Rod Dreher's Blog, page 516

Trump & Civic Empathy

In his column today, Damon Linker laments “the decline of civic empathy — the capacity to listen respectfully and compassionately to the complaints, fears, anxieties, and anger of fellow citizens with whom we disagree about the highest goods in life.”

It’s the decline in civic empathy that feeds the longing for a new nationalism that will reunify the country — a longing that Trump has encouraged and promised to fulfill. But the decline in civic empathy also makes the fulfillment of that longing impossible. America is politically polarized, as we know all too well. That polarization has now insinuated itself into other facets of life, rending the country’s cultural, moral, and religious fabric. Regions, states, cities, towns, neighborhoods, churches, and sometimes even families are deeply divided, with members glaring at each other across yawning chasms of incomprehension and sometimes even mutual disgust.

An interesting point: the marriage therapist John Gottman says that in his line of work, he has found that there is no greater predictor of divorce than mutual contempt within a marriage.  Could that be true in a nation as well?

Linker says that this blog is a particularly representative example of it. Excerpts:

Over the past couple of years, Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative has served as a kind of compendium of and clearinghouse for stories of tradition-minded Christians being bullied by governments, corporations, universities, and other institutions into conforming with the post-Obergefell order of things. More often the stories express anxiety about persecution that has yet to arrive but is just around the corner. Many posts sketch a future in which conservative religious believers will be driven underground and forced to conceal their views in public, and a number of them end with Dreher ominously intoning, “Make no mistake, this is coming.”

If you were to read only his posts that discuss issues of religious persecution, you’d conclude that Dreher is a great defender of freedom of thought and belief, and a scourge of bullies everywhere. But quite a lot of posts on his blog have a different aim and tone. When he isn’t pointing to (or anticipating) the suffering of his fellow social conservatives, he’s often highlighting incidents of lunacy committed by cultural leftists on college campuses, and occasionally within the corporate world as well. Hardly a week goes by without Dreher injecting himself into a conflict at a university, harshly ridiculing tenured “social justice warriors” and precious student “snowflakes” who demand “safe spaces” where they can feel protected from any opinion that threatens, or even diverges faintly from, their own (apparently very fragile) secular, left-liberal, multicultural beliefs.

Well, this is true, especially in the last week, in which we have witnessed an emotional meltdown among the left without precedent. I usually lash out at SJWs and their academic enablers precisely because they are behaving like bullies. They certainly are here. More on this in a bit.  But first:

The contrast between these two categories of posts would be less glaring if Dreher were not also well known for promoting something he calls a “Benedict Option,” in which conservative religious believers seek to protect, preserve, and strengthen their communities in the face of present and future religious persecution. Is this not a “safe space”? The contradiction is so blatant that it’s difficult not to conclude that Dreher’s objection to campus leftists isn’t so much that they seek to insulate and protect themselves from outside influences as that they’re protecting, preserving, and strengthening beliefs that Dreher views with utter contempt.

Nonsense. My (general) objection to campus leftists is that they are driving religious and political conservatives into the closet, and even off campus , and doing so in the name of virtue.

The Benedict Option is not about suppressing dissent on college campuses, organizing mobs to bully professors and others, threatening people with losing their jobs for expressing the “wrong” opinion, destroying schools and other institutions in an attempt to compel them to accept my opinions, ruining the livelihoods of people who have a sincere religious disagreement with me … and on and on. This is what the Social Justice Warrior left is all about. All the Benedict Option seeks to do is to build strong, resilient communities of faith.

If there were no such thing as SJWs, we would still need the Benedict Option to live as Christians, because modernity is by its very nature desacralizing and fragmenting. The fact that we do have SJWs who are not content to leave us alone, who want to push us out of the public square, and who are already showing that they will not be content to leave us alone — well, we need it even more. Linker indicates skepticism that small-o orthodox Christians are going to have pay a price, in “persecution” or something short of that, for their (our) beliefs. He should spend some time talking to law professors and litigators about the kind of religious liberty cases they’re dealing with now, and the clear trends they see coming.

No, we’re not likely to see things like companies saying, “If you believe in Jesus, turn in your badge.” It’s far more likely to be the shunning of those who cannot in good conscience affirm whatever pro-LGBT statement or policy demanded of them by progressives. Gordon College had to fight hard to hold on to its accreditation, not because its academic quality declined, but because the small Evangelical Christian institution refused to abandon its religious principles on the LGBT matter. Christian colleges in California this year very nearly lost a fight for their lives when the state legislature tried to deny their students access to state student funding to punish the colleges for being insufficiently progressive on LGBT issues.

I don’t know that Linker sees it this way, but many on the left construe “religious liberty” as freedom to worship. No serious person engaged in the religious liberty fight from the pro-faith side believes that the government is going to force churches to worship in a certain way. Religious believers, Christian and otherwise, know that to live one’s faith is not simply something on does on holy days. It’s your entire life. True, in a pluralistic, secular democracy, nobody has carte blanche to do what they like and claim religious liberty. But religious liberty is guaranteed in the First Amendment, and was extremely important to the founding of this country. We should try to accommodate religious believers, even if what they believe and do is unpopular, and in fact especially if it is unpopular. Of course this is not an infinitely elastic principle (“Whatabout fundamentalist Mormon polygamists? Whataboutwhataboutwhatabout…?”), and there is simply no way to come up with a strict rule that is generally applicable. The point is we should deliberate from a standpoint of seeking the maximum accommodation possible. Instead, on campuses and elsewhere, we see again and again progressives using anti-discrimination ideology to bulldoze religious and social conservatives out of the way as bigots — at times doing so with the collusion of the media. And this didn’t start yesterday.

Even though I’m a political and religious conservative, I would not stand for treating atheists, gays, progressives, et al., the way they treat conservatives. For example, I’ve said here many times that I am glad the closet is no more. But it is not a moral advance to get rid of the closet for gays, only to frog-march religious conservatives into it.

Damon has been a friend for years, and a close reader of my Benedict Option writing. He is not a conservative, but he has been strongly critical of illiberalism on campus. Unless he’s changed his views since 2009, sees religious particularism as dangerous to civic peace. I couldn’t find his essay in praise of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, but Ross Douthat, on his old Atlantic blog, quoted a key graf from it. This is Linker:

Theologically speaking, this watered-down, anemic, insipid form of Judeo-Christianity is pretty repulsive. But politically speaking, it’s perfect: thoroughly anodyne, inoffensive, tolerant. And that makes it perfectly suited to serve as the civil religion of the highly differentiated twenty-first century United States.

As a committed Christian, I say to hell with MTD. It’s a greater threat to the integrity and survival of the Christian faith than atheism. That’s the primary thing the Benedict Option is meant to combat. As part of it, of course I defend the right of Christian communities to have their own private schools, run by their own standards. And I would do the same thing for Muslim schools, and for LGBT schools like Harvey Milk High in Manhattan. There is a big difference between wanting a “safe space” so one can protect oneself from having to hear a different perspective, and wanting an educational institution focused on a particular mission. I’d wager that my semi-homeschooled Christian kids know a lot more about the world and its history than most kids their age, not because they’re smarter, but because we’ve made a point of exposing them to a wide range of human thought, belief, and experience, as part of their Christian education. If we have created a “safe space” for them in classical Christian education, it is in part so they could be educated within a Christian context, but also so they could be educated more broadly and deeply than is standard today.

Anyway, all across the country, orthodox Christian colleges and schools are being told by lawyers that they had better build a high wall of enforced doctrine between themselves and the public square if they want to retain the ability to run their schools in fidelity to their religious convictions. The lawsuits are coming. What one spiteful and litigious couple in Minnesota did to a classical (secular) charter school to compel it to instruct its kindergartners in gender ideology is coming everywhere, and religious schools had better be ready. I have spoken personally to Christian headmasters who are being forced to draw harder, firmer lines than they want to do, but who are being told by lawyers that the survival of their institutions is at stake. So when my friend Damon Linker sniffs at the Benedict Option as merely seeking out a “safe space” in the same way these pathetic campus snowflakes do, I cannot take it seriously. He is apparently ignorant of what is actually going on in this country on that front.

But I digress. More Linker:

I don’t mean to single out Dreher for criticism. He is a friend. I admire and have learned from many of his cultural, moral, and religious insights over the years. And I share many of his concerns about the future of religious freedom in the United States. But I also think it needs to be said that many of the individuals and groups that Dreher incessantly attacks on his blog are seeking to defend people who, historically speaking, have faced centuries of actual persecution at the hands of the state and private citizens. In many cases, that persecution came to an end within living memory, and often just within the last few years, and sometimes it persists down to this day.

Does that not make these people deserving of at least a little civic empathy?

Right, but what counts as “civic empathy”? Where are the boundaries between “hey, I know you’re hurting, and maybe even afraid, and I feel bad for you,” and “what on earth is wrong with you?!” I did not vote for Donald Trump, and none of the worries I had about him taking office have been ameliorated in this past week. True, I’m not as upset about it as most people I know on the left, but I can see why they’re unhappy with the results of the election. I have no problem with that. 

What I strongly object to are the extremes to which some of the anti-Trump people have gone. Had Trump lost the election, would we have seen mobs taking to the streets to smash windows, light fires, and deface public buildings and monuments with profanity and graffiti calling on white people to die (as happened in New Orleans)? Of course not, and if we had, those thugs ought to have received zero public sympathy, and in fact arrested. There are lots of people saying that minorities are being harassed by Trump supporters in the wake of his victory. By now we’ve learned that we can’t credit the simple claim of such on social media as valid, absent other documentation, but insofar as it is true, it is deplorable. People who treat others this way should be punished, strongly.

But this does not just go one way. I’ve seen nothing yet more shocking than this video of the black Chicago mob beating a white man and stealing his car because they identified him as a Trump voter. And yet, yesterday, Slate chief political correspondent Jamelle Bouie, who is black, wrote that Trump voters are racists who deserve no empathy. All 60 million of them. I don’t blame Jamelle Bouie for what that black Chicago mob did, but hey, can we have a little civic empathy there? Can we?

What I have spent the last week doing is documenting left-wing freakouts, almost all of them on campus, not simply for the sake of mockery, but to reveal how far gone into decadence and delusion many campuses are under the leadership of their present administrators and faculty. This is not just “get a load of those loony leftists” trollery; there is something deeply and seriously wrong at these places, and it speaks to something profoundly disordered in our elites.

Bear with me here, because this is long, but it’s a perfect example of what I’ve been talking about. A reader at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania forwarded it to me yesterday, saying it was sent out by the Dean of Students:

Dear Faculty and Staff Colleagues,

Many of you have reached out to me in the past week to share your support, to ask what is being done for our students during this difficult time, and to inquire about how you can help. I thought I might provide you a brief update from my perspective on 1) what is the current student climate in the wake of the election; 2) What is being offered to students as a means for supporting them and assisting them in making meaning of things; and 3) how can you continue to help?

The cliff notes version:

-The climate is unsettled, students are struggling, but they are showing courage and are slowly turning toward the future

-Many events have taken place in the past week, and the next big one will take place on the College Green at 2pm on Friday – A community gathering to affirm our Muhlenberg values – Please join us!

-Please continue to offer students opportunities to reflect and make meaning, to be heard and to be challenged to look at things from multiple perspectives and if you witness or hear about acts of intolerance, please report them immediately

-We are in this together and our commitment to creating a culture of respect in which our students can learn and develop is paramount

The full story…

1) My personal (one person) read on the student climate at the moment, is that it is tenuous, brave, and unsettled…a lot like the broader country I would say. I have sat with students at both ends and all across the middle of the political spectrum who have felt marginalized, silenced, afraid, and troubled…some of them feeling those things potentially for the first time in their life and wrestling with the privilege that comes with that, some learning about the work and cost of allyship in a different way than they have thought of it before, and for some, a difficult reinforcement of reality and the many ways they have been made to feel lesser and silenced long before this election. All of that said, I am starting to witness a shift…in some cases from a place of grief and almost despair toward a place of hope and a deeper level of conviction and commitment to social justice than ever before. The most promising of all at the moment and one of the overriding descriptors I can name is “ENGAGED” – Students have been awakened in a real and deep way and for the most part they are reading, watching, sharing their voices and this is something we have a huge opportunity to harness and help guide as educators. Finally, at this point, we have not had any significant bias issues reported in our community since the election unlike some other institutions across the country and in our own backyard. However, I would be remiss if I did not share the sobering fact that there have been some second-hand accounts relayed to many of us of offensive and harmful things that have been said among students in hallways, classrooms and in residence halls. Students are struggling, but they are working at it. And for that I am thankful.

Though I know you all know it better than almost anyone, here is a brief bit of context for their emotional responses. These are some of the things I have been reminding myself of in the recent days. These recent events and actions present a complex set of emotions for me to deal with and I am far from 18-22 years old. For most, this is also their first election, they have known a president from the Democratic Party since they were 10-12 years old, and 9/11 happened when they were on average 3-5 years old. There have not been times of major activism in their lifetime and they are learning to navigate all of this complexity and unrest for the first time under less direct guidance from their parents (we hope). They are not fragile, but they do have much to learn about resilience. And we should not coddle, but we must listen, comfort, and help them reflect.

2)What have we done so far on campus and what will we be doing moving forward?

-An email was sent to all students by both the President and the Dean of Students and resources for support and dialog across campus were shared

-Last Wednesday, about 80 people gathered for a post-election conversation led by faculty from Political Science

-Many, many of you made room in your classes for reflection, support, and dialog last week – THANK YOU!

-Groups gathered in spaces where they felt most comfortable and welcome from Hillel to the Multicultural Center, to clubs and organizations to your offices to receive support

-Several faculty and staff met with a student who self-organized walking partners to meet a potential need and from that conversation she is moving forward with her plan while we work with her and others to look at institutional measures to assist

-We have scheduled our annual Campus Safety walk with student reps and Plant Ops to walk around on campus to determine places that need more lighting, additional blue lights, etc. to further enhance safety

-SGA invited students and student groups to their meeting to dialog post-election

-MTA and the Acafellas, with the help of a couple faculty members, hosted “Songs for Solidarity” where over 75 people came out to support one another and sing songs of hope.

-The Hate and Bias resource team (which you will hear much more about in the coming weeks) has been reconstituted, is meeting regularly and supports people in our community who experience acts of harassment and discrimination

And much more…

What is next?

-This week, I am inviting about 12-15 student thought leaders from all different backgrounds and experiences to come together to break bread and talk about how they want to enact our campus values of diversity, human dignity and respect and how they want to empower their peers broadly to bring those to life in our community. They have asked for this type of conversation, and my hope is that it will lead to future partnerships and collaborations.

-Many faculty and staff continue to offer 1-1 and small group conversations across campus

-On Friday, we ask that you join the Campus Committee on College Life in solidarity – please see the description below:

Community Gathering:

Friday, November 18, 2:00 pm, Parents Plaza

The past few weeks have highlighted both the worst and the best of our country’s humanity and no matter your beliefs or political views, it has been a time of high tension, emotional exhaustion, and deep uncertainty for many. This Friday, the College Committee on Campus Life invites you to please come, join your peers, colleagues and community members in an important non-partisan event. We will observe a few moments of silence on the College Green where collectively we might reflect on our humanity as a community, show our visual support for Muhlenberg values of human dignity, respect, and civility and recognize the power of our collective solidarity. After those reflective moments, there will be a few minutes of song. Then there will be a time for you to have refreshments with one another, add your name to a large Muhlenberg banner that demonstrates our community’s commitment to values of diversity, inclusion, and mutual respect and for you to share a personal commitment to upholding these values. Please don’t miss this important moment in our community to show your support! More info: Jeffrey Peterson, Chair of CCCL: jpeterson@muhlenberg.edu

And there will be much more offered in the weeks and months to come, I am sure!

What can you do?

It is truly difficult to know exactly how to be helpful in times like this, but I can share some of the things students have shared with me:

1) They crave opportunities to reflect and make meaning across generations and with adults who have a bit longer history on this crazy world we live in – so join them, be present, share your perspectives, and listen to theirs.

2) Balance the challenge and support you provide for their ideas and concerns…do what you always do – push them to think critically, to consider another angle, to defend their arguments, but require them to to do so with humility and civility. Below is the link to some resources Kathy Harring provided last week that some faculty found very helpful.

http://www.crlt.umich.edu/

3) If you hear about or witness an act of bias in our community, report it. http://www.muhlenberg.edu/hatebiaspolicy/policy.html For the overall health of our community, we need to maintain a strong understanding of any acts of intolerance so that we can support victims, provide resources, respond appropriately, and understand the most pressing issues of harassment and discrimination on our campus that need to be addressed. To report these incidents, please utilize the link below and/or call my office or if you prefer. If a student victim(s) is not comfortable with reporting something that happened to them, please connect the individual to a confidential resource such as the Counseling Center or Rev. Callista Isabel or Rabbi Melissa Simon.

Finally, I want to say thank you for being such a supportive force for our students. For some of you, it is in times like these on predominantly white campuses that faculty and staff of marginalized backgrounds are even further shouldered with the burden of being a primary support resource for underrepresented students. I want to recognize that. Know that you are not alone in that burden and that my office, the Office of Multicultural Life, Religious Life and others are here to support you and serve as a resource alongside you in your work. Please don’t hesitate to call on us!

If there has been one over-riding message I have left all of the student groups with whom I have had the privilege of sitting with in the past week, it is this…Muhlenberg College affirmed the value of your human dignity on this campus long before this election season because your inherent value is not about politics. As such, this College will continue to stand behind you and all of your many identities moving forward. That did not change last Tuesday and it is an unwavering commitment that we will continue to make good on and improve upon in the days to come.

Please reach out if you have any questions.

Take care,

Allison Gulati

This is an epistle from deep, deep inside the campus bubble. Imagine being a Trump voter on this campus. The Dean of Students, presumably speaking for the administration, has identified you as a traumatizer of minority students. You would probably want to keep your head down and your mouth shut. The assumption of this letter is that the Trump election was a catastrophe that stands to set off pogroms against “underrepresented students” (the euphemisms progressives come up with!), and that compels white students to face their “privilege” and assume the responsibility of “allyship”. For what? It was a democratic presidential election! Sure, people on campus are upset, and there’s nothing wrong with convening public groups to talk about it. But this kind of progressivist Romper Room infantilizing of college students is absurd and destructive. If the faculty, staff, and student body of Muhlenberg College cannot imagine why half the voters in this country — including 29 percent of Latino voters eight percent of black voters — chose Trump, other than bigotry, then it is they who have the problem, not the country.

Empathy is fine. Empathy is good. When your child falls down and scrapes his knee, you naturally want to comfort him. But if you overplay it, and exacerbate his sense of trauma — “Omigosh, are you hurt? Are you bleeding? Omigosh, this is horrible! Oh, sweetie!” — you actually make it worse. That’s what’s going on here, seems to me, and at other colleges. They are taking a democratic presidential election and treating it like a Reichstag fire. Many campuses are already places where non-progressives feel marginalized and silenced. And this is not what college campuses are supposed to be. 

Worse — and this is why my well of civic empathy runs dry for these people — is that they politicize and weaponize empathy for identified victim classes as a way of gaining power over opponents. This has been going on for quite some time, and has been very effective. I’ve mentioned in this space before how shocked I was back in 1994 to have been having lunch at a DC restaurant with a friend and two of her female acquaintances, all three of them involved in Democratic politics. One of them brought up abortion, and said, hey, you’re a Catholic, what do you think about abortion? I told them I’m pro-life, but didn’t want to discuss it at lunch. That was just about the last word I got in. All three women dogpiled me rhetorically, telling me that I had no right to an opinion on it because I was a man, a religious bigot, et cetera. This is someone all three had just spent a pleasant morning with, walking around DC.

After a few minutes, one of the women at the table folded her arms and looked frightened. Someone asked her what was wrong. She said, “I don’t feel safe with him at the table.”

I stood up, threw down money to pay my bill, and walked out of the restaurant. And that was the end of me and them. I could not believe how pathetic that conversation was, and how childish and manipulative was that young woman who feigned fright as a way to marginalize me. Little did I know that she was ahead of her time. And you know, she probably wasn’t feigning anything. I don’t know where she went to college, but I would not be surprised if she graduated from one of the liberal arts schools that taught her to be afraid of conservatives.

Mind you, that’s a personal anecdote, but when I read things like the Dean of Students letter at Muhlenberg detailing the progressive nannyish stance the school is taking towards the Trump election, and the way it’s surely going to drive dissenters on campus further into the closet, and when I reflect on how this sort of thing has been happening on many campuses across America this week — well, it infuriates me. I say that as someone who did not vote for Trump, and who did not vote for Trump in part because I find him a spiteful man. But I’ve gotta say, the reaction this past week from many of his progressive opponents has brought into sharp relief the reason why so many people who don’t really like Trump voted for him anyway.

For example, you can say many bad things about Donald Trump that are true, but that he’s “anti-gay”? Ridiculous. But that hasn’t stopped progressives from freaking themselves out about how he’s surely an anti-gay bigot. I think the victimhood pathology of the left actually enjoys the idea that Donald Trump is going to hurt them, even if the evidence is lacking. They love the drama. In this, they are no different than the right-wing nuts who responded to Obama’s election by stockpiling guns, or the religious extremists who work themselves into a tizzy about the End Times, in response to geopolitical events. I have been that person before, in response to a very real event in which freaking out was a rational response — 9/11, which I experienced as a New York City resident — and I very much regret the way I let my (understandable) emotions overtake my better judgment in the wake of it.

So: does the “civic empathy” Damon Linker finds so lacking in my response to Trump require me to join the campus pity party of hysterics and their enablers, or to look with anything but contempt upon the violent bigots causing violence and mayhem in some cities to protest the results of a democratic election? Sorry, not going to happen, and it’s not going to happen mostly because throwing a temper tantrum around victimhood, and using it to silence dissent and to increase power within institutions, has been the left’s modus operandi for some time. We’ve seen it on campuses, we’ve seen it in the media and in workplaces, and I have no sympathy for it.

Linker:

Now take the animosity between Dreher and his opponents and imagine it playing itself out hundreds and thousands of times across the country every day, in personal and online interactions. That’s America today, with sub-political attachments and antagonisms increasingly overriding the national solidarity that makes civic empathy possible. Without a shared sense that we hold a certain history or body of ideals in common, it becomes impossible to take the cares and concerns, anxieties and fears of our fellow citizens seriously. In such circumstances, the “nation” amounts to nothing more than the sum total of tribes jostling for position, competing for power, in an endless series of zero-sum games. It’s politics conducted as a civil war by other means.

Well, yeah, but that’s Alasdair MacIntyre’s point, as Linker surely knows. Not only do we have less and less to bind us — something that progressivism, with its identity-politics obsession, bears the greatest responsibility for — but we have become a civic culture ruled by emotivism: the idea that if we feel it, it must be true. This is not something that is limited to those on the political and cultural left. I’ve had almost as many pointless exchanges with people on the Right, years before Trump was ever a thing, about this or that right-wing shibboleth. Their minds were just as closed to the possibility that they might be wrong as any campus faculty member — yet they were completely convinced that they had perfectly open minds. This is not a left-wing or right-wing problem; this is an American problem. 

It’s the kind of problem that education is supposed to address and improve. Instead, in the past week, we have seen many campuses bunkering down into fortresses of ideological purity and hive-mindery. It is a scandal, it is embarrassing, and it is a threat to the possibility of civic life. It is good and necessary to have empathy for your fellow citizens who are having a hard time living with the results of the election. But empathy has limits. Had Hillary Clinton won, today many, many religious conservatives would be deep into despair over what that result meant for the safety and integrity of our institutions, given Mrs. Clinton’s views on the matter. Do you think Muhlenberg College, or any other college in America, would have gone into Defcon 5? No, and neither should they have done. I think, though, that there would have been a complete lack of “civic empathy” on the left for what us bigotty-bigotty-bigots on the Christian Right would have been facing? Please.

Loving Like A Liberal, Hating Half The Country

Slate’s Jamelle Bouie says that 60 million Americans are no damn good. Seriously, he says this:

Hate and racism have always been the province of “good people.” To treat Trump voters as presumptively innocent—even as they hand power to a demagogic movement of ignorance and racism—is to clear them of moral responsibility for whatever happens next, even if it’s violence against communities of color. Even if, despite the patina of law, it is essentially criminal. It is to absolve Trump’s supporters of any blame or any fault. Yes, they put a white nationalist in power. But the consequences? Well, it’s not what they wanted.

“One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man,” wrote James Baldwin in his seminal work, The Fire Next Time. “But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” We can hope Trump was bluffing about his promises. If not, then the next four years will be hard for the Americans he plans to target. What we cannot do is pretend this wasn’t a choice, that no one was responsible.

Ross Douthat wants to know how Bouie thinks pro-lifers should apply that moral reasoning to fellow citizens.

Now, what was Jon Haidt saying about the ongoing fragmentation of the country?

 

Ummmmm…. pic.twitter.com/7q0eXIhPbF

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) November 15, 2016

When The Bough Breaks

Someone on Twitter said that Election Day wasn’t the End, but the End of the Beginning. I thought of that as I read this Vox interview by Sean Illing with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, about the troubled times upon our nation. Excerpts:

Sean Illing

What you’re describing sounds like an expansion of the culture war. Is it your view that culture wars have subsumed all of our politics and that policies are just props in this broader battle?

Jonathan Haidt

Yes, that’s right. There are existential questions at stake, and this election has felt really apocalyptic for both sides. The right thinks the country is crashing into a void and that Trump, while crazy, is our only hope. The left thinks Trump will bring about a fascist coup, a war with China, or a betrayal of our alliances.

So there is an apocalyptic feeling here. Sacred values are at stake. There really can be no compromise between these two visions.

More:

Sean Illing

There are some who think we’re not quite as polarized as it seems. The idea is that what often appear to be deep divisions are really just products of people living in echo chambers, and that this amplifies differences and obscures commonalities. I’m not terribly persuaded by this, but perhaps it’s worth considering.

Jonathan Haidt

There’s certainly a debate among political scientists about this, but I’m a social psychologist, so I’m not looking at people’s views about policy; I’m looking at their views about each other. And if you look at any measures of what people think about people on the other side, those have become vastly more hostile. That’s what concerns me.

In the 1960s, surveys asked people how they’d feel if their child married a Republican or an African American or a Jew, and back then some people really didn’t want their kids to marry someone of a different ethnicity, but a different political party wasn’t as big a deal. Now the opposite is true.

So I’m quite confident that there is affective polarization or emotional polarization in recent years.

And, Haidt:

We have to recognize that we’re in a crisis, and that the left-right divide is probably unbridgeable. And if it is, we’ll have to give up on doing big things in Washington, and do as little as we possibly can at the national level. We’re going to have to return as much as we can to states and localities, and hope that innovative solutions spring from technology or private industry.

Polarization is here to stay for many decades, and it’s probably going to get worse, and so the question is: How do we adapt our democracy for life under intense polarization?

Read the whole thing.

This is one reason I keep saying that the Benedict Option is key to our future, at least the future of us conservative Christians. We have entered a period of increased fragmentation and dissolution, not only in our society, but in the church. Better not to have illusions about where we are, and where we stand to go.

 

Dead Swans And The ‘Grand Decadence’

Here, sent by a reader and taken from the Washington Post website, is a snapshot of the mind of official Washington:

As you know, I did not vote for Trump, but this past week, when confronted by the collective gran mal seizure of the left, Oscar Wilde’s cruel line about Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop came several times to mind: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” I mean, honestly, look at what the University of Michigan Law School — the Law School! — had planned to comfort its traumatized students:

And yet, now that we are almost a week into the Trumpening, the derisive laughter, however much deserved, is starting to become hollow. I don’t know that Stephen K. Bannon is an anti-Semite, but it is clear that he is not a good man, and having a man of his character and temperament sitting at the right hand of the President of the United States is not a sign of the Republic’s vigor. One senses that we will soon be longing for the golden years of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson.

The other night, the Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon gave a beautiful lecture at Notre Dame about the poet Wallace Stevens and the Catholic imagination. (You can watch it here.) Last night at bedtime, thinking about what Prof. Glendon had to say, I picked up my copy of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, and read around. I happened upon his poem “Academic Discourse At Havana”. It is a difficult poem (Stevens is a difficult poet), and I can’t pretend to understand the whole thing. But certain lines resonated with me in this present political and cultural moment. This second stanza:

 

Life is an old casino in a park.

The bills of the swans are flat upon the ground.

A most desolate wind has chilled Rouge-Fatima

And a grand decadence settles down like cold.

Stevens once said that Fatima was the most beautiful woman in the world, and that he used the word “rouge” here to “touch her up.” The image suggests that even our artificial efforts to fill faded beauty with life cannot withstand the desolating chill. The overall image — of a dead casino with dead swans — is one of an exhausted life. A casino in a park is a city in a wood, once a place where life was concentrated, and fate determined the joy of the people within it. But now all that has passed. Stevens speaks of leaves filling the fountains at the casino, an image that brought to mind a Santayana metaphor cited by Mary Ann Glendon in her lecture: “a harvest of leaves.” Santayana used it to describe the false sense of intellectual fertility in mid-19th century New England. Here’s the Santayana quote, as presented by Glendon:

About the middle of the nineteenth century, in the quiet sunshine of provincial prosperity, New England had an Indian summer of the mind; and an agreeable reflective literature showed how brilliant that russet and yellow season could be.  There were poets, historians, orators, preachers…they were universal humanists.  But it was all a harvest of leaves; these worthies had an expurgated and barren conception of life; theirs was the purity of sweet old age.

Now, “Academic Discourse At Havana” is not really a poem about decadence, but rather one about the trickiness of imposing meaning on matter, and the difficulty of perceiving reality. Remember that Stevens was one of the great Modernists, and at this stage of his life, was an atheist. In the poem’s next stanza, Stevens knocks the illusions of people who thought the now-dead swans and all they represented would live forever:

                        The toil

Of thought evoked a peace eccentric to

The eye and tinkling to the ear. Gruff drums

Could beat, yet not alarm the populace.

The indolent progressions of the swans

Made earth come right; a peanut parody

For peanut people.

What he’s saying here is that people chose to believe the illusions of order around them, and worked hard (“The toil/Of thought”) to believe that what they had — the casino, the park, the swans — would last forever. The peace is “eccentric to/The eye” because it contradicts what the eye sees. So, when the “gruff drums” of approaching apocalypse are heard in the distance, no one gets alarmed. They just looked upon the swans and thought about how everything was really as it should be. Stevens’s scornful line (“a peanut parody/For peanut people”) suggests that their unserious gaze treats the world as a circus, and reduces themselves to circusgoers.

But the next stanza tears into idealists. If the Swan People are compromised by the illusion that there was a Golden Age that would last forever, then those who believe that perfection is ever achievable are also deluded. “This urgent, competent, serener myth/Passed like a circus,” he writes, indicating that a more philosophical and reflective pursuit of perfection is no less circus-like.

And then Stevens takes down the self-styled realists who “ordained/Imagination as the fateful sin”. The realist who believes that art, religion, and poetry are nothing but the means by which we feed false gods is also subject to his own illusions. He thinks he is telling himself the hard truth about the meaninglessness of the world, but in the end, when faced with the brute fact that all things decay and die, we find that we need these things because they comfort us with a sense of transcendence. This too, Stevens suggests, is a construal. The final line — “Life is an old casino in a wood” — tells us that none of us can live without analogy and metaphor to impose meaning on our experiences.

The fourth and final stanza reveals Stevens’s view: that the poet mediates between us and the phenomenal world. He does not tell us what to believe; rather, he opens up new ways of seeing the world after the old illusions have lost their power to give sight. This is a poem about wonder in the face of dazzling reality, and the redemptive power of those who can open our weary eyes to it. In that sense, “Academic Discourse In Havana,” though written by an atheist, is a deeply religious poem. Stevens concludes by saying that the words of a poet might lie to us, leading us to believe that an apocalypse is upon us when in fact that is not the case. Maybe an old, boarded-up casino in Havana is not a metaphor of our own decadence, but is in truth nothing more than a failed business. Or, says Stevens, a poet’s words might reveal to us that an apocalypse is, in fact, upon us, and may in that case be a kind of protest against our own passing:

And the old casino likewise may define

An infinite incantation of our selves

In the grand decadence of the perished swans.

In other words, by naming the old casino as a symbol of the great forces that threaten to annihilate us, we may find that we have power over them. In this case, art and poetry (and, I would say, religion) give us the power to endure the unendurable. There’s a line in the new movie Doctor Strange in which one of the mystic warriors instructing Stephen Strange in sorcery tells him the function of “relics” in this world. When the power of certain magic is too great for them to bear, they direct it into an object to hold. This is what Wallace Stevens says the poet does with words and metaphor.

Reading this poem brought to my mind the apophatic prayer method of the Orthodox mystics, who instruct those learning the Jesus Prayer to push all images out of their minds as they pray, the better to still the mind and prepare it to encounter the living God without analogy. It also brought to mind — as Mary Ann Glendon says in her lecture — the words of Joseph Ratzinger, who said that art and the saints (that is, beauty and goodness) are better arguments for the truth of Christianity than syllogisms. When rational discourse is exhausted, instances of beauty and goodness can provide us windows allowing us to see into the Truth of things, and to carry on. Not all that is true and real can be captured in mere words and syllogisms.

So. You are thinking: what on earth does all this have to do with Trump? Let me explain.

The accession of men like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon to the heights of political power are an unmistakable sign of decadence. It’s not that Trump is the first bad man to hold that office. For example, we did not know how decadent John F. Kennedy truly was, but had we known, he never would have been elected. (The Camelot mythology obscures, not enlightens.) The point about Trump is that we all know who he is and what he is, and yet we still chose him. Nobody can be shocked that he has elevated Steve Bannon in his White House: that’s who Trump is. He told us this about himself. He hid nothing.

And yet, when I read the collective gasp of the Establishment, in Washington and elsewhere, I realize that they have little idea of their own decadence, and how it led to Trump. Do you people really not see your own fault here? Do you not grasp how you collaborated in this ruin? The Washington consensus led us into a disastrous war for the second time in only half a century. The Washington consensus, in collaboration with Wall Street, opened the gates to a financial catastrophe that devastated countless ordinary Americans. The inability or unwillingness of Washington to police effectively our nation’s borders contributed to the insecurity of ordinary people, and the Washington consensus on free trade left millions and millions of workers unemployed or underemployed, even as it enriched the bank accounts of wealthier Americans.

Meanwhile, the Entertainment-Industrial Complex has been pumping out moral sludge for decades. The Academy has failed to transmit wisdom and culture, and respect for our civilization’s ideals, and has driven out dissent (kudos to conservative students at the University of Michigan for denouncing the university’s president for his post-election asininity; “Mr. Trump won because people like me are sick and tired of people and institutions telling us the ‘correct’ way to think and view the world”).

And the churches? Please. It’s Moralistic Therapeutic Deism all the way down. We are now at a point in which marriage and the family are dissolving, and our elites call that virtue. There is nothing that Donald Trump or any president can do to stop it.

Philip Rieff wrote, in the mid-Sixties:

The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves. Many spokesmen for our established normative institutions are aware of their failure and yet remain powerless to generate in themselves the necessary unwitting part of their culture that merits the name of faith. “Is not the very fact that so wretchedly little binding address is heard in the church,” asked Karl Barth, rhetorically, in 1939, “accountable for a goodly share of her misery—is it not perhaps the misery?” The misery of this culture is acutely stated by the special misery of its normative institutions. Our more general misery is that, having broken with those institutionalized credibilities from which its moral energy derived, new credibilities are not yet operationally effective and, perhaps, cannot become so in a culture constantly probing its own unwitting part.

Name one established normative institution in American culture that conveys ideals that remain inwardly compelling. Can’t do it, can you? Hillary Clinton was the symbol of the decadent old order, the one that fewer and fewer people believe in. Can you imagine how far things have had to decay for the very embodiment of the American political establishment to lose a presidential election to Donald J. Trump? True, Trump represents a bad direction for America, an order that may be new, but is rotten through and through (some they think of him as “a kind of solution”). But then again, he is not so different from Hillary Clinton. They were both running to be the floor boss at an old casino.

This is a time and this is a place in which we do not need politicians and pundits, but rather poets, priests, and prophets. We need those who can read the signs of the times, and reveal to us the phoenixes rising from the corpses of swans and the source of life and renewal beyond the leaf-choked fountains.

 

We’ve Hit Peak Park Slope

Don’t worry, lefties; there will always be a Park Slope, Brooklyn. From the current issue of The New Yorker:

On a recent Saturday morning, about two dozen small children and their parents gathered in the Park Slope branch of the Brooklyn Public Library for a new reading series. There were pregnant women with tattoos, breast-feeding moms, and a little girl in pink ballerina gear climbing on the laps of her two dads. Many of the kids, who ranged in age from newborn to five years old, wore tiny T-shirts showcasing their parents’ favorite bands (Nirvana, David Bowie) or political views (one read, “The Future Is Female”).

The event was hosted by Michelle Tea, a writer from Los Angeles, who started attending library story hours after becoming a mom. “Story time rises or falls on the charisma of the storyteller,” she said. “Some seemed to have a personality disorder or didn’t even like children.” She’d brought her partner, Dashiell Lippman, and their two-year-old son, Atticus, who had a haircut that resembled David Beckham’s. “He is pretty butch—we call him Fratticus,” Tea said. “I’m always pushing a tutu on him, but he’s, like, ‘No.’ ”

Tea’s solution, called Drag Queen Story Hour, introduces elements of gender bending and camp. “I have long thought that drag queens need to be the performers at children’s parties, rather than magicians or clowns,” she said. “Drag has become more mainstream. Kids might have seen one on a billboard or on TV.”

The kids didn’t seem all that thrilled about the gender-bending weirdo. But hope springs eternal:

“Restlessness happens when you get this many young people, but I thought it held their attention,” Megan Nicolay said. She had brought her daughter, Esmé, and her son, Niko, who gazed at Lil Miss Hot Mess with wonder but seemed afraid to approach her. “My son is psyched that he and Lil Miss Hot Mess had the same color shoes.”

Her daughter Esmé and her son Niko. Don’t ever change, Park Slope.

Vatican Bombshell

Four cardinals, including the American Raymond Leo Burke, have put Pope Francis on the spot. Back in September, they formally submitted a request to the Pope to clarify certain points of doctrine in light of Amoris Laetitia, his encyclical letter that some are interpreting as opening the door for communion for the divorced. Because the Pope declined to respond, they say, they are making their letter public. Says Sandro Magister:

The letter and the five questions presented in their entirety further below have no need of much explanation. It is enough to read them. What is new is that the four cardinals who had them delivered to Francis last September 19, without receiving a reply, have decided to make them public with the encouragement of this very silence on the part of the pope, in order to “continue the reflection and the discussion” with “the whole people of God.”

They explain this in the foreword to the publication of the complete text. And one thinks right away of Matthew 18:16-17: “If your brother will not listen to you, take with you two or three witnesses. If then he will not listen even to them, tell it to the assembly.”

The “witness” in this case was Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Because he too, in addition to the Pope, had been a recipient of the letter and the questions.

The five questions are in fact formulated as in the classic submissions to the congregation for the doctrine of the faith. Formulated, that is, in such a way that they can be responded to with a simple yes or no.

As a rule, the responses given by the Congregation explicitly mention the approval of the Pope. And in the routine audiences that Francis gave to the cardinal prefect after the delivery of the letter and the questions, it is a sure bet that the two talked about them.

But in point of fact the appeal from the four cardinals received no reply, neither from Cardinal Müller nor from the Pope, evidently at the behest of the latter.

You can read the cardinals’ letter and questions at the Magister link, or at the traditionalist website Rorate Caeli, which adds:

A Pope has never been publicly questioned for clarification on a most sensitive matter (his own teaching office) of a more sensitive content (his own major document) by his own Cardinals at any moment since the Counter-Reformation. It is astounding: certainly unheard-of in modern times.

Read the document. The questions of interpretation that the cardinals put to the Pope are deep and substantive, and cannot be glossed over with Bergoglian happy-clappy.

This is not mere inside Catholic baseball. This is an astonishing moment, even a crisis moment. Watch.

Stranded In The Academic Archipelago

Jon Askonas, a reader studying at Oxford for his PhD, writes:

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article with a quick and dirty analysis of the university bubble as shown by county-by-county voter data comparing the counties where a state’s flagship public university is located and the overall state average. Obviously this is “noisy data”, but it is still absolutely astounding.

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Yes-You-re-Right-Colleges/238400

Two graphs below. First one shows states and flagship universities. But then I used the data to make one that displays the difference. In almost half of all the states, there was a TWENTY POINT difference between how much a state supported Hillary and how much the flagship university county did. No wonder the response from the ivory tower to a Trump victory has been so out of touch with the mood in the rest of America.

I have not used the first graf, because it belongs to the Chronicle (you can see it by following the link). But the second one, created by Jon, is here, and it is astonishing:

In other news from the self-exiles in the Academic Archipelago:

UVA professors petition university president to stop quoting UVA founder Thomas Jefferson. No, really, this is happening:

University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan is being asked to refrain from quoting Thomas Jefferson because of his racist beliefs, according to The Cavalier Daily.

A letter, signed by 469 faculty members and students, was sent to Sullivan on Nov. 11 protesting the use of a Jefferson quotation in her email calling for unity after the presidential election, the student newspaper reported.

“We would like for our administration to understand that although some members of this community may have come to this university because of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy, others of us came here in spite of it,” the letter read. “For many of us, the inclusion of Jefferson quotations in these e-mails undermines the message of unity, equality and civility that you are attempting to convey.”

This kind of thing needs to be beaten back, forcefully and unapologetically. The campus loony left is trying to sever the university from its deepest roots, all in the name of shame left-wing diversity.

Meanwhile, in Dallas, Southern Methodist University has made a fool of itself by traducing common decency in the name of, yes, sensitivity and diversity. From the Dallas Morning News:

The daughter of one of the Dallas police officers killed during the July 7 ambush was told she was no longer invited to hit an honorary serve at a volleyball game at Southern Methodist University “in light of recent events and diversity within the SMU community.”

The university has since apologized and re-extended the invitation, but it did not explain why the invite was spiked in the first place.

Heidi Smith shared the email she received from a university official Thursday night on Facebook. Her husband, 55-year-old Sgt. Michael Smith, was one of five officers killed by a lone gunman during an attack after a July protest. Nine other officers and two civilians were injured in the attack.

“Victoria was scheduled to serve an honorary serve at the SMU volleyball game this Saturday to honor her Dad,” Heidi Smith wrote in the post. “This is the email they sent me today to back out … I had to read it to Victoria after dinner tonight.”

The email said there would no longer be an honorary first serve at Saturday’s game against South Florida due to a communication breakdown and concerns about optics.

“The volleyball program was not correctly informed that this would be taking place at the game,” the email Smith shared reads. It continues saying that “the demonstration could be deemed insensitive.”

Can you believe that? Smith’s father was murdered by a racist black man who told police that he “wanted to kill white people” — and SMU officials were so worried that honoring this dead officer would be insensitive to black people on campus that they disinvited this fatherless child?

Contemptible. Utterly contemptible. This is exactly the kind of liberal provocation that is making America worse, and creating division where none need exist.

On a minor scale, but still telling, this e-mail went out to the faculty and staff of Rhodes College in Memphis from the administration:

Dear Rhodes Community,

After this week’s elections, we learned of incidents of verbal harassment between students on campus. We wanted to let you know that we have dealt with these issues quickly and appropriately.

Throughout this past week, you, as administrators, faculty, and staff (along with so many of our student leaders), have stood side by side, every day and night, to ensure that everyone at the college feels safe, valued, and wanted. We will accept nothing less, and we are extremely grateful for the hard work you are doing at Rhodes.

The safety and well-being of our students is our highest priority and we will continue do everything within our power to ensure that all of our students have a secure place to live and learn.

If you have questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us or other members of the Academic Affairs and Student Affairs teams.

Says the person who forwarded it to me:

Note that nowhere is “verbal harassment” or “dealt with these issues…appropriately” defined. And nowhere in our rulebook either. The administrators and students have a lot of leeway in defining bad behavior, and the punishment is…? I’m trying to find out from colleagues and students with no luck.

The “students must feel safe” business bothers me because our campus is in a high crime city where theft, robbery, assault, carjacking, and shootings, even of colleagues and students are common. Nary a word about that kind of safety though. Violence off campus just evens out millennia of white supremacy I guess.

Liberal Self-Recrimination

See Google’s homepage today? It informs us that Google is “supporting the transgender community.” Click on the link, and it takes you to a page dedicated to “celebrating transgender changemakers.” Because this is Transgender Awareness Week. As if every single day wasn’t Transgender Awareness Day among the cultural elites.

To this point, a Catholic reader writes:

I’m not a big Michael Sean Winters fan, but he had a good paragraph on Friday:

I am friendly with two families that have a transgender child. I know how difficult and challenging this situation is, and how little we know about the phenomenon. I am deeply sympathetic to how an issue like which bathroom you can use will affect a child going through the already difficult teen years. But, when the attorney general had a big press conference to announce a lawsuit against North Carolina on the issue, I remembered something my mother used to say when I would not let a given issue go: “You don’t have to make a federal case out of it.” From the time spent this year discussing transgender rights, you would think it was one of the most pressing national issues. Was any such attention lavished on less trendy causes like the dearth of health care in poor rural areas? Same goes for lighting up the White House after the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. Did Obama ever think of lighting up the White House for something important to white, rural Americans?

Winters also quotes someone named Krystal Ball who writes for HuffPo. Ball said:

They said they were facing an economic apocalypse, we offered “retraining” and complained about their white privilege. Is it any wonder we lost? One after another, the dispatches came back from the provinces. The coal mines are gone, the steel mills are closed, the drugs are rampant, the towns are decimated and everywhere you look depression, despair, fear. In the face of Trump’s willingness to boldly proclaim without facts or evidence that he would bring the good times back, we offered a tepid gallows logic. Well, those jobs are actually gone for good, we knowingly told them. And we offered a fantastical non-solution. We will retrain you for good jobs! Never mind that these “good jobs” didn’t exist in East Kentucky or Cleveland. And as a final insult, we lectured a struggling people watching their kids die of drug overdoses about their white privilege.

Back to Winters, who is very much on the Catholic left:

It is true that economics drives much of what ails rural America, which rose up en masse to defeat Clinton. But, the problem is deeper than that and it is vital that the left grasps this: Voters doubted Trump had the answers to the economic problems they face, but they voted for change anyway. They were tired of being talked down to and ignored. Think of the horrific phrase “the right side of history” that has been coming from the left throughout debates of issues like same-sex marriage. It is fine to tell someone you disagree with them on the issue and why you think they are wrong. But telling them they are on “the wrong side of history” tells them you think they are a bumpkin with no future. To be clear, this election was not fought on social issues per se, but the condescension with which the left framed those issues angered many people.

…

Democrats talk a lot about inclusion and it is indeed a value for us Catholics, one that Pope Francis speaks of with great frequency and fervor. But, poor rural whites never made it on the list of people who needed to be included.

Read the whole thing.

A left-of-center reader sent me approvingly this “epic rant” from a UK writer named Colum Paget. Here’s an excerpt, sanitized for your protection™, but with the original spelling and grammar left intact:

As a white man from a working-class background, I find it difficult to applaud the ‘progress’ of the upper classes suddenly realizing what a smart move it is to pack out power positions in society with their daughters as well as their sons. Frankly one is left wondering why they didn’t click to this wheeze sooner. Why did you make your daughter fight for the position? Was it to ‘build character’ or something? But with the rise of the ‘femocracy’ we can all applaud as Donald Trump drops Ivanka into a plum position along with Eric and Donald Junior. In the meantime the working class woman finds that, even if she gets a degree, doors are not open to her in the way they are for women born into the connected classes. The working class man finds that his employment is going overseas. Many working-class people of color find that nothing changes for them, despite all the concern about whether actors of color win Oscars or whether the Hugo awards are too white.

The great battles of the past years have been the Culture Wars, in which ‘liberal’ lefties have exhibited the opposite of liberal tendencies. Indeed, the modern political left is so middle-class that it resembles the days of Mary Whitehouse, being obsessed by pointless protestant Christian values of decorum and decency. Is there too much boobage in video games? Are female characters sufficiently covered up in ‘sensible armor’ or preferably in a high-tech burka like Seamus Aran, that completely conceals their gender? I don’t doubt that this constant warring in our cultural spaces is another thing that’s made numerous lifetime enemies for the political left. While western foreign policy has reduced the middle east to a live action Goya nightmare, global warming has begun to lay its clammy fingers on our planet and inequality has risen to new highs, the latte left have mostly been concerned with fighting internet misogyny and attempting to enforce total ideological purity in universities.

In many ways Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the apex of this champagne-feminist madness. I don’t blame Hilary, who I think is unfairly hated, and who in some ways strikes me as a modern Lady Jean Grey: surrounded by people telling her she’s going to be Queen without really having done the work to make it possible. The insider skinny was that Bill Clinton was constantly bemoaning the need to reach out to rural and working class whites. However, he was overridden by ‘experts’ who, as so many people in leftist politics now think in terms of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘patriarchy’ basically said “F**k those redneck neckbeard dudebros, this is about a woman getting to be president.” Thus the campaign appeared to be about Madeline Albright and Gloria Steinem ticking off an item on their feminist bucket list.

I am savoring this stuff not simply for reasons of Schadenfreude, but also because it’s salutary to see this kind of deep and unsparing self-examination in the wake of failure. If we on the right had gone through this at any point in the past eight years after our losses, things might look different today. The GOP Establishment and movement conservatism has itself to blame for the hostile takeover by Donald J. Trump.

Anyway, you Silicon Valley people keep celebrating Transgender Awareness. This morning I’m thinking about the small-town Louisiana elementary school teachers I spent some time with four years ago, when they invited me to drive over to their school to talk about the book I wrote about my schoolteacher sister. One of the things my sister had done, and that I wrote about, was reach out to nurture impoverished children in her classroom, of which there were more than a few. After my talk, I sat around with the teachers in this school talking about this. It was eye-opening to say the least. These teachers — all of whom were making public school teacher salaries in Louisiana, which isn’t a lot — shared stories about how they were spending their own money to help clothe little children in their classes. Over and over I heard stories of childhood suffering because of parental neglect. No father in the home. Mothers strung out on drugs. It was J.D. Vance stuff, and it was black kids and white kids both. The teachers didn’t really have the money to do what they were doing, but the alternative was to watch innocent kids suffer. So they did what they could, knowing that it would never be enough.

You will never see a Google awareness day for people like those children, or their self-sacrificing teachers. The people who run Google are not aware of them, and don’t want to be. I think about the white poor and working class people I know personally, and how hard life is for them. If they bothered to vote at all, I’m sure they all went for Trump. I agree with J.D. Vance: the idea that Donald Trump is going to fix their problems is a mirage, in part because some of those problems are self-inflicted. But at least Donald Trump sees them, and doesn’t see them as the Enemy.

I wish the Michael Sean Winterses and Colum Pagets well in their crusade to slap their own side out of its ideologically induced stupor, and to return to the real world, where, believe it or not, there are worse evils than little old lady florists who decline to arrange flowers for a gay wedding, and charter schools that must be destroyed because it prefers not to mainstream transgenderism to its kindergartners.

Trump Consolidates Gay Rights

Liberals who call Donald Trump anti-gay are doing it only out of reflex, not out of any thoughtful consideration of who the man is and his record, such as it is. A reader pointed out in the comments thread here last night that Trump is the first president in US history to enter office supporting gay marriage.

In his 60 Minutes interview last night, Trump said:

Lesley Stahl: One of the groups that’s expressing fear are the LGBTQ group. You–

Donald Trump: And yet I mentioned them at the Republican National Convention. And–

Lesley Stahl: You did.

Donald Trump: Everybody said, “That was so great.” I have been, you know, I’ve been-a supporter.

Lesley Stahl: Well, I guess the issue for them is marriage equality. Do you support marriage equality?

Donald Trump: It– it’s irrelevant because it was already settled. It’s law. It was settled in the Supreme Court. I mean it’s done.

Lesley Stahl: So even if you appoint a judge that–

Donald Trump: It’s done. It– you have– these cases have gone to the Supreme Court. They’ve been settled. And, I’m fine with that.

You know what? I’m fine with him saying that. I did not support Obergefell, I believe the legal scholars who say it’s poorly reasoned, and I would be pleased to see it overturned. But Obergefell is a decision that’s widely supported in our culture, and will be gaining higher levels of support as the elderly die. I see no reason to waste political capital attempting to reverse it. (Note well that a reversal would only mean each state gets to decide its own marriage law. Most states would pass same-sex marriage at once, and those that didn’t would get there within a decade.)

It’s far, far more sensible for a Trump administration and conservative activists to put their attention on protecting religious liberty in an Obergefell world, both through laws and by confirming judges, especially Supreme Court justices, who have a strong sense that religious schools and institutions must not be discriminated against for practicing their faith with regard to marriage, family, and sexual expression. This is where a reasonable compromise can be achieved. It’s not going to thrill either religious conservatives or LGBT activists, but it’s something we can live with. Plus, it will be a great thing if the Trump administration ends the federal government’s Title IX crusade, especially on the trans front. Those issues are the ones for conservatives to hold the new president’s feet to the fire on, not the overturning of Obergefell.

The thing to keep in mind is that with President Trump, the biggest gay rights gain in history — the constitutional right to same-sex marriage — is safe. There will almost certainly never be another US president who doesn’t affirm the right to gay marriage. If you insist on seeing Trump as anti-gay, you simply aren’t paying attention, or you’re the sort of extremist who sees failure to endorse every single thing the activist cadre demands as a sign of bigotry. In which case you’re being an unserious person, and should probably huff off to your safe space and try to come to terms with reality.

Mother Of The Year

NSFW! From Fox:

“Since you voted for Trump, you can get your s—t and get out,” the woman is heard saying to the boy as she records the video on a cellphone. As of Friday the video had been shared more than 200,000 times, sparking outrage and demands that she be locked up. “Uh, uh, the suitcase is packed by the door.”

The boy bawls uncontrollably as he’s shown to the door with the suitcase and a handmade sign that says, “My mom kicked me out because I voted for Donald Trump.”

“Bye Donald Trump lover,” she is heard saying.

This idiot woman was so proud of what she did to her child that she posted the video to her Facebook page!

UPDATE: James C. writes:

Not idiot woman. Evil woman.

When I was that kid’s age, my mother did the same thing to me for having the temerity to say I wanted to visit my father (my parents were in a vicious years-long custody battle). She packed my suitcase and threw me out of the house. I bawled uncontrollably and have never forgotten it (it happened a few more times).

And I’m tearing up now. Child abuse. That poor kid!