Rod Dreher's Blog, page 454

Benedict Option In Brooklyn?

This monkish draught is what I’m drinking right now as I prepare for a trip to Italy. I just wanted to post this picture, is all

I met a wonderful new friend in St. Francisville at Walker Percy Weekend. She’s a lawyer in Brooklyn. She writes today:

Hope all is well! It was such a pleasure to meet you this past weekend, which was a delight from start to finish. St. Francisville is so special; wonderful place, wonderful people, and it reminded me (again) of how much I love Louisiana. Can’t wait until next year.

I wanted to take you up on your kind offer to post something on the blog re: folks in New York who are BenOp-curious and looking to connect with each other. For example, I’ve often thought how much I’d love to have something like Eighth Day Institute’s Sisters of Sophia or Hall of Men here in Brooklyn, for those of us longing for practical ways to orient our lives toward true and beautiful things and hoping to find fellow travelers. Surely there are enough New York readers of the blog to make this happen? Or suggest an existing local forum that would welcome newcomers?

Anybody interested? Post in the comments how to get in touch with you, or write me privately at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and I’ll pass your contact on to the reader.

When They Come To Take Your Kids Away

This bill just passed in Ontario:

Pro-family advocates warn Bill 89 gives the state more power to seize children from families that oppose the LGBTQI and gender ideology agenda, and allows government agencies to effectively ban couples who disagree with that agenda from fostering or adopting children.

Bill 89, or the Supporting Children, Youth and Families Act, 2017, repeals and replaces the former Child and Family Services Act that governs child protection services, and adoption and foster care services.

It adds “gender identity” and “gender expression” as factors to be considered “in the best interests of the child.”

At the same time, it deletes the religious faith in which the parents are raising the child as a factor to be considered, and mandates child protection services consider only the child’s own “creed” or “religion” when assessing the best interests of the child.

“With the passage of Bill 89, we’ve entered an era of totalitarian power by the state, such as never witnessed before in Canada’s history,” says Jack Fonseca, senior political strategist for Campaign Life Coalition.

“Make no mistake, Bill 89 is a grave threat to Christians and all people of faith who have children, or who hope to grow their family through adoption.”

More:

Statements by Minister of Child and Family Services Michael Coteau clearly signaled the pro-LGBTQ, gender ideology Liberal agenda, critics warned.

Coteau, who introduced the bill, told QP Briefing he sees questioning teenagers’ self-identification as LGBTQI or telling them to change as abuse.

“I would consider that a form of abuse, when a child identifies one way and a caregiver is saying no, you need to do this differently,” he said.

“If it’s abuse, and if it’s within the definition, a child can be removed from that environment and placed into protection where the abuse stops.”

Children’s Aid agencies now have “a type of police power to bust down your door, and seize your biological children if you are known to oppose LGBT ideology and the fraudulent theory of ‘gender identity’, if for instance, some claim is made that your child may be same-sex attracted or confused about their ‘gender,’” according to Fonseca.

Fonseca also blasted the Catholic Church hierarchy for its silence in the face of this legislation.

I’ve only seen this covered on Christian media outlets, so I was a little wary of it. I e-mailed a friend in Ontario who follows this stuff, and asked if Bill 89 was as bad as it is described in this story. Yes, he says, it is — and the Kathleen Wynne government is extremely liberal on social issues.

So, under the provisions of this bill, if your 11-year-old son says that he is a girl, and you won’t go along with it, the government can seize your child.

Don’t think it can’t come here. In Illinois, the state won’t let families who oppose transgenderism foster children, or staffers within the Department of Child and Family Services oppose gender ideology:

According to the gender guardians at DCFS, all children have a “right to self-determination of gender and sexual orientation,” and individual choices about “sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression” should be viewed as “developmental milestones, not problematic behavior.”  The role of adults is simply to “facilitate exploration of any LGBTQ matters through an affirming approach…by being open, non-judgmental, and empathic.”

Thus, when children or adolescents “explore/express a sexual orientation other than heterosexual and/or a gender identity that is different from the child/youth’s sex assigned at birth,” DCFS “staff, providers, and foster parents” must “support and respect” the child’s exploration “without any effort to direct or guide them to any specific outcome for their exploration.”

In other words, all DCFS staff and volunteers must communicate a uniform message to the children and adolescents in their care: it’s perfectly normal to identify as transgender or gender non-conforming, and just as conducive to a child’s wellbeing to be transgender as to identify with one’s actual sex.

For the true believers behind Illinois’ new child welfare policies, the state’s sacred task is to “facilitate” children’s “exploration” of the rainbow-colored, imaginary world of gender-as-you-like-it. Names, pronouns, and body parts are tried on or swapped out like fashion accessories to match the shifting feelings of “gender-fluid” (otherwise known as “confused”) children.

Read the whole thing — the details of this new policy are chilling. It only covers kids in the foster care system and their caregivers. How much longer before liberal politicians (and courts) make it illegal to deny your minor child the hormones and other things needed to transition to the opposite sex?

UPDATE: Here is the complete text of Bill 89.  I may have misread it the first time. I took it to refer to what constitutes child abuse requiring the intervention of child protective services under Ontario law. It might be restricted to children in foster care overseen by the state. That’s a meaningful distinction, but it is very, very easy to see how that could be logically extended to all children. After all, if it’s considered abusive to prevent a foster child who considers himself transgender from exploring his gender identity, why isn’t it abusive to prevent one’s natural child from doing so?

As usual with the LGBT advocacy crowd, never, ever, ever believe that they will stop here and go no further. The Law of Merited Impossibility (“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”) is ironclad.

UPDATE.2: Reader MichaelGC writes:

Oh, it’s definitely in the works. This is what was discussed in a in a session of the WPATH (World Professional Association of Transgender Health) conference this year in LA:

And the final piece on suicidality is family non-acceptance. This is where you have a family who is saying, no, no, no…and then you realize that actually the family is contributing to some of that negativity at home. So the family is creating a toxic environment. (i.e. not letting him or her have hormones) And that’s where we have let the young person know the potential ramifications of calling DHS and saying that this is an unsafe environment. And that we’ve given the family every chance. To learn, to grow. And they’re continuing to be part of the problem. So thankfully this was an important time when I realized it was worthwhile in starting the clinic at children’s hospital to have lots of meetings with the lawyers in risk management. To be able to say, “alright. I have the ethicist, I have the lawyer, I have the guru from risk management, I’m gonna sit down and say, I need to describe a case to you and make sure this is actually parents being negligent in the healthcare needs of their child.

https://4thwavenow.com/2017/02/

Elsewhere in that link, a Dr. Forcier says “We spent a half day with family court judges, telling them this is what gender and transgender is . . .”

So when they come after your child for not going along with her desire to transition with her buddies at school where transitioning is a thing, it will be because a judge has deemed you derelict by withholding needed medical care.

UPDATE.3: Frank Beckwith called this seven years ago. Excerpt:

So, here is the future: if the state can declare the Johns unfit to be foster parents, and thus deny them foster children, because they may teach these children the Christian understanding of human sexuality, then the state, armed with Judge Walker’s premises, can declare any married couple unfit to be parents, and thus remove their natural children from their home, because these parents, in fact, teach their children the same lesson the Johns were forbidden from teaching. For it is a lesson that is irrational and harms others, and thus to impart it to one’s children is a form of child abuse. As Leonard Cohen would put it, “There’ll be the breaking of the ancient western code. Your private life will suddenly explode.”

 

The Herd Of Sacred Cows

Michael Brendan Dougherty, bang on:

Imagine if Saturday’s three London Bridge killers had been British Nationalist party thugs, ramming their car through a Pakistani neighborhood. Would a single decent person have heard the news and immediately said, “Well, this number of dead people is statistically insignificant compared to those that die in car accidents. These punks can’t threaten our society!” Would anyone have asked, “Why are we talking about the killer’s politics? There are thousands of gun murders in America every year and those killers don’t have their politics talked about.” Would they have felt like singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” the next morning to conjure up a vision of a day when people of all political creeds can get along?

We all know the answer.

And yet, even before the victims on London Bridge had stopped bleeding, this was the reaction among society’s best, brightest and most morally self-assured members on social media. The pattern is by now familiar. Even as an Islamic terrorist killer’s proclamations about Allah’s will are still ringing in victims’ ears, these individuals are already declaring that the true danger from the attack is an Islamophobic backlash, and that you’re more likely to die by drowning in your own swimming pool than from a terrorist attack. Do they know how callous that sounds? Do they not realize that sensible human beings react differently to a car accident than to a murder plot? Or that states and car manufacturers are constantly working to decrease the lethality of driving, while terrorists are constantly trying to improve the lethality of their enterprise?

More:

The reason the subject changes so quickly from the people dying in the street to the potential victims of backlash is obvious. Islamist terror is politically inconvenient for advocates of mass migration from the Islamic world. To talk about it honestly might lead people to notice that the Czech Republic, which doesn’t have mass migration from the Islamic world, also doesn’t have Islamist terror attacks. And because of that, Czechs also typically don’t engage in these self-criticism sessions over Islamophobia.

Read the whole thing. MBD says there’s an even deeper reason why managerial elites who run the West don’t speak the bleeding obvious when it comes to Islamic terrorism in the West. But you’ll need to read his column to find out what that is.

MBD’s piece got me to thinking about things we don’t talk about. Take the violence (mostly rhetorical) and intimidation at Washington’s Evergreen State College. If a group of alt-right frat boys took up bats and started patrolling a campus to intimidate ideological dissenters, as is happening with left-wing militants at Evergreen, it would be treated as a national crisis by the media. Mostly, though, there has been silence. More generally, the spate of militant left-wing campus illiberalism has been downplayed, in my view, by the mainstream media. If it’s noticed at all, it is generally taken as a one-off event, and in no way indicative of left-wing thought and practice.

That’s fair, to a point. Evergreen State is a famously left-wing college, so it’s probably accurate to say that there’s not a conservative among its 4,000 or so students. If the Seattle Times is right and only about 200 of the students are behaving militantly, it is likely the case that the overwhelming majority of students are both a) left-wing, and b) staying out of the protests. But their silence and submission to the intolerant militants is itself important, because it shows that there is no will among the more mainstream left to resist the extremes. Lenin understood how important a committed vanguard was to making revolution.

If the institutions of managerial liberalism — especially the mainstream media — cannot bring themselves to fight left-wing illiberalism, they will lose to it. The interesting question is why they won’t resist it — indeed, why they won’t talk about it as a crisis of liberalism. We have heard more than once from conservatives on faculties that they don’t worry about the older liberals among their colleagues. They may be on the left, but they’re on the old-fashioned left, the left that valued freedom of expression. The younger colleagues, those are the hard-core ideologues.

I think there are at least two reasons why the media won’t confront this crisis with the kind of intensity and thoroughness it would if it were coming from the political and cultural right.

For one, there is a natural sympathy with the left-wing protesters, one captured by the Old Left slogan that “Communism is just liberalism in a hurry.” This was what the Old Left said to tranquilize mainstream liberals who would have otherwise objected to them. Yes, the Social Justice Warriors may be too forceful, in the view of managerial liberals in the media, but really, don’t we agree that they want justice and a better world? Should we really be so hard on them?

The second reason is the more important one. Social Justice Warrior militancy is the inevitable fulfillment of left-wing identity politics ideology. This is what “diversity” and “multiculturalism” leads to: aggrieved, group-based militancy. Diversity (as they define it) has become the secular religion of managerial liberals throughout American society. If what SJWs are doing on campuses across the nation is not an aberration but the logical result of diversity ideology, then liberals have a big, big problem. So, like Islam and immigration, they don’t talk about it.

Was it Hitchens who said that if you want to know what a society’s sacred cows are, ask what it is you are not allowed to say in public? A sacred cow is a taboo thought necessary to observe for the sake of keeping society together and stable. Every society — including smaller societies, like churches, families, schools, and so forth — needs them. But at some point, they end up as the Emperor’s New Clothes: official lies that most people don’t believe, and that prevent people from seeing and dealing with truth. In that case, the fervor for protecting the sacred cow can end up destroying the thing the taboo was meant to protect.

I have said in the past that I am extremely uncomfortable with scientific information we’re learning about genetics, because I do not trust humans, given our nature, to deal with this knowledge. I don’t think we should know it, in most cases — but the truth can only be suppressed for so long. I wrote about this kind of thing in a 2012 post about forbidden knowledge.  We’re all hypocrites on this subject: quick to blame others for their cowardice in wishing to suppress certain facts, but also quick to defend our own willingness to do the same thing. Some knowledge deserves to be forbidden. But where do we draw those lines? And who draws them?

I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago when I got into a conversation with a Cajun woman working behind the counter at a grocery store in town. We were talking about the finicky eating habits of our kids, and somehow that led to schooling. She told me that she took the job at the supermarket so she could afford Catholic elementary school for her daughter.

The woman said her daughter was the only white kid in her first grade class at a public school, and as such, suffered a lot of bullying, much of it racial. She also said she was shocked at how foul-mouthed her first-grader became, just from the crude language she was picking up from her classmates. The mother said she couldn’t stand subjecting her daughter to that, so to Catholic school it was.

This is how schooling in East Baton Rouge Parish has become de facto re-segregated, one family at a time. I don’t blame this mom one bit for doing what she did for her child. This is something that white people talk about a fair amount in the area where I live, but never publicly — that is, never in settings where they think they’re likely to be called racist for noticing. Every now and then, though, it does spill into public discussion, like at this story about meetings the Louisiana state education commissioner held around the state. Excerpts:

After 12 hours of public hearings in six cities this week, the top issue is student behavior, state Superintendent of Education John White said Friday.

White made the comment during a two-hour hearing at McKinley Middle Magnet School on how the state should change its public school policies to comply with a new federal law called the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA.

The issue of student behavior, including classroom violence, came up several times in a gathering of more than 100 parents and school officials, including several local superintendents and two members of the state’s top school board — Jada Lewis and Kathy Edmonston.

White said student violence is not on the rise either in Louisiana or nationally, though it is the topic he hears raised the most.

He said disruptive students are often those that need to be in classrooms the most, and that sending them home “is not helpful to them or society.”

Well. A few years ago, a teacher friend of mine ended up with a shattered hand because of an altercation with a juvenile delinquent in his public school classroom. But let’s be tender towards these poor dears.

More:

Gretchen Lampe, an official of the Louisiana Association of Educators for East Baton Rouge Parish, said she thinks institutional racism is part of the problem.

“We’ve got a problem and nobody wants to talk about it,” Lampe told the group during one of the periods of public comment.

Lampe, who is white, said white teachers are routinely sent into classrooms where they “don’t know how to have conversations and understand other cultures.”

So it’s the fault of white teachers that the black kids under the authority in classrooms misbehave and act violently? Right. Anyway, whether or not you agree with Lampe’s diagnosis, she’s right that people don’t want to talk about it. We maintain social peace, if not harmony, by avoiding discussion of the problems, except among those who already agree with us.

Something else the Cajun woman said to me that night in the grocery store brought up another local sacred cow. She told me that her older son is in Catholic school too, and that on his account, there’s a lot of classroom disruption there as well. But it’s not as bad as in public school, so they’ve decided to live with it. I reflected on how friends of mine who have come through the local Catholic school system, or who have kids in it, complain privately about its mediocrity, but wouldn’t do that in public. Sacred cow.

I suppose the Catholic school system could solve its problems, given its autonomy, if the bishop and the bureaucracy wanted to, and if they got enough buy-in from parents. But it’s hard to see what good can come from a frank public debate over race and the public schools. It’s all tied into Louisiana’s racist history, the collapse of the black family, and all kinds of third-rail issues tied to race. So the problem goes unaddressed, and we all muddle along, trying to keep the peace. When there doesn’t seem to be a solution possible, maybe maintaining the taboo on talking about the problem is the best thing to do. It’s dishonest, but the price of honesty in this case might be too high.

This was the calculation Catholic bishops and others made regarding the sexual abuse scandal among Catholic priests — and it was a terrible, terrible mistake. I see today a story about how a California civil jury has awarded damages to Carra Crouch, a granddaughter of the late Pentecostal televangelist Jan Crouch, for something the elder Crouch, co-founder of the Trinity Broadcast Network, did to cover up the younger woman’s rape. Excerpt:

According to a lawsuit filed in 2012, Carra Crouch was 13 when a 30-year-old Trinity employee forced himself on her in an Atlanta hotel, where she had accompanied her grandmother to attend a Praise-A-Thon fundraiser. When Carra told “Momma Jan” what happened, the ordained minister did not report the case to police—going against her obligation as a mandatory reporter under California law—and also blamed the teen for being alone with the man.

In the lawsuit, Carra Crouch said her grandmother got angry and asked her, “Why would you have that man in your room? Why would you let this happen?”

“The jury ultimately determined that Jan’s response—by blaming and castigating Carra, by saying words beyond all realm of decency—constituted outrageous conduct,” David Keesling, Carra Crouch’s attorney, told the Los Angeles Times.

Blaming the victim, the messenger of bad news, to protect the institution is a common response.

Abortion rights advocates are doing this regarding the Planned Parenthood undercover videos: trying to destroy David Daleiden, the filmmaker, to distract from and negate the horrible truths his videos tell about Planned Parenthood. I wrote about this in 2015, quoting a Ross Douthat column in which he discusses the undercover abortion films, and how the media have trouble reporting on them straightforwardly:

Because dwelling on that content gets you uncomfortably close to Selzer’s tipping point — that moment when you start pondering the possibility that an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism.

As Douthat went on to say, this is a human universal. He’s done it. So have I. The evasion goes something like this:

1. [Our side] is accused of doing/supporting/enabling this horrible thing.

2. We are not the kind of people who would do/support/enable that sort of thing.

3. Therefore we are not guilty.

Or it goes like this:

1. Our side is accused, etc.

2. But the people making the accusation are bad.

3. If they are right, bad people win.

4. Therefore, they are wrong.

Or like this:

1. Our side is accused, etc.

2. If the accusers are right, then we will have to stop doing what we’re doing.

3. The cost of that would be too high.

4. Therefore, the accusers are wrong.

Some version of this is how I behaved in the march-up to the Iraq War. This is how I dismissed the warnings of dissidents from that war. But I couldn’t see it at the time. I bet right now, I’m doing the same thing about something else, but I can’t see it. You too.

In 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published this short manifesto in which he urged fellow dissidents to “live not by lies,” no matter what it costs them (and it will cost them). We always like to think that if we were made to suffer like Solzhenitsyn and other anti-communist dissidents had to suffer, that we would make the brave choices that they did. We are almost certainly lying to ourselves. Every one of us lives by lies now. Maybe not big lies, but there are still truths we do not speak because we judge them to be imprudent. Maybe we’re right to do so. Not every true thing ought to be spoken. Still, to examine one’s own conscience, looking for the lies that we live by, and to repent of them, is one of the hardest things to do.

One more anecdote about this. If you read my book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, you will have seen how my niece Hannah, Ruthie’s daughter, blurted out a terrible truth about the society of our family — a truth that shattered my illusions. She immediately regretted saying it, but it could not be unsaid. That truth, knowledge of which the family had worked for years to keep from me, forced a series of confrontations within myself, and between my parents and me. These were extremely painful, but they were necessary — and in time, healing came, at least to me. I think all the time about the terrible cost of the lie that preserved the illusion of family harmony, and how much better things would likely have been for all of us if we had dealt with the truth earlier.

If anything, that sad legacy has made me even more determined to search out the lies by which I live, and to deal with them as honestly as I can. This is a life’s work, and most of us aren’t willing or able to undertake it. I hate confrontation, and cannot easily judge when I am not speaking out on an issue because of prudence, or because of cowardice. As a Christian, I believe that in the afterlife, we will have a moment in which we will be given a glimpse of the reality of our own sin, and how it disfigured us. If we could see it right now, in all its ugliness, most of us would not survive the shock. I am sure that is true for me, with my own lies and tendency to believe comforting lies hiding behind a herd of sacred cows that I scarcely perceive.

This is true for you too.

Let’s have a thread about sacred cows. Don’t point out the sacred cows of others; that’s boring. Point out your own — ones you’ve had in the past, but managed to kill, and ones you think you might have now. Have you suffered from someone else’s sacred cows? If you are a regular commenter who wants to be anonymous for this thread, that’s fine.

Trump To Qatar: ‘Drop Dead’

Down, down, down we go:

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was stunned Tuesday when told by reporters about President Trump’s tweets on Qatar.

Asked for his reaction, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) first said he hadn’t seen the tweets.

Told by a reporter that Trump accused Qatar of being a state sponsor of terrorism, Corker responded, in a notably lower register, “The president?”

Reporters responded yes, and five seconds of silence later, Corker followed up: “When did that occur?”

Told that it happened Tuesday morning, Corker stood silent for about another 10 seconds.

Here’s what the president tweeted:

During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar – look!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

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So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

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…extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

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What the Commander in Chief is doing with his reckless tweeting is putting at risk one of the largest and most important American military installations in the world:

The U.S. has located one of its largest air base operations in the desert outside the Qatari capital of Doha which is home to close to 11,000 U.S. military personnel. However, with the recent visit of U.S. President Donald Trump to the Middle East, ties with Saudi Arabia have strengthened.

The Al Udeid U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) military base in Qatar was set up in 2003 after it was moved from the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. The base, which boasts a long runway of 12,500 feet, is an important facility for the U.S. as it can accommodate up to 120 aircrafts. The base in Qatar serves as logistics, command and basing hubs for the U.S. CENTCOM area of operations, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

The day before, Defense Secretary Mattis and Secretary of State Tillerson had made public statements trying to calm the waters. This morning, they woke up to this mess from President Trump, who endorses a regional blockade of our ally!

We have a major military base in Qatar that the Qataris could close tomorrow if they wanted to. And Trump is antagonizing them for what? To please Our Friends The Saudis™?

I don’t mind that Trump is being disruptive. I very much mind that he is being stupid about it, and making enemies for our country for no good reason. On the other hand, I suppose there could be a bright side: I suppose that’s one way Trump is getting us out of the Middle East.

Larison says:

The more worrying thing about this statement is that Trump’s opinion of Qatar’s activities seems to be guided entirely by what other leaders told him about their government. Last month in Riyadh, Trump boasted that the U.S.-Qatari relationship was “extremely good” and that he and the emir would be discussing the purchase of “beautiful military equipment” made in the U.S. That was unfortunate in its own way, but it shows how different Trump’s view of Qatar was a few weeks ago. As I said before, Qatar is responsible for supporting jihadist and Islamist groups abroad, but they are hardly the only government in the region that has done so. Judging from Trump’s statement, he is simply taking Qatar’s neighbors at their self-serving word and he is letting himself–and the U.S.–be used to legitimize their vendettas. That bodes ill for this particular crisis, and it also shows how easily regional clients can shape U.S. policies during Trump’s presidency.

All the Saudis had to do was flatter the US President, and he swung their way in an incredibly destructive way — this, without consulting his own national security leadership, and indeed by undercutting them, and indeed by making fools of them. The recklessness is stunning — and frightening. There is no foreign policy stability at the pinnacle of the US government. The word of the Defense Secretary and the Secretary of State is worthless in foreign capitals. What matters are the spontaneous tweets of an President disconnected from a realistic sense of responsibility for his office and the security of the nation he leads.

Sooner or later, Mattis, Tillerson, and H.R. McMaster are going to have to resign to protect their own integrity. And then what?

Evergreen, Ever Crazy

Things just keep getting worse at Evergreen State College in Crazypants, Washington:

An official at Evergreen State College sent a memo to students Sunday asking an apparent group of campus vigilantes who have taken to patrolling the grounds armed with bats or batons to end the practice, according to an email forwarded to The College Fix. 

The email was from Vice President for Student Affairs Wendy Endress, who in her memo addressed to “colleagues” included the message sent to students Sunday by Sharon Goodman, director of Evergreen’s Residential and Dining Service, or RAD, asking the “community patrol” to lay down its weapons.

Thugs marching around campus like brownshirts with clubs in hand, to protect people from … student dissent:

Endress, in her June 5 email to colleagues, asked them to counsel students to “embrace choices that de-escalates.” She goes on to cite an email she received from an Evergreen professor who is concerned for one of her pupils.

The Evergreen student had told the professor that “Because I had shown some criticism to the protest that was occurring on campus in earlier weeks I have become targeted and harassed by a wide number of students on campus. Recently there have been a number of students who patrol lower campus with weapons like baseball bats and tasers who claim to be making the campus safer but in reality are making campus more hostile.”

It’s not just students. At this page, watch a video clip of a black professor on campus cursing out her fellow professors for dissent. Excerpt from the monologue:

This is about THEIR needs. And that Equity Council handed you — handed you! — a way to do this EASILY!

We put so much fu*kin’ work– you know, one of the things we talked about is, “Oh, we gotta have a process.” You know how many people on that Council got anything like release time to do that work? About a grand. So when, exactly, were we gonna have time to sit there and wax FU*KING POETIC for YOUR benefit about SH*T that has been in the works– We are literally asking for the same sh*t that students have been asking for since the ’70s!

NONE of this is new! None of it! You should know this! …

I am sick! Put in a lot of goddamn effort. Listen to these people talk SH*T to you for seven FU*KING YEARS.

So no, I don’t want to hear about it. So what I am saying is what I said at the start: You can go inside and you can listen to the students and what they’re trying to say, or you can take your ass home! That is it!

Biologist Jerry Coyne says that the Seattle Times has editorialized against the crackpot college, pointing out that its enrollment has plummeted even though the school, with an acceptance rate of over 98 percent, accepts anyone with a pulse who applies. Coyne adds:

If Evergreen State’s enrollment has dropped steeply in the last 6 years, well, that’s nothing compared with what is to come. Students throwing rocks through windows, threats phoned in to shoot a lot of people, student “vigilantes” roaming the campus with baseball bats—what parent would want to send their kid to such a school, even if they did accept the po-mo and often ridiculous classes the students have to take? (Evolutionary biology seems to be a welcome exception.)

The fracas at ESC may not be, as I predicted, a turning point in the Left’s coddling of its regressive element, or of authoritarian students dominating the discourse on campuses, but it surely presages hard times for ESC—and that’s deserved. The trustees and President should apologize to Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, his wife who also teaches biology (and was also called a “racist”), and they should discipline the students who disrupted classes and carried baseball bats, fire the invertebrate President George Bridges, and get rid of its fluffy po-mo courses. I suspect that none of this will happen, but, as the Seattle Times editorial notes, if something isn’t done, the College is doomed.

Turns out that about a quarter of the Evergreen faculty signed a statement calling on the college administration to discipline Prof. Bret Weinstein for objecting to a call for all white people to leave the campus for a day. Almost all of the humanities faculty signed.

Happily, a Washington state representative has introduced a bill calling for the failing state college to be privatized:

“When you cross the line and start attacking a Jewish professor when you cross the line and you start telling white people or anybody based on their skin color that they can’t come to school, that violates our anti-discrimination laws,” he said.

…

“My heart goes out to the non-crazy students, but there has to be change at the top,” Manweller said, noting that he is not attacking the school because it is a more liberal school.

“These guys are out of control,” he said. “They are openly advocating for racism and bigotry. It’s not appropriate to be spending taxpayer money on that. If they want to be a private institution and pursue their bizarre, bigoted ideology, that’s their prerogative. But taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund it.”

A college run in which the administration asks student thugs nicely to quit patrolling with bats and batons is not a college that has what it takes to restore order and safety to its campus. It will be interesting to see what Evergreen State’s enrollment is this fall. Like Coyne said, you’d have to be a moron to send your kid to school at such a nuthouse. Imagine have to be afraid your child might get beat up by left-wing bullies roaming campus with bats in hand — bullies that the marshmallows who run the college are too progressive to confront.

If this college wants to let Social Justice Warriors among the students and faculty run it, fine. Let them quit asking the taxpayers of Washington to fund it, though.

Bob Dylan On The Road To Damascus

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture was pretty good.  I was first struck by his account of his artistic epiphany, his own Road to Damascus moment. It happened at a Buddy Holly concert:

He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than twenty-two. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.

I think it was a day or two after that that his plane went down. And somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the song “Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.

This is a religious story, don’t you see? Dylan then talks about how he entered into an artistic apprenticeship, teaching himself the folk and the blues canon. These songs gave him a framework for understanding his calling and expressing it. Once he mastered contemporary music, he didn’t stop there:

I had all the vernacular all down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head – the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.

But I had something else as well. I had principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world. And I had had that for a while. Learned it all in grammar school. Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Tale of Two Cities, all the rest – typical grammar school reading that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by. I took all that with me when I started composing lyrics. And the themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally. I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard, and these themes were fundamental.

Specific books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school – I want to tell you about three of them: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.

He goes on to discuss those three novels, and how they affected his understanding of the world, and in turn, his music. One of the greatest popular musicians of the 20th century, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, got his start in what we now call classical education — one that gives the student “a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by.”

Here’s part of his description of The Odyssey. He makes it sound like a folk song. He makes it sound like real life:

In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you’ve had close calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good. And that’s still not all of it.

Let me not take away from you the delight of reading the whole thing.

Again, I read this as Dylan’s mingling religion with art. What is this story but a retelling of St. Paul on the Damascus Road, then after his conversion, using his deep knowledge of Hebrew religion to both break with the tradition and extend it in new and revolutionary ways?

Isn’t this what all serious religious pilgrims and truth seekers do? After their epiphany, they submit to tradition — not just the more recent tradition, but big-T Tradition. They know that books and works of art and teachings that have survived for so long must in some way speak truth about the human experience. You know my own story: how I found my own troubled life 21st century life, and the way out of the dark wood, in the 14th century Commedia of Dante Alighieri. Not a week goes by in which I don’t think in some way about how our own life today is in some profound ways a repetition of events in the Commedia. Because that’s what real art does.

In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have been thrown out of your community for things you didn’t do. You too have made an idol of a woman, and suffered because of it. You too have been spellbound by the voice of a charismatic teacher who led you wrong. You too have faced a wall you could not break through, until divine assistance came. You have seen the hard faces of the damned, and heard the sweet consolations of those grateful for mercy. You learned that things you used to believe were important actually don’t matter. You have won hard wisdom, and faced the temptation to rest too early, before your journey’s proper end. And that’s still not all of it.

This is also the journey of the religious believer. There are those who wrongly believe that the Damascus Road moment is the end of the journey, and that they do not have to submit themselves to any tradition, or root themselves in any commitment. For them, their religious journey is a lifelong attempt to recapture the thrill of the Damascus Road. But notice: St. Paul’s journey only began on that road. He had incredible adventures ahead of him, in the service of the Lord he met on the road to Damascus. In truth, if you are to understand the meaning and purpose of Damascus Road, you need to start listening to those who have walked it before you — and even those who sought the light but never found it there, and those who found it but veered off into a dark wood.

If you do, maybe you will be able to receive the grace from the Creator that allows you to participate in His creation through making great art. And the greatest art is the artwork that is your life.

Jeff Sessions In The Doghouse

Is there a more loyal Donald Trump supporter than Attorney General Jeff Sessions (not named “Trump” or “Kushner,” I mean)? Sessions was with Trump when everybody else in Washington thought that was absurd. But even that is not enough to protect Sessions from the wrath of the president who thinks the law is himself, according to The New York Times:

Few Republicans were quicker to embrace President Trump’s campaign last year than Jeff Sessions, and his reward was one of the most prestigious jobs in America. But more than four months into his presidency, Mr. Trump has grown sour on Mr. Sessions, now his attorney general, blaming him for various troubles that have plagued the White House.

The discontent was on display on Monday in a series of stark early-morning postings on Twitter in which the president faulted his own Justice Department for its defense of his travel ban on visitors from certain predominantly Muslim countries. Mr. Trump accused Mr. Sessions’s department of devising a “politically correct” version of the ban — as if the president had nothing to do with it.

In private, the president’s exasperation has been even sharper. He has intermittently fumed for months over Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election, according to people close to Mr. Trump who insisted on anonymity to describe internal conversations. In Mr. Trump’s view, they said, it was that recusal that eventually led to the appointment of a special counsel who took over the investigation.

Trump’s worst problems have not been caused by Jeff Sessions, or by Sean Spicer, or by anybody other than Donald Trump. More:

But the messages caused considerable head scratching around Washington since it was Mr. Trump who signed the revised executive order and, presumably, agreed to the legal strategy in the first place. His posts made it sound like the Justice Department was not part of his administration.

The White House had little to add to the president’s messages on Monday. Asked why Mr. Trump signed the revised order if he did not support it, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokeswoman, said he did it only to convince a California-based appeals court. “He was looking to, again, match the demands laid out by the Ninth Circuit and, for the purpose of expediency, to start looking at the best way possible to move that process forward,” she said.

Our president is making himself look like a fool who doesn’t know how the US government works. In revising the travel ban language, Jeff Sessions and the Justice Department were trying to come up with one that would be more likely to survive Supreme Court review. Trump must be the only person in America who thinks that by force of his audacious will, he can bend the Supreme Court to his will. Sessions and his team were trying to serve the president’s best interests — and it seemed that the president understood that, which is why he approved the revised version. Until now.

Why does anyone want to work for Trump? He routinely cuts the legs out from under his most loyal people. He marched Spicer et alia out to give an official story about James Comey’s firing, then made them out to be liars a couple of days later in his interview with NBC. Now it is reported that he ambushed his national security team — McMaster, Mattis, and Tillerson — with an impromptu speech change at the NATO summit, concerning Article 5. Excerpt from Politico:

It was not until the next day, Thursday, May 25, when Trump started talking at an opening ceremony for NATO’s new Brussels headquarters, that the president’s national security team realized their boss had made a decision with major consequences—without consulting or even informing them in advance of the change.

“They had the right speech and it was cleared through McMaster,” said a source briefed by National Security Council officials in the immediate aftermath of the NATO meeting. “As late as that same morning, it was the right one.”

Added a senior White House official, “There was a fully coordinated other speech everybody else had worked on”—and it wasn’t the one Trump gave. “They didn’t know it had been removed,” said a third source of the Trump national security officials on hand for the ceremony. “It was only upon delivery.”

The president appears to have deleted it himself, according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump’s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion.

Incredible. The chaos and dysfunction in this White House is such that the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of State get sandbagged by the boss in public. Nixon was sneaky, yes, but he was smart. With this one, we are approaching The Madness of King George territory. With nukes, and the world’s most powerful military at his disposal.

When they write the history on the death of the Trump administration, it will be judged a suicide.

View From Chris Arnade’s Table

Late roadside lunch pic.twitter.com/4ccRpwNUkw

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) June 5, 2017

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If you aren’t following him on Twitter, you are missing out on the story of America in our time. Do it!

Pride & Louisiana Politics

You might remember the thing I wrote the other day about the Louisiana legislature trying to change the name of my high school alma mater from the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts to the Jimmy D. Long Sr. Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts. The late state Rep. Long was a key founder of the school, one of the nation’s first public high schools for gifted kids, back in the early 1980s. His name is held with honor and affection by the school’s alumni.

Two state legislators who were close to him — State Sen. Francis Thompson, and State Sen. Gerald Long, Jimmy’s brother — filed a bill to honor his memory by renaming the school. This stoked fierce opposition from the school’s alumni, who hold the school’s tradition dearly. They lobbied fiercely against the bill, not out of disrespect for Rep. Long, but out of high regard for the school and its traditions.

Some outsiders, including Louisiana legislators, couldn’t understand what the big deal was. It’s just a name, they said. There are all kinds of good arguments that could be mustered against that position, but in the end, it boiled down to this: the name of the school is a family tradition. It might not make sense to outsiders, but within the family, it is sacred. That’s what was happening here. It’s why the alumni fought so hard for their cause. To them, it felt that Louisiana politicians were trampling on a cherished tradition, just to throw their weight around.

This afternoon, the Louisiana House of Representatives narrowly passed a version of the Senate bill.  Excerpt:

The House, without objection, added an amendment aimed at placating opponents of the measure, Senate Bill 1.

Whether it represents a compromise remains in dispute.

While the school would be named after Long, as originally drafted, it would not affect diplomas, transcripts, logos, stationery and other items. In addition, the LSMSA’s board of directors would have control on exactly how the name change is implemented, including signs and class rings.

More:

Others alluded to the fact that Sen. Francis Thompson, D-Delhi, sponsor of the bill and Sen. Gerald Long, R-Winnfield, Thompson’s key ally on the legislation, were in the House chamber before and during the vote.

[State Rep. Patricia Smith, a bill opponent] noted that the LSMSA depends on state dollars for its operations. “I don’t like getting emails from people saying they are threatened and their funding is being held up,” she said.

Thompson said he was pleased with the House-passed version of his bill and plans to ask the Senate to give it final approval before adjournment on Thursday at 6 p.m. “I don’t know anything about any threats,” he said after the vote.

I’m told by alumni who were at the legislature and active in lobbying efforts that the arm-twisting by Thompson and Long that Rep. Smith mentions was a big part of today’s vote. I heard from a lobbyist friend not involved in the controversy that Thompson and Long really wanted this to go through, and the fact that the bill passed the House with and amendment that “gutted” it was a real accomplishment by the alumni.

There’s no doubt that the Senate will approve the compromise, and that Gov. John Bel Edwards will sign it into law. The Louisiana state budget is a rolling disaster, and Edwards needs all the support he can get. Thompson and Long are powerful state senators. The story writes itself.

This is a Pyrrhic victory for Thompson and Long. This name change is as nominal as it gets. Everybody will get to officially do what they would have done anyway: ignore this, and call the school what it has been called for 34 years. They won’t have to go through the hassle and expense of changing signs, letterhead, and the rest. The school’s board of directors will have say-so on how this law is implemented. Maybe I’m not seeing something, but it looks like the best thing that alumni could have hoped for short of an outright win. It looks like a face-saving solution for two of the most powerful men in the Louisiana Senate.

But here’s the thing: from now on, through no fault of his own (he’s dead), poor Jimmy Long’s name will be mud with the alumni and the community of the school. It ought to be held with affection and honor, but now it will forever be associated with this ugly legislative attempt to force something unwanted onto the school and its community. Plus, there are thousands of alumni and alumni families throughout the state and nation who are fired up in advance of the next legislative election, ready to work for and donate to legislators who stood by the school despite the pressure from Thompson and Long, and ready to work against those who did not. I knew before this started that graduates of the school (I was in the Class of ’85) felt passionately about the place, but the intensity of feeling and commitment around the name-change issue honestly shocked me.

This episode has been a good lesson in politics. It was not the victory alumni hoped for, but it was a remarkable result all the same, given how things usually go in the Louisiana legislature. The teaching moment will continue past the signing of this bill. Here’s a list of how state reps voted. I was pleased to see how my state representative, Kenny Havard, came down on the issue.

Still, what a shame, what these prideful lawmakers and those who knuckled under to them have done to Jimmy Long’s memory. But the alumni memory is longer.

The Storm Before The Storm

Here’s a must-read piece by Jacob Siegel, reflecting on how dissatisfying he found a public debate last weekend between editors from Dissent and American Affairs. Siegel says that for the past 10 years he has been moving both right and left politically, as the center has become hollowed out. He didn’t like the debate because “the left pandered and the right was coy.”

In Siegel’s account, the two Dissent editors, Tim Shenk and Sarah Leonard, carried on as if the Left were obviously correct, had nothing to talk to the new Right about, and simply had to wait for the Left’s inevitable triumph. Siegel says that is a pretty incredible position to hold when Republicans are winning all over. And:

“As someone who considers myself a leftist,” one audience member said during the Q&A, “I did feel sometimes a little bit uncomfortable with the only calls for building broad solidarity coming from the right.”

What the questioner was getting at I think, was Shenk and Leonard’s refusal to even acknowledge any conflict between identity politics and the formation of broad class-based coalitions. An especially notable omission given how commonly this issue comes up in intra-left debate.

At various points both Dissent editors dismissed concern over political correctness and campus radicalism as petty preoccupations of the right. This at the same moment, while “the Left turned on its own”  that videos of the Evergreen college protests were going viral. Broadcast—forget about just on cable TV—in millions of youtube clips that are played, refracted, remixed and replayed to a vast audience of Americans who are still, as Shenk rightly noted, deeply invested in the culture war.

Siegel says that the Left makes a huge mistake in minimizing this stuff. He’s correct in that. Political correctness may be extreme on certain campuses, but it will inevitably be mainstreamed by institutions run by graduates of these colleges.

A small but telling example: the announcement that the US men’s and women’s national soccer teams will be wearing pro-gay jerseys:

And notice how the Fox Sports journalist described this move:

U.S. Soccer has dropped some spiffy new rainbow kits to raise money for a good cause, coinciding with LGBTQ Pride month in June.

What if you are a US Soccer player who is Catholic, Evangelical, Muslim, or otherwise religious, and objects morally to celebrating gay pride (even if you have no problem at all with gays and lesbians playing professional soccer)? Too bad for you. If you objected publicly by refusing to wear the jersey, you would put your career at risk. So: violate your conscience or suffer professional consequences. This is one example of how coercive political correctness moves throughout the system.

There are others. Progressives have a bad habit of dismissing or minimizing them (see, for example, this dishonest and inaccurate Snopes.com piece explaining away the violent anti-white radicalism of Texas A&M philosophy professor Tommy Curry), but people outside the bubble notice this stuff.  [Side note: I used to trust Snopes as a source of debunking, but after having had personal interaction with the Snopes reporter, and seeing what she wrote about a controversy I was a part of, I will not trust Snopes again. — RD]

Turning to the Right, Siegel criticizes Gladden Pappin and Julius Krein of American Affairs. He says they talked about building “working-class solidarity,” but left it vague as to what the glue of that solidarity would be. They were clear about what it would not be, however:

Krein and Pappin went out of their way to disassociate themselves not only from ethno and white nationalism but with anything resembling, as Schmitz puts it, “the chthonic forces of blood and soil.” No surprise then that Krein dismissed the alt right as something marginal and unimportant.

Which leaves the question, which I put to them at the debate: If not race or ethnicity or romantic nationalism, what is the force that will keep the civic and legal procedures undergirding this renewed nationalism from coming apart as happened not very long ago, to the last version of civic nationalism in this country?

What, I was asking, will hold the laws and procedures together? Laws and procedures, they answered.

 To be clear, Siegel says that the American Affairs guys share much of the critique of liberalism that the Alt-Right does, but they reject the racial and ethnic politics of the Alt-Right. But the Alt-Right, he says, is more honest:

The difference is that in the alt right it’s clear what holds their concept of politics together: racism, white identity, ethno-nationalism or some combination of the same.

Given all the premises they share, either the white nationalists of the alt right are American Affairs secret allies or they are the competition. Dismissing them as marginal figures and figments of the opposition’s imagination as the left does with its problematic radicals won’t make them go away. If it did they wouldn’t be here to begin with.

Siegel quotes “someone close” to American Affairs explaining this as “probably dancing around religion.” Siegel adds:

That’s certainly plausible, and an understandable apprehension given the presumed secularism of the crowd. But it doesn’t really matter. Whether it’s a cross up your sleeve or a knife, people see you hiding something up there they think you’re a sneak. That is not a feeling that attracts people to new ideas.

Siegel concludes in part by saying this:

I don’t think the country can survive the way it’s going. That doesn’t mean it will fall apart tomorrow. But if society continues to balkanize—now with more street fighting—if the Federal government keeps expanding its power while failing at its most basic duties, as Amazon, Google and the like keep moving towards quasi omniscient information monopolies that add wealth at the top while shrinking jobs, wages and the middle class….well, I don’t know exactly, and I don’t counsel despair, but it doesn’t end well.

I agree with him. “[T]he stakes are high, so say what you mean,” Siegel said. Read the whole thing. 

I advise you to read Matthew Schmitz’s account of the evening here.  Here’s Schmitz expressing puzzlement with the inability of the Dissent editors don’t see how sexual liberation and market capitalism go hand in hand (a question that I have been putting to my fellow social conservatives for a long time):

But what makes today’s left so sure that economic justice and sexual liberation coincide in the way, say, that truth, beauty, and goodness do in the schemes of theologians? Granting that culture and economics intersect, isn’t it a bit odd that the social views of the average leftwing editor are indistinguishable from those of the CEO of Apple? Men like Eric Schmidt think that free markets and free love are by no means irreconcilable. In this judgment they are joined by every pope since Leo XIII. Any left unable to see the way we are enslaved by lust will end up the unwitting handmaiden of those who exploit.

Ross Douthat sums up the meaning of Siegel’s piece succinctly:

Younger intellectuals are trying to wrestle with a moment in which liberalism seems exhausted but real illiberalism remains taboo.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) June 5, 2017

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This is exactly right. Siegel calls for us to say what we mean, so let me say what I mean.

I agree with Siegel that we can’t go on like this. Something has to give. It might not give next year, or ten years from now, but we can’t muddle through forever.
The rising Left is bound and determined to crush or at least permanently sideline people it deems heretics — in particular, whites, males, orthodox Christians, and skeptics of the LGBT project. It does not want a pluralistic modus vivendi; it wants total domination. The establishment Left lacks the will to stop them. Its members are terrified of appearing un-woke. All a major corporation has to do to buy off the Left is declare itself in favor of Pride, and so forth.
The establishment Right lacks the will to stop them either, for fear of being called bigots. And it lacks the will or the imagination to stand in any way against corporate interests. It tried to stop Donald Trump, but failed.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats know how to address the conditions that gave rise to the Trump presidency. It would offend too many interests within their respective coalitions.
Trump is a reckless man whose presidency is going to end badly for America. It will also end badly for the people who voted for him; he has no principles except self-promotion, and will sell them out. He also will not be able to get anything serious done, in part because of his total lack of discipline. Trump is a symptom of our political crisis, not a solution.
The real glue holding the dynamic Left together is hatred of the Other. You can see this in part from the Dissent editors’ unwillingness to explore any kind of alliance around economic issues with the right-wing dissidents of American Affairs. For them, the culture war is of such paramount importance that it precludes economic-based alliances.
The real glue holding the dynamic Right together is hatred of the Other. The American Affairs guys would like to suspend the culture war and make common cause with the economic Left, but the Left is not interested.
Christianity, in whatever diluted form, was for most of America’s history the ties that bound us together (whether or not we were Christians). Those days are gone.  Liberalism, in the broadest historical sense, is secularized Christianity, and as such is parasitic on Christianity. When Christianity disappears, as it has largely done in Europe and is well on its way to doing in the United States, it takes with it the basis on which liberalism operates. Laws and procedures alone do not hold a people together.
In a post-Christian nation like ours, there is no realistic hope that religion is going to hold the nation together, or even the forces of the Right. The faith that the old Religious Right (= politicized white Evangelicals) has placed in Donald Trump is self-deceptive, to put it mildly.
As American politics becomes more extreme on both sides, serious Christians will be squeezed out. A significant number of conservative Christians will give themselves over to a Christianized version of blood-and-soil politics. The uncritical embrace of Trumpism by many conservative Christians today opens the door to this.
The future of American politics is highly uncertain. Christians have to do the best they can to fight for moral values in our politics, and in particular for religious liberty. But the “imperium” — meaning the American political order — is probably beyond saving at this point.
The most important thing by far to be conserved is the orthodox Christian faith — and that entails a particular set of moral beliefs and customs, including the traditional family.
Contemporary American life is corrosive to this end in many ways, not all of which are understood by the Christian Right at the moment, mostly because they still confuse Christianity with The American Way Of Life™.
Those orthodox Christians who understand the radical nature of the crisis before us will devote themselves to building up their faith, communities, institutions, and ways of life to be resilient and resolute in the face of American decline. I call this the Benedict Option. The politics of the future may be more left-wing or right-wing, but they will be increasingly anti-Christian. Keeping our heads clear and our hearts stout during this long time of trial will be the most important task facing Christians in this new Dark Age. We too will have to bind ourselves together more tightly to Jesus Christ and to each other in his church.

Bottom line: Identity politics will dissolve the traditional bonds that have held Americans together, and re-bind forces of the Left and forces on the Right to each other. Absent Christianity as a meaningful force in American life, liberalism will continue to fade into exhaustion and senescence. Illiberalism of the Left and of the Right is not yet fully mainstream, but that day is coming. The only thing that can save us from it is a rebirth of Christian consciousness, which at this stage would require a miracle.

Miracles can happen. But I wouldn’t bet the future on them. Read the signs of the times, and prepare.