Rod Dreher's Blog, page 32

Is NPR In The Grips Of (Checks Notes) White Supremacy?

I mentioned this in a post yesterday, but I want to explore it more: National Public Radio is reportedly in a crisis because so many people of color are resigning and taking other jobs. Excerpt:

Celeste Headlee, who has hosted several public radio programs and written extensively about race in the industry, said she couldn’t speak to the specific reasons individual hosts have left but called the departures concerning. “It’s so common for companies to put resources into recruiting people of color and then put no resources into really retaining them or supporting them in the roles they have so that they will continue with the organization.”

She said she regularly hears from public-radio staffers of color who say they deal with daily slights and resistance to their ideas, despite a sense they got their jobs to help expand the audience.

But Headlee — who founded a nonprofit for minority public-radio employees — credited John Lansing, NPR’s president and chief executive, for being “dead serious about solving these issues.” She added: “If there ever was a chance for our industry to move forward, now is the time.”

NPR employees raised questions about the exodus of women of color during an all-staff meeting last month headed by Lansing, who is generally well-regarded within the organization. But he received a cool reception when he told employees that turnover was common in the news media and that NPR couldn’t stand in the way of staffers seeking greater opportunities elsewhere, according to one participant.

The WaPo piece quoted this tweet from last September by NPR’s Sam Sanders:

Look at all the incredibly talented hosts from marginalized backgrounds who’ve left @npr recently:
–@lourdesgnavarro
–@RadioMirage
–@HiddenBrain
–@Maria_Hinojosa
–@maddie_sofia
–@NBCJoshua
I believe in the mission of public radio; this trend is antithetical to that mission.

— Sam Sanders (@samsanders) September 9, 2021

And this, from All Things Considered’s co-host:

I’m on vacation and not planning on staying glued to twitter or email. If you’re a journalist writing about this, I’ll sing Audie’s praises to the end of time but refer you to @isalara at NPR comms for comment on why we’re hemorrhaging hosts from marginalized backgrounds.

— Ari Shapiro (@arishapiro) January 4, 2022

Oh, please. You know which employees “from marginalized backgrounds” NPR doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about recruiting? Working class white people. Evangelicals. I am neither, but from listening to NPR over the years, I know that those people are invisible to many of NPR’s reporters, except as a menace.

Of all the reasons why NPR is losing so many on-air hosts of color, the idea that NPR is hostile to them and their ideas is the most risible, at least from the outside. Of course I don’t know what happens inside NPR, but judging from the content of the programming, whenever I turn in, NPR has become so unlistenable because it seems to care only for the so-called “marginalized” — LGBT, POCs, et al. — who are centered in NPR’s overall coverage. If what we hear on NPR is the product of a newsroom that is hostile to minorities, what on earth would an NPR deemed friendly and supportive to minorities sound like?

Over the past 20 years, NPR has developed but ended three separate programs focusing on black audiences. Tavis Smiley left NPR back in 2004, and the other two shows (“News & Notes” and “Tell Me More”) were cancelled during funding cutbacks, when management had to let go of the lower-rated programs. It’s not the fault of NPR management when programs aimed at a narrow demographic don’t succeed. I used to listen to Tavis Smiley’s show, because though I wasn’t the target audience, I felt that his program gave me an insight into the things some black Americans cared about. Besides which, he was interesting, if at times exasperating. But I would turn off the radio for those other shows, because they were so insular and uninviting.

In the network’s defense, an NPR spokeswoman said that NPR can’t help it when its employees get better offers from other companies — private ones that can pay better salaries. She has a point. I don’t know about the public radio business, but the market for print journalists of color is very much a seller’s market. You have deep-pocketed employers fighting for the same limited number of job candidates. A journalist of color with a successful track record can pretty much write his or her own ticket in the business — especially because journalism is so liberal. Any conservative who has worked in the mainstream media, especially religious conservatives, can tell you that there is less than zero concern among newsroom management to diversify its staff by viewpoint.

I am sure the business has changed a lot since I left newspapers 11 years ago, but I was in management for a couple of years, and I remember sitting in on planning sessions in which newsroom leaders agonized over how to hire more minorities. One piece of research data stood out so strongly that I still recall it today: most people who go into print journalism come from households where families read newspapers and magazines. For whatever reason, back when this research was done (first decade of this century), whites were far more likely to read newspapers than blacks and Hispanics.

If you think about it, this makes sense. It was certainly the case with me, and, I believe, with most of my friends in journalism school. As much as I crack on NPR for not caring about viewpoint diversity, I concede that it would be hard to find conservatives interested in a career in public radio journalism, because so few conservatives grow up listening to public radio. (We are such a family, or were until NPR went super-woke, and my youngest kid dreamed for a while about becoming a public radio journalist.) All of this is to say that if public radio staffs are disproportionately white and liberal, the fact that NPR attracts a white liberal audience has a lot to do with it.

But does it have everything to do with it? In 2015, an analysis of NPR’s demographics found:

From a political standpoint, the NPR demographics are equally split into thirds when identifying as a conservative, moderate, or liberal.

My guess is that those numbers have shifted to favor liberals, simply because when the Great Awokening conquered NPR, turning it from liberal to woke, many conservatives (like me) abandoned it. And yes, if I seem like I obsess over what has happened to NPR, it’s because I used to care about NPR a lot, and I miss it greatly, but there’s not much there anymore for people like me, except cultural hostility and contempt for us. Granted, I don’t know precisely what POCs leaving NPR think the problem is there, and for all I know, they have a point; we won’t be able to judge it fairly until they start speaking in specifics. But again, judging from what is on the air, the idea that NPR is under the boot of white supremacy is the kind of idiotic claim that only someone who has gotten high on their woke supply can make.

Earlier this morning I did a Zoom session with a group of PhD candidates at a conservative Evangelical seminary. They wanted to talk about Live Not By Lies, which they had read. I told them that one of the biggest challenges facing pastors and other leaders of conservative churches is getting their congregations to see the world as it is, not as they wish it were. Conservative congregations, especially those dominated by older people, can easily be locked into a rigid framework where they assume that their very particular way of seeing the world is normative. For example, Southern Baptist congregations are known for nationalistic special services, like First Baptist Dallas’s annual Freedom Sunday service:

 

Many people like this are so committed to their worldview that they don’t want to hear the news about the Great Awokening having captured the senior leadership of the US Armed Forces. As you readers know, I regularly hear from active duty and recently retired service members who say they now discourage traditional Christians and political conservatives from military service, saying that the Pentagon brass are politicizing the Armed Forces strongly to the cultural Left — such that conservative and conservative Christian service members might have to face the question of whether to violate their own conscience, or disobey an order and destroy their military careers. This kind of thing is very hard for normie conservatives in the pews to grasp. I recall back in 2002, when I was at National Review, interviewing a Catholic seminarian who told me that when he came home from his first semester at seminary, and told his conservative Texas parents that the seminary was controlled by sexually active gay men, and that the seminary had hosted a BDSM-themed Halloween party for seminarians, the parents refused to believe it. It was easier for them to call their own son a liar than to accept what he was telling them about an institution they trusted. Talking to that young man — who had transferred to a solid seminary — helped me to understand that bad people like those who administered his former seminary got away with so much because of normies on the outside who refused to comprehend what was really going on.

I wonder if the culture within NPR is such that many of its people simply cannot grasp how they look and sound to those outside the bubble of wokeness. Admittedly my listening to NPR is not as frequent as it used to be, but it was (and no doubt still is) rare to listen to NPR shows and think that the network has any interest in people not like themselves. The controversy over whether or not NPR is in the grips of white supremacy sounds as ridiculous as, say, the faculty of Oberlin College tying itself up into knots over the same question. This is a deeply intra-progressive controversy, and the fact that it exists at all is, I think, a sign of how far gone down an ideological rabbit hole National Public Radio has gone. If they hadn’t driven off Garrison Keillor over #MeToo allegations, they would probably be ready to carpet-bomb Lake Wobegon for being too white. I’m serious. Can you imagine doing a show today about Lake Wobegon? NPR’s internal commissars would raise hell about the tiny rural Minnesota town not reflecting the diversity of America (while at the same time not giving a damn about the fact that NPR’s news and programming ignores America’s diversity too, just not in a way that satisfies liberal priors).

Again, I await more details about what precise criticisms these disaffected NPR hosts have about NPR. It is possible that their complaints have substance, but can’t be perceived from the outside. From what we know at this point, though, it seems that NPR’s senior management is caught in a bind that a number of news and information organizations are. Their core people are so ideologically committed that they won’t be satisfied with anything that strikes them as half-measures, even if doing what they want alienates a lot of people who would normally be their allies. We see on the Right now some obnoxious people imposing purity tests as a way to achieve power within conservative circles, while simultaneously making it more difficult to build a conservative movement capable of achieving something in the real world. I’m seeing this happen right now in my broader circles, and I wonder if that’s what this NPR controversy is about: activist types trying to impose their own narrow vision on an organization, even if it makes it harder for the organization to fulfill its mission because it alienates people who normally would join up.

Religions need to draw clear boundaries and defend them, because religions speak of Ultimate Truth. Political parties and media organizations cannot be run like religions, and media organizations that aspire to be non-partisan and even-handed cannot be run like political parties.

Finally, check out this post from Tara Henley on why she resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It’s very powerful. Excerpts:

For months now, I’ve been getting complaints about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where I’ve worked as a TV and radio producer, and occasional on-air columnist, for much of the past decade.

People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog is an editorial priority for the CBC, when local issues of broad concern go unreported. Or why our pop culture radio show’s coverage of the Dave Chappelle Netflix special failed to include any of the legions of fans, or comics, that did not find it offensive. Or why, exactly, taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as “brainstorm” and “lame.”

Everyone asks the same thing: What is going on at the CBC?

More:

Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted.

It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.

To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.

It is to sign on, enthusiastically, to a radical political agenda that originated on Ivy League campuses in the United States and spread through American social media platforms that monetize outrage and stoke societal divisions. It is to pretend that the “woke” worldview is near universal — even if it is far from popular with those you know, and speak to, and interview, and read.

To work at the CBC now is to accept the idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others. It is, in my newsroom, to fill out racial profile forms for every guest you book; to actively book more people of some races and less of others.

To work at the CBC is to submit to job interviews that are not about qualifications or experience — but instead demand the parroting of orthodoxies, the demonstration of fealty to dogma.

It is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like.

It is to endlessly document microaggressions but pay little attention to evictions; to spotlight company’s political platitudes but have little interest in wages or working conditions. It is to allow sweeping societal changes like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school closures to roll out — with little debate. To see billionaires amass extraordinary wealth and bureaucrats amass enormous power — with little scrutiny. And to watch the most vulnerable among us die of drug overdoses — with little comment.

It is to consent to the idea that a growing list of subjects are off the table, that dialogue itself can be harmful. That the big issues of our time are all already settled.

It is to capitulate to certainty, to shut down critical thinking, to stamp out curiosity. To keep one’s mouth shut, to not ask questions, to not rock the boat.

This, while the world burns.

Read it all. It’s very good. Henley is talking about the death of journalism within progressive-run journalistic institutions. Is there anybody within NPR who thinks this way? I would like to hear from them if so. E-mail me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. I will not publish anything without your permission, and will respect privacy.

I’ll leave you all with this below. It’s talking about journalism, but it could be talking about the Left in general. It still likes to think of itself as outsider, but in fact it defends the institutional status quo. As far as the Left is concerned, Big Business can do whatever it wants to do as long as it checks off the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity list.

If you wonder why @joerogan has 13x the viewers of CNN, this is the reason: pic.twitter.com/KxvOZhnqav

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) January 4, 2022

The post Is NPR In The Grips Of (Checks Notes) White Supremacy? appeared first on The American Conservative.

To Hell With January 6

I’ve been away from the keys this morning, in church celebrating the Feast of Theophany, the baptism of Christ. That’s how I prefer to think of January 6. I am in a distinct minority in this country, at least this year. The entire episode makes me angry at everybody. Let me get this off my chest.

I have no sympathy at all for the rioters, or for the president who encouraged their shocking crimes. I supported the second impeachment of Trump precisely because he stoked the mob’s rage, and did not call them off at the first opportunity. What that mob did at the Capitol was as close to a desecration as is possible in a secular building. Every one of those people who went into that building knew what they were doing was wrong, or should have known. It is right to hold them accountable.Ashli Babbitt is no hero, and a victim of only herself. Before she even arrived at the Capitol, she was a crazy person, driven by her own rage.  She has been made an ex post facto martyr by the Right in the same way that violent druggie George Floyd was made a martyr by the Left. But in Floyd’s case, he didn’t deserve what happened to him. In Babbitt’s case, I don’t see where the Capitol Police officer who shot her had a choice. Ask yourself, conservative: if that had been a Black Lives Matter mob invading the Capitol, and Babbitt had been a BLM activist barreling through a locked door into a chamber where members of Congress were sheltering, would you blame the cop for shooting her? If that January 6 event had been a Black Lives Matter riot, every white conservative in this country would know exactly what to think of it. To hell with double standards, on both the Right and the Left.Trump bears a lot of moral responsibility for that atrocity, because of his lie about the “stolen election.” Shame on members of Congress who stand by that lie.If you have forgotten how despicable the mob action of a year ago was, watch this video by Luke Mogelson, taken inside the riot. There is no legitimate defense of this. None.

Having said that…

The pageant of victimhood that the Democrats and the media are staging is absurd. I said last year when those useful Trump idiots stormed the Capitol that the Democrats were going to make this MAGA riot into a Reichstag fire moment — that is, they will use it to justify taking extreme measures against their opponents. That has happened in particular with the US military. Over the past few months, I have been publishing e-mails and the results of conversations with conservative active-duty and recently retired members of the Armed Forces, all of whom are afraid and disgusted by the atmosphere of persecution that they say now reigns in the ranks. Conservatives who had nothing to do with the January 6 riot, and who have no affection for those cretins who carried it out, are now leaving the military, or planning to, because they are sick of the woke political indoctrination coming down from the Pentagon, and are afraid that any connection that can be demonstrated to conservative institutions or thought will be used against them to destroy their military careers. Numbers of former or current Armed Forces members have told me that they will do everything they can to prevent their children from going into the military service under these conditions.Today I was driving home from church and listening on podcast to a story from NPR this morning about the radicalization of the American middle class. Check it out here. The reporter, Odette Yousef, says that after January 6, radicals started focusing on local issues, like attacking school boards to protest “racially-inclusive education.” Say what? These were parents who don’t want their children force-fed Critical Race Theory, which many on the Left falsely said wasn’t being taught in schools, despite the fact that there was abundant evidence that it was, in many places. (A version of the Law of Merited Impossibility: “CRT is not being taught in public schools, and wherever it is, you bigots deserve it.”) You have to be skeptical of everything the media have to say about any of these issues. I don’t blame middle-class conservatives for being radicalized by events in this country, because every major institution in America has become or is in process of becoming radicalized to the Left by wokeness. The story that NPR and the mainstream media tell themselves about what is going on in this country is at best a half-truth — and people are not wrong to reject it. For example, the media are very concerned (and rightly so!) about the lies Trump and his supporters tell about the 2020 election, but they have no compunction at all regarding spreading the malicious, destabilizing lies of the 1619 Project. Do you remember that time in 2017 that a left-wing activist carried out a mass shooting of GOP members of Congress at a baseball park in suburban Virginia? He nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise, who underwent extensive surgery because of his wounds. The Virginia attorney general later described it as an act of terrorism. Where was the ongoing spasm of media What-Does-It-All-Mean over that atrocity? Where was the anguished introspection over what that says about the radicalization of the Left in America? That event was sent right down the memory hole. Of course there are important differences between that event and the January 6 riot, so I am not saying they were an exact equivalent. But that was a much bigger deal than it was treated at the time by the media and by the official culture of US elites.Do you remember the 2020 mass riots all around the country after the George Floyd shooting? The BLM riots? We all saw how the media and official culture worked hard to explain away that violence, and to make us all think that the rioters might have pushed it too far, but they had reason: Systemic Racism made them do it. Remember how so many in the medical profession, who had been telling us all to mask up and lock down and avoid crowds, changed their tune when it came to BLM mass protests? We on the Right saw that, and we call bullsh*t. It’s harder and harder to tell when things are straightforward, and when they are politicized. When people can see a vast discrepancy between the world they perceive with their own eyes, and the world as construed for them by the media, by the education system, by Big Business, and by the government, you damn well better believe they are going to be radicalized. As I said above, there is no excuse — none — for the January 6 riot. But some riots are more morally acceptable to our elites than others. Again, see the BLM riots. We on the Right know how this works. The very last thing that the media will do is ask itself what they are doing or have done to advance the radicalization of Americans on both sides. The very last thing Big Business, or the US military, or the schools and universities, will do is ask itself (and its HR departments) what it is doing to radicalize Americans. They are all going to keep sitting back and wondering how on earth it all happened. NPR, for example, has been in the news this week because of a recent exodus of on-air personalities of color. The Washington Post reports that some of them say that NPR stifles POCs. To be fair, I don’t know what the atmosphere inside NPR is like; maybe they have a point. But I do know that NPR over the past four years or so has become unlistenable, because of its obsession with race, gender, sexuality, and identity. If that’s not progressive enough for NPR, what is? The question nobody at NPR or in the national media asks about the network is why is its coverage so biased towards the Left? It’s not just an NPR thing; it’s all the national media. After George Floyd’s killing, the media went through more spasms about whether or not they had done a good job of reporting the realities of life of black America. Any conservative, white or otherwise, can tell you that the media do a crappy job of reporting on our lives and our worlds — but again, this is of zero concern to the media. So, screw ’em.

Whether you are on the Left or the Right, it is very hard to live not by lies in America today. There are so many people in authority in both worlds who are eager to tell themselves lies (or half-truths), and to spread them to others. This is very, very dangerous for our country. Hannah Arendt warned that a sign of coming totalitarianism is the willingness to believe lies because they suited us. From Live Not By Lies:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.” For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

Here’s an important example of this happening in our time and place. In 2019, The New York Times, the world’s most influential newspaper, launched the “1619 Project,” a massive attempt to “reframe” (the Times’s word) American history by displacing the 1776 Declaration of Independence as the traditional founding of the United States, replacing it with the year the first African slaves arrived in North America.

No serious person denies the importance of slavery in US history. But that’s not the point of the 1619 Project. Its goal is to revise America’s national identity by making race hatred central to the nation’s foundational myth. Despite the project’s core claim (that the patriots fought the American Revolution to preserve slavery) having been thoroughly debunked, journalism’s elite saw fit to award the project’s director a Pulitzer Prize for her contribution. Equipped with this matchless imprimatur of establishment respectability, the 1619 Project, which has already been taught in forty-five hundred classrooms, will find its way into many more.

Propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is. Writes Arendt, “The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movement has the power to drop the iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

In 2019, Zach Goldberg, a political science PhD student at Georgia Tech, did a deep dive on LexisNexis, the world’s largest database of publicly available documents, including media reports. He found that over a nine-year period, the rate of news stories using progressive jargon associated with left-wing critical theory and social justice concepts shot into the stratosphere.

What does this mean? That the mainstream media is framing the general public’s understanding of news and events according to what was until very recently a radical ideology confined to left-wing intellectual elites.

It must be conceded that right-wing media, though outside the mainstream, often has a similar effect on conservatives: affirming to them that what they believe about the world is true. For all users of social media—including the nearly three quarters of US adults who use Facebook and the 22 percent who use Twitter—reinforcement of prior political beliefs is built into the system. We are being conditioned to accept as true whatever feels right to us. As Arendt wrote about the pre-totalitarian masses:

They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent with itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Every single one of us, no matter what our political beliefs, are subject to these forces. Below, an example of what Arendt is talking about. The person who posted these tweets says that this is a “perfect example of the Left,” but I can tell you from my personal experience that there are plenty of people on the Right who would do the same thing.

perfect example of the Left. pic.twitter.com/ynbEAdeTuo

— Catturd (@catturd2) January 5, 2022

The post To Hell With January 6 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Wokeness Defeats Rule Of Law

This is a genuinely terrible ruling from the UK, one that sets a horrible precedent in that country:

Anti-racism campaigners tonight hailed a jury’s decision to clear protesters responsible for toppling a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston as a huge step in getting the UK to face up to its colonial past.

Jake Skuse 33, Rhian Graham, 30, Milo Ponsford, 26, and Sage Willoughby, 22, did not dispute the roles they had played in pulling down the statue and throwing it in the River Avon during a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest but all denied criminal damage.

In closing statements following the nine-day trial, the defence had urged jurors to “be on the right side of history”, saying the statue, which stood over the city for 125 years, was so indecent and potentially abusive that it constituted a crime.

After just under three hours’ deliberation, a jury of six men and six women found the so-called “Colston Four” not guilty by an 11 to one majority decision at Bristol crown court on Wednesday afternoon.

More:

But some critics reacted with fury. Scott Benton, a Conservative MP, denounced the verdict as an “absolutely appalling decision”, tweeting: “Are we now a nation which ignores violent acts of criminal damage? This sends out completely the wrong message.”

The former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie said he could not help “questioning the sanity of the jury”. He added: “The verdict was a shocking signal to every lefty protester in the country that they can damage with impunity as long as they chant the phrase hate crime.”

One more:

In the trial, in which few facts were in question, the four defendants argued that their actions were justified because the statue was so offensive.

Each defendant described being motivated by sincere antiracist conviction, frustration that previous attempts to persuade the council to remove the statue had failed, and a belief that the statue was so offensive it constituted an indecent display or a hate crime. …

But Liam Walker QC, representing Willoughby, said: “Each of these defendants were on the right side of history, and I submit, they were also on the right side of the law. Colston’s deeds may be historical but the continued veneration of him in this city was not. The continued veneration of him in a vibrant multicultural city was an act of abuse.”

Read it all. 

Notice that this wasn’t a woke judge deciding this, but a jury. These defendants admitted that they did this crime, but said, Castro-like, “History will absolve us!” And a jury agreed with them! It has now been established in England that you can commit crimes but if you are on the “right side of history,” you can get away with it.

So much for the rule of law. Meanwhile, in Surrey, the police are tracking down the REAL criminals:

.@SurreyPolice consider this a public order offence and wish to arrest the person who posted it.

Please retweet if you disagree this is a public order offence and that the police should have better things to do. pic.twitter.com/HusqNdoRRI

— WeAreFairCop (@WeAreFairCop) January 2, 2022

The post Wokeness Defeats Rule Of Law appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Nobody Talk About The Bolsheviks!’

The left-liberal Orthodox Christian website Public Orthodoxy, the parish newsletter of Orthodox Christians who want to turn American Orthodoxy into Episcopalianism, has published a piece by the scholar Kristina Stoeckl that seriously misunderstands a few things. As my work is one of the things she misunderstands, I need to set the record straight.

She begins by lamenting — correctly — the closure by Russian authorities of the organization Memorial, which exists to keep alive memory of Communism’s crimes. Yet she somehow believes that this lamentable act by the Putin government is supported by conservative Orthodox Christians. More:

On the pages of Public Orthodoxy, Aram G. Sarkisian recently pointed out the odd affinity which some American Orthodox cultivate vis-à-vis the time of the American Civil War and how ultraconservative Orthodox groups appropriate an eighteenth-century story to fit a twisted and ahistorical agenda of the twenty-first. The identification with past epochs it nothing unique to American Orthodox. In my own studies of moral conservatism in Russia and the US, I have also encountered this identification with the past, in particular with the period of the 1920s to 40s.

I wrote about that Sarkisian piece (my response was titled “The Phony Threat Of Orthodixie”), and criticized it for being wildly off the mark in describing the reality of contemporary American Orthodoxy. Sarkisian found a handful of reactionary Southern Orthodox Christians, and conflates their views — which I do not share, and which most Orthodox I know don’t share — with all politically and theologically conservative Orthodox Christians from the American South. American Orthodoxy is very small, but one place it is growing is the American South — meanwhile, it is dying in the blue-state Northeast. Prof. Stoeckl is Austrian, so perhaps she doesn’t realize that Sarkisian’s piece is an example of the very thing she criticizes: appropriating past history wrongly to advance a line of criticism of a contemporary phenomenon. It is a truism that for the American left, it is always and forever 1963 in Selma. Sarkisian appears to have decided that it is also Fort Sumter, 1861.

Here’s where I come in. Stoeckl writes:

In his speech to the 18th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, Vladimir Putin drew a historical comparison between the 1920s and today, comparing advocates of gender equality and rights pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity with Bolshevik revolutionaries:

“In a number of Western countries, the debate over men’s and women’s rights has turned into a perfect phantasmagoria. Look, beware of going where the Bolsheviks once planned to go—not only communalizing chickens, but also communalizing women. One more step and you will be there […] this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraeger also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way.”

Putin conjures up a contemporary “red scare” in order to recommend his Russia built on Orthodoxy, traditional values and military power as alternative model. “Beware of going there” is addressed to the foreign participants in the Valdai Discussion Club. You Westerners, he is saying, you think that you won the Cold War and defeated communism, but you don’t see that you now have communism in rainbow colors. The true winner of the Cold War, this is the essence of his message, is Russia.

The copyright on this idea is held not by Putin, but by Rod Dreher, who wrote an entire book in order to argue that those on the liberal and progressive side in today’s culture wars are just like Bolshevik revolutionaries and that religious conservatives are the new dissidents in our era. The book cover of his Live Not By Lies invokes a red pillage of churches in a distinctly 1920s constructivist iconography.

Well, Putin may or may not be a bad man, but he is absolutely correct in that statement. But as to my work, do I say that the libs are “just like” the Bolsheviks? No, not at all. I will be charitable and presume that Dr. Stoeckl, who is personally kind, read Live Not By Lies, and has simply forgotten that its main premise is that we are living through the emergence of a new, softer form of totalitarianism, but are slow to recognize it because our idea of totalitarianism is based on Stalinism, which this most certainly is not. In my book, I talk about the distinctions, but also the similarities. In fact, the entire genesis of the book, as I explain, was that emigres to the US from Soviet bloc countries are seeing things happen here that remind them of what they left behind, but they can’t get Americans to take them seriously, because naive Americans think that It Can’t Happen Here.

Moreover, I discuss the forms that contemporary totalitarianism takes that distinguish it from the Soviet model, and indeed from the classical model: chiefly, the fact that it is not centered in the State, but is emerging simultaneously from ideological capture of private institutions, most importantly of Big Business (“woke capitalism”). And I point out that unlike the Soviet Union (and the state of Oceania in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four), our softer form of totalitarianism seeks domination and conformity not by imposing pain and terror on people, but rather by manipulating their access to status and comfort. Yet the end goal is the same for all kinds of totalitarianism: the politicization of all of life, and the establishment of a single ideology to rule.

This is what the Soviet bloc emigres see happening now in America — and not just in America, but also in Europe. Here is the core of her thesis:

The identification of the leadership of the World Congress of Families, of Vladimir Putin and of Rod Dreher with the anti-communists of the past is – apart from hilarious in the case of Putin—haunted by a double historical blind spot: first they ignore the totalitarian potential on the right, and second, they ignore the fact that terror is born by ideological polarization. In their re-imagined 1920s struggle, they ignore the lesson of totalitarianism.

This is just bizarre. I won’t speak for Allan Carlson and the World Congress of Families (she criticizes him too), and certainly not for Putin, but I cannot for the life of me understand this accusation of “ignor[ing] the totalitarian potential on the right.” Of course right-wing totalitarianism existed! That’s what Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were; Mussolini invented the word “totalitarianism,” in fact. There is always totalitarian potential on the right, but we are not seeing the emergence of a totalitarian right today. We are, however, seeing everywhere the emergence of a soft-totalitarian left, as I document in my book.

Prof. Stoeckl’s essay is in large part an exercise in liberal whataboutism — except there is no “what” in her whatabout. Where are the right-wing totalitarians in the West? Mind you, there is a difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Authoritarianism is anti-democratic, and seeks to establish a monopoly over the political sphere. Totalitarianism is authoritarianism, but extended to every aspect of life (that is, it makes all things political). This distinction matters — and even so, I can’t see any meaningful danger from right-wing authoritarianism. It could arise, yes — and European + American liberals of the left and the right always point to Hungary’s Viktor Orban as an example of right-wing authoritarianism. But this is absurd, as spending any time in Hungary will make clear to the fair-minded observer. There are many substantive critiques of the Orban government, but the idea that he is turning Hungary into a Magyar version of Franco’s Spain is risible.

I can only speculate about why Prof. Stoeckl is willing to overlook my argument and the evidence I present, but if she’s like other liberal critics, it’s because that she doesn’t see progressive ideological hegemony as problematic at all. It’s the way the world is supposed to be, according to them.

On her point about terror being born of ideological polarization, I’m trying to figure out what she is saying in her essay. Here’s a passage:

Terror rarely produced solidarity. While millions of persons perished, the Christian Churches failed in front of the challenge, becoming both victims and collaborators. The “lesson” of totalitarianism is that under conditions of utmost ideological polarization, no-one is safe nor saved. The ideological polarization of the 1920s, 30s and 40s produced terror from the left and from the right.

Why, then, is the identification with the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s so significant for twenty-first century conservatism? One could dismiss it as merely rhetorical. After all, we live in 2021, the Cold War ended in 1991, not even China is communist any longer, what is the problem if some people continue to kick the anti-communist ball after playoff? I don’t see it this way. The identification with the time before the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century allows conservative actors to ignore the lesson of totalitarianism: under conditions of utmost ideological polarization, no-one is safe nor saved.

I don’t get her point here. All you have to do is look at the Spanish Civil War to realize that under condition of utmost ideological polarization, no one is safe or saved. Who disputes that? But in the US today, it is the left that is driving this polarization: by driving people out of their jobs, exiling them to social margins, and instilling fear in people, that they will get on the wrong side of the woke commissars, and find themselves unpersonned. This is happening everywhere here, though perhaps not in Austrian academia, and if it were, Prof. Stoeckl, a progressive and a liberal Catholic, will not have to fear for her livelihood.

Yesterday in this space I wrote, after a series of informal conversations with conservatives I know, about a conservative exodus from certain professions, because of wokeness. I’m thinking right now of one of those friends with whom I spoke. He is a Christian and a conservative, but not very political. If he were more politically oriented, he would have identified as Never Trump, but basically, he’s a man of high principle who doesn’t bring politics to his job. Now, though, he has endured the woke-ification of his workplace, and is planning to get out. The atmosphere of fear within his firm is intense, and he can no longer do his job with integrity. This is something that was 100 percent advised and executed by the left. No phony equivalence (“the right might do this too one day”) can erase the fact that whatever potential the right has, the left is turning their own potential into acts.

We do have an illiberal right in America. Some of them are scary people. They also are largely powerless. The illiberal left, which holds immense power, depends on the threat of the illiberal right to justify its own illiberalism. The woke-ification of the US military, for example, went into high gear after January 6; it’s why our national media are obsessed with keeping the memory of January 6 alive. For the record, I think what happened on January 6 was appalling, and that people should be punished for it. I supported the second Trump impeachment because of the way he behaved on that date. But I also believe that the left in this country is using that event as a Reichstag Fire moment, to justify its own repression. As regular readers know, I have been publishing e-mails and comments from readers who are either now in the military, or who have recently retired, all testifying to the way wokeness imposed from on high is tearing military cohesion apart. We cannot and should not have a US military that is politicized — but that is exactly what the left in power is doing! 

I don’t know what the professor thinks about that, or even if she, being Austrian, knows about it. But it is definitely happening, and it is an example of the kind of thing that is driving our country apart. Maybe the professor is like our standard American liberals: defining “polarization” and “aggression” as refusing to agree with whatever new thing the left proposes now. Allow me to once again bring up the interview I did last summer with one of the most prominent Hungarian Orban critics, an academic who is permitted to say whatever he wants about the Orban government (as he should be!). He told me in our interview that despite all his criticism of Viktor Orban, he feels completely at liberty to stand in his classroom and say whatever he wants to. I told him that in the US, professors like him are permitted by law to say whatever they want to … but most of them would be fools to criticize wokeness in any way, because it would stand to cost them their job and their career, not because the State would get involved, but because academia has become highly illiberal, to the left.

In the end, the professor’s argument is not really with me, but with all the emigres from Communist countries whose painful experiences in their native lands taught them to see what comfortable liberals and conservatives in America and western Europe cannot. This no doubt comes as painful news to many academics, but yes, sometimes liberals and progressives really are the bad guys.

By the way, if you haven’t read Live Not By Lies, this short PragerU clip gives you the essence. In the very first lines, I refute Stoeckl’s thesis, by pointing out that we are not going to have an American gulag, and the state is not going to come after us — because it doesn’t have to. Watch:

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J.D. Vance: Pat Buchanan’s Heir

Let me start by saying that this blog is a J.D. Vance stan blog. Though nothing in this post should be considered an endorsement — TAC doesn’t do endorsements — J.D. is my friend, I admire him, and if he were running in Louisiana, I would vote for him twice (and this being Louisiana, I could!). If you are going to criticize him in the comments section, of course I will allow it — he’s a politician, after all — but be aware that there is a limit to my patience for what critics say about him. My point is, try to avoid the ad hominem. Nobody likes to hear their personal friends criticized harshly. Remember that there is a human being moderating the comments — a human being who recognizes his professional obligation to let commenters have their say, but who also has a finite capability to stand by while his friend is being slandered.

Now, to business. The Washington Post has a big piece out on the “radicalization of J.D. Vance.”  The reporter spoke to me for an hour or so about it some time back. Though he only used one or two comments from me, and though it is very frustrating to not see all the positive things I said about J.D. and his character, he did not misquote me. Anyway, this is the gist of the piece:

The beard isn’t a bad symbol for Vance’s U.S. Senate campaign — or at least for how that campaign is being received. Discourse around the race centers mostly on the idea that Vance is a changed or fraudulent person. Five years ago, Vance was eloquently decoding Donald Trump supporters for liberal elites, while lamenting the rise of Trump himself. Vance, whose mother is a recovering heroin user, compared Trump to an opioid, calling him an “easy escape from the pain.” Now, since announcing his run, he’s reversed himself on Trump and adopted a bellicose persona at odds with the sensitive, bookish J.D. of his memoir. On Veterans Day, 48 hours after the Steubenville event, Vance tweeted that LeBron James — of Akron, Ohio — is “one of the most vile public figures in our country.” (James had joked that Kenosha, Wis., shooter Kyle Rittenhouse “ate some lemon heads” before crying on the stand during his trial.) Watching Vance campaign, I felt him straining to deliver his talking points in an angry register. It wasn’t just that steel jobs had been offshored; they were outsourced by “idiots” in Washington, to countries that “hate us.”

Commentary about Vance from Never-Trumpers and liberals tends to strike a note of personal chagrin about his evolving image. …

The reporter asked me about that. I can’t remember exactly what I told him — we spoke weeks ago, as I was driving home from Birmingham — I’m pretty sure I explained the change in J.D. by citing the Great Awokening. See, I completely reject the thesis that J.D. turned combative to try to win office. What people who say that conveniently ignore is the Left’s hysterical reaction to Trump, and the way that, over the four years of his presidency, wokeness seized control of the commanding heights of American institutions. Believe me, in 2016, I was a lot closer to 2016 J.D. Vance’s take on Trump than I am today … in which I still don’t care for Trump, but I am far more concerned about the soft-totalitarian Left. Liberals and Never Trumpers are so fixated on Trump as a unique menace that they ignore what so many of the rest of us see.

To his credit, the Post reporter, Simon van Zuylen-Wood, gets what eludes Vance’s critics:

The surface-level changes are indeed striking. Yet the more I watched him, the more it seemed to me that the emerging canon of “what happened to J.D. Vance” commentary was missing the point. Vance’s new political identity isn’t so much a façade or a reversal as an expression of an alienated worldview that is, in fact, consistent with his life story. And now there’s an ideological home for that worldview: Vance has become one of the leading political avatars of an emergent populist-intellectual persuasion that tacks right on culture and left on economics. Known as national conservatism or sometimes “post-liberalism,” it is — in broad strokes — heavily Catholic, definitely anti-woke, skeptical of big business, nationalist about trade and borders, and flirty with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban. In Congress, its presence is minuscule — represented chiefly by Sens. Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio — but on Fox News, it has a champion in Tucker Carlson, on whose show Vance is a regular guest. And while the movement’s philosopher-kings spend a lot of time litigating internal schisms online, the project is animated by a real-life political gambit: that as progressives weaken the Democratic Party with unpopular cultural attitudes, the right can swoop in and pick off multiracial working-class voters.

Yep. J.D. Vance is not a hypocrite. He has learned a valuable lesson from the past five years. His political worldview is, as the article states, coherent, and part of a wider reaction on the Right. More from the Post piece (emphasis mine):

Vance’s Senate race is an almost perfect test of these ideas because the front-runner in the Republican primary, former state treasurer and tea party product Josh Mandel — who, according to recent polling, leads Vance by 6 points — is the candidate of traditional conservative tax-cutters. To those watching the Vance-Mandel slugfest from afar, it may just look like two candidates trying to out-flank each other on the right; but the fissures between them run deep. The Club for Growth, known for its free-market zealotry, is supporting Mandel and has spent roughly $1.5 million on anti-Vance attack ads. One TV spot highlights a tweet in which Vance says he “loved @MittRomney’s anti-Trump screed.” The narrator does not linger on the rest of the message, which reads: “too bad party will do everything except admit that supply-side tax cuts do nothing for its voters.” Before Vance deleted his old anti-Trump tweets, he tended to attack Trump for abandoning his stated commitment to economic populism. In a 2020 interview with anti-establishment pundits Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Vance contended that Trump’s great political failure wasn’t his handling of the pandemic, but his signature corporate tax cut and his attempts to undo Obamacare.

That is the only thing Ohio conservative voters need to know: that The Club For Growth is behind Josh Mandel. Elect Mandel, and nothing changes. Elect Vance, and there is suddenly a threat to the cozy system. Mandel fronts as a populist, but in the end, is the candidate of The Club For Growth. That tells you something. That tells you everything.

On the point that Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, is a hypocrite, he says:

“Dominant elite society is boring, it is completely unreflective, and it is increasingly wrong,” he told me. In other words: “I kind of had to make a choice.”

He did — and in my view, he chose correctly. The piece explains Vance’s pivot from criticizing the personal failings of hillbillies that led to their chronic problems, which he did in Hillbilly Elegy, to criticizing the neoliberal system, characterized by free markets and “whatever” morality. These are two sides of the same critique, Vance says: neither excludes the other, and in fact the calamity that has overtaken so much of America, especially working class America, has its roots in both camps. This is a version of a critique we heard a generation earlier in Christopher Lasch — and not just Lasch. The Post says:

The political forefather of this vision is probably Pat Buchanan, who inveighed against free trade and multiculturalism in the 1990s. But it also draws from the milder “Reformicon” blueprints of 10 years ago, as well as older strains of leftism, such as the anti-globalism of the Seattle WTO protests. One unlikely text Vance has cited is Elizabeth Warren’s 2004 book “The Two-Income Trap,”about the financial pressures families experience when two parents enter the workforce.

If you look for it, elements of Vance’s current critique were in “Hillbilly Elegy” too. People like his grandfather, who moved to southwest Ohio to work in the then-bustling Armco Steel plant, strengthened the local social fabric as producers. A generation later, with jobs disappearing, his mom and his neighbors were not just isolated and angry but also, he wrote, “consumerist.”

Exactly! It was there in Hillbilly Elegy all along, which is why all this “J.D. Vance is a hypocrite” talk is ridiculous, and shows that many people only read the book looking for their own biases to be confirmed. I love how the Post reporter goes on a ride-along with the sheriff of J.D.’s hometown, and brings up the standard left-wing critique of Hillbilly Elegy (that Vance was snobbishly blaming the victims); the sheriff said no, he told the truth about the problems here.

It is no bad thing to have the Washington Post anoint J.D. Vance as the heir to Pat Buchanan. It is also the truth. The Vance candidacy gives Ohio voters a real choice, not an echo of Club For Growth conservatism wearing populist drag. As I told the Post reporter, J.D. has made the breakthrough to realizing that the culture war is really class war. A US Senator who has understood that can go very far claiming unexplored territory in American politics — and in owning the conservative future.

UPDATE: A friend said one of the shitposting integralists accuses me of saying that I’m worried about J.D.’s soul. Here’s how the Post quoted me:

Vance’s friends split the difference: They say he’s the same guy but he’s been radicalized.“I think he’s gotten a lot more bitter and cynical — appropriately,” conservative blogger Rod Dreher told me. To Dreher, the change in tone is justified by the course of American politics over the past five years. “Trump remained Trump — but the Left went berserk,” he wrote in a post defending Vance. Still, Dreher — who attended Vance’s 2019 baptism into the Catholic Church — worries about the toll campaigning is taking on his friend. “S–t-posting has become the signature style of young radicals on the right, and this is particularly a hazard I think for Christians,” he told me.

For the record, I’m not worried about J.D.’s soul. I told the reporter that it was a temptation to me as well, and to all of us who mix it up in public. It does not surprise me that one of the integralists is mischaracterizing my work to try to break up my friendship with J.D. Those guys are trying to build a brand on the rubble of friendships they’ve destroyed, and bridges they have burned.

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Escape From New York

I lived in New York City in the last half of the Rudy Giuliani mayoralty. It was a glorious city. If only I had a dollar for every conversation I had with someone that started, “I’m a liberal, but…,” and then went on to praise Giuliani for cleaning up the city and making it livable again. A main part of Giuliani’s strategy was the so-called “broken windows” theory: the idea that tolerating relatively minor quality-of-life crimes signaled to criminals that the people of the city did not care about defending order, and thus invited more serious crime.

Well, as with the proverbial dogs that return to their own vomit, New York City voters have broken definitively with Giuliani-era maxims. The newly elected Manhattan district attorney, a wokester named Alvin Bragg, has announced that his officer will cease seeking prison time for all but a handful of extreme offenses. No kidding — check out the memo. Excerpt:

The new DA is also not going to prosecute certain other crimes. Fare jumpers, hookers, trespassers and others — it’s your city now, baby!

What if the city and the state pass laws demanding prison time for certain offenses? Can the DA just ignore the law? Is this even permitted in our democracy?

The violent crime rate in NYC is soaring now, but voters, in their infinite wisdom, elected a soft-on-crime District Attorney (who depended on George Soros money to run his campaign). Bragg did not hide his soft-on-crime positions during the race; New York voters knew what they were getting with him. Now NYC joins other progressive DA cities like Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, all of which are overrun by violent crime.

I remember thinking, after living for several years in New York City, how the people there had seen what good government, including strong policing, could do to turn around a city that was once considered a national basket case, and that they would never, ever return to the Bad Old Days.

via GIPHY

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The Great Conservative Exodus

You see that this week, the woke succeeded in cancelling Norman Mailer? No kidding:

Random House has reportedly cancelled the publication of a collection of Norman Mailer essays, which would correspond to the 100-year anniversary of his birth next year, because a ‘junior staffer’ objected to the title of his 1957 essay entitled ‘White Negro.’

The project had an editor assigned and the agreement from the Mailer estate, according a best-selling author Michael Wolff.

‘With slow-mo hammer-dropping predictability, Norman Mailer’s long-time publisher has recently informed the Mailer family that it has canceled plans to publish a collection of his political writings to mark the centennial of his birth in 2023, confirms the film producer Michael Mailer, the author’s oldest son,’ best-selling author Michael Wolff, who penned the piece, writes.

A junior staffer! Where the hell are the spines among senior publishing executives? “The White Negro” was massively discussed, pro and con, when it came out in 1957. Mailer was writing as a man of the Left. James Baldwin criticized his piece; Eldridge Cleaver praised it. Those horrible, repressive 1950s were a time when we could actually talk about these things, like a real culture. Not anymore. We are too progressive for that now. They have cancelled Norman effing Mailer, because publishing executives are afraid of junior staffers who were in elementary school when Mailer died.

This week I’ve been communicating with some conservative friends who are highly placed within their professions. They are telling me about an ongoing exodus of high-ranking conservatives from those fields. I can’t be more specific, at their request, but this is remarkable stuff — though entirely predictable. One of them, who is on the way out of his field over fear of seeing his career destroyed by accidentally getting on the wrong side of the woke, told me that Live Not By Lies is prophetic, that the things it talks about are “already happening” in his world.

Some are going into retirement. Others are taking lesser positions at companies or non-profits where they can continue to work with a lesser fear of persecution. One of my sources said that the good news is that religious conservatives are starting to live the Benedict Option, but the bad news is that this means that culture-forming institutions will be bereft of religious conservatives.

Is this surrender? Some might say so, but those with whom I’ve talked — and again, I have to respect their privacy by not being too specific — tell me about situations in which people who hold their views have decisively lost the internal struggle within their organization and/or profession. The situation they are facing is one in which they have concluded that they cannot do any good (so much for “faithful presence”), and by staying, risk losing everything, or know they will be put into a situation where they will have to violate their conscience to keep their jobs.

In every single case I’m talking about, these are jobs that until only a few years ago were not political. Now they have been overrun by wokeness. One of my interlocutors reached out yesterday after seeing my PragerU video about soft totalitarianism, and said from where he sits, it is well underway. Given his profession, which he is preparing to leave, he’s right.

I know some of these people personally, and I can tell you that when they leave their respective fields or companies, the profession will lose some serious expertise. The managers in these fields do not care; they only want to be Righteous, according to the gospel of Ibram X. Kendi and the Human Rights Campaign.

I suspect there is a lot of bargaining going on inside the minds of some conservatives. It’s the kind of thing that conservative Christian parents do when faced with whether or not they should keep their kids inside of morally problematic public schools. It’s the old “salt and light” dodge, e.g., “We think that we should keep Katelynn in that school so she can be salt and light to the other fourth graders.” There is zero chance that little Katelynn will lead those other kids to Christ, and a serious chance that the anti-Christian culture in that school will lead Katelynn away from her faith. But some parents might balk at the financial commitment Christian school requires, and other parents who can afford it financially may have other reasons to avoid making that hard choice — for example, incurring the judgment of their parental peers.

Yet for other social and religious conservatives, the bargaining period is over. This is when they understand that the Benedict Option is a survival strategy for Christians in a post-Christian, and increasingly anti-Christian, culture. I got word from a friend late this morning that he has cancelled his plans to pursue a humanities PhD, because he no longer has confidence that he can do so in an academic environment in which he is free to think and write, as opposed to parrot an ideological line. Knowing his circumstances, I am certain he made the right decision. The world will not suffer overmuch from having one less humanities PhD, but universities that drive intellectually diverse aspiring scholars away because of their ideological rigidity will ultimately die of irrelevance.

What about you? Are you facing a similar decision now, or do you anticipate facing it sometime this year? Tell us about it in the comments section. What are your thoughts? What do you think would happen if you stayed? What do you expect to happen to your profession if this exodus of conservatives becomes more general?

UPDATE: Readers, I am not interested in reading general complaining about conservatives in the comments, or general speculation about the state of the world. Stick to the topic, please (“the topic” includes Norman Mailer, if you like).

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Fat, Wokeness, And Morality

The New York Times promoted an op-ed with this headline:

Well, that triggered me. Before I explain, let’s read on to see what Cornell University philosopher Kate Manne has to say about fatness, a condition with which she has struggled for many years, she says:

I have long admired the work of fat activists — Marilyn Wann, Sonya Renee Taylor and Aubrey Gordon among them — and recognize that fat bodies can be not only healthy but also athletic, beautiful, sexy. I believe in the concepts of intuitive eating and health at every size — at least, for other people. I recognize that the vast majority of diets fail to make people any thinner or any healthier in the long term. I recognize that even if you are a fat person who would be healthier if you lost weight, you don’t owe it to anyone to do so; you don’t owe it to anyone to be healthy in general. And I know how much my internalized fatphobia owes to oppressive patriarchal forces — the forces that tell girls and women in particular to be small, meek, slight, slim and quiet.

I recognize all of this in the abstract. In practice, however, I struggle.

I have lately wondered how much my self-directed fatphobia owes to my career as an academic philosopher. More than one author has remarked that there is a dearth of fat, female bodies in academia in general and in philosophy specifically. Philosophy, with its characteristic emphasis on reason, often implicitly conceives of rationality as the jurisdiction of the lean, rich, white men who dominate my discipline.

We praise arguments for being muscular and compact and criticize prose for being flabby, flowery and, implicitly, feminine. When it comes to our metaphysics — our pictures of the world — we pride ourselves on a taste for austerity, or as W.V.O. Quine put it, “desert landscapes.” And what is the fat body in the popular imagination but excess, lavishness, redundancy?

Oh, right, you knew this was coming: academic bullshitter Kate Manne feels bad about her weight because of the patriarchy, and whiteness. Manne says that by dieting,

I have contributed in a small way to a society that lauds certain bodies and derogates others for more or less arbitrary reasons and ones that lead to a great deal of cruelty and suffering. (The most common basis for childhood bullying is a child’s weight.) I have denied myself pleasure and caused myself the gnawing pain and sapping anxiety of hunger.

These are all things we usually think of as straightforward ethical ills. Almost all versions of the family of moral theories known as consequentialism hold that pleasure is morally good and pain and suffering are morally bad. Even if this is not the whole truth of ethics, it is plausibly part of the truth.

And it has the superficially surprising implication that dieting inflicts real moral costs, real moral harms, ones we largely impose on ourselves (albeit under the influence of potent social forces). If the chances of long-term weight loss (and the supposed benefits and pleasures that conveys) are vanishingly small, then why do we keep doing it? I suspect the answer is not only habit and a false sense of obligation but also the lure of aspiration: a dieter’s perpetual sense of getting somewhere, getting smaller and thus becoming more acceptable, more reasonable, as a body.

She has the idea that thinness is the same thing as reasonableness. Read it all.

I read this after my morning weigh-in on the Noom diet plan. I have been using this diet app since November 19, and as of today, have dropped ten pounds. I still have thirty more to go, but I am so encouraged! I haven’t weighed what I weigh this morning in six years or more. The Noom diet has been all about counting calories, which the app makes easy to do. When I first signed on for Noom, it asked me some questions about my activity level, etc. (sedentary!), and assigned me a daily calorie count (1,556). I can eat whatever I want, as long as I don’t go over that count. In my old way of eating, it was very easy to exceed that calorie count daily. But Noom compels me to, um, apply reason to my food consumption. I can eat bread, rice, and pasta if I want, but that will quickly get me to the daily limit. If, however, I choose vegetables, fruits, and lean protein, I can eat more.

I started this diet around the same time we Orthodox Christians began the Nativity fast, which put meat and dairy out of the picture. So from mid-November until Christmas Day, my life was filled with fresh vegetables (or rather, flash-frozen chopped vegetables in big sacks from Costco, which made preparing them easy). Having to think about what I was eating, to make everything fit the daily calorie count, was really helpful in training me to be more thoughtful in general about food consumption. After two weeks, I had lost five pounds, which was mostly water weight, as by default I wasn’t consuming carbs. But that little bit of weight loss, and the nice way it felt to be able to fit into my old corduroys, gave me the encouragement I needed to refuse holiday sweets.

When Christmas arrived and I was free to eat meat, dairy, and alcohol again, I found that I didn’t want to overdo it, because I could look down at the weight loss tracking chart on Noom and see visible proof of the progress I had made. I did have a few sweets and drinks, but made sure to cut back in other ways. Some days I climbed aboard the elliptical trainer machine I have in my bedroom, and worked off 500 calories, or bought myself thereby credit with Noom that I could use later in the day.

Overall, what I’ve been doing via this app is retraining myself and acquiring more sensible eating habits. Have I been hungry? Yes, at first — but that’s because I was eating immoderately by habit, and refusing to exercise. Mind you, I am genetically predisposed to be heavy. My 23 & Me analysis showed that, but I didn’t need the genetics company to tell me that descendants of my grandmother have a tendency to be fat. I was a fat little kid, and have struggled with weight all my life. The thing is, I can’t blame it all on genetics. I love to eat, and I hate to exercise. There’s no way I’m going to be able to avoid being fat absent diet and/or exercise. The last six months I lived in Philadelphia in 2011, I became a regular at the YMCA, and lost thirty pounds … which I regained in the first few years after moving to Louisiana, and abandoning exercise. I’ve been carrying this weight, plus ten extra pounds, for most of the last decade, causing health problems and general malaise.

The patriarchy didn’t do this to me. Whiteness didn’t do it to me. Genetics and immorality did it to me.

Immorality? Yes. I am gluttonous and slothful. It’s just true. I have seen in my past experience that if I eat sensibly and exercise, over a period of time, I can get down to a healthy weight. If I stop eating sensibly and/or stop exercising, I gain it all back. I was diagnosed a few years ago with a hiatal hernia that requires me to take acid reflux meds. My doctor has been begging me to lose weight so I can get off those drugs and avoid surgery. Heart problems and diabetes both run in my family too (my obese granny, a diabetic, died of a heart attack), so I can’t afford to carry all that extra weight around. Plus, the obese — and I am technically obese — are more vulnerable to Covid.

Despite what Prof. Manne says, it is irrational for me to carry forty extra pounds, because it increases the chances of serious health problems. Besides, I hate being so fat. I might be an old married guy, but I am vain enough that I don’t like the way I look in the mirror, and I hate not being able to wear some of my favorite things.

And for me, at least, being overweight is immoral. Yes, immoral, because it is the result of me allowing my disordered passions to control me. Orthodox Christians consider the moral life to be a matter of conquering the appetitive passions. This is where spiritual battles are won or lost. This is why fasting during liturgically prescribed seasons is so important to us. It’s not about food per se, but about submitting the appetites to reason, and reminding ourselves and our bodies that the flesh should be subordinate to the spirit. I can’t deny that my delight in food is immoderate, nor can I deny that I lack a proper appetite for exercise. My body needs me to rein in my appetite for food, and to increase my appetite for exercise, in order to be healthy. This isn’t rocket science, and though I do have a religious framework for understanding the passions (appetites), you don’t have to be religious at all to recognize this reality.

This is about retraining the will to desire the things that make one healthy, and to stop desiring things that lead to compromised health. This is ultimately about learning how to exercise moral agency to improve your life. I have learned by using Noom that I can be satisfied eating far less than I normally did in a given day. This is great news! I had been under the control of my appetites, but using this app to diet has taught me that my appetites don’t have to control me. The weight loss has been slow but steady, and, I think, sustainable, because the eating habits it is teaching me are things I hope to permanently incorporate into my life.

It is easier for some people to lose weight and keep it off than it is for others. It is harder for me to do this than it is for many people, owing to my genetic profile, but I am sure I have it easier than many overweight people. Because weight has been a lifelong struggle for me, I don’t look at overweight people and judge them harshly. I know what an emotional and psychological burden it is to be heavy. If you are the kind of person who makes fun of the obese, I want you to know that there is nothing you can think about or say to them that is worse than the punishment most heavy people give themselves for their condition.

But I also resent the hell out of people like Prof. Manne, who would take away hope from people like me by externalizing her resentments over her weight struggle, and say that It’s Society’s Fault — especially that it’s the White Patriarchy’s Fault — that we feel bad about our weight. I agree that we foolishly fetishize thinness, especially in women, but the answer to that is not to pretend that there’s nothing wrong with being fat, and that the problem is with people who tell us that fat is not healthy. Being fat is unhealthy! I know because I’m living it. And being fat, for many (even most) people, certainly has a moral dimension, as I have explained. We do no one any favors by pretending otherwise, and we condemn overweight people who really could help themselves to helplessness and resentment.

I don’t know what Kate Manne looks like now, but on her website, she looks healthy and beautiful. When I think about the so-called “fat acceptance” activists — people praised by Kate Manne in her op-ed — I think that these people are aiding and abetting the culture of consumption that trains us to think that our desires are self-legitimizing. Who benefits from the belief that eating as much as you want is morally neutral, or even good? The people who sell us things, that’s who. The people who tell us that we won’t be okay unless we consume more. We have been given the gift of free will, and it is a very good thing to learn how to exercise it to practice dominion over our appetites. It feels great to have more control over my appetite for food than I once did. It’s awesome to be able to look at a piece of cake, and decide that no thanks, I’ll pass … or if I want it, to resolve to eat less at dinner, or get on the elliptical trainer.

Why would a professor of moral philosophy wish to deny people like me the opportunity to have victory over our own immoderate passions? I don’t get it. Then again, in October she hosted a video podcast with a black radical about the radical’s book, titled The Case For Rage. I guess immoderate passions are good things to indulge when they are directed at Bad People. So, each time you want to have that extra cupcake, just tell yourself that you are striking a blow against whiteness, or something.

 

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PragerU Asks: Can Totalitarianism Happen Here?

My PragerU video about Live Not By Lies will launch tonight (January 3) at 7pm Eastern. If you’re reading this after that time, take a look below:

If you’re reading before 7pm Eastern on Monday, then you can watch it now directly on the PragerU site by clicking here. 

If you haven’t yet read the book, I hope you’ll check it out, especially because Amazon is still running its sale on the Kindle version, which you can buy for $4.99 while the sale lasts.

Here is a link to the free, downloadable Live Not By Lies study guide.

The book has sold 150,000 copies in its 15 months on the market — this, without any coverage from the mainstream media. It’s been from podcasts, Christian and conservative radio, but mostly, I think, from word of mouth. People understand that we are in dangerous times, and need to prepare ourselves for resistance.

Dave Jacobson and R.J. Moeller, the documentary team behind No Safe Spaces, are now raising money to turn Live Not By Lies into a documentary. The hope is to get as many of these anti-totalitarian voices from the Soviet bloc on camera while they are still alive. More people will watch a movie than read a book. We want not only to warn people about what appears to be coming, but also give them practical advice for how to prepare themselves, their churches, and their communities. It’s one thing to read their words on the page, but to see the faces and hear the voices of those Christians (and others) who stood up to totalitarianism and prevailed is even more powerful.

If you’re willing and able to help fund the development of the Live Not By Lies documentary in 2022, please contact the producers Dave and RJ at LiveNotByLiesProject – at – gmail – dot – com.

The post PragerU Asks: Can Totalitarianism Happen Here? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Lucille Of The Libs

In 1977, Kenny Rogers became a country music superstar on the strength of his great sad song “Lucille”. If you’ve never heard it, or haven’t heard it in a long time, take a listen. It has lost none of its power over the decades. Here are the lyrics:

In a bar in Toledo
Across from the depot
On a bar stool she took off her ring
I thought I’d get closer
So I walked on over
I sat down and asked her name
When the drinks finally hit her
She said I’m no quitter
But I finally quit livin’ on dreams
I’m hungry for laughter
And here ever after
I’m after whatever the other life brings

In the mirror I saw him
And I closely watched him
I thought how he looked out of place
He came to the woman
Who sat there beside me
He had a strange look on his face
The big hands were calloused
He looked like a mountain
For a minute I thought I was dead
But he started shakin’
His big heart was breakin’
He turned to the woman and said

You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille
With four hungry children
And a crop in the field
I’ve had some bad times
Lived through some sad times
But this time your hurtin’ won’t heal
You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille

After he left us
I ordered more whisky
I thought how she’d made him look small
From the lights of the bar room
To a rented hotel room
We walked without talkin’ at all
She was a beauty
But when she came to me
She must have thought I’d lost my mind
I couldn’t hold her
‘Cause the words that he told her
Kept coming back time after time

You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille
With four hungry children
And a crop in the field
I’ve had some bad times
Lived through some sad times
But this time your hurtin’ won’t heal
You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille

I do hope you’ll listen to the song, though. The lyrics themselves can’t convey the pain in the story they convey.

“Lucille” came to mind after so many years after reading Atlantic senior editor Honor Jones’s account of her self-liberation from the responsibility of husband and family. I have tried writing about this a couple of times, but have stopped because the topic was too emotional for me. I am not surprised to find a person who can do what she did. All of us struggle with demons, and if there’s one thing living long enough teaches you, it’s that you should be hesitant to judge a marriage from the outside. Everything I write below is based on a judgment of Jones’s marriage based only on what she tells us about it. I think, however, that what tears me up about this essay is not so much what she has done — as bad as that is — but that Honor Jones is proud of what she has done, so much so that she wrote about it in the national magazine for which she works. She ought to be ashamed of herself; a healthy society would have shamed her, instead of held her up as virtuous, as the publication of the essay does. As I will explain below, the Jones essay — what it says, and the fact that it was written and published at all — is profoundly emblematic of the moral bankruptcy of our culture.

Here’s how her piece starts:

I had wanted, I thought, soapstone counters and a farmhouse sink. I had wanted an island and a breakfast nook and two narrow, vertical cabinets on either side of the stove; one could be for cutting boards and one could be for baking sheets. I followed a cabinetry company called Plain English on Instagram and screenshotted its pantries, which came in paint colors like Kipper and Boiled Egg. Plain English cost a fortune, but around a corner in the back of its New York showroom you could check out the budget version, called British Standard. But it cost a fortune too. I wished there was a budget British Standard. I wished there was a room behind that room, the cabinets getting flimsier and flimsier until a door opened and let me back into my own shitty American kitchen, just as it was.

My husband talked to the architect; my husband talked to the builder. And I kept paring the plans down, down, making them cheaper, making them simpler. I nixed the island and found a stainless-steel worktable at a restaurant-supply store online for $299. I started fantasizing about replacing the counters with two-by-fours on sawhorses and hanging the pots from nails on the wall. Slowly, I realized, I didn’t want this kitchen. Slowly, I realized, I didn’t want this life.

I didn’t want to renovate. I wanted to get divorced.

It turns out that Honor Jones’s life as a wife and mom was not something out of catalogues. She had a cleaning lady to help her with the house, but it didn’t matter.

Even with Luba’s help, the house was chaos. I could never keep the children and their mess corralled. Toys and books were always underfoot. The crumbs—they were everywhere. I knew I was lucky to have all these crumbs and the house to keep them in. To have Luba to help. Still. If our kitchen became a murder scene, a forensic investigator could have told the story of my days with those crumbs. Three percent blue Play-Doh; 10 percent toast; 87 percent Honey Nut Cheerios dust: This was who I was.

Yes, it is! We have all been there, we who have children. You end up trading in your sporty sedan for a minivan, and the minivan quickly develops a permanent layer of Cheerios dust and crumbs. This is life! Back in 2003, shortly after we moved to Dallas, my wife and I went with a colleague of mine and his wife to the movies to see The Secret Lives Of Dentists, an indie movie about a married-with-kids couple in suburban New York City, both dentists. The husband discovers that his bored wife is cheating on him. Most of the movie is the husband struggling with his anger, and trying to figure out what he should do, given that they have three little children. The climax involves stomach flu hitting the family, apocalyptically. You could tell who in the audience were parents by who was laughing at the upchuck-a-palooza unfolding on screen. My then-childless colleague and his wife sat stone-faced, not understanding why my wife and I were doubled up laughing. This was such a familiar picture of marriage-and-family, hilarious in its awfulness. And yet, the husband (Campbell Scott) was bearing up so heroically, caring for them all, because he loved his family more than he loved himself.

There is nothing obviously attractive about being a parent who is caring for three children suffering from various stages of vomiting and diarrhea. What makes that scene so beautiful from the point of view of a parent who has been there and done that is that Campbell Scott’s faithful sacrifices are an icon of fatherly (and husbandly) devotion. He doesn’t have time to think about himself, and how much all of this — his cuckoldry, the kids’ sickness — sucks. They need him. I have watched my wife be this person hundreds of times. I have been this person hundreds of times. It’s part of the deal. It’s what helps make a family a family.

This is not the way of Honor Jones.

But the crumbs got me down. I sometimes felt that they were a metaphor, that as I got older I was being ground down under the heel of my own life. All I could do was settle into the carpet.

I didn’t have a secret life. But I had a secret dream life—which might have been worse. I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself. Everything I experienced—relationships, reality, my understanding of my own identity and desires—were filtered through him before I could access them. The worst part was that it wasn’t remotely his fault; this is probably exactly what I asked him to do when we were 21 and first in love, even if I never said it out loud. To shelter me from the elements; to be caring and broad-shouldered. But now it was like I was always on my tiptoes, trying to see around him. I couldn’t see, but I could imagine. I started imagining other lives. Other homes.

More:

I wanted to be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy. How much of my life—I mean the architecture of my life, but also its essence, my soul, my mind—had I built around my husband? Who could I be if I wasn’t his wife? Maybe I would microdose. Maybe I would have sex with women. Maybe I would write a book. …

They divorced and moved from Pennsylvania to Brooklyn. Now her little children split time between Mommy’s apartment and Daddy’s apartment. Jones writes:

Maybe I’m deluding myself. Maybe I’m not free of anything and I just want different objects, a different home, maybe someday—admit it—a different man. Maybe I’m starting the same story all over again. “For what?” you’d ask me, and you’d be right.

But I don’t think so. I think I’m making something new.

Read the whole thing. It’s contemptible.

Again, we can never fully know what happened inside that marriage, or inside any marriage. I can only judge in this case on the information Jones provides. What we know from the piece is that she got bored and restless being a wife and mother, and blew up her family for the sake of being free, or rather, “free”. Free to think about the patriarchy, and how horrible it all is, though I do wonder what lessons her poor children will take from this about the glories of the matriarchy.

Listen, your middle-aged correspondent doesn’t have to sit here long and think about the people he knows in his wide circle of friends — both husbands and wives — who are suffering through a painful period in their marriages, but keeping it together. Some of them are doing it for the kids. Others are doing it because they are Christians, and believe that one should only divorce as a last resort. Still others are doing it because they expected to have times like this in marriage, and they have a basic belief that you don’t destroy a family over a crisis that may pass. I won’t say more about these people, because I don’t want to violate any confidences. I can tell you, though, that in no example I’m aware of does infidelity or physical abuse show up (though in all honesty, some of them are enduring some sort of emotional abuse). As I write this, I’m thinking of four people in particular — two men, two women, all Christians — who are carrying heavy crosses, 100 percent because they do not want their children to suffer. In conversation with them over the past few years, I have learned that they see their situation as dying-to-self to preserve a semblance of a stable childhood for their kids.

“You’ve got to get out of there,” I said to one of those friends, who is married to a self-centered jackass. She’s going to wait until their youngest reaches a certain age. Her husband doesn’t physically abuse her; he has simply abandoned her within the marriage, and treats her rudely and coldly. It’s horrible, but as she sees it, endurable for the sake of the children. I admire her immensely, sacrificing her own happiness to provide well for their kids. She is a heroine. True, if she left him, I would 100 percent support her, and certainly not judge her (I know what she’s gone through). But the fact that she shoulders this burden for the sake of the kids is deeply honorable. She is absolutely clear-eyed about her situation, and doesn’t ask for anyone’s pity. She sees her primary duty as giving their kids the best life she can, as long as she can bear the cost to her personal happiness.

Hear me clearly: in no way do I believe a husband or a wife should have to submit to infidelity or physical abuse, or serious and/or prolonged emotional abuse, for the sake of holding a marriage together for the kids. But having raised three kids, two of whom are legal adults, and the youngest of which is 15, and having observed friends raising their kids, I understand now in a way I could not have when I first married almost a quarter-century ago how much sacrifice is part of the deal with marriage and family. Sometimes, marriages fail, and the only realistic and reasonable thing to do is to start over. But if children are involved, there ought to be a high bar. I confess that my reasoning here is motivated in large part by my love for my own children. If I were put to the test like my friends are, there is a hell of a lot of dying to self I would be willing to do out of love for them. The Secret Lives Of Dentists shows a husband and father whose sacrificial caring for his daughters during their sickness mirrors his willingness to absorb pain inflicted by their mother for the sake of sheltering them. Knowing that she was unfaithful, he had grounds for divorce, but being confronted with the vulnerability of his children compels the husband to consider forgiveness.

None of this has a thing to do with Honor Jones and her situation. She was just bored, that’s all. I think of the story I tell in Live Not By Lies, about my Hungarian friend lamenting that she can’t discuss her struggles as a wife and mom with her friends, because so many of them believe that if she’s having any trouble at all, she should get divorced and put her kid in day care. They can’t understand that she really is happy, despite the struggles she and her husband sometimes have, and despite the drudgery of caring for a small child. My friend factored suffering in as part of the deal, because my friend is realistic. The crazy people are those who believe that obligations to spouses and children can honorably be abandoned as soon as one finds oneself anxious or unhappy. In the Orthodox Church, in the marriage service, both the husband and wife are crowned. These crowns have a double meaning: they are both crowns of joy and crowns of martyrdom, in recognition that marriage contains both, and they cannot be separated. If you want the joy, you have to be prepared to accept dying to self. There is deep wisdom in that.

But none of that makes any sense to Honor Jones. By her own account, what drove her to divorce was boredom, and the belief that she was losing herself inside this marriage.

I don’t understand this at all. And here’s the thing: no man would write an essay like this, making public the shameful fact that he abandoned his wife and children because he was bored being domesticated. In fact, the friend I mentioned above? Her husband is an older male version of Honor Jones, though they have not divorced. He thinks he was made for a more thrilling life than domesticity. He believes that Cheerios ground into the minivan carpet and all of that is beneath him. I like to think that even he would have the sense to understand what a shameful thing it would be to publish an essay about his so-called self-liberation from dull domesticity. If he did publish such an essay, the man would be subject to widespread and deserved condemnation from all quarters, as a selfish prick.

But women who do this? No — we have a double standard in their case.

Maybe it goes back to the revolutionary 1879 Ibsen play A Doll’s House. In it, a bourgeois Danish woman suffers a crisis in her marriage, the resolution of which reveals how powerless women were in 19th century Danish society. Nora Helmer, the protagonist, realizes that she was treated like a doll by her late father, and also by her banker husband, Torvald. She tells him in the final scene that she is leaving him and their children to find herself. He reminds her that she is a wife and a mother, and is walking out on those responsibilities. She responds that there must be more to her than that — and leaves for good.

I recall seeing that play for the first time, on Broadway, in Janet McTeer’s much-lauded performance. McTeer made me feel the hopelessness of her Nora, and the injustice visited upon women in that society. And I also pitied Torvald, who is a martinet, yes, but who was fulfilling a stuffy role given him by Danish middle-class society. He is both victimizer (of Nora) and victim of a rigid society that crushed people within it. It was impossible not to sympathize with Nora’s suffering, and her desire to escape a marriage in which she was treated as nothing more than an ornament, a wife, mother, and plaything of her husband. She flees in the middle of the night in search of herself.

And yet — what about the children? That question has been the bone stuck in my throat about this play over the years. We are now coming up on 150 years since the debut of A Doll’s House, and the world Western women live in has changed in revolutionary ways, in part because of works like Ibsen’s. No woman of the professional middle class lives like Nora, or has to live like Nora. Perhaps Honor Jones sees herself as Nora, but she was not oppressed in her marriage: she was simply bored and unfulfilled.

On the evidence provided in her essay, Honor Jones is not Ibsen’s Nora Helmer; she is Kenny Rogers’s Lucille.

As I said, “Lucille” came out in 1977, and became a monster hit. I was ten years old. On the school bus, the driver (my mom) played the radio for us on the afternoon ride home. I recall sitting there in my seat, transfixed by the story of Lucille. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that a mom would leave her four children because she wanted a more fun life. It was not only cruel, but far beyond cruelty: it shattered the right order of the world. Back then, I had only one friend whose parents were divorced, and it frightened me that such a thing could happen.

Now, forty-five years later, I recognize that my own parents did not always have an easy marriage. Both were at fault, though I also recognize that the struggles my parents had were ordinary struggles that all couples have. The stuff they dealt with are the kinds of things that people today, lacking the moral gravitas of previous generations, divorce over now — like Honor Jones has done. But they bore it. I am sure that all the parents of my childhood friends were also struggling too, because that’s what married people do.

Might either one of my parents have found greater happiness by leaving the marriage? Possibly. At various times in their marriage, I can easily imagine that one would have had reason to leave the other. But neither one did. A big part of the gratitude I feel today towards my late father and my aging mother is the sacrifices each made to provide my sister and me with a stable childhood home. I’m sure I will never know the full story of those sacrifices — that generation doesn’t like to talk about such things — but I am confident that the kinds of dying-to-self that both of my parents did was replicated throughout our neighborhood. That was a generation of people who, for all their faults, understood that there were more important things in this world than personal happiness.

Someone like Honor Jones, and what she has done, would have been inconceivable to that generation, or at least those around whom I grew up in the rural South in the 1970s and 1980s. I bet, though, that many of their grandchildren see the world and their obligations to it as Honor Jones does. It’s not just Americans, either; consider the testimony of my Hungarian friend about her generation. As I write this, I am thinking about a heart-shaking conversation I had back in 2013 with professors at a conservative Evangelical college I was visiting. I asked them what their greatest concern was about their students. One said, “That they won’t be able to form stable families.” This puzzled me, because this was a conservative Evangelical school.

I asked the professor why he feared they wouldn’t be able to form stable families. He said, “Because most of them have never seen one.” The other professors around the table nodded in agreement.

What a heavy burden we have placed on our children! We want them to rise in the world, marry, have families of their own, and achieve happiness, but we also deny them the help they need to do so. Dante, in Paradiso Canto V, explains the importance of keeping vows. He tells us (through the voice of Beatrice) that next to existence itself, free will is the greatest gift God gives us. When we freely sacrifice that liberty by yoking ourselves to some other person or cause, through our vows, it is no small thing. The disorder of the world, Dante indicates, comes in large part by the refusal of people to live by their vows freely made.

I am guilty too. I made a vow to live as a Catholic, but violated that vow when I left the Catholic Church. That vowed relationship had dissolved before I chose to leave Catholicism. At the end, the vow was not a fortress wall protecting something precious, but an empty cage. I don’t regret breaking that vow, because it had been rendered meaningless by events having to do with my own weakness, and the weakness of the Church, and besides, the harder I worked to keep that vow by force of will, the further it drove me from Jesus Christ.

But the dissolution of that vow was nevertheless an extremely painful thing, and it should have been! On the other hand, I bore a hell of a lot of pain to honor that vow for as long as I could, but eventually I shattered. I was not proud of abandoning that vow, and grieved over its necessity (because I was by the end well along the path to losing my faith in Christ entirely). Nevertheless, it was just for me to suffer for the sake of the vow, and to suffer after I abandoned it, in part because vows are necessary for the solidity and order of our world. The end of one’s relationship to a religion, of one’s marriage, or any other relationship consecrated through God, is a tearing of the fabric of our society, and even of our world. Children understand that, even if adults rationalize their behavior.

In my writing, I have highlighted the concept of “liquid modernity,” the phrase sociologist Zygmunt Bauman uses to describe our condition. It is one of no fixed structures, institutions, or ways of life. In liquid modernity, everything solid melts into air — even marriages. The person who thrives in liquid modernity is the one who makes no firm commitments, who keeps her options open. Honor Jones is an exemplary liquid modernist. I am sure she received lots of praise for her “brave” essay, from the kind of educated professional class people among whom she has nested. I keep trying to see Jones’s essay from a more empathetic standpoint, but I can’t do it. She writes:

Everything I experienced—relationships, reality, my understanding of my own identity and desires—were filtered through him before I could access them.

Yes! Because he is your husband, and you became one flesh! Nowhere in that essay does she write that her husband mistreated her, or, like Torvald Helmer, made his wife feel small. She even concedes that he behaved towards her as she wanted him to when they first married … but she changed her mind, so screw you, jack, and screw the kids. Honor needs to find herself. If that man’s heart is broken, if those children’s worlds are shattered, too bad. It’s all about the inaptly named Honor, who needed the freedom to think about art and patriarchy.

Once, when I was about 20, I accidentally overheard my parents having a very bitter fight about something. I can’t remember what it was, but I remember hearing my mother, who was overwhelmed by anxiety about my plans to backpack in Europe that summer, saying some extremely cruel things to my dad. The next day, when we were alone in the pickup truck, I told him what I had heard, and told him that if he wanted to divorce, Ruthie and I were both in college, and old enough to handle it. He didn’t even take his eyes off the road. All he said to me were these words: “I made a vow.”

That was the end of the conversation. I did not understand his point of view, because I was young and immature, and I thought that personal happiness was the summum bonum of life. But my father had the greater part of wisdom. He felt honor-bound by the vow he had made, and of course he understood, in a way that I could not at that age (especially coming from a family in which our parents rarely argued in front of us), that couples sometimes have hellacious fights, and that that’s just part of marriage. If my parents had divorced then, or even later in their life together, I would have forgiven them, especially as I grew older, and came to see them as real people, with virtues mixed in with flaws. The fight I overheard that summer of 1987 was no doubt not the worst fight of their lives, nor the last, but it was the first time I had seen this from my parents, which is why it shocked me so profoundly. (It was a real mercy to us kids that they didn’t argue in front of us.)

Please don’t think that I’m saying my parents had an unhappy marriage! I think they had a normal marriage, and that their immature 20-year-old son, who had been taught by post-1960s pop culture that maximizing personal happiness is the greatest good, was the historically abnormal figure. You couldn’t have convinced me of that, though, until I lived marriage and parenthood myself, and came to understand through practical experience how important stability is to children, and how complicated the concept of happiness is. It is certainly possible that one or both of my parents would have found a greater measure of personal happiness had they divorced — and it is also possible that their quest for personal happiness at the cost of breaking their marriage vows would have ended in even greater sorrow, not only for them, but for my sister and me, and our families. We will never know what sacrifices both my mom and my dad made to keep their marriage together through the hard times. What I do know is that their mutual willingness to make those sacrifices gave me and my sister a better life, and foundation for life, than we would have had if either had ended the marriage. My kids are almost all grown now, but I know without a shadow of a doubt that if I had left their mother, a large, dark shadow would have covered any attempt at personal happiness on my part, because I would not have been able to cleanse the stain of the pain I caused those children.

And that’s how it should be. One more time: I am not talking about divorce in cases of abuse, infidelity, or criminality. I’m talking about what Honor Jones did, and variations of that. Over the past twenty years, I have been acquaintances with two different men who walked out on their families because they found happiness in the arms of another woman. Maybe God forgives them, but I can’t, and wouldn’t cross the road to dump a cup of water on either if they were on fire. Such disgraceful men do not belong in the company of honorable men.

It is hard for me to believe that a world in which a woman feels that destroying her marriage and family structure for the sake of her own self-discovery is good or sustainable. Again, just think how you would feel if a man had written this essay, justifying leaving his wife and plunging his children into divorce not because his wife was an adulteress, or cruel, or any bad thing, but simply because he felt bored and stifled by marriage. Here are some fruits of the culture of narcissism, of which Honor Jones is an exemplar:

Burke’s “Little Platoons” no longer have a hold on a majority on Americans.

Today, most American adults are not:

Stably married
Regularly engaged IRL civic life
Regular churchgoers (see below)

Update your worldview accordingly.https://t.co/5CkDA993n4 pic.twitter.com/ZlwDLtHkpu

— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) January 2, 2022

We in America are running up debts that we demand our children, and their children, pay, so we can live as we like. About abortion, St. Teresa of Calcutta once said:

“It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”

Along those lines, it is a poverty that a marriage and a family must die so that you may live as you wish. Not “to save you from an abusive situation” or “to sever ties to an adulterous spouse,” or any other serious thing that would make divorce a necessary tragedy. No, only so that you can pursue thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy, and whatever the Other Life brings.

We have learned nothing from the Sixties and Seventies. You know that, right?

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