Rod Dreher's Blog, page 225

Trump Summons Demons

Tonight at a rally in North Carolina, the President of the United States criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar, which he is certainly entitled to do. But listen to the crowd: “Send her back! Send her back!” Did he try to stop them? Of course not.

Where does he think this is all going to go? This is horrifying. Republican members of Congress need to stand up right now and say that this is unacceptable behavior in a president, whipping up a mob like this.

This is why I say that there’s no telling who’s going to win in 2020. Trump is unhinged. Omar and the Squad deserve strong criticism, but Trump can’t restrain himself from going too far. I have said for some time now that as bad as Trump is, I believe that putting Democrats in power would be worse, solely because of what it would mean for laws and policies that are important to me. But this degrading demagogic behavior is exactly the kind of thing that would flip me to the other side. There are things worse than a president who is radically pro-abortion, opposed to religious liberty, and favoring open borders. It’s having a president who recklessly endangers the lives of people for the sake of winding up a mob.

The truly psychotic thing about Trump is that he doesn’t have to do this! It’s easy to fight the radicals of the Squad without resorting to this kind of thing. In fact, he is winning on the politics of Omar & Co. But that’s not enough for him. You’ve got to wonder if he’s some kind of sadist.

Where does this cycle stop? I don’t see how it fails to end in violence. Or rather, let me revise that: not end in violence, but cross the threshold into retributive violence. Antifa has been pushing for that on the Left. And now, on the right, we have the man with the biggest megaphone in the country leading a mob in chanting for the expulsion of a political opponent — a US citizen! — from the country. I reject most everything that Ilhan Omar stands for, but this is degrading, disgraceful behavior from an American president. This is Two-Minute Hate stuff. From Orwell’s 1984:

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

That’s not what this rally’s audience was like. But give it time. Trump is summoning demons.

We are not soon going to recover from this man.

UPDATE: I endorse:

Check my feed. I’m very tough on Omar bc she deserves it, on the merits.

I am sickened by the hate-laced “send her back” chants. Shame on every person who participated.

POTUS has a responsibility to put an end to it. He alone has the ability to do so. Chant “vote her out.”

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) July 18, 2019

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If this were a Democrat president who had called for a prolife Christian rep to go back to where her came from on Twitter, and then at a rally his, people started chanting, “send her back,” I would call or evil, bigoted, and dangerous.

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EWTN’s Real ‘Sin’: Success

This is something that will only mean anything to Catholic readers, but it’s so hilariously un-self-aware that I have to share it with you. Michael Sean Winters, a marquee columnist for the ultra-liberal National Catholic Reporter, the whole raison d’etre of which has always to do Catholic journalism independent of the Catholic bishops’ control, is upset because the independent Catholic cable network EWTN is doing the same thing from the Catholic right — and succeeding. He writes:

The vast complex of parishes and schools and hospitals and fraternal associations that American Catholics built in the 20th century were all, in some meaningful way, connected to the hierarchy of the church. People might agree or disagree with what the church had to say, but they knew who spoke authoritatively for the whole. EWTN, however, severed its official ties to the church at the same time as it had eclipsed the bishops’ own efforts to create a Catholic television network. NCR is proud of its independence from any official control, but EWTN repeatedly claims it is presenting the news “from a Catholic perspective.” When you are the only Catholic network, people can be forgiven for thinking the “Catholic perspective” being presented is authentic and accurate.

And that claim could not be more wrong. Despite their insistence that they are loyal to the magisterium, EWTN has always been highly selective in presenting church teaching. They distort some teachings and ignore others. They inflate those teachings they like to the point that they block out other important teachings. They evidence none of the historical suspicion with which the Catholic tradition has always viewed capitalism. NCR has always acknowledged its role as a kind of loyal opposition. EWTN has claimed to be loyal to the party in power, but now in the age of Pope Francis, their disloyalty is no longer able to be hidden.

“NCR has always acknowledged its role as a kind of loyal opposition.” I apologize to you Catholic readers who fell out of your chair when you read that, or who broke a rib laughing. But wait, there’s more!

The bishops have a large problem on their hands. They have lost control of communications within the church. Millions of Catholics watch EWTN. How many read a press release from the bishops’ conference calling for protections for undocumented immigrants? How many read a diocesan newspaper if there still is one?

Oh man, Catholic readers, can you just even? National Catholic Reporter came into existence precisely to be a voice for covering the Church independent of the feeble diocesan press, which was suffocating under institutional control. From the NYT’s obituary of Robert Hoyt, NCR’s founder, who died in 2003:

In 1964, when Mr. Hoyt started The National Catholic Reporter, almost all Catholic newspapers and magazines were published by dioceses or religious orders and, as Time magazine noted at the time, usually displayed ”a nervous, reverential caution in telling what goes on inside the church.”

Mr. Hoyt’s aim was to bring the professional standards of secular news reporting to the Catholic press.

”If the mayor of a city owned its only newspaper,” he liked to say, ”its citizens will not learn what they need and deserve to know about its affairs.”

He was right about that. NCR has published some good and important journalism, most of all Jason Berry’s pathbreaking reporting on the abuse scandal. But NCR has over the decades been a bastion of amplifying and indeed glorifying left-wing dissent from authoritative Catholic teaching. That’s what it does. I was never a faithful reader of that paper, but my impression of NCR’s editorial line over the years was: No enemies to the left. The paper never met a radical lesbian nun that it didn’t love.

Now, I’m sure that there’s stuff to criticize about EWTN. I don’t have cable, and haven’t kept up with the network since I left the Catholic Church in 2006. I’m not in a position to defend EWTN, though when I was a Catholic, I was grateful for it, because despite the network’s shortcomings, it provided something for orthodox Catholics to hold onto. Still, the idea that a National Catholic Reporter columnist, of all people, would dress down another Catholic media outlet for criticizing the Pope and for failing to follow the bishops’ instructions on covering the Church is like watching Madonna chastise Miley Cyrus for being a self-promoting slut.

 

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We Almost Lost Notre-Dame

Jerome Labouyrie/Shutterstock

Here’s a terrific piece of reporting in today’s NYT, about how the fire emergency at Notre-Dame cathedral came closer to destroying the medieval masterpiece than we knew. Check this part out:

The fire warning system at Notre-Dame took dozens of experts six years to put together, and in the end involved thousands of pages of diagrams, maps, spreadsheets and contracts, according to archival documents found in a suburban Paris library by The Times.

The result was a system so arcane that when it was called upon to do the one thing that mattered — warn “fire!” and say where — it produced instead a nearly indecipherable message.

It made a calamity almost inevitable, fire experts consulted by The Times said.

If that’s not a metaphor for the fragility of advanced civilization, I don’t know what is. For example: we now have incomparably more information about how the world works than any humans who have ever lived, but when we are called to the one thing that matters — produce future generations capable of doing the basic things necessary to carry on life — we are failing.

Read it all. It’s an incredible story, very well told by the Times‘s reporters. I rag on that newspaper (to which I subscribe) all the time for its biases, but when it gets something right, no news organization on the planet can touch it.

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Nixon ’68::Trump ’20

Yesterday’s satire is tomorrow’s headlines. pic.twitter.com/hdACx1mnmG

— Kyle Mann (@The_Kyle_Mann) July 17, 2019

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Here’s the new RNC ad that Ryan Saavedra mentions. Note to readers — and let this be an evergreen — my quoting or posting an ad for any candidate or cause does NOT mean that I support that candidate or cause. I’m “quoting” this ad here because it tells us a lot about the kind of campaign the Republicans are going to run in 2020:

Here’s a clip from the Gang of Four the Squad appearing on CBS, to call out Nancy Pelosi, of all people, for aiding and abetting racism, and those who issue death threats — this, for criticizing them:

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) calls out Pelosi: “She is Speaker … she can ask for a meeting to sit down with us … acknowledge the fact that we are women of color … be aware of that and what you’re doing … because some of us are getting death threats”pic.twitter.com/ujGrfiSjFE

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) July 17, 2019

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New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is flipping out. From his piece today:

I’m struck at how many people have come up to me recently and said, “Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” And in each case, when I drilled down to ask why, I bumped into the Democratic presidential debates in June. I think a lot of Americans were shocked by some of the things they heard there. I was.

I was shocked that so many candidates in the party whose nominee I was planning to support want to get rid of the private health insurance covering some 250 million Americans and have “Medicare for all” instead. I think we should strengthen Obamacare and eventually add a public option.

I was shocked that so many were ready to decriminalize illegal entry into our country. I think people should have to ring the doorbell before they enter my house or my country.

I was shocked at all those hands raised in support of providing comprehensive health coverage to undocumented immigrants. I think promises we’ve made to our fellow Americans should take priority, like to veterans in need of better health care.

And I was shocked by how feeble was front-runner Joe Biden’s response to the attack from Kamala Harris — and to the more extreme ideas promoted by those to his left.

Friedman says he wishes the radicals would stifle it and stay focused on the economy, and themes of unity, at least long enough to get Trump out of office. More:

But please, spare me the revolution! It can wait. Win the presidency, hold the House and narrow the spread in the Senate, and a lot of good things still can be accomplished. “No,” you say, “the left wants a revolution now!” O.K., I’ll give the left a revolution now: four more years of Donald Trump.

That will be a revolution.

I know, I know: it’s Thomas Friedman. But you know, he’s right. And look, he’s not talking about the Squad. He’s talking about the party’s presidential aspirants!

With the release of today’s GOP video, it’s clear that Trump is making the Squad the face of the Democratic Party. And this quartet of amateurs are even attacking their party’s leader and framing her as a threat to “women of color.” You watch: none of these Democratic presidential hopefuls are going to criticize the Squad. Only Kamala Harris and Cory Booker might, because they’re black, which gives them some protection — but after what Rep. Ayanna Pressley said at Netroots Nation over the weekend, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Squad responded by calling Harris and/or Booker Oreos.

Golly, 2020 is gonna be lit. Trump is going to run as Nixon ’68, positioning the Democrats as the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion.” It lacks the alliteration of Tricky Dick’s line, but “open borders, socialism, and anarchy” has a beat, and you can dance to it. Check out this 1968 Nixon campaign ad:

Notice the slogan at the end of the ad, one that is repeated on other Nixon ads that year:

If Trump follows Nixon’s successful path, he’ll figure out a way to make the 2020 race a referendum not on particular policy differences, but on rival ways of viewing the world — and make the choice feel like an existential one.

UPDATE: I’m so stupid. A reader points out that “acid, amnesty, and abortion” was Nixon ’72. Still, the general point holds.

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‘Asymmetrical Multiculturalism’

Reader Jonah writes:

On Sunday, my wife had brunch with several friends who have children in kindergarten or early elementary school. All of them live in a nearby densely packed suburb here in our county, which is a “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants in all but name.

Every single friend confessed that they and their husbands plan to sell their homes and move to other areas of the county because “the schools have gotten so bad.”

All of these nice, liberal-signaling people are uprooting their entire lives to get their kids into better schools, but they can never speak the reason aloud. The schools turning bad is force majeure, you see, like a hurricane or an earthquake, but with utterly mysterious origins, like a pulse from another dimension that leaves the world’s top scientists scratching their heads.

It’s just so weird. White, Asian, and black people can haul ass away from schools that are overcrowded with Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan immigrants, schools that take tax money to implement programs for youth gang interdiction, and they can speak openly about the fact that they’re leaving, but nobody is allowed to utter why they’re leaving. It’s absolutely verboten to suggest that concentrating impoverished immigrants in certain places even sometimes has social and cultural down sides. We can’t even suggest that local politicians have mismanaged the influx of immigrants. We’re only allowed to reiterate that immigrants add colorful threads to the diverse multicultural tapestry of our community. We’re not allowed to say that schools are less safe, violent crime has doubled, and we have a gang problem we didn’t used to have—not even at brunch with friends, as if there are no options between tight restrictions and open borders.

This is a super-bourgeois observation — I mean that in the sense that what he’s talking about is the code among college-educated middle class white people. Funny story: once, about 20 years ago, I was visiting my folks down in Louisiana. One day, when I drove in from town, a mill worker from down the road had stopped by, and was on my mom and dad’s front porch visiting. He hardly knew me; I was Ray and Dot’s son who had moved away and was in the media. I walked in mid-conversation, and found this mill worker talking in a strange way about some big problem at the mill, and the Democrats this, and the Democrats that. I couldn’t make sense out of what he was saying.

After he left, I asked my folks what on earth the Democratic Party had to do with the problems at the mill. They all laughed. My sister, who had been sitting there listening to it, said that “Democrats” is the code white working-class people like the mill worker use to talk about black people when they’re in the presence of white outsiders who are likely to judge them as racists.

I can’t remember any details of what the mill worker said, but I do recall thinking clearly at the time that even if that particular mill worker was a racist, substituting “black co-workers” for “Democrats” in his narrative that afternoon wouldn’t have made it racist. The point was that this mill worker assumed that because I was white, and college-educated, and lived in the big city, that I hated people like him, and was prepared to judge any criticism of black people at all as racist. He wasn’t going to stop telling his story to my Louisiana family just because the city boy he barely knew had walked up … so he code-switched.

(And what a code word! This man, who is probably retired now, if he’s still alive, worked in a paper mill and lived in a trailer in rural south Louisiana — yet for him and his social circle, the word “Democrats” was synonymous with “blacks.” A generation earlier — my dad’s generation — all white men like him would have been registered Democrats. If that man is alive today, I bet he’s a Trump Republican, and was finally glad to have a Republican to vote for who sounds like him.)

To be honest, that simple mill worker was right to be wary about me, a middle-class urban white guy, for the same reason that reader Jonah says in his comment.

What Jonah is talking about is what the UK academic Eric Kaufmann calls “asymmetrical multiculturalism.” Park MacDougald writes about the idea here in New York magazine. MacDougald opens by talking about how thinkers and commentators on the left decry white identity, while their counterparts on the right respond by rejecting identity politics of all kinds. More:

This bipartisan aversion to white identity is the target of Whiteshift, a fascinating new book by the political scientist Eric Kaufmann. Kaufmann claims that despite our best collective efforts to repress the topic, white identity concerns are already in the process of reshaping politics across the West. Migration-driven demographic change is polarizing white electorates, pitting group-oriented whites determined to resist their decline against cosmopolitan whites who accept or even cheer it, leading to the liberal-internationalist versus populist-nationalist split we see in nearly every Western country. More controversially, Kaufmann argues that the identity-based concerns of whites who oppose or fear their demographic decline should not be considered racist, and that it is neither possible nor desirable for the mainstream to suppress or condemn them. Instead of assuming that all political expressions of white identity are motivated by prejudice, Kaufmann calls for a new “‘cultural contract,’ in which everyone,” white and nonwhite, “gets to have a secure, culturally rich ethnic identity as well as a thin, culturally neutral and future-oriented national identity.”

MacDougald notes that Kaufmann contends the future of the West is going to bring a lot more interethnic marriage, as a result of immigration. Kaufmann, who is one-quarter Latino and one-quarter Asian, says the he himself is an example of the future. More:

In the meantime, however, he predicts that the conflict between those who wish to slow this transformation and those who wish to accelerate it will become the defining cleavage of Western politics.

In fact, at the center of Whiteshift is the argument that this conflict is already reshaping our politics. In Kaufmann’s view, white identity concerns, not economics, are behind the rise of right-wing populism. For all the attempts to explain populism as a backlash to inequality or a revolt of the losers of globalization, Kaufmann, drawing on his own research and that of colleagues such as Karen Stenner and Ashley Jardina, sees it as an expression of conservative white opposition to demographic change. Among whites in the United States, for instance, support for Trump was strongly predicted by psychological conservatism and authoritarianism, white identity and ethnic consciousness, and opposition to immigration. (Similar measures predicted support for Brexit in the U.K.) Kaufmann also cites suggestive research not directly related to the election, such as Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson’s finding that whites, after reading a passage about their demographic decline, displayed greater levels of in-group bias and support for the GOP.

One more:

Kaufmann is not the first to suggest that populism is an expression of white demographic anxiety. Versions of this argument have been made before, often becoming, in simplified form, the basis of a morality tale in which Trump voters are racist authoritarians whose only real goal is to maintain white supremacy. Yet Kaufmann believes that it is perfectly legitimate for whites to prefer immigration restriction for cultural reasons, and criticizes the expansive elite anti-racism norms that see this preference as racist. These norms, according to Kaufmann, make it difficult for mainstream politicians to respond to their voters’ actual concerns, producing a vast unmet demand for restrictionist policies that the populist right is well-positioned to meet. They also lead restrictionist voters and politicians, who oppose immigration for cultural reasons but fear accusations of racism, to invent spurious economic or security rationales to justify their preferences. “Paradoxically,” Kaufmann writes, “it becomes more acceptable to complain about immigrant crime, welfare dependency, terrorism or wage competition than to voice a sense of loss and anxiety about the decline of one’s group or a white-Christian tradition of nationhood.” Consider the debate over Trump’s border wall. The president has cited terrorism, drug and human trafficking, and immigrant crime as reasons to build the wall, tarring immigrants as criminals while offering a policy that would do little to address his stated concerns. It would be far better, in Kaufmann’s view, if the president — or at least, the more intelligent of his advisers and supporters — were just to admit that what what really made them anxious about immigration was demographic change.

I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing. Every paragraph is meaty and challenging. The book is Whiteshift.

MacDougald says Kaufmann, a sociologist at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, believes that both the identity-politics Left and the anti-identity-politics Right, are going at the social and political questions wrong.

The Left observes what Kaufmann calls “asymmetrical multiculturalism” — the belief that every racial/ethnic identity should be asserted and celebrated, except white identity. This, says Kaufmann, is a strategy that works for “psychological liberals,” but not for everybody else. Asymmetrical multiculturalism is at work in the story reader Jonah told about the middle-class white people who are desperate to get away from bad schools that got that way for reasons that those white people cannot even bring themselves to speak about among each other. This is distorting, and destructive.

But the Right plays its own version of denial, in Kaufmann’s view, with its belief that all identity politics are immoral. They do this in part because they are trying to maintain moral symmetry: if it’s wrong for white people to identify with their race, and to pursue political policies based on what’s good for their race, then it must also be wrong for every ethnic group to behave that way. The problem with this, says Kaufmann, is that it’s unnatural and just plain wrong. People of various “tribes” do this all the time, and though it obviously can be abused, it’s better (in Kaufmann’s view) to allow everybody to engage in a limited version of this, rather than to deny that it has any validity at all. If whites were allowed by the popular culture to think of themselves collectively in the way blacks, Latinos, Asians, and others are allowed to think of themselves, then perhaps non-liberal whites would recognize that some identity politics claims made by racial minorities are valid and important to recognize.

That’s the theory, anyway.

Imagine what would happen if a Republican Congressman said about whites in politics what Mod Squad member Rep. Ayanna Presley said about gays, Muslims, and racial minorities in politics last week:

We would have a national media freakout on our hands. Anderson Cooper would interview a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of mayonnaise on live TV. Frankly, I find what Pressley is doing here — policing the boundaries of minority politics — to be repulsive, and I would find it repulsive if a white Republican Congressman did it for whites. The fact, though, that this is considered normal behavior by progressives who are racial minorities, but absolutely unthinkable for white conservatives, testifies to the power of asymmetrical multiculturalism.

Speaking from my own experience, when I think of whites being allowed to think about race, identity, and politics in the same way as racial minorities, I think about segregationists like the late Gov. Lester Maddox, who said on that Dick Cavett interview I mentioned yesterday that he supports black folks who believe in defending the preservation of their race, and white folks who believe in the same thing. In 1970, when he said it. that was a transparently a fraudulently fair-minded argument for maintaining white supremacy.

Would it be today? Perhaps, but much less so. What about circa 2040, when America becomes a majority-minority society?

I hate asymmetrical multiculturalism because in the world I live in — among media, academic, and cultural elites, broadly speaking — it is a strategy for disempowering and marginalizing people on the basis of race, sexuality, and religious belief, and psychologically disarming any instinct for self-preservation among them. I’m one of those right wingers that Eric Kaufmann says is mistaken in his opposition to all identity politics.

He might be right about me and my kind. One thing is for sure, though: in this time of turmoil and social transition, conservatives who think like me are going to lose ground to white right-wingers — not conservatives; right wingers — who think like the black Democrat Ayanna Presley. Who, by the way, has more in common with Lester Maddox than she could possibly understand. In that sense, Donald Trump is arguably playing by the rules Pressley, Omar, and the asymmetrical multiculturalists of the American Left observe — and that’s why they hate him so much. I don’t think Trump is any kind of political genius, but perhaps it takes someone as uncultured and unformed by the norms of his economic class to reject the asymmetrical multiculturalism that is received without question by our elites.

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‘Rednecks’ And The Two Randys

This is an anecdote, nothing more. But I think it says something about where we are in this culture.

This morning, our air conditioner repairman came over to fix our clunky system. We’ve used Jackie (as I’ll call him) before for various heating and cooling issues. Really nice guy — works hard and well. I have mad respect for a man who will climb up into a Louisiana attic in summer. Jackie does it all day, every day, all over this city.

After he finished, we stood on the front steps talking. I told him that I had just gotten back from Poland, and had learned a lot about what Poland had been through in the Second World War. I showed him my Auschwitz photos, and talked about the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Jackie said that he had been reading a lot about the war lately, and watching documentaries. We think we have things so hard today, he said, but we have no idea about how much people suffer.

We briefly spoke about contemporary American politics. Jackie said something — how to put this? — strongly uncomplimentary about the Squad (AOC and her three cohorts). A word you wouldn’t hear in church might have been used. Then he went on to tell me about a Vietnam veteran he knows who is the hardest worker he’s ever seen. Old man is 70 years old, and can outwork anybody, said the repairman. Jackie told a story about how the guy is a total badass, and how he (the repairman) saw the old guy a few years back sawing limbs off a tree, hanging from a harness high up in the crown. The old guy had a chainsaw in one arm, and was clearing limbs with the other. An amazing thing, said the repairman.

“I wouldn’t go at him unless I had a 12-gauge,” Jackie laughed.

Then we shook hands, and he went off to do his next job. A few minutes later, I got into my car and drove off to pick up one of my kids. As I pulled out of my driveway, the public radio interview show Fresh Air was finishing up on the car radio. It’s earnestly liberal to an almost comic degree. Host Terry Gross invited listeners to tune in tomorrow, and hear guest Randy Rainbow (yes, that’s his name), a gay comedian who has made a name for himself doing political satire making fun of President Trump, and who incorporates show tunes into his act.

I found myself suddenly as mad as hell. Randy Rainbow — seriously? There is no way in five thousand lifetimes that Terry Gross would have Jackie the Repairman on her show, or anybody sympathetic to his worldview (other than that time she interviewed J.D. Vance in 2016). OK, so this is not a fair comparison. Some conservative talk radio host might have a Jackie on, but never in a million years host a Randy Rainbow figure. I get that. My point, though, is that our mainstream media pretty much only cares about Jackie the Repairman and the things he cares about in order to deplore them.

As I drove, the Boston-based NPR show Here And Now was next up. The host touted the stories coming up in the next half hour. One of them was a look at a gay male columnist who is calling on gay men to come out as feminists. Turns out the piece lasted nine minutes — a long time in radio. Look, I get this too: the public radio audience is more likely to be interested in gay male feminists than in the lives and concerns of middle-aged air-conditioner repairmen.

What ticks me off, though, is the lie that the mainstream media, and other leading cultural institutions, tell themselves about how interested they are in “diversity.” This is an old complaint of mine, and I won’t bore you with the details again. I’ll tell you why it stood out to me today, though — and it’s not just because of the Trump tweet saga, which I’ve already tuned out, for Tommy Kidd reasons:

Or, to put it in terms lasering in on my concerns, “We are living through the collapse of Christianity, akin to the fourth-century collapse of Roman paganism, and I can’t bring myself to sustain outrage over what President Archie Bunker tweets about four loony left Congresswomen.”

Still, I would love for the major media reporters to spend even half as much time trying to understand why people like Jackie the Repairman find the rhetoric of AOC, Ilhan Omar, and the like so infuriating, as they spend setting their hair on fire about what a racist Trump is. I just checked to see if Terry Gross had invited Chris Arnade, an actual leftist, on her program to discuss his amazing new book Dignity, which is a travelogue about his journeys among the down and out in America — including whites, blacks, and Latinos, and yes, including Trump supporters, for whom he has human sympathy, if not political sympathy.

She has not. But she’s got Randy Rainbow.

Anyway, the Jackie conversation, followed by the NPR stuff, was a bone in my throat because early this morning, I listened to this amazing new episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s great Revisionist History podcast. The entire episode is about the singer-songwriter Randy Newman, and his terrific, unsettling 1974 song “Rednecks,” the lead track from his masterpiece Good Old Boys, one of the greatest albums ever. The song is sung in the character of an Alabama steelworker. Here’s a link to the performance — I warn you, though, it’s not safe for work, because it uses the n-word. The song starts like this:

Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show

With some smart ass New York Jew

And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox

And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too

Well he may be a fool but he’s our fool

If they think they’re better than him they’re wrong

So I went to the park and I took some paper along

And that’s where I made this song

Lester Maddox was the segregationist firebrand Georgia governor from 1967-1971. He was a populist Democrat who never finished high school. I’ve loved Randy Newman, and that song, for decades, but I had not realized until listening to Gladwell’s podcast that the Maddox incident cited in the song had really happened, on the Dick Cavett Show. (Cavett is not Jewish; remember, Newman, who is Jewish, was writing this song from the point of view of a working-class white man from Alabama, who might have naturally assumed that a liberal New York talk show host was Jewish).

Here’s what happened: eight minutes of Lester Maddox sharing the screen with football great Jim Brown, and eventually stalking off the stage because he believed Cavett insulted his honor.

It’s riveting TV. Maddox is an indignant redneck boob who makes a fool of himself — though his Trumpian performance controlled the screen. Guess who was watching the show that night? Randy Newman. And being a superlative ironist, Newman imagined what Maddox’s humiliation on national TV might have looked like to a white Alabama steelworker.

In the song, Newman’s character repeatedly admits that Southern whites are “keeping the n–gers down.” Then he concedes:

Down here we too ignorant to realize/That the North has set the n–ger free

Verse 4:

Yes, he’s free to be put in a cage

In Harlem in New York City

And he’s free to be put in a cage on the South-Side of Chicago

And the West Side

And he’s free to be put in a cage in Hough in Cleveland

And he’s free to be put in a cage in East St. Louis

And he’s free to be put in a cage in Fillmore in San Francisco

And he’s free to be put in a cage in Roxbury in Boston

They’re gatherin’ ’em up from miles around

Keepin’ the n–ers down

See what Newman is doing? He’s turning on the hypocrisy of Northerners, who live in cities segregated not by law, but by fact, and in effect asking them if they are scapegoating Southerners like the narrator while hiding from their own guilt.

Newman tells Gladwell that he stopped performing that song in the South when he realized that white Southern audiences were not taking it in the right spirit — that is, they were saying, “Hell yeah we’re rednecks, and proud of it!” Gladwell also observes that a song like that could not be written today. Too dangerous. Gladwell also spends some time on Newman’s even greater song about race in America, “Sail Away,” which is written in the voice of a slave trader who is trying to convince a black child in West Africa to climb aboard his ship, and sail away to paradise on the other side of the ocean. Watch an old clip of Newman performing it here. Listen closely to the lyrics. You have to listen to the Gladwell podcast to hear the story about what Bobby Darin did with this song — it’s a jaw-dropper, and very, very American.

As a thought experiment, I know well that had I, as the 52 year old man I am today, been watching Lester Maddox on TV that night, I would have laughed at what an ignoramus and a fool he was, and probably felt bad that he embarrassed the South so much. But it took a sly, 27 year old secular Jew from Los Angeles to see more deeply into that encounter on television between the bigoted Southern populist and the iconic New York liberal. To be clear, I don’t think Newman’s narrator was dinging Dick Cavett personally, but rather hitting out at the superiority of the kind of people who identify with Cavett.

That’s how I felt listening to Terry Gross and the other NPR show after listening to Jackie talk briefly about the Squad. Our media elites will fall all over themselves to defend and celebrate people like Ilhan Omar and Randy Rainbow, but guys like the middle-aged man who came down from my attic today dripping sweat, and who can’t bear people like Ilhan Omar — in the eyes of our liberal elites, they’re what’s wrong with this country.

I imagine Jackie identifies with Tucker Carlson’s monologue last week about Omar. Excerpts:

No country can survive being ruled by people who hate it. We deserve better. For all of our country’s flaws, this is still the best place in the world. Most immigrants know that and that is why they come here. It’s also why we’ve always been glad to have them here.

But now, there are signs that some people who move here from abroad don’t like this country at all. As we told you last night, one of those people now serves in our Congress.

Think about that for a minute. Our country rescued Ilhan Omar from the single poorest place on Earth. We didn’t do it for the money, we did it because we are kind people. How did she respond to the remarkable gift we gave her?

She scolded us, called us names, showered us with contempt.

He’s not wrong. Read this Washington Post profile of her. More Carlson:

It’s infuriating. More than that, it is also ominous. The United States admits more immigrants more than any other country on Earth, more than a million every year. The Democratic Party demand we increase that by and admit far more. OK, Americans like immigrants, but immigrants have got to like us back.

That’s the key, it’s essential. Otherwise, the country falls apart.

More:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali would, by the standard of identity politics, seem to have everything in common with Ilhan Omar. She was born in Somalia, moved to Kenya and eventually came to this country. Unlike Omar, she loves and cares about the United States. She believes this country is superior to the country she came from.

For saying that, the left despises her. Two Somali immigrants, one among the most impressive people in America. The other, among the least.

It’s not about race. But, of course, Omar and her friends already know that. Nothing they say on the subject of race is sincere. It’s all the hustle designed to get them what they want. Omar has made a career of denouncing anyone and anything in her way as racist. That would include virtually all of her political and personal opponents. It includes even inanimate objects like the border wall, that’s racist. So was the Congress, so is the entire state of North Dakota, she once tweeted.

Omar may be from another country but she learned young that crying racism pays. The bigger question is, who taught her that? She didn’t arrive from a Kenyan refugee camp announcing people as bigots for a political campaign. She wasn’t always a professional victim. That is learned behavior.

Importantly, she learned it here. In some ways, the real villain in the Ilhan Omar story isn’t Omar, it is a group of our fellow Americans. Our cultural gatekeepers who stoke the resentment of new arrivals and turn them into grievance mongers like Ilhan Omar. The left did that to her, and to us.

Blame them first.

Gov. Lester Maddox really was a racist. If Donald Trump is, then he’s not a racist in remotely the same way that the segregationist Maddox was. I say that so you don’t think I’m making a one-to-one comparison between Maddox and Trump. And again, I think Trump’s “go back to where you came from” rhetoric directed at all four of the minority Congresswomen was wrong, and probably racist, and certainly politically stupid. (Had he kept it to Omar alone, it would have been much more understandable.)

Having said all that, I wonder what 27-year-old Randy Newman would make of this. (I know what Randy Rainbow would.) People like Jackie the air conditioner repairman know the kind of contempt people like Omar, Rainbow, Woke Capitalists, and the liberal media, have for them, and everything they stand for, including a certain idea of America. Donald Trump may be a fool, but he’s their fool. This point has been made about a million times since 2016, but it’s still salient.

I don’t like or respect Trump one bit, but I like and respect Jackie, and I’d rather stand with him than with Ilhan Omar, Terry Gross, and their lot, who don’t even see men and women like Jackie as anything other than bigoted rednecks — if they see them at all.

When your air conditioner is broken in the middle of July, don’t call Randy Rainbow to come fix it. Same with your country.

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‘It’s Nothing To Do With Race’

A British schoolteacher comments on the “Busing Or Bust” post from the other day. I’ve adapted it slightly for a separate post. The emphasis below is mine:

I’ve taught here in the UK for over 40 years (officially retired two years ago, but still going into school on a voluntary basis), and we have exactly the same pathologies in so many classrooms here: what’s euphemistically called ‘low-level disruption’, something that covers everything from pupils shouting across the room to their mates to telling a teacher to ‘F- off’. It’s practically impossible to teach everyone in these circumstances: the most one can do to control the disruption enough to enable the pupils who want to work to do so, knowing that they’re quite likely to get beaten up outside the classroom by the thug tendency. And younger, inexperienced teachers can’t manage to control the class at all: it’s unsurprising that many drop out. And that seems to be worsening. The statistics from the National Foundation of Educational Research are worrying:

“The retention rates of early career teachers are also lower now than they were a few years ago. Around 87 per cent of teachers who enter teaching remained in the profession at the end of their first year, which is a figure that hasn’t changed since 2010, until this year, when it decreased to 85 per cent. Worse still, the three-year retention rate has dropped from 80 per cent in 2011 to 73 per cent in 2017 and the five-year rate has dropped from 73 per cent in 2011 to 67 per cent in 2017.”

In other words, a third of new teachers leave the profession within five years of starting. (It’s slightly better in primary schools and worse in secondaries.) And the two factors most mentioned in surveys of teachers leaving are workload (which is huge during term-time) and behaviour.

The thing is, though, that it’s nothing to do with race: the major offenders are white — but they are disproportionately from (another euphemism) ‘deprived backgrounds’: mother’s never been married, has several children by various fathers, and lives on state benefits (which are not particularly generous: poverty is part of the problem, though not the largest part). Drugs and alcohol are always in the background, and boys in particular carry knives. Culture matters, not race.

Here’s a City Journal article from nearly 25 years ago (!) by the British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple (pen name of Anthony Daniels), in which he discusses at length British schools as failure factories. In this first excerpt, Dalrymple, who spent his career working in prisons and with the lower classes, talks about how lower-class kids in the UK are socialized:

Alarmingly, this arbitrariness reinforces precisely the kind of discipline which I see exercised around me every day by parents whose philosophy of child rearing is laissez-faire tempered by insensate rage. A small child rushes about noisily, creating havoc and wreaking destruction about him; the mother (fathers scarcely exist, except in the merest biological sense) first ignores the child, then shouts at him to stop, then ignores him, pleads with him, ignores him again, laughs at him, and then finally loses her temper, screeches abuse at him, and gives him a clout on the ear.

What is the child supposed to learn from this? He learns to associate discipline not with principle, and punishment not with his own behavior, but with the exasperated mood of his mother. This mood will itself depend upon many variables, few of them under the control of the child. The mother may be irritable because of her latest row with her latest boyfriend or because of a delay in the arrival of a social security payment, or she may be comparatively tolerant because she has received an invitation to a party or has just discovered that she is not pregnant after all. But what the child certainly never learns is that discipline has any meaning beyond the physical capacity and desire of the mother to impose it.

Everything is reduced to a mere contest of wills, and so the child learns that all restraint is but an arbitrary imposition from someone or something bigger and stronger than himself. The ground is laid for a bloodyminded intolerance of any authority whatever, even should that authority be based upon patently superior and benevolent knowledge and wisdom. Authority of any kind is experienced as an insult to the self, and must therefore be challenged because it is authority. The world is thus a world of permanently inflamed egos, trying to impose their wills on one another.

How do you suppose kids who are raised that way do in school? Answer: the way the British schoolteacher says they do.

Here’s a second bit from Dalrymple’s 1995 essay:

There is one great psychological advantage to the white underclass in their disdain for education: it enables them to maintain the fiction that the society around them is grossly, even grotesquely, unjust, and that they themselves are the victims of this injustice. If, on the contrary, education were seen by them as a means available to all to rise in the world, as indeed it could be and is in many societies, their whole viewpoint would naturally have to change. Instead of attributing their misfortunes to others, they would have to look inward, which is always a painful process. Here we see the reason why scholastic success is violently discouraged, and those who pursue it persecuted, in underclass schools: for it is perceived, inchoately no doubt, as a threat to an entire Weltanschauung. The success of one is a reproach to all.

And a whole way of life is at stake. This way of life is akin to drug addiction, of which crime is the heroin and social security the methadone. The latter, as we know, is the harder habit to kick, and its pleasures, though less intense, are longer lasting. The sour satisfaction of being dependent on social security resides in its automatic conferral of the status of Victim, which in itself simultaneously explains one’s failure and absolves one of the obligation to make something of oneself, ex hypothesi impossible because of the unjust nature of society which made one a victim in the first place. The redemptive value of education blows the whole affecting scene apart: no wonder we don’t want no education.

Read the whole thing. 

We can’t talk about these things, of course.

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The Curse Of Passionate Intensity

We have the worst people setting the tone and the content of American public life:

We will never be a Socialist or Communist Country. IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY HERE, YOU CAN LEAVE! It is your choice, and your choice alone. This is about love for America. Certain people HATE our Country….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2019

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Translation: if you dissent, you don’t belong here. And given that only one of the four Congresswomen targeted by Trump was born outside of the US, I don’t see any way to read this other than a racist remark. Look, I think these four — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley — are wrong about many things, and maybe even bad people. I don’t care if POTUS denounces this so-called “Squad” for their political views.

But the way he does it matters. He crossed a line. I invite defenders of Trump to imagine a future progressive president who denounces a Nigerian-born black pastor, or a US-born Arab Christian or Muslim, for their opposition to transgender rights, telling them that this is America, and if they don’t like it, they can go back to their bigot countries.

Meanwhile, here’s a member of the Squad yesterday, speaking to a progressive group:

Rep Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice” pic.twitter.com/2NIj5Vvcor

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) July 15, 2019

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Translation: if you are a racial, religious, or sexual minority, and you dissent from progressive orthodoxies, you are a traitor to your race, religion, or sexual tribe, and we don’t want you.

It’s easy for liberals to see why Trump is extremely problematic for saying things like he does (and we conservatives ought to try harder to see and hear Trump from the point of view of others). But liberals ought to imagine what it’s like to be someone who doesn’t fit into the Squad’s woke progressive categories of acceptability, and to imagine what it would be like for those people under that kind of progressive government.

One of the people I follow on Twitter is the American Muslim Ismail Royer. He is a pro-life social conservative, and often calls out US Muslim leaders for taking public stands (e.g., pro-abortion, pro-LGBT) that contradict Islamic law. He is exactly the kind of Muslim that progressives like Ilhan Omar and others would marginalize, because progressive orthodoxy means more to them than religious orthodoxy, or even tolerance of the religiously orthodox. I certainly wouldn’t say that Ismail Royer supports Trump, but I can at least conceive that for him, as an American Muslim of morally and socially conservative conviction, it is not clear whether it would be worse for America if it was ruled by the Trumpist right or the Woke left.

This is how I see things as a socially and religiously conservative Christian, anyway. I’ll say flat-out that I think Trump is a scarcely competent president who is a moral cretin and is damaging American life. But the idea that on policy, Trump is worse than where most Democratic politicians stand today? I don’t buy it. It seems axiomatic for many liberals and progressives that Trump’s awfulness negates any bad qualities from progressive would-be rivals (if they — the liberals — see these qualities as bad in the first place, which many do not).

For example, I remind you that nearly all of the Democratic presidential contenders are operationally open borders. Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum said the other day that he can’t tell any difference between what Elizabeth Warren proposes on immigration, and an open borders position. Every one of the Dems is strongly pro-abortion, and strongly pro-LGBT, in ways that pose significant threats to the liberties of religious dissenters, and ought to concern everyone regarding transgender ideology and its spread in schools and in the medical profession (more on which in a separate post today). There’s more. None of that negates the bad things about Trump, heaven knows, but it’s just bonkers for liberals to act as if we’re dealing with a devilish president versus angelic opponents.

I know some religious and social conservatives who fear progressivism in power, but believe for various reasons that Trump is worse, and who will either vote Democratic in 2020, or withhold their vote.

I know some religious and social conservatives who fear progressivism in power, and who believe that as bad as Trump is, if he’s the only thing standing in the way of progressives, then they need to bite the bullet and vote for him.

I think both strategies are rational — that is, I think a reasonable case can be made for both. I am more likely to take the latter than the former, but until we get to election day next year, I won’t be sure which one it will be. I have been in a situation like this before: voting for the corrupt Democratic Edwin W. Edwards for governor in 1991, to prevent former Klansman David Duke from becoming governor. To me, that wasn’t a close call, but it still made me sick to have to vote for Edwards, who symbolized most of what was wrong with the political culture of our state. But Duke was worse. No conservative who voted EWE in ’91 was under any illusion as to why it was important to vote for the crook that year.

Anyway, what is do damned depressing about our time is that all the political energy is with the worst people. David Brooks touches on this issue in his column about the civil war among progressive and liberal factions in the Democratic Party. Excerpt:

Critics on the left argue that liberalism is a set of seemingly neutral procedures that the privileged adopt to mask their underlying grip on power. Left-wing critics detest liberalism’s incrementalism and argue that only a complete revolution will uproot injustice.

They do not share liberalism’s belief in the primacy of free speech. They argue that free speech sometimes has to be restricted because incorrect words can trap our thinking. Bad words, like insensitive gender pronouns, preserve oppression.

They embrace essentialism, which is the antithesis of liberalism. Essentialism is the belief that people are defined by a single identity that never changes. A cisgender white male is always and only a cisgender white male.

In short, many of today’s young leaders, and their older allies, don’t want to work within the liberal system. They want to blow it up.

So which side will prevail?

Over the short term, I’d put my money on the anti-liberals.

Read the whole thing to see why. I think he’s right, and that this is why the best chance the Dems have to toss out Trump — boring old Joe Biden — is not going to win the party’s primary. One thing Brooks says in his reasons why anti-liberals are going to prevail in the Democratic Party resonates especially with me:

Second, liberal institutions have deteriorated. A liberal society needs universities where ideas are openly debated, it needs media outlets that strive to be objective, it needs political institutions, like the Senate, that are governed by procedures designed to keep the process fair to both sides. It needs people who put the rules of fair play above short-term partisan passion. Those people scarcely exist.

How much have you read in the leading media about Antifa’s assault on Andy Ngo? How much have you read, seen, and heard about the Antifa loony Willem van Spronsen, shot dead by authorities while throwing incendiary devices at a government (ICE) immigration facility, and trying to blow up a propane tank at the facility? It’s not that the media have ignored these stories entirely, but that they rarely receive coverage proportional to their importance, at least from a conservative perspective.

And there are things like this. Jesse Singal is a self-described progressive who covers science for New York magazine — and he’s appalled by the politicization of trans coverage:

Outlets have completely, completely given up on covering this like they would any other health or science subject. It’s just astounding how radical the journalistic shift has been. https://t.co/9XMKriFyuo

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) July 14, 2019

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From where I sit, the mainstream journalism coverage of LGBT issues is heavily propagandistic — not even-handed, but almost pure advocacy journalism. In fact, most coverage of so-called “diversity” issues is too, as is a lot of immigration coverage. Point is, when one is conservative, and sees how thoroughly the culture-forming, opinion-making institutions of American life are shifting further to the left, and away from old-fashioned, fair-play liberalism, having Archie Bunker in the White House isn’t as much of a problem as it would otherwise be.

Conservative supporters of Trump say, “At least he fights” — as if idiotic, immoral, fat-mouthing tweets constitute “fighting.” They are “fighting” in the same sense of some redneck moron deciding that he’s struck a blow against evil by giving some authority figure a good cussin’. But look, now the left is going to benefit from the same performative nonsense from the Squad. They’ll say all the things that rile up their core, and appall or frighten many others. I’m not sure that Yeats’s famous lines are exactly true today, and that the best lack all conviction, but it is certainly true that the worst, on both left and right, are full of passionate intensity. And, as in the Spanish Civil War, sooner or later most of us are going to have to choose a side, even if it’s only in the secrecy of the voting booth.

UPDATE: Please read Douthat’s column today. In it, he talks about how Trump is a cruder version of what he ran against. Excerpts:

But in the post-Cold War dispensation [conservatives’] defense [of American exceptionalism] became rote and unconvincing, because even as they chest-thumped about their own patriotism and the perfidy of liberalism, conservative politicians didn’t seem to be actually cultivating or sustaining the things their ideology claimed to be defending.

This tendency culminated in an Obama-era conservatism that decided that anyone unhappy with Republican governance was just an ingrate who didn’t deserve the American experiment: You were a socialist if you doubted the perfection of our health care system, part of the mooching “47 percent” if you didn’t think a capital-gains tax cut would solve the working-class’s social crisis, an appeaser if you doubted the wisdom of a maximally hawkish foreign policy.

Right, and Trump rose because he was willing to talk about things that ordinary Republicans weren’t. Now, because of the ground he opened up, a really interesting philosophical conversation has begun among many on the Right, who are openly questioning the conventional wisdom of the worn-out GOP vision. (I’m talking about this week’s National Conservatism conference in DC, more on which separately.) More Douthat:

But — and you know there’s a but — none of the people having this lively debate are the president of the United States. And in the president himself you can see how nationalism-in-power, instead of correcting exceptionalism as Thiel suggests, can simply become a cruder, more exclusionary version of the “everything is awesome” mentality that inspires its irritation in the first place.

Read it all. 

UPDATE.2: Matthew Walther says this probably won’t hurt Trump:

The only people who are adversely affected by his rhetoric are the rest of us who have to inhabit the noxious political atmosphere that he did not create but in which he has flourished. He will not be the last important American politician to employ these tropes — perhaps not even the last president. This is the cockle of rebellion, insolence, and sedition that we ourselves have plowed for, sowed, and scattered.

Now it’s harvest time.

UPDATE.3: I was unclear about which tweets of Trump’s I believe were racist. Not the one at the very top! (It’s just dumb.) These were the ones that crossed the race line, in my view:

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019

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….and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019

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The racism part comes in assuming that all those women are foreigners, because of African or Latino descent, and that therefore they should get out of the country.

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Sunday Morning At Auschwitz

On Sunday morning, I went to Auschwitz. I had to take an Uber there from the Tyniec monastery. It was jarring to take Uber to Auschwitz. It was jarring to pass by strip malls and movie theaters and all the usual signs of modern life only a short walking distance from the scene of world-historical mass murder. Watching through the car window older Poles walking to mass down the streets of Oswiecim, I wondered what it’s like to live in a town that is forever associated with infamy — even though your people were victims, not perpetrators.

I have the sense that I’m like someone who ran to the melting-down Chernobyl reactor to see what was happening, and now have to wait to see the effects of radiation poisoning. It wouldn’t be correct to say that “nothing prepares you for Auschwitz.” In fact, our culture does a pretty good job preparing people for Auschwitz, though I will agree that standing in front of the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate really does give you a jolt. The entire time I walked around the grounds, I was praying my prayer rope for the souls of the dead. If I’m honest, I was also praying it, in a sense, for myself — as a kind of shield against the moral horror of what I was seeing.

Because there’s nothing to say about Auschwitz that hasn’t been said a million times already, I’ll keep this short, and restricted to my own brief impressions.

I didn’t realize that there are actually two Auschwitzs — Auschwitz II, which is 2 km away from the first camp, is called Birkenau. They are very different places, though also the same. The first Auschwitz is where the most interesting things are, because it was where the Germans tried their worst things; Birkenau is what they built when the number of Jews and others being brought to Auschwitz I overwhelmed its capacity to murder them. There’s not as much to see at Birkenau, because by the time the Nazis built it, they had it all down to a science. The vastness of Birkenau is what knocks you flat. I took the photo above just inside the red brick gate (the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate is at Auschwitz I):

Imagine train cars lined up about as far as you can see, disgorging human beings. That’s what happened here. The great contemporary historian of Poland, Norman Davies, writes:

It took only twenty minutes between the arrival of a train load to be undressed and “disinfected” [gassed] and the arrival of the special detachments to strip the corpses of hair, gold fillings, and personal jewellery at the entrance to the crematorium. Hair mattresses, bone fertilizer, and soap from human fat were delivered to German industry with Prussian precision.

The barracks and crematoria covered a massive plain. I could not count them all. Most of them have been allowed to rot; all that remains are crumbling chimneys from the small stoves inside the barracks, meant to keep the inmates warm. This gives the site the appearance of a dead forest. When historians say that the Germans were doing industrial-scale murder, this is what they mean. I really could not have conceived of this without seeing the size of Birkenau. It is a platitude (if speaking of Auschwitz can ever be that) to call Auschwitz-Birkenau a killing machine, but confronting it with your own eyes — especially Birkenau — reveals the truth of that observation with staggering clarity. It could not have been more efficient.

That was Birkenau — which I saw after I had toured Auschwitz I.

Two things jumped out at me about Auschwitz I. First, how utterly banal it is. Again, that platitude, that cliche: the banality of evil. But seriously: it’s true here, like nowhere else I’ve ever seen. If you didn’t know what had happened there, it would look like a dull barracks. You’ll walk by a building, and stop to read the museum marker, and it will say something like, “In this building, Dr. Josef Mengele…”. There’s a room there where the museum displays hair the Nazis harvested from female corpses, and sold to textile makers. There was over one ton of it. Do you know how much human hair it takes to make a ton? Enough to fill a small house! I also saw a cell where prisoners sentenced to death by deliberate starvation were kept. Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic saint, died in that cell.

The second thing that jumped out at me was how mind-blowingly bureaucratic it all was. Again, this is something historians tell us, but you really need to examine the documents on display there to grasp the perversity of this. The Germans kept records of everything. It was so methodical. If somehow this site had been the place of a battlefield massacre, it would have been more comprehensible. But this was about as premeditated as it gets. It makes you ashamed to be human.

The whole thing made me aware of our capacity, as human beings, to do this kind of thing, and to hide what we do behind forms and papers and ideas. There was handwritten testimony there by Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz commandant from 1940-43 (later hanged there as a war criminal), who wrote about receiving the order from Himmler to start gassing Jews. Himmler told him this in a face to face meeting in 1941. Hoess wrote (this is from the Yad Vashem website):

We discussed the ways and means of effecting the extermination. This could only be done by gassing, since it would have been absolutely impossible to dispose by shooting of the large numbers of people that were expected, and it would have placed too heavy a burden on the SS men who had to carry it out, especially because of the women and children among the victims.

Can you believe that? They came up with mass gassing in part to spare the tender feelings of SS men, who would feel bad about shooting women and children. Again, this is not news, but to see it at Auschwitz, in Hoess’s own handwriting — there’s nothing like it.

Human nature never changes

Here’s what the inside of a gas chamber looks like:

I wondered if those scratch marks were from the hands of the dead, but a guide told me no. In the room next to the gas chamber were these ovens for burning bodies:

In the car riding out to Auschwitz, I had caught up on my Twitter feed, and read initial reports about the BBC’s new documentary in which former Labour Party employees spoke out about anti-Semitism in the party, and Jeremy Corbyn’s upper management team trying to squelch complaints. Here’s the latest, from The Guardian on that story. Excerpt:

Several other officials told the programme that dealing with the scale of the complaints took a severe toll on their mental health. Kat Buckingham, the former chief investigator in the disputes team, said she had a breakdown and had decided to leave the party.

“I couldn’t hold the tide and I felt so powerless and I felt guilty and I felt like I failed,” she told the programme.

This was on my mind when I saw those ovens. Labour Party leadership is institutionalizing anti-Semitism, according to whistleblowers within the party, commenting on the controversy that has dogged Labour ever since the far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn took over the party’s leadership three years ago.

Look at this. These are clothes taken off children that were later gassed:

This young man’s photo hangs on the wall with those of other children and teenagers. Look at his eyes. I have a son about the same age as Kopel Polter:

And of course these empty cans:

I remember thinking  as I was walking out of Birkenau that the only thing harder than believing in God after Auschwitz is not believing in Him. There is an outdoor exhibition outside the gates of Auschwitz I featured photos and excerpts of contemporary interviews with Auschwitz survivors, reflecting on their religious thoughts after Auschwitz. Here’s a story from the Times of Israel about the exhibition. 

As I walked through it, the rain began, and it came down hard, but I couldn’t tear myself away from reading the words of these survivors. Punctuation below is in the original inscriptions at the exhibit.

Here’s something from Tzipora Fayga Waller, a Hungarian Jew:

I was 18 years old. During the selection in Auschwitz, I held onto my aunt’s child. Mengele motioned me to the left. I did not understand. He screamed at me “is that child yours?” I said “no.” He took Avrumy from me and pushed me to the right. I didn’t know what it meant then. We believed Hashem [the Most High — a name of God] was going to help us. But it didn’t work. I was the first born, and the only one that survived. What I learned from my experience in Auschwitz is to believe in kindness. Be good to the people around you.

Here’s one from Avraham Zelcer, a Czech Jew:

I was 16 years old. The train stopped in Auschwitz on the morning of Shavuos. We thanked God we arrived. The horrors of our transport from Czechoslovakia were beyond words. So many people suffered and died. We didn’t know what was waiting for us. Women and children to the left. I went to the right. I asked someone: “where are the women and children?” He pointed to a tall chimney: “they went out through there.” The only way out of Auschwitz was through the chimney: today, tomorrow, or the next day. It took me a year after liberation to return to my faith.

From Ernest Rumi Gelb, also from Czechoslovakia:

I was 17 years old. I remember our daily marches to work every day in Auschwitz. Invariably there was someone who knew the morning davening [prayer] by heart. I am not sure I felt like praying, but I did. The impulse for rejection was strong. Prayer, however, was a reminder of God. On Rosh Hashanah, as on all days, we were forbidden to pray. But we did it on the marches. Commiserating with other Jews through prayer was important for me. We could all hope and imagine together that, God willing, next year we would be out of there.

From Rabbi Nissan Mangel (Czech-born):

I was 11 years old. The fires of Auschwitz made some people lose their faith. one morning, I was marching with others in the camp. A man in the group saw a yingele [Jewish boy], dead, hanging from the gallows. He screamed, “where are you God!” Another man responded, “you know where God is? He is on the gallows with the boy. That’s where he is.” I saw the exact same barbarity. The man could not reconcile what he saw with a compassionate God. My father taught me that fire makes things hard, or it can make them melt. My emunah [faith] became stronger that day.

One more, from Irving Roth, also Czech:

I was 14 years old. it was the day before Yom Kippur. I was hungry, frightened. I couldn’t eat my piece of bread. I could not drink the coffee. Looking back, as a religious man, I ask myself today how did I live through this? I decided that my quarrel was not with God, but with man. It was man that created the gas chamber. Not God. In spite of all that the Nazis took from me, I made choices in the midst of this meaningless terror. I made decisions about how I would conduct myself. Fatih was the only thing left. I took comfort in it.

As I was leaving Birkenau, I thought: ifI had survived imprisonment at Auschwitz and thought God didn’t exist, and that ultimate justice would be impossible, I don’t know how I would be able to go on living.

My next thought was a Christian one: about how deeply right it is that God would take the form of a man persecuted and put to death by torture, and would overcome that death through resurrection. After Auschwitz, the logic of the Incarnation and the Passion made sense to me at a deep level, in a way that it had not before.

I also thought about how forgiveness is the only way to maintain civilization. There is no way Germany could ever atone for the Holocaust. No way. In fact, I have to say I admire the moral courage of the German visitors I saw at Auschwitz that morning (I knew they were German because I heard a guide speaking to them in German.) I would not be able to bear the shame of it.

Leszek Kolakowski, whose essay collection Is God Happy? has been my constant companion in Poland, writes about theodicy (the branch of theology concerned with reconciling an all-powerful, all-just, and all-merciful deity with the existence of evil):

People today do not lose their faith because of the evil they see around them. Unbelievers perceive evil in a way that is already determined by their unbelief: the two are mutually supporting. The same holds true of the faithful: they perceive evil in light of their faith, which is consequently affirmed rather than weakened by what they see. So there seem to be no good grounds for saying that the evil of our time casts doubts on the presence of God; there is no compelling logical or psychological connection.

Similarly with science: Pascal was terrified by the “eternal silence” of infinite Cartesian space; but both this silence and the voice of God are in the ear of the listener. God’s presence or absence lies in belief or unbelief, and each of these attitudes, once adopted, will be confirmed by everything we see around us.

The meaning of the godless Enlightenment has not yet become apparent, because the breakdown of the old faith and the collapse of the Enlightenment are taking place simultaneously, both before our eyes and in our hearts.

In the same essay, he wrote:

The collapse of Christianity so eagerly awaited and so joyfully greeted by the Enlightenment turned out — to the extent that it really occurred — to be almost simultaneous with the collapse of the Enlightenment. The new, radiant anthropocentric order that was to arise and supplant God once He had been deposed never appeared.

I have long believed that the Holocaust was the most important event of the 20th century, and maybe the most important event in human history outside the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, because it tells us the truth about who we are. That no matter how advanced we become, in culture, education, and technology, we are capable of doing this to each other. It wasn’t just the Germans. The Soviets did something like this too. As did the Red Chinese. What happened in Auschwitz could happen anywhere, given the right set of circumstances.

I can understand how someone would lose their faith in God because of the Holocaust. What I can’t understand is how they could retain their faith in Man. There is no such thing as a radiant anthropocentric order. It’s a lie, and only fools believe it. They are fellow travelers of Christian fools who believe in a happy-clappy God of Your Best Life now.

And that’s all I have to say about it, for now.

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Poland’s Crisis

I’m about to leave Poland, headed back home. Flight out of Krakow boards in a few minutes. I wanted to say a couple of things before I head out. I’ll elaborate more later if I have time.

First, I can’t overstate how much I have enjoyed being in this country. The people are so warm, the culture so rich, the food so delicious. Since I’ve started this new book project, I’ve been able to spend time among the peoples of countries that for much of my life, I never imagined I would be able to visit, because they were behind the Iron Curtain. The new friends I have made there will be with me always. Let me encourage my fellow Americans to travel to Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and other countries that we call “Eastern Europe” (which, note well, they hate, because it’s a Cold War framework imposed on them). There is so much to learn here, and so much to love. I might sound like a tourist board marketer by saying that, but it really is true. If you’re an American who loves to travel in Europe, and you only know the UK, France, Germany, and the other familiar countries, then you only know half of Europe.

Second, I must admit that I did not foresee the sense of cultural crisis that exists in Poland, but which now, after nine days here, is undeniable. I had a number of conversations in Warsaw and in greater Krakow, with laity and clergy, with middle-aged people and young ones. Almost everyone I spoke to expressed deep concern about the direction of the country, and awareness that it’s at a crossroads.

Most of my interlocutors are political conservatives, though not all of them support the present government. Those with whom I spoke who oppose the populist government really hate it, with the same passion that progressives hate Trump back in the US. Some of the conservatives I talked to are reluctant supporters of the government, but all of them, even the unconflicted supporters, worry about the deep political division within the country. As in other liberal democracies, the splits among political factions are widening into a chasm.

The most concerning thing to me, and to my interlocutors (almost all of whom were practicing Catholics), is the state of the faith, and specifically of the institutional Catholic Church. This is the most surprising thing for an American like me to hear, because many of us have been accustomed, since the days of John Paul II, to thinking of Poland as a bastion of popular Christianity. The “Alas For Fortress Poland” sentiment I picked up on my first days here was more than confirmed by later interviews and conversations.

As I’m about to board the plane for home, the conversation that stands out strongest in my mind is one I had with a veteran priest. He is exasperated with the bishops and the institutional church. He told me that they are full of themselves, and completely indifferent to the mounting crisis around them. This cleric spoke with unusual depth and passion. In his view, they are proud and full of vainglory, and don’t see how dissatisfied Poles are with their leadership. He said the Polish church is coasting on past glories, and its leadership doesn’t grasp the seriousness of the moment.

A Millennial-generation Catholic who was part of that conversation told me later, “He’s right. I don’t know a single Catholic, of my generation or of any generation, who is satisfied with the bishops. Everybody is angry over the way they have handled the abuse scandal.”

Mind you, the abuse scandal has only just started in Poland. There is much more to come.

I spent my last couple of days in Poland at a monastery, where I spoke at a summer school attended by Catholic college students. Last night I talked with one at dinner. The student said that most of her friends have walked away from the Church, because they have never really been raised in it.

“This thing you talked about in your speech, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, that is exactly how most of my generation were raised,” she said.

I heard the same kind of thing often on this trip, from practicing Millennial Catholics and Gen Z Catholics. In last night’s conversation around the dinner table, I repeated what a young Warsaw Catholic told me: that within 10 to 20 years, Poland will be where Ireland is today in terms of the faith.

There was nodding all around.

This is Poland, y’all.

The good thing is that relative to the churches in other Western countries, the Poles have a stronger base from which to mount resistance. But if the testimonies of the faithful Catholics I’ve been talking to over the last nine days are accurate, it seems to me that renewal and resistance will not come from the institutional Church. It will come from engaged laity and the priests who share their sense of mission in a time of crisis. Now that I think about it, I wish I had emphasized more strongly to the students in my speech that nobody is going to come save them. I did repeat to them something I heard from a middle-aged Catholic earlier in the trip: that the future of Polish Christianity depends on the faithful among Millennials and Generation Z, not in the trite general sense of “the young are our future,” but because they are the only ones who really understand the severity of the crisis. 

The message I received loud and clear is that those who we Americans would call Baby Boomers, and even many Generation Xers, like me, are too detached from the main currents of faith and culture in this country to perceive what’s happening, much less mount effective resistance. One young Catholic in Warsaw said to me, “We are desperate for leadership.”

It seems to me that what Poland needs is some way to connect these younger Catholics to each other, and to lay and clerical Catholics who share their sense of crisis, and their eagerness to find a way through it. But how will they do it? Now is the time for spiritual entrepreneurs among the orthodox Catholic faithful to come forward.

We really are all in this together. What happens in Poland affects us Americans, and vice versa. Let’s build the networks now, and help each other.

Plane is boarding. More later.

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