Rod Dreher's Blog, page 515

He Doesn’t Care If You Call Him Racist

Wolf! Wolf! (SashaS Skvortcova/Shutterstock)

A reader who comments as “Andrew” left this comment. It describes the way a lot of people I know feel:

As a 46 year old white male, I’d like to give my perspective for the various liberals and leftists who comment here (and I’m truly glad you are here).

By your definition, I’m a racist, and I just don’t care anymore. I don’t believe I’m actually a racist, but you’re going to label me that way anyway, so I’ll just accept it. I’m a racist based on your definition. Fine. I won’t argue, I’ll just acknowledge you are right. I’m guilty of racism. Frankly, I’ve given up trying to prove you’re wrong. Hell, you’ll call me a racist for thinking algebra should be taught in school, and gifted programs should be kept even if they “lack diversity.”

And so now, if I can be so bold, here’s my response: “So what? I get it. I’m a racist. Do you have anything else to say? Now that you’ve defined me as a racist, should I just disappear? Should I just admit that you are right, and come around to your way of thinking? What, exactly, do you want me to do? Because I still think about the issues affecting this country in the exact same way.”

In my work place a few years ago, I was talking to a colleague of mine. Very nice person, intelligent, considerate, and an open liberal. Somehow the topic of immigration came up. I said, very politely, that I believed immigration laws should be enforced. He stood up, veins popping from his neck, and shouted, “You’re a racist!” So that was the end of our conversation.

I’m naming one example out of a thousand. I’ve experienced this time and time again, as have many people I know. (Incidentally, I’m the only non-liberal in my family.) On one issue after another, the response to my opinion is some variation of “You’re a racist!” (Or sexist, or homophobic, or bigoted, or guilty of white privilege – the whole litany.) I get it. My opinions are not to be valued, or even considered. I’m a bad person! If only I were educated (but I am). If only I was enlightened.

Someone above mentioned the Willie Horton ad. Such a racist ad. Here is the name of Willie Horton’s first victim: Joseph Fournier. Mr. Fournier was 17 years old when Horton stabbed him to death. Horton then stuffed Fournier into a trash can, where he bled out from his wounds. After Gov. Dukakis granted Horton a furlough from prison, Horton raped a woman twice, in front of her fiance (who he beat up and knifed). Do liberals care about Mr. Fournier, or his family? Do they care about the woman and her fiance that were traumatized? I don’t see any evidence that they do. You know what they care about? You know what will make them angry? If I use the word “thug” to describe Mr. Horton. Well that’s just not acceptable in polite society. It’s a racist code-word.

My question for all you dear liberals and progressives: Is there a way people like myself can talk about Willie Horton honestly without being accused of racism? Would there have been any way for Bush Sr.’s campaign to discuss the issue of weekend furloughs, and their innocent victims, without being written off as racist? “There goes the GOP again, stirring up white voters.” The Horton ad is considered prima facie evidence that Republicans are racists. But what about Mr. Fournier? How many Democrats know his name?

(A brief aside to my liberal friends. Do you want to reduce white racism? If there’s one issue that perpetuates hostile attitudes of whites towards blacks, it’s black crime. So take that on, why don’t you? But white people only talk about that under the radar, after the equivalent of a secret handshake ensures that they won’t be turned in to the thought police.)

With all of his faults and weaknesses, Trump gave a voice to one group of people who were ignored by both the Democrats and the mainstream press: victims of crime, and their family members. But since the criminals – the murderers and rapists and drug dealers – were illegal immigrants, of course, Trump was racist to do so. And all of us who appreciated him talking about this issue were reacting to “dog whistles.”

Do you want to know why sites like Breitbart are popular? Because they cover stories and issues that the mainstream press won’t touch, or will cover for as brief a period as possible. For example, the woman in Massachusetts who was kidnapped, beaten and gang raped by four Guatemalan illegal immigrants. One of those immigrants had a criminal record, and another had been deported before. Why wasn’t that front page news? What do the Democrats have to say to that woman? Trump at least spoke to the issue. But of course he’s a racist.

Do a Google search for “off duty patrol agent gets killed.” The first two results are from Breitbart, and Fox news. I wish that wasn’t the case, but there you go. The man who was murdered: Javier Vega, Jr. He was a Latino victim, so surely his name will be covered by the press? Killed in front of his wife and children – surely that will be front page news? But no. The two men who killed him were illegal immigrants from Mexico who had been arrested and deported numerous times. So no one knows Vega’s name except “right-wingers” like myself who occasionally read sites like Breitbart.

(But a story like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown – well that gets non-stop coverage for months. And there are many educated people who still don’t know “hands up don’t shoot” was a complete lie.)

Dear Liberals, Democrats, progressives, leftists: Your use of the word “racist” doesn’t work anymore. We get it. You’re superior. You’re enlightened and we’re not. You care about diversity and we don’t. We only listen to dog whistles. We have given up trying to talk you out of your presumptions, or trying to earn your approval. We no longer consider it worth our while to reassure you that we’re not “that kind” of Republican.

But the fact is, we’re not as stupid as you think we are, and we see right through you. And if there’s one thing Trump has done, he’s given us some backbone to make our voices heard. Of course, that means “expressions of racism” will increase. (OMG!) And every child who behaves like a bully will be blamed on Trump. The fact is, we just won’t care about your freak-outs. Go ahead and caterwaul. You lost, and you deserved to lose.

I cast my vote for Trump reluctantly. Now, I couldn’t be prouder.

Thoughts?

UPDATE: Andrew writes:

I do have an addendum to suggest, if you wouldn’t mind. The sentence in my comment that refers to Gov. Dukakis wasn’t accurate. Another commenter pointed this out on the original thread. Dukakis wasn’t directly responsible for Horton’s furlough. He didn’t make any personal decision. It was the penal administration that granted Horton’s furlough. But as governor, Dukakis vetoed the bill that would have stopped furloughs for first-degree murderers. So the state legislature wanted to make that change, and Dukakis prevented it.

I’m making the correction so that people don’t get sidetracked from the main point because of my inaccuracy.

Done. I would like to add my own thought. I understand where Andrew is coming from in this e-mail, and I highlight it here to point out that a country in which people do not feel shame over racist thoughts, beliefs, and actions is a morally diminished country. I take Andrew’s point to mean that the left has accused him and people like him of racism for so many things, no matter how trivial, that the accusation doesn’t faze him anymore. I have been saying for some time now that if the alt-right grows in power and influence, it will be because ordinary people get tired of being bullied by these kinds of accusations, and choose to ally with people who might actually be bona fide racists, but who aren’t bothered by the attacks from the left.

I think Trump’s not giving a rip about political correctness was a big factor in his rise. If you’ve been reading me all year, you know that I’ve objected to his vulgarity and coarseness on many occasions. Trump lowers our discourse, and normalizes ways of talking in public that ought not be normalized. Having said that, it is undeniably true that the willingness of many on the left to demonize as bigots (racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, etc.) white people who don’t live up to strict progressive blasphemy codes has called forth contempt for the (necessary and important) taboo against racism itself.

Think of it like this: Prohibition encouraged contempt for the law. If you pass so many “laws” around normal discourse, saying to transgress them makes you an “outlaw” (= bigot), then you should not be surprised when people go full Uncle Chuckie, and cease caring.

This is not a good thing, to culture people into contempt for law! But this is the effect that smug SJW liberalism is having. As the young left-wing writer Emmitt Rensin wrote earlier this year, “The wages of smug is Trump.” I blogged on that Rensin column when it first appeared in Vox back in April, and revisited it tonight after a liberal reader of this blog e-mailed it with his approval. It’s fascinating to read it now. In it, Rensin gives his own side a merciless hiding, saying at one point:

Trump capturing the nomination will not dispel the smug style; if anything, it will redouble it. Faced with the prospect of an election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the smug will reach a fever pitch: six straight months of a sure thing, an opportunity to mock and scoff and ask, How could anybody vote for this guy? until a morning in November when they ask, What the f**k happened?

That morning came a week and a half ago. Here’s more Rensin, from that April piece:

Make no mistake: I am not suggesting that liberals adopt a fuzzy, gentler version of their politics. I am not suggesting they compromise their issues for the sake of playing nice. What I am suggesting is that the battles waged by liberalism have drifted far away from their old egalitarian intentions.

I am suggesting that open disdain for the people they say they want to help has led them to stop helping those people, too.

I am suggesting that in the case of a Kim Davis, liberalism resist the impulse to go beyond the necessary legal fight and explicitly delight in punishing an old foe.

I am suggesting that they instead wonder what it might be like to have little left but one’s values; to wake up one day to find your whole moral order destroyed; to look around and see the representatives of a new order call you a stupid, hypocritical hick without bothering, even, to wonder how your corner of your poor state found itself so alienated from them in the first place. To work with people who do not share their values or their tastes, who do not live where they live or like what they like or know their Good Facts or their jokes.

This is not a call for civility. Manners are not enough. The smug style did not arise by accident, and it cannot be abolished with a little self-reproach. So long as liberals cannot find common cause with the larger section of the American working class, they will search for reasons to justify that failure. They will resent them. They will find, over and over, how easy it is to justify abandoning them further.  They will choose the smug style.

Maybe the cycle is too deeply set already. Perhaps the divide, the disdain, the whole crack-up are inevitable. But if liberal good intentions are to make a play for a better future, they cannot merely recognize the ways they’ve come to hate their former allies. They must begin to mend the ways they lost them in the first place.

Reader Andrew, and the place where liberal hectoring and condemnation has driven him to, is exactly what Emmitt Rensin was talking about.

Bill Penzey’s Spices Ain’t Nices

You can buy Penzey family spices, without the self-righteousness

When I lived in Philadelphia, I used to shop at a Penzeys Spices shop in my neighborhood. I was especially fond of their Bavarian spice blend. Penzeys says the spice blend comes from, or is at least inspired by, the cooking of owner Bill Penzey Jr.’s grandmother. Nothing tastes better on pork loin or roasted turkey than that stuff. Just the other day I told my wife that I wanted to get some more of it for the holidays, and — not kidding about this — I was planning to go to the Penzeys website and order some by mail.

But: a reader just forwarded the latest e-mail newsletter from Bill Penzey Jr.. I had a vague sense that he was some kind of genial Ben & Jerry’s progressive, but I did not realize until reading this, then spending a bit of time googling, that he’s also a jerk. Here’s what he sent to his customers:

Racism Update: At Penzeys we believe it’s not the use of tools that set us on a different path from the rest of the animal world; what has set humanity in motion is cooking. In our nearly a million years gathered together around the fire, cooking shaped our bodies and transformed our minds. Cooking unlocked our potential and gave birth to reason, to religion, and to politics and government. The kindness of tens of thousands of generations of cooks created our humanity, but racism, sexism, and homophobia can all very quickly unravel all the goodness cooking puts out into the world. As the voice of cooks, we will never sit idly by while that happens.

You may have read Tuesday Night’s email. In it I said: “The open embrace of racism by the Republican Party in this election is now unleashing a wave of ugliness unseen in this country for decades. The American people are taking notice. Let’s commit to giving the people a better choice. Our kindness really is our strength.”

Since I ask you to read my emails, I feel it’s only right that I read each of your replies. In sifting through those replies it was clear that, though not intended, a good number of people seemed to sincerely believe that in my statement I was calling all Republicans racists. In the emails of those Republicans who voted for someone other than the party’s nominee, I sensed genuine pain at having the strength of character to not go along with what was happening, but nonetheless be grouped in with those who were. I apologize for writing something that caused you pain; that is not the person I want to be. You are your party’s future, and you deserve my admiration and respect, and your country’s as well.

For the rest of you, you just voted for an openly racist candidate for the presidency of the United States of America. In your defense, most of you did so without thinking of the consequences of your candidate’s racism, because for most of you the heartbreaking destruction racism causes has never been anything you or your loved ones have had to experience. But the thing is elections have their consequences. This is no longer sixty years ago. Whether any of us like it or not, for the next four years the 80% of this country who did not just vote for an openly racist candidate are going to treat you like you are the kind of person who would vote for an openly racist candidate.

You can get angry at everyone else for treating you like you just did the thing you just did, or you can take responsibility for your actions and begin to make amends. If you are lucky and younger family members are still coming over for Thanksgiving, before it’s too late, take a moment and honestly think about how your actions must look through their eyes. Simply saying “I never thought he’d win” might be enough. But if you have the means, leaving a receipt from a sizable donation to the ACLU or the SPLC accidentally laying around where you carve the turkey, might go over even better.

Or, just do what you do best and volunteer. Through our customers’ support, we’ve given away a lot of our Penzeys Pepper, the Pepper with heart. More often than not, those we meet cooking and serving food to feed those in need are Republicans. You really are a good bunch, but you just committed the biggest act of racism in American history since Wallace stood in the schoolhouse doorway 53 years ago. Make this right. Take ownership for what you have done and begin the pathway forward.

Thanks for reading,

Bill

bill@penzeys.com

Got that? Most of the people Bill Penzey meets serving food to the poor and hungry are Republicans, but a lot of them voted for Trump, and they’re going to have to prove their moral worth to ol’ Bill before he will give them a pass.

Well. I’m a conservative who did not vote for Trump, but I don’t want any part of Bill Penzey’s sanctimony and condescension. I’m not a big one for boycotts, and it doesn’t bother me one bit if a merchant holds political opinions opposed to my own, and advocates for his or her candidate or issue. That’s what America is about. But I’m not about to spend a solitary sou, farthing, or pfennig in the store of a merchant who has such open contempt for people like me. No, I didn’t vote for Trump, but as far as I’m concerned, I would like for Bill Penzey to assume that I did. I know lots of good men and women who voted for Trump, and the idea that Bill Penzey despises them puts me off of his business for good.

There’s a happy ending here. While looking around online to see what Bill Penzey’s problem is, I discovered that his sister Patty Erd and her husband Tom run a competing (but much smaller) spice business, called The Spice House. Bill Penzey Sr. and his wife started the business in the 1950s, and Patty inherited it. Bill Jr, her younger brother, started his own catalog company, Penzeys. I have no idea what the Erds’ politics are — far as I know, they could be commies, or they could be Trumpkins — but they don’t seem to make a habit of getting on their high horse and insulting their customers. Even better, they make a Bavarian seasoning! 

I buy all of my spices at my local spice shop, but they have nothing in stock like the Bavarian blend. I have just ordered some from The Spice Shop for my Thanksgiving turkey — and if you’re looking for something different and delicious to try this year, I recommend the same to you.

This Bill Penzey reminds me of the proprietor of a neighborhood coffee shop on Court Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, when we lived there in the late 1990s. Cobble Hill is very much a liberal place, and the kind of neighborhood where people want to support the local guy, but this shop owner was so over the top obnoxious in his left-wing politics that he drove people away. You didn’t want to go there, because the guy couldn’t stand kids, and you felt that he was constantly hovering over you judging you for failing to live up to his extremely particular standards. When Starbucks opened down the street, that was the end of him, if only because Starbucks was happy to welcome moms with strollers, and you could sit and have your cup of coffee without being judged.

‘Ordinary Sam’ and Harry Potter

My kids are struggling with a particularly nasty viral cold that’s been going around. My daughter Nora, who reads voraciously (she conquered the entire Harry Potter oeuvre when she was seven and eight), exhausted her supply of library books, and I haven’t had the chance to go replace them. Fortunately, our old friend Erin Manning happened to send along a Kindle edition of her latest book, The Adventures of Ordinary Sam: Book One: The Sand Stone. Here’s the Kindle description:

Sam Oldfield is an ordinary kid with an ordinary life. Or is he? When he wakes up in a hospital he is told he’s been missing for three days—so why does he remember nearly a year’s worth of adventures in a magical kingdom in another world?

Was all of it a dream? Did Sam really imagine a wise old magician, a cranky but loyal bird, a beautiful bossy princess, and the Sand Stone itself, whose power Sam alone could wield? That can’t be true. But if the magical world of Ebdyrza and all of Sam’s memories are real, then there really is an Enchanter’s War, too. And the Enchanters may end up in Sam’s world seeking to destroy the Sand Stone, and Sam with it.

Nora just handed me back my iPad; she had been reading it on my Kindle app. Here’s the actual dialogue we had:

“I love fantasy books, and that is probably the best one I’ve ever read. It was so well-written!”

“How do you mean, the ‘best’ you’ve ever read?” I asked.

“Better than Harry Potter.”

“No, really?”

“I’m serious. It was that good.”

This is a little girl who comes home from the library with ten or more books in her bag. If she says the book was that good, I take it seriously. You can also get it in a paperback version.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to Erin’s blog, And Sometimes Tea.

A Professor In Post-Truth America

igorstephanovic/Shutterstock

Further to my point about the challenging, irksome fact that we live in what the OED calls a “post-truth” culture, I received this today in an email from a college professor. At his request, I’m withholding his name and the name of his institution:

People tend to make up lies when it suits their emotional needs all the time, and so I don’t want to make too great a claim about generational differences; nonetheless, millennials seem to lie, at least at their colleges, as if the fabric of the universe were simply malleable to pleasing their own wishes. I have seen even those students who seem most bright and most wholesome make bald faced lies to their classmates and to me; they just do it as if it came naturally and they don’t seem to have any conscience about it.

Not long ago, one student spoke to me in casual conversation of telling her club on campus an absolutely outrageous lie (I forget what it was precisely, but it was on the scale of “I survived cancer” or “I was raised in Germany). She mentioned it because she could see at some point she was going to have to pay the piper, but her disbelief went beyond that. She herself was stunned that she could just make things up out of thin air and pass them off as truth to people with whom she was going to spend hours a week for several years in a block. It wasn’t so much shame, so far as I could tell, as an incomprehension at this odd and troubling power that just happened to be right there inside her.

Here’s a more irksome one: several years ago, a student lied to me about something and then, out of necessity, confessed he had lied to me. He had requested an official document from me and had lied about why he wanted it for no apparent reason as it was the kind of document I would routinely provide to him as part of my duties as a professor. I had initially just given him some information and not said document, because the lie he told did not indicate he would really need it. When he confessed his lying and asked again, I was insulted by his dishonesty and ignored his request. Out of desperation, he wrote again, saying something like “I’m sorry [as in, it sounds as if he is apologizing for lying] but I didn’t think I would be in this bad position [as in, caught lying and with no alternative but to confess].” He actually said he was truly sorry not because he had been dishonest (again, for no apparent reason), but because he had been put in the horrible position of having to confess to a lie. “Sorry for being caught” doesn’t quite capture the absurdity of his statement.

Has this happened in your workplace? Asking seriously. I have a Millennial friend who changed the focus of her studies at one of the nation’s top medical schools after she observed rampant, conscious fraud among her student colleagues in the research lab. I asked her if she was talking about things as egregious as falsifying data. Absolutely, she said. The reason was competition for status and research grants. They just did not care. She did not want to be co-opted by that system.

She was not talking about lawyers, or liberal arts professors, or anybody like that. She was talking about research scientists.

It’s not quite the same thing as this, but closely related: Dante believed that the loss of belief in the sacred and binding qualities of vows was behind the social and civic collapse of Italy in the High Middle Ages. He discerned that if people believed that their word was only valid when they believed it advanced their interests, things would inevitably fall apart. This is why Traitors were in the lowest pit of Hell: because when you cannot trust the word of anybody, not even your neighbor, a stable society becomes impossible.

The Benedict Option After The Election

I keep getting e-mails from people asking what I think the Trump victory means for the Benedict Option. I’ve tried to answer that inside much longer, and more rambling, posts, with no luck. Let me be as clear and as succinct as I can manage in this one.

The good news from the Trump victory is that the progressive assault on religious liberty has probably been halted for a period, or at least slowed down. I share Ryan T. Anderson’s hope. Excerpt:

Donald Trump promised that he would make America great again. If he is to make good on that promise, he’ll need to start by robustly restoring our first freedom: the free exercise of religion.

Unfortunately, under President Barack Obama’s administration, it came in for attack as never before. Thankfully, many of those attacks can be rectified in the very first days of a Trump administration.

Trump should commit to protecting the free exercise of religion for all Americans of all faiths. In her concession speech, Hillary Clinton referred to the “freedom of worship”—piety limited to a synagogue, church, or mosque. But what the American founders protected was the right of all to live out their faith every day of the week in public and in private, provided they peacefully respect the rights of others.

The reduction of religious liberty to mere freedom of worship is a hallmark of the Obama years. Houses of worship, for example, were exempted from the Department of Health and Human Services Obamacare contraception and abortifacient mandate.

Trump is not a religious man, but I hope that with Mike Pence whispering in his ear, he will make good on these hopes. It is also to be hoped that a Trump administration, which will replace Scalia, can also replace one or more other SCOTUS justices, and lock in a court majority solidly in favor of strong religious liberty protections. So far, so good, I think.

But this surprise Trump win in no way obviates the need for the Benedict Option. All it does is buys us a little more time, and maybe a little more space within which to build it. My great concern is that conservative Christians who were beginning to perceive the danger to our faith coming from an aggressively secularist government will now allow themselves to believe that everything is fine, because we are going to have a GOP president and a GOP Congress.

Nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, one of the reasons the church is in the perilous place it’s in is because far too many conservative Christians were complacent about the culture, thinking that all we had to do was to vote Republican and get “good” judges in place, and everything would be fine. Wrong, wrong, wrong. A change of administration in Washington is not going to change historical currents that have been desacralizing the Western mind for at least 200 years. To the extent that conservative Christians believe this lie, they leave themselves wide open.

If you are under the impression that the chief threat to Christianity is the power of the state as embodied in the person of Hillary Clinton, you are seriously misreading the times. Here’s a small but telling example. The other day, the influential Evangelical leader Gabe Lyons tweeted this:

“Christian leaders” who celebrate same-sex relationships & gender confusion, aren’t leading the Church.

They’re following the culture.

— Gabe Lyons (@GabeLyons) November 15, 2016

This is basic orthodox Christianity. It would be extremely unrealistic to expect no one to object to it. What’s interesting — and characteristic of our time — is the kind of responses Lyons got, especially this one:

Love u Gabe but it’s just as likely that Christian leaders who oppose same sex relationships are doing so bc of their own cultural biases. https://t.co/WJ032oJw3X

— Kirsten Powers (@KirstenPowers) November 15, 2016

No, it’s not. Not remotely. Well, let me back up: yes, it’s possible (even likely) that some Christian leaders who oppose same-sex relationships are doing it purely out of prejudice, and haven’t thought it through. But Scripture is very clear about this, and the belief that Christianity forbids homosexual conduct was unquestioned for nearly 2,000 years. So if a Presbyterian pastor in Deepest Jesusland hasn’t worked out a sophisticated theological answer to the challenge posed by homosexuality, that does not mean that he is wrong. It only means that he accepts the authority of Scripture and the weight of nearly every generation since apostolic times believing without question that Scripture is true on this point. If you are going to say that Scripture is wrong, and the church’s interpretation of Scripture for nearly two millennia was wrong, you’re going to have to do a lot better than this.

What Powers is doing here is more straightforward than that, I believe. She’s saying that the answers to the theological challenge posed by contemporary views of homosexuality are culturally conditioned, and therefore “just as likely” to be matters of opinion, nothing more. That’s simply not true. If it were true, wouldn’t it be at least as true for the proposition, “It’s just as likely that Christian leaders who believe in the Trinity are doing so because of their own cultural biases”? In Powers’s case, she wrote a decade ago, quite movingly, about her conversion from atheism to Christianity, and how one of the first obstacles she had to overcome was her own closed-mindedness, summed up in this question she posed to herself: “What if this is true, and I’m not even willing to consider it?”

Been there, done that. In fact, the greatest obstacle in the end to my own conversion back in the early 1990s was not wanting to accept the church’s teaching on sexuality, period. I finally surrendered, because it was obvious to me that the only reason I was refusing it was that I did not want it to be true, because if it was true, then I would have to change my life in ways I did not want to change. I was being an intellectual and spiritual coward, refusing to recognize what I had come to recognize as truth, because it was a hard teaching. So I surrendered.

Why am I bringing all of this up here? Not to pick on Powers, certainly; her way of reasoning is quite common today. It’s to say, though, that this way of approaching the Christian faith is characteristic of our emotivist era, and is a far, far greater to Christianity’s integrity and resilience than anything that President Clinton, President Trump, or President Anybody could possibly do to the church. We are living in a era, one in which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the term (it’s Word of the Year 2016), “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

This is in large part what the Benedict Option intends to resist. Yes, it’s to help ground orthodox Christians more firmly in the truths of the faith and in Christian community and culture, in part to make us more resilient from attacks from the outside (e.g., a hostile state). But it is also, and even moreso, about making us more resilient in the Post-Truth Culture.

What will become more clear in the next few years is the irreconcilability of our differences. With luck, we will work out a way to live together in peace, but we had better be clear and sober-minded about the challenges ahead.

Here’s an important truth that will help you make sense of where we are now, and where we are going: social order is sacred order.

That is, society is ordered by what its people consider to be sacred.

Jonathan Haidt, in a 2012 New York Times essay, spoke to this point:

Despite what you might have learned in Economics 101, people aren’t always selfish. In politics, they’re more often groupish. When people feel that a group they value — be it racial, religious, regional or ideological — is under attack, they rally to its defense, even at some cost to themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes.

The key to understanding tribal behavior is not money, it’s sacredness. The great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred. People who worship the same idol can trust one another, work as a team and prevail over less cohesive groups. So if you want to understand politics, and especially our divisive culture wars, you must follow the sacredness.

A good way to follow the sacredness is to listen to the stories that each tribe tells about itself and the larger nation. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith once summarized the moral narrative told by the American left like this: “Once upon a time, the vast majority” of people suffered in societies that were “unjust, unhealthy, repressive and oppressive.” These societies were “reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation and irrational traditionalism — all of which made life very unfair, unpleasant and short. But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies.” Despite our progress, “there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation and repression.” This struggle, as Smith put it, “is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.”

This is a heroic liberation narrative. For the American left, African-Americans, women and other victimized groups are the sacred objects at the center of the story. As liberals circle around these groups, they bond together and gain a sense of righteous common purpose.

Haidt goes on to characterize a conservative narrative, one that emerged in the Reagan era. It’s fascinating to read this 2012 piece, and to observe how dated the Reagan narrative has now become in Trump’s America. Anyway, Haidt’s conclusion is even more relevant today than it was when he wrote it back then:

America faces multiple threats and challenges, many of which will require each side to accept a “grand bargain” that imposes, at the very least, painful compromises on core economic values. But when your opponent is the devil, bargaining and compromise are themselves forms of sacrilege.

It’s hard to overstress the truth of that last line, and how it applies to everybody, not just to our political, religious, and cultural opponents.

Even a devout atheist has sacred values — that is, beliefs that he holds to be non-negotiably true, beliefs that cannot be proven objectively (often about the way reality is constructed), but that he considers to be self-evident. In fact, there are very few self-evident truths, not even “all men are created equal.” That may be true, but it is by no means self-evident. To consider it so is to proclaim that one holds it as a sacred value.

Whenever you hear a liberal say that religious people have no right to impose their religious beliefs on everybody else, you are hearing the liberal state one of her sacred values. The fact that so many liberals fail to understand that they are not operating from a position of neutrality, but are taking sides on subjective grounds, accounts for their inability to understand why so many people oppose them. That so many conservatives fail to understand that liberals, despite what they like to tell themselves, are generally no less driven by their own ideas of the sacred accounts for why conservatives remain confused about what liberals want and why they want it — though, as Haidt’s research has shown, conservatives are far more likely to understand the liberal mind than liberals are to understand the conservative one. Look:

Based on painstaking cross-cultural social-psychological experimentation, Haidt establishes that the moral foundations of liberals and conservatives are not just different, they are dramatically unequal. The liberal moral matrix rests essentially entirely on the left-most foundations; the conservative moral foundation—though slanted to the right—rests upon all six.

This is a stunning finding with enormous implications. The first is that conservatives can relate to the moral thinking of liberals, but the converse is not true at all. Haidt, who is liberal himself, elegantly explains how and why conservatives will view liberals as merely misguided while liberals tend to view conservatives as incomprehensible, insane, immoral, etc.

Another implication is that liberal prescriptions tend to be incredibly single-minded as compared to those of conservatives. Haidt uses the metaphor of a bee hive to illustrate. A liberal, finding a bee in the hive suffering from injustice, is motivated more or less exclusively by the desire to get justice for the bee. A conservative, being partially driven by the Care/Harm foundation, also desires to alleviate the injustice, but tries to find a solution that also contemplates the survival of the hive itself.

Liberals seek to create justice and equity; whether doing so harms core institutions simply doesn’t enter into their moral reasoning. Conservatives, in contrast to their typical caricature, do care about justice and fairness, they merely cherish vital institutions relatively more. If there’s a conflict, conservatives will err toward protecting institutions.

And this is precisely why the “conservative advantage” is a far bigger deal than Jonathan Haidt had likely envisioned. Everyone cares about suffering and injustice. But most everyone (except liberals) also believes that maintaining core societal foundations is a legitimate, reasonable moral value.

That makes a lot of sense to me, but I’m wondering how true it remains in the present moment. Trump is an incredibly disruptive figure — disruptive of institutions, for sure. The question is whether by voting for him in the GOP primaries and then in the general election, people were casting a conservative vote (that is, saying that the politicians and institutions of the current order are not working to conserve customs and institutions under attack, and need to be replaced by a new order that will), or casting a revolutionary vote for throwing out the old and replacing it by “let’s see what happens.”

The point I want to make here is that the social order will be something over which we contend heatedly for the foreseeable future, because we cannot reconcile clashing visions of sacred order. We cannot even get many on the left to recognize that they have a sacred order, in the sense that many of their premises are not self-evident, but simply asserted. Philosopher Ryszard Legutko, who is emerging as one of the most important voices of our time, has written:

A liberal is someone who takes a rather thin view of man, society, morality, religion, history, and philosophy, believing this to be the safest approach to organizing human cooperation. He does not deny that thicker, non-procedural principles and norms are possible, but believes these to be particular preferences which possess validity only within particular groups and communities. For this reason he refuses to attribute to such principles and norms any universal value and he protests whenever someone attempts to impose his profound beliefs, however true they may seem to him, on the entire social body. Liberals might have divergent opinions on economic freedoms and the role of government, but they are united in their conviction that thinness of anthropological, moral, and metaphysical assumptions is the prerequisite for freedom and peace. Whoever would thicken such assumptions generates ideological conflicts and is believed to undermine the basis of peaceful cooperation and open the door to unjust discrimination.

Can one have non-liberal or even antiliberal views today without becoming, at best, a laughing stock, or at worst, a dangerous supporter of authoritarianism? Is the thinness of basic assumptions indeed the only way to secure liberal ends? I, for one, think that the identification of liberalism and liberty, so characteristic of modern times, is largely unfounded. Liberalism is one of several systems whose aim is to establish a certain ordering of the world. Whether this ordering is good, or preferable to other orderings, or to what extent this ordering increases our freedom, are open questions, and no definite answer seems compelling.

More:

Obsessed with the specter of discrimination and enslavement looming within every social practice, philosophy, or moral norm, liberals fall prey to the rhetoric of emancipation and are helpless when faced with modern ideological mystifications, which are often created in bad faith and from evidently erroneous assumptions. During the last century there have appeared many ideologies that proclaim their noble aim of opposing unjust discrimination. There is practically no minority today that, making recourse to these ideologies, cannot make a convincing case that it is a victim of a particularly sinister form of discrimination.

Who is today a liberal, and who is not, is often difficult to say since emancipatory rhetoric has become so omnipresent. The true-breed liberals—for whom the idea of freedom is so dear—are extremely generous in co-opting new groups into the everexpanding circle of freedom fighters. But their generosity is not always reciprocated. Such radical groups as homosexual activists or feminists do not have any profound sympathy with liberalism, but they use its tools to promote their own goals. In fact, they are egalitarians, and the idea of equality, not liberty, is their principal value. The problem is that the liberals cannot reject the claims of such groups because they are paralyzed by the rhetoric of liberation and by their own conviction—which I find rather silly—that saying “no” to these groups would amount to the renunciation of the liberal creed.

Sometimes the desire to co-opt everyone may express itself in a vision of society which is infinitely spacious—a utopia of utopias, as Robert Nozick once called it—which could be compared to a department store where all possible goods are available, and where people are not forced to buy only those that are currently fashionable or recommended by some authoritative agency. In a department store there is no ethical hierarchy that would tell producers what to produce and customers what to purchase. A society which is modelled on the department store is said to stock goods for hedonists and spiritualists, for Jews and Muslims, for illiterate pleasure-seekers and for refined intellectuals; there is pornography and the Bible, Plato and Stalin, communism and laissez-faire. No one is deprived of the opportunity to find what he is looking for. Muslims are not coerced to accept the Christian faith, homosexuals are not forced to marry the other sex, monks are not distracted from their search for the absolute, and usurers are not constantly reminded about the Sermon on the Mount. The diversity produced by these arrangements eliminates any need for the distasteful logic of political trade-offs.

The problems with this vision are two. The first is conceptual. Such a system is in fact egalitarian, not libertarian: a world of no discrimination is a world of perfect equality. It is an illusion to believe that the egalitarian logic of the whole will not influence what people think within each community. The entire system will either have to create a spontaneous acceptance of the assumption that all ethical creeds are essentially equal, or else a supreme authority will have to impose the rule of equality on all groups. In both cases we might talk of the emergence of a sort of multiculturalism, which—as some think— may be a good thing in itself, but this puts an end to a dream of real cultural diversity. Multiculturalism is always either a highly regulated system or a homogenizing ideology which conceals its homogeneity by selecting some fashionable minority “culture”— homosexuals, Africans, feminists— to which its adherents kowtow and make this kowtowing the criterion of “openness” to plurality.

The second problem is practical. The effect of the increasing number of individual and group claims and the supportive toleration of those claims by liberals creates social and political chaos. The liberals try to bring some order to the situation, but in practice they encourage new groups to make ever more claims and thus to increase the chaos. Liberals resemble a traffic specialist trying to find traffic rules that would enable an increasing number of cars to drive efficiently and without collision and who at the same time is an automobile manufacturer interested in selling as many cars as possible. This task is not feasible. The rules are more and more inclusive, but at the expense of being more and more remote from reality. The result is a loss of a sense of proportion.

Read the whole thing — and better, buy Legutko’s great new book, The Demon in Democracy.

For the reasons Legutko mentions, the situation we are now in is not resolvable. We cannot live without authority, but increasingly, attempts to impose authority will be seen by many Americans at all places on the political spectrum as illegitimate. It will also be the case that within their own groups, Americans won’t be able to agree on basic sources of authority. This is what the minor-but-really-major argument between Gabe Lyons and Kirsten Powers highlights.

This is the world the Benedict Option intends to help orthodox Christians navigate successfully without losing their faith. Trump’s victory changes almost nothing.  Calvinist theologian Carl Trueman writes today in First Things that two things that were true before the election still are: 1) the nation-state is in precarious shape, and 2) orthodox, traditional Christianity (of the sort he and I share, despite our different churches) is weak in our post-Christian culture:

So last week was a week in which everything changed and nothing changed. For all the hysteria on both sides, Christianity has no more and no less cultural credibility than it had before. But Christian life goes on. It would have done so if the election had gone the other way. It is time for Christians to put not their trust in princes—and return to business as usual.

Carry on, and keep building that Ark. It’s gonna rain. It already is.

Moralistic Therapeutic Education

United Educators of San Francisco, a Bay Area teachers union, is committing its members to undermining the next president of the United States. In a statement on its web page:

The results of the November election are rightfully sending people to the streets, taking a stand against the vile hatred and intolerance that Donald Trump represents. His election has made all of us less safe in our lives, but particularly those who are immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ community, the Muslim community, and women. Without a doubt, we must continue organizing in our communities and across the state and nation to resist every and all attempt by Trump to role [sic] back our rights and to take back all of the hard earned progress that we have made as a country.

Talking to students about the election is important. Educators have a role to play to help them make sense of the new reality, especially those who come from the communities who have been attacked by Trump, and who now face a very uncertain future. A good start is this article from the Huffington Post. Mission High School Peer Resources teacher Fakhra Shah has also put together this lesson plan to talk about the election with your students.

The lesson plan was written the day after the election. It begins:

Tomorrow, I hope that you will take the time to put all lessons aside and talk to our students about what has happened and how they feel. Please, let them speak and be heard. Let them say what is on their minds, this is crucial for our school and our community. Let us please not sidestep the fact that a racist and sexist man has become the president of our country by pandering to a huge racist and sexist base.

Objectives:

• Students express their concerns and voice their thoughts/feelings

• Students gain empowerment/hope

• Students feel safe and respected

• Anti-Racist/Anti-Sexist/Anti-Islamophobic/Anti-Homophobic (etc.,) teaching lenses are magnified and put into full use tomorrow and students should come away with an

understanding of this through discussions held in class/norms established

• Students gain a working knowledge of context of American racial violence, sexism etc.,

• Feel free to add more (This is not the model of Bloom’s taxonomy for learning

objectives, but what do traditional models of education know anyway?)

Here are some recommendations for how to conduct a discussion:

1. Establish some norms if possible:

a. One Mic

b. Respect

c. Confidentiality

d. Step up Step Down

e. Speak your truth

f. Stay engaged

g. Add whatever the students want to add (you can ask for them to limit or not use

profanity here as well if that is important to you)

2. What has happened? Let the students speak one at a time. PLEASE VALIDATE

STUDENTS FEELINGS. Example: “What you are saying is valid,” or “I hear you,” “I

support you, I understand you.” “you are right and this is unjust.” Let them speak, guide the discussion, use a talking piece if necessary. (I know that they might curse and swear, but you would too if you have suffered under the constructs of white supremacy or experienced sexism, or any isms or lack of privilege. You would especially do so if you have not yet developed all of the tools necessary to fight this oppression. It is our job to help them develop these tools, ie the language etc., Let’s not penalize and punish our youth for how they express themselves at this stage.)

An RA’s Defense Of ‘Crybaby’ Students

Here’s a really thoughtful e-mail that came in last night from a reader at a major urban university. I’m withholding his name and his institution for privacy reasons:

It’s becoming a conservative ‘meme’ to call out treating college students as ‘infantile’ because of treating the election of Trump as a traumatic event. I live in dorm with undergrads and I have a word of caution.

Your response to Linker struck me as 50% right on and 50% completely off. You are right to point to the attempts to stifle dissent on college campuses as dangerous, and right to be offended at the tedious self-righteousness with which it often happens. But I think you are at risk of papering over the responsibility some of us have to respond to some real emotions and beliefs held by the folks behind the scenes. On a political and abstract level it is appropriate to just call these things out as absurd, satirize their principles (or lack thereof) and lament their illiberality. But on a personal level that often does not persuade or even treat the other seriously. Consider the difference between responding to the ‘no trigger warnings’ letter at the University of Chicago at a national level and on campus: students here tended to say ‘why would they not want to help victims of trauma?’ as much as ‘ooh, they deny rape culture!’. I don’t like how easily abused trigger warnings are and I distrust them, but the former is a question coming out of concern for another. If I were to ridicule it I would not be answering a valid concern held by another. If I were writing policy I might take a blunter approach, but if I am talking in person to that student who cares I’d have harder work to do to try to explain myself persuasively.

So back to Trump-wailing: I am also disturbed by the angst and tears provoked by the election. I heard about a professor on my campus comparing the need to discuss the election in class to the need to discuss 9/11 when he was an undergrad. I am all for discussing important national events in class, but that made my blood boil. I was an undergrad when 9/11 happened too, and people were leaving class to find out if their parents were alive or not. That makes it different.

At the same time, I think it’s important to understand that at universities there is often a grand narrative about how Justice is working now. Conservatives like to pretend they do not participate in these, but they do: many like to own the movement towards Justice when it pertains to the civil rights, or to the pain felt by those solidly in the pro-life camp. These are ways of orienting us to national movements that demand responses but are hard to understand fully.

So first, one of the prominent movements of the moment is the sense that minorities suffer from leftover effects of previously institutionalized racism, that these effects still take a toll on their well-being, and that they ought to be addressed. For many minorities, and for many non-minority college students who have been taught this, the insensitivity of Trump and his coalition to this is what stings. It feels as though it is now in no one’s interest to deal with real problems they face. Moreover, they feel as though it will be politically rewarding to dismiss these claims.

I would not affirm all of those claims, but I can see why students who deeply believe these things feel threatened. Some have more of reason to than others, but many of the majority culture students are grieving with their friends who are not. Sometimes that turns into ridiculous political posturing; but for many I know it’s genuine compassion coming out of a shared perception.

The point is that the feeling can be real even when the perceptions that lead to it are warped. I would imagine from my reading–I know few Trump supporters personally, since I live on a college campus–that there are Trump supporters whose own suffering has been ignored and as a result are willing to overlook the pain experienced by the large politically liberal minority population of the country. But this is a most dangerous situation: when two groups feel they are wronged and refuse to see each other’s suffering and acknowledge each other’s hurt, resentment is sure to grow. Conservatives should point out that in an important way, Trump’s election is a victory for justice for the disempowered: conservative voters long ignored by their representatives voted against their own political leader’s preferences. They should also be willing to hear about other narratives, where this feels like a great defeat for the cause of justice.

I wish that instead of doing the silly pantsuit ‘Alleluia’ that SNL had worked out another ‘Black Jeopardy’ style skit about parallel experiences of despised blacks and whites. Perhaps about politicians who are elected over and over but never deliver, or about the inability to get their co-workers to even listen for ten seconds without interposing the prefab counterarguments supplied to them by their favorite blog or TV show last night.

So again as towards the weepy college students: we got here largely because people ignored the real pain felt and said those people were ridiculous anyway, that their pain didn’t count for anything. I don’t advise making a habit of mirroring that behavior if we want to claim to offer a different way forward for the nation. You don’t have to agree with someone to say I’m sorry you feel desperate, and you do have to love them to offer hope.

I really should just knock off for the day. Between Scott Alexander’s post and this reader’s letter, I can’t hope to write anything remotely as thoughtful or compelling.

‘Stop It, Lefties, You’re Making Us Crazy’

Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous psychiatrist who writes the Slate Star Codex blog, has won the Internet for the week with his long, magnificently well researched post telling the anti-Trump left to quit scaring people with their ridiculous propaganda. Alexander is not a Trump supporter, so why does he feel so strongly about this? This is why:

Why am I harping on this?

I am a psychiatrist. So far I have had two patients express Trump-related suicidal ideation. One of them ended up in the emergency room, although luckily both of them are now safe and well. I have heard secondhand of several more.

… Stop fearmongering. Somewhere in America, there are still like three or four people who believe the media, and those people are cowering in their houses waiting for the death squads.

I am not going to quote Alexander’s blog post at length, because if I got started, it would be hard to stop. What he does is go through most of the allegations against Trump (e.g., that he’s anti-Semitic, that he’s a white supremacist fellow traveler, that he hates gays, etc.), and demolishes them with factual analysis. He really does. I learned a lot of things I did not know about Trump. And again: Alexander is not a Trump supporter. One of his points is that the left, especially in the media, have focused on trivial stuff (the kind of stuff that freaks out a relatively small sliver of lefties, actually) and let the big things go. Alexander:

Stop centering criticism of Donald Trump around this sort of stuff, and switch to literally anything else. Here is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, whose philosophy of governance basically boils down to “I’m going to win and not lose, details to be filled in later”, and all you can do is repeat, again and again, how he seems popular among weird Internet teenagers who post frog memes. In the middle of an emotionally incontinent reality TV show host getting his hand on the nuclear button, your chief complaint is that in the middle of a few dozen denunciations of the KKK, he once delayed denouncing the KKK for an entire 24 hours before going back to denouncing it again. When a guy who says outright that he won’t respect elections unless he wins them does, somehow, win an election, the headlines are how he once said he didn’t like globalists which means he must be anti-Semitic.

Stop attempting suicide. Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. Stop terrifying children. Stop giving racism free advertising. Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them. Stop. Stop. Stop.

Earlier in the post, he touches on one of my favorite themes:

Stop turning everything into identity politics. The only thing the media has been able to do for the last five years is shout “IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS!” at everything, and then when the right wing finally says “Um, i…den-tity….poli-tics?” you freak out and figure that the only way they could have possibly learned that phrase is from the KKK. Y’know, a week before Election Day, Lena Dunham, featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention this year, produced and tweeted a video called How Are You Feeling About The Extinction Of White Men? which featured giant feet stepping on cartoon white males in a very-definitely-endorsed-by-the-author way. I am sure you are very well-educated and understand that this is a completely harmless letting-off of steam with no racial overtones; whereas when a Republican says he opposes the corrupt establishment, this is an anti-Semitic dog whistle which proves that his entire life philosophy is based on nothing but hatred and bigotry. But I worry that the non-college-degree-having white working class is not as well-educated as you, and is too ignorant to grasp this simple and obvious point. And maybe they start thinking of America’s ongoing tribal/partisan conflict through a race-based lens, which is surely an unpredictable testament to their own bad character and not the exact thing you’ve been encouraging every second of every day since the turn of the millennium.

Read the whole thing, then let’s come back here and discuss it.

Scholarship As Propaganda

A mind is a terrible thing to waste (extender_01/Shutterstock)

Look, I’m not posting this as another “get a load of those krazy kampus lefties” item, and if you’re tired of this kind of topic, I don’t blame you. If this triggers you, stop reading. I want you to consider this seriously, though, and not just in light of the Trump election. It is the text of a letter addressed to the students at Villanova University, published in The Villanovan, a campus newspaper. Read this

To the students of Villanova University:

A letter from the co-directors of gender and women’s studies

By Dr. Catherine Kerrison & Dr. Timothy McCall

On November 15, 2016

The national election results shocked many Americans, but women were particularly devastated. Initially, analysts pointed to unprecedented turnouts among rural, non-college educated men to explain Hillary Clinton’s defeat. But according to the Washington Post, it turns out that 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump, many of them middle class and educated. Why?

There is no need to reproduce here the vulgarities, invective and swagger about having committed sexual assault, uttered by the President-elect and by some of his supporters. We have all heard, seen and read them. Worse, since the election, they seemed to have unleashed an open season of attacks on women around the country. Women have been grabbed on the street and told that this is what life will be like under Trump. Muslim women have had their hijabs ripped from their heads. On our own campus, black women have been subjected to racial epithets and one was physically assaulted in the tunnel by white men chanting the name of the President-elect. Why would women vote for a man who would be in a position to normalize and institutionalize those views at law?

There are several reasons:  the workings of gender, patriarchy and race are thoroughly tangled, complex and insidious.

First, there are rewards for women who do not challenge patriarchal authority and who do not make themselves obnoxious by demanding the full human rights and sovereignty of self that (white) men command. Such women are not besmeared with epithets and hatred. Indeed, they can enjoy real material benefits in their associations with men.

Second, American history is replete with examples of white women who have cared more about preserving racial superiority than about achieving gender equity. During slavery, white women saw themselves as the moral and intellectual superiors of enslaved women, possessed of a capacity for rational thought that they denied all slaves.  In the nineteenth century, white women abandoned black in the struggle for suffrage, to forge alliances instead between northern and southern white women.  In the twentieth century, white feminists overlooked entirely the different concerns of black feminists, and when it was time to write the history of those movements, black women were largely omitted.  On Nov. 8, 2016, black women again did the heavy lifting for women:  94 percent of them voted for Hillary Clinton.

Certainly many female Trump supporters would emphatically deny that they are sexist or racist. They voted on other issues, they insist. But in their vote for a candidate who openly expressed those ideas, they affirmed that ultimately sexism and racism did not matter as much as other issues.   A little sexism is okay.  A little racism is tolerable.

It’s hard for women not to take this personally.  Smart, hard working, ambitious women on this campus saw that a smart, hard working, ambitious woman with decades of experience was defeated by a man with no record of public service, whose crude language dehumanized and objectified women.

But there is a way to fix this, and we’re going to do it together.  We can change this trajectory of patriarchy, misogyny and racism.

You are important. Take a Gender and Women’s Studies course in your field, so that you will understand how gender permeates the work place you are preparing to enter. Be informed, so that armed, you can fight ignorance.

There is an awesome group of gender and sexuality scholars at Villanova who stand ready to help.  Stop by their offices to talk. Go the GWS website for their names and for other resources, both on campus and off. You are not alone. We believe in your intellect, strength and goodness, and we stand in solidarity with you.

So much for the idea of independent scholarship. These two professors see their department and their field as explicitly political, and themselves as organizers who “stand ready to help” mobilize women and others to “change this trajectory of patriarchy, misogyny, and racism” by voting for progressive candidates. “Hitherto, philosophers have sought to understand the world,” said Marx. “The point, however, is to change it.”

As presented by the co-directors of the Gender & Women’s Studies Department, their field is not about scholarship, but about propagandizing. I wonder: do people inside the academy understand what this looks like to people on the outside? One of the department’s faculty is Catholic theologian Katie Grimes (whose perennial specialty is condemning the Catholic Church as white supremacist), whose post-election analysis denies that the white working class exists. There is only one defensible way women can vote, according to the leadership of the Gender & Women’s Studies Department at Villanova University, and that leadership offers itself to educate young women at the university out of their prejudices.

Again: I’m not trying to poke fun at these people (though heaven knows I have done so before). This is serious. People like these radical professors are feeding the alt-right. If you politicize the academy, and tell people that the only reason they disagree with your radical views is because they are evil bigots (racist, sexist, anti-gay, etc.), and you in turn shout down and shame and no-platform ordinary conservative voices, you are going to be left with nobody but those who welcome your hatred, and thrive on it.

More broadly, what kind of university allows a department to become nothing but a training ground for ideological militancy? I would never pay for my kid to study in a program where this is what passed for teaching and scholarship, even if I agreed with the ideology the professors were trying to pound into my kid’s head. This is like being a fundamentalist and sending your kid to study paleontology at North Tupelo Bible College — except it costs between $48,000 and $62,000 per year to attend Villanova to get your Gender & Women’s Studies degree.

Seriously, if this is the narrative that people inside the liberal arts tell themselves, no wonder they don’t understand this country outside their bubbles, and no wonder they think that militant Trumpkins are mustering now to round them all up and put them in abandoned Wal-marts turned into detention camps, and be fed nothing but Frito pies. If the student body at North Tupelo Bible College is formed intellectually by a crackpot narrative, well, that’s a shame for them, but those kids are not likely to enter the American establishment. Graduates of universities like Villanova? That’s something different. A high school teacher e-mailed the other day to remark on how the promiscuous deployment of the word “privilege” among Millennials of his acquaintance functions as a magic word to stop all deliberative conversation. What students educated (“educated”) like this are learning how to do is not to think, but to emote with political skill. This has consequences.

(And if you’re wondering, I didn’t go searching for that; a Villanova alumnus and Trump voter sent it to me.)

Trump & Tolerance

Unfortunately I don’t have much time to write further at the moment. House full of sick kids, multiple doctor appointments, and so forth. I do want to make a couple more remarks in light of my logorrheic piece about Trump and civic empathy. 

One of the reasons that I did not vote for Trump, and said I wouldn’t vote for him, was this graf from a column Ross Douthat wrote on October 29 (N.B., I agree with the entire column, but I want to highlight this):

The second peril is major civil unrest. Some of Trump’s supporters imagine that his election would be a blow to left-wing activists, that his administration would swiftly reverse the post-Ferguson crime increase. This is a bit like imagining that a President George Wallace would have been good for late-1960s civil peace. In reality, Trump’s election would be a gift to bad cops and riot-ready radicals in equal measure, and his every intervention would pour gasoline on campuses and cities — not least because as soon as any protest movement had a face or leader, Trump would be on cable bellowing ad hominems at them.

I believe that we are going to see this. I hope I’m wrong, but everything we’ve seen from the Left in the past week tells me that they’re going to push themselves this far, and that Trump and his followers will not be able to resist egging them on.

I also believe that it has been difficult to discern (absent video, or reliable reporting) when there have been serious instances of racist, sexist, or other violence or insults in the past week, and when it has been exaggerated, or a hoax. The fact that people are claiming on social media that this has been happening is not confirmation. To be clear, I am sure that it has been happening in some places. When and where it has happened, it ought to be condemned, and those engaged in it punished. What bothers me is that to many on the Left, this only goes one way.

Speaking as a conservative and a Christian, I believe that people like me have a special obligation to speak out against Trump and his followers when they engage in racial abuse, and the like. A (white, female, conservative) Christian friend emailed this morning to say, quite rightly, that orthodox Christians are not alt-right racists, but we can easily be seen that way if we fail to stand up to the alt-right racists. Again: she’s right about that. I’m going to write something about this later, after I get back from the orthodontist with one of my kids.

What frustrates me so much about the left, especially the campus left, in this moment is that they are fulfilling, and doubling down on, my belief that practicing left-wing identity politics calls forth the same thing from the right. Alan Jacobs speaks to this from a slightly different angle in this post about the damage of postmodernism:

The academic left interrogated the discourses of “truth” and “reason,” revealed the aporias thereof, exposed the inner workings of the power-knowledge regime, all in the name of social justice. I remember vividly Andrew Ross’s insistence, twenty-five years ago, that it was actually perfectly appropriate and consistent for a would-be revolutionary like him to have a tenured position at Princeton: “I teach in the Ivy League in order to have direct access to the minds of the children of the ruling classes.” It turns out that the children of the ruling classes learned their lessons well, so when they inherited positions in their fathers’ law firms they had some extra, and very useful, weapons in their rhetorical armory.

In precisely the same way, when, somewhat later, academic leftists preached that race and gender were the determinative categories of social analysis, members of the future alt-right were slouching in the back rows of their classrooms, baseball caps pulled down over their eyes, making no external motions but in their dark little hearts twitching with fervent agreement.

Alan continues:

It seems that we’ve all now learned the lessons that the academic left taught, and how’s that working out for us? The alt-right/Trumpistas are Caliban to the academic left’s Prospero: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.”

People are correct to be vigilant against the kind of thing Trump has called up in many of our fellow Americans. What they had better be careful of is an overcorrection, such that anyone who questions the progressive Narrative is seen as one with the alt-right. A reader of this blog who is a friend living in Massachusetts sent me some material her kids’ high school principal sent out to parents and faculty. It is the same kind of thing we’ve been seeing from school authorities everywhere this week. The friend, who is Catholic, said that her children’s experience at the school over the years has featured frequent slurs against Catholics and conservatives — slurs that nobody in authority seems to notice because it confirms what they already accept as normal. I don’t know if my friend voted Trump or not, but what she reports is the kind of thing that sends people toward Trump without apology.

This is a very difficult needle to thread, standing between the SJW left and the alt-right, but I don’t know where else to stand. The middle ground in this country is fast shrinking. Cucked if you do, cucked if you don’t…