, for example, companies that can make a difference in the way they interact with their suppliers and customers; or journalists or artists, who have a broader influence than just local. From above, it is the politicians who enact the laws that will have an impact on the whole chain. None of these three ways of changing things is superior to the other; it is simply up to each person to discern to which of the three they feel called (it is possible to act at all three levels!).

What kind of life do you foresee for your children as they grow into adulthood?

It is tempting to think that, as the world gets worse and worse, my children will live in a world even worse than mine; there will probably be even more violence, moral disorder, ignorance, political mistakes. But I’m not sure that’s the right way to look at it.

I am part of a generation that has received little from the generation of its parents. We know how to do nothing with our hands, we are left to ourselves, desiring transhumanism because we are diminished beings. That’s why we took it in hand, with friends, to launch this eco-hamlet: to rediscover a lost conviviality, to learn to do things with our hands again.

But the transition is so long and costly that I tend to think that, like Moses, we will not see the promised land. We will walk in the desert for 40 years; what motivates us is precisely to know that our children may see the promised land. By rebuilding a real village life, by passing on to them know-how and deep knowledge, a healthy lifestyle and an incarnate spirituality, we hope to enable them to live in a more livable world than ours.

Each generation must live its life as if it were going to live the end of the world, and at the same time as if humanity still had a thousand years ahead of it; it is a tension that is present in the very Gospel. Evil takes different forms, and is to be fought in each generation. Our children will not escape it, but we will have tried to give them the weapons to face this mission in the most serene way possible.

How can Christians in the US and elsewhere contact you to find out more about your project?

Our email address is: ecohameaubenissondieu -at – lilo.org

You can write to us in English.

We also opened a website on a Christian crowdfunding site: https://www.credofunding.fr/en/ecole-laudato-si-benisson-dieu

The English page describes our different projects, and gives a particular focus on the school we have opened. It is possible to support us by making a donation. Thank you very much!

[end of interview]

Isn’t that marvelous? I strongly encourage any American Christians interested in doing something like this, or the agrarian life more generally to go to the Journées Paysannes annual meeting, on Feb 16-17, 2020.

It’s in the village of Souvigny, which is not far from La Bénisson-Dieu. Sounds like a trip. I went two years ago, and let me tell you, it’s an occasion of great joy, meeting real French farmers and food artisans who live in the countryside, and who are serious about their faith.

In other news from Benedict Option communities, I heard this week from some Polish friends. There’s going to be a Benedict Option event in Warsaw in a couple of weeks:

 

I also received an e-mail from Father Włodzimierz Zatorski, a Benedictine monk at Poland’s Tyniec abbey, not far from Krakow. He has a dream of establishing a Benedict Option intentional community for laity and at least two priests to serve their spiritual needs. Father Wlodzimierz wrote to say that on November 22, they legally established the Foundation Opcja Benedykta (the Benedict Option Foundation). Now they can raise money to make it happen. They will be searching for a place. Father Wlodzimierz and I had a long conversation about how concerned he is about the future of spiritual life in Poland. This project he imagines will be an initiative to meet the challenges of the current moment. I’ll tell you more about it when I hear from him — and how you readers interested in building a Ben Op community in Poland can help.

Finally, I have a new video from my old friends the Tipi Loschi, the glorious Italian Catholic community on the shores of the Adriatic. I wrote about them and their charismatic leader, Marco Sermarini, in The Benedict Option. They are the most ideal example of a lay Ben Op community I have yet to see. It’s full of children, and light, and life, and joy. And it’s growing so big that they need help expanding. They’ve just created this video. When you watch it, make sure you have the subtitles on:

These are the dearest people to me. Please help if you can. Here’s a donate page, but if you want to ask questions first, write to them at scuolachesterton — at — mail.com.

So many great Benedict Option things happening in the world now. I know another superb initiative underway in Italy, but it’s still not public yet. Just wait! If you have anything going on that the rest of us should know about, give us a shout.

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Elie Mystal’s Woke Thanksgiving

Retiring to my chambers to ride out a tryptophan fugue, I saw this essay from The Nation on Twitter. “Surely this is a parody,” I thought. Oh, but no! Here’s the headline and subhed:

Wow. Somewhere in America, there are some Mystal family members who are pouring themselves extra wine to fortify themselves in the face of their yappy, rude, woke kinsman. Here’s part of what the Progressive Grinch Who Ruined Thanksgiving had to say:

We stand on the precipice of losing our American character to the forces of authoritarianism and bigotry. For many people, this holiday season will be the last face-to-face encounter with family members before the most consequential election of our lifetimes. And yet, many people are desperate to pass the potatoes without starting any uncomfortable conversations.

The holidays are when your resistance is needed. Some of you have the opportunity to talk to Trump voters and assorted conservatives this weekend. Some of you will have the opportunity to talk to people who live in an echo chamber of Fox News commentary and Russian troll farms. To waste that opportunity because of your own hang-ups and Mommy or Daddy issues is criminal.

Criminal! I guarantee you that anybody who took Mystal’s advice only confirmed their Trumpist or Trump-leaning relatives in their decision to back Orange Man. More:

You might not like conflict, but if you choose to break bread with Trump supporters and climate change deniers because you happen to be related to them, then conflict is required. Anything less is appeasement, and we’ve had far too much of that these past few years. So stiffen your spine, rehearse your talking points, and get ready to fry some turkeys in your family with your righteousness.

Thus follows the worst possible advice for anybody hoping to persuade right-wing relatives that they’re wrong. It’s so colossally clueless that you think that you must be reading an article from The Onion or the Babylon Bee. But no! Here’s an example of the pure, uncut hathos here, from him urging readers not to fall into the trap of thinking that there are non-political things you can talk about when you’re together with the family:

Take a traditional Thanksgiving Day football game. This may seem like safe, nonpolitical ground—so long as everybody agrees to not talk about Colin Kaepernick. But it won’t take long for Trump supporters in your family to say something racist, sexist, or plain nutty while watching the game. They’ll say a white athlete is just a “hard worker” while praising a black athlete’s “natural gifts.” They’ll champion a slur against Native Americans, masquerading as a nickname, on a holiday that commemorates the prelude to a continental genocide. They’ll make fun of the “egghead statisticians,” which will sound like they’re making a comment on football strategy, but actually they’re making an attack on science and math that will later fuel their climate change denier sensibilities. Or maybe they’ll just sit like lumps on the couch while women: prepare dinner, set the table, take care of the kids, clean up after dinner, serve dessert, and fetch them a beer.

In those moments, I think of the children. I think of the behavior that is being modeled for them. I think of the cultural messages they are learning as they’re being exposed to these “traditional” structures.

Holy Helen Lovejoy, he’s thinking of the children!

Read it all, if you can. Wait, what do I mean “if you can” — this is so, so pleasurable. Mystal advises:

The smallest political unit is the family. Your activism among the people who know you and love you is the most effective. Fight. Welcome the opportunity for conflict.

This is great advice if you want to make those who know and love you hate you, and want nothing to do with you or your politics. What kind of loon do you have to be to think otherwise? I guess you have to be Elie Mystal, whose biography at Above The Law, the online legal website he runs, says:

Elie received a degree in Government from Harvard University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He was formerly a litigator at Debevoise & Plimpton but quit the legal profession to pursue a career as an online provocateur.

Oh. Harvard and Harvard Law. Well, there you are. See, this kook is why a lot of us are afraid to vote in the Left. They’re so prosecutorial, and won’t even let you watch the damn Cowboys game in peace.

Elie Mystal, denouncing as racist a relative who asked for white meat from the turkey

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