Rod Dreher's Blog, page 517

How Trump Won: Competing Liberal Narratives

If you haven’t seen that Jonathan Pie video, oh boy oh boy, are you in for a treat. Warning: the language is very vulgar in parts. Totally NSFW. Pie, by the way, is a fake news reporter played by Tom Walker. In the epic rant, he blames the left, including himself, for Trump’s victory, in part because the left’s political correctness has made it impossible for people to say what’s on their minds. Below, I’ve tried to embed a subtitled Facebook version, which you can watch with your sound muted.

I find that incredibly persuasive. If you’re Team Hillary, though, you prefer the sexism/Comey/the media/anybody but us argument. Or if you are an academic like sociology professor Crystal Fleming, you are burrowing down to a diamond-hard bubble in the center of the earth, sniffing glue. Behold, the narrative that we’re going to be living with for the next four years (she also calls President Obama a coward for calling for a peaceful transfer of power):

Live From Sanctimony Ground Zero, It’s ‘Saturday Night’!

I cannot believe that this was the actual cold open for SNL tonight. Could they possibly be more sanctimonious?

Actually, I can believe it. These people have a sense of self-awareness like hotels in Mecca have Jimmy Dean sausage on the breakfast buffet. By now nobody expects SNL to be funny except sporadically, but this was such an unintentionally self-parodic expression of the cluelessness of the coastal cultural elite that it will one day be used in history classes to help explain why Trump happened.

Is Liberals’ Vanity Stronger Than Their Misery?

A reader writes:

So this is really happening:

https://newrepublic.com/article/138624/hillary-clintons-celebrity-feminism-failure

The New Republic says Clinton failed because nobody cares about Katy Perry and Lena Dunham, and they just want MORE progressive policies. Minimum wage!

The article seems to say that the only thing wrong with the Democrats’ appeal is that it wasn’t more economically based. While there is a lot of truth to that, it leaves unaddressed the possibility that the multicultural identity politics that liberals suck on like crack pipes had a lot to do with their loss.

The reader comments:

Maybe she’s right about the economic security. But she doesn’t even consider that there might be tension between the goals of economic and cultural progressivism. That you can be FOR a higher minimum wage but AGAINST wangs in the girls locker room. And that some people might choose to forego the wangs even if it means foregoing the wage.

The worldview is so obvious to them that they cannot even imagine that union members might object to mass, unfettered, low skill immigration on logical grounds. And it cannot imagine seeking such voters because they are guilty of the only sin there is: BIIIGGGOOTTT!!!

Because to even consider the question is to commit that sin themselves.

Seems to me that they forced conservatives to collapse on marriage, but then moved all too quickly to the trans thing, insisting against all logic that these are exactly the same, even though many in the LGBT community don’t see it that way. Worse, they forced all legitimate questions into the closet, then were shocked when people chose to lie to pollsters rather that risking cultural pariah status.

And now, their solution is… more progressivism!!

Trans is to Obamaism what tax cuts became for Reaganism.

Legit issue! But when you refuse to accept victory and demand annihilation instead, you get Trump instead. Just like Reaganites spawned Obama.

This clip from the liberal philosopher Richard Rorty’s 1998 book Achieving America has been going around. I found it in Jedediah Purdy’s new piece in Jacobin, but it’s been bouncing around all year in various versions:

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

There are two interesting things about this passage. The first, obviously, is Rorty’s foresight (which is to say, Luttwak’s) about wages, outsourcing, and politics. The second is Rorty’s moralistic blindness about cultural issues. He reminds me here of those rightist nuts who couldn’t tell the difference between Obamaism and Marxism. This is not analysis on Rorty’s part; it’s hysteria. Thing is, Rorty was not a talk-radio ranter, but one of the most influential American philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. Roger Scruton’s summary of Rorty’s legacy is revealing:

Undoubtedly he was the most lucid of the postmodernist philosophers – though that is, given the competition, no great achievement. And undoubtedly he added, in his thoughts about contingency and irony, a real insight into a peculiarly postmodern way of thinking. However I believe that the concept of truth is fundamental to human discourse, that it is the precondition of any genuine dialogue, and that real respect for other people requires an even greater respect for truth. I therefore cannot go along with what seems to me, whenever I encounter it, to be a wholly specious and even cheap way of arguing, which Rorty typified and indeed perfected. Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts, while defining the consensus in terms of people like themselves.

What it reveals is the sanctimony with which many liberals cloak their epistemic closure on cultural issues. It never seems to occur to people like Rorty that people who disagree with them on cultural matters might be anything other than bigots. It leads them to assume, completely without warrant, that America is a seething cauldron of hatred kept from boiling over only by a heavy lid controlled by the sure hand of liberal authority. When they construe the rest of the world in that way, they cannot help but misread it, and impute evil to those who don’t share their strict views. They end up only having a conversation with themselves, because they have so stigmatized anyone to their right that they both don’t want to listen, and make the price of dissent so high that dissenters end up keeping their mouths shut for fear of losing their jobs or their positions.

On this point, Frank Rich Bruni (of all people!) is one liberal who seems willing to take a lesson from this week’s stunning vote:

Other factors conspired in the party’s debacle. One in particular haunts me. From the presidential race on down, Democrats adopted a strategy of inclusiveness that excluded a hefty share of Americans and consigned many to a “basket of deplorables” who aren’t all deplorable. Some are hurt. Some are confused.

Liberals miss this by being illiberal. They shame not just the racists and sexists who deserve it but all who disagree. A 64-year-old Southern woman not onboard with marriage equality finds herself characterized as a hateful boob. Never mind that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton weren’t themselves onboard just five short years ago.

Political correctness has morphed into a moral purity that may feel exhilarating but isn’t remotely tactical. It’s a handmaiden to smugness and sanctimony, undermining its own goals.

I worry about my and my colleagues’ culpability along these lines. I plan to use greater care in how I talk to and about Americans more culturally conservative than I am. That’s not a surrender of principle or passion. It’s a grown-up acknowledgment that we’re a messy, imperfect species.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has documented that conservatives understand the liberal mind better than liberals understand the conservative mind. The basic reason is that liberals generally interpret all moral action in terms of Care and Fairness. Thus when conservatives think or behave in ways that violate what liberals believe is the Caring and Fair thing to have done, they can only figure that this is because conservatives Don’t Care and Aren’t Fair. In fact, Haidt says, there are other things going on in conservative moral reasoning, but liberals who strictly adhere to the Care/Fairness standards blind themselves to them.

This week’s vote shows what can happen when you do that. Robby Soave, a young editor at Reason magazine, showed no mercy in laying into the politically correct for Trump’s victory. Excerpts:

The segment of the electorate who flocked to Trump because he positioned himself as “an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness” think it means this: smug, entitled, elitist, privileged leftists jumping down the throats of ordinary folks who aren’t up-to-date on the latest requirements of progressive society.

Example: A lot of people think there are only two genders—boy and girl. Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe they should change that view. Maybe it’s insensitive to the trans community. Maybe it even flies in the face of modern social psychology. But people think it. Political correctness is the social force that holds them in contempt for that, or punishes them outright.

If you’re a leftist reading this, you probably think that’s stupid. You probably can’t understand why someone would get so bent out of shape about being told their words are hurtful. You probably think it’s not a big deal and these people need to get over themselves. Who’s the delicate snowflake now, huh? you’re probably thinking. I’m telling you: your failure to acknowledge this miscalculation and adjust your approach has delivered the country to Trump.

More:

This is akin to the political-correctness-run-amok problem: both are examples of the left’s horrible over-reach during the Obama years. The leftist drive to enforce a progressive social vision was relentless, and it happened too fast. I don’t say this because I’m opposed to that vision—like most members of the under-30 crowd, I have no problem with gender neutral pronouns—I say this because it inspired a backlash that gave us Trump.

My liberal critics rolled their eyes when I complained about political correctness. I hope they see things a little more clearly now. The left sorted everyone into identity groups and then told the people in the poorly-educated-white-male identity group that that’s the only bad one. It mocked the members of this group mercilessly. It punished them for not being woke enough. It called them racists. It said their video games were sexist. It deployed Lena Dunham to tell them how horrible they were. Lena Dunham!

Soave goes on to say that Trump appealed to lots of people who were told by the left that they didn’t have a right to speak their minds, because he was not afraid to speak his. Read the entire Soave column. It’s important.

It’s hard to know whether there will be much soul searching within left-wing institutions around this question, and subsequent reform. This remarkable post-election editorial in the Harvard Crimson calling for on the university to make “ideological diversity” a priority is a welcome sign. I can’t help being skeptical of the imaginative capabilities of most liberal institutions, though. Universities, newspapers, and political parties are not churches, but the people who run them think of them as institutional forms of secular religion (though the last people in the world to realize that are their leaders). Forgive the irony of this analogy, then, but the liberal clerisy has just had a political version of the Ninety-Five Theses nailed to their wooden backsides by the American voter.

One last thing: don’t be fooled by the fact that the GOP is triumphant today. This is not the GOP of the Bush family and the Republican establishment. Trump destroyed that, and he was able to do so because it had rotted from within — mostly because its own religiously-held ideology blinded it to the discontent its policies caused for many of the people within its own base. And don’t be fooled by the fact that the candidate supported by many on the old Religious Right is going to be president. Donald Trump is not a moral or religious conservative, did not campaign as one, and is not likely to govern as one. The Religious Right did not win the culture war. To be opposed to political correctness is not the same thing as being a social conservative. Trump is right-wing, which is not the same thing as conservatism. Milo Yiannopoulos is the real face of Trumpism. Ralph Reed and all the old school Religious Right folks are just along for the ride, whether they know it or not.

It all goes back to the wisdom spoken by Don Fabrizio in The Leopard, about his countrymen: “The Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery… .”

Annals Of Right-Wing Wishful Thinking

Stephen Turley at The Imaginative Conservative:

It is the waning of this secular vision of life that is perhaps the most significant indicator of Mr. Trump’s win. We are now entering into what scholars call a post-secular society age. As the name implies, a post-secular society is one that no longer subscribes to the two fundamental commitments of secularism: scientific rationalism and personal autonomy or lifestyle values. At a very basic level, post-secular society is about the return of religion and religious values in the public square. We’ve seen this with the advent of Sharia councils in the U.K. that arbitrate between conflicts among Muslims, the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church as a major political, moral, and cultural force in the Russian Federation, the revival of imperial Shintoism at the highest levels of the Japanese government, a revitalization of Confucian philosophy among Chinese officials, Hindu nationalism in India, Islam in Turkey, and on and on.

Here in the U.S., similar processes are evident in the increasing collapse of multiculturalism and political correctness, which together represent the value system of secularization. Multiculturalism is the idea that America is made up of a plurality of cultural identities that consumer-defined individuals get to pick for themselves, with no single culture being dominant or superior. And political correctness is simply multiculturalism married to the state, wherein government policies favor some cultural or ethnic groups at the expense of others. Hence, Van Jones, on the night of Mr. Trump’s victory, could spout on CNN that white people voting their interests is racist and nativist bigotry while black people voting their interests is liberation and justice.

Erm…

We can see evidence of a revitalized civic religion here at home. In his recent campaign speech in Maine, Mr. Trump said: “Imagine what our country could accomplish if we started working together as one people, under one God, saluting one American flag.” This became a refrain in his campaign speeches: one people under one God. And while some can’t get past the potential threat to religious freedom such a hypothetical statement represents, we have to understand that this is precisely the kind of revitalization of public religion that accompanies the ascendancy of nationalist sentiments.

Thus it appears that the waning of multiculturalism and the rise of a nationalist populism indicates the dawn of a post-secular age. Despite the sporadic protests to the contrary, a Trump presidency signals to the wider culture that it is now open season on political correctness. And as far as I’m concerned, it couldn’t have come soon enough.

Where, exactly, is this evidence of revival? If Hillary Clinton had won — as she nearly did — conservative Christians would be decrying the secularization of post-Christian America. And now the surprise victory of a thrice-married Republican candidate who brags about grabbing women by the p*ssy and who says he doesn’t need to be forgiven by God for anything — this heralds a new Christian dawn?!

Here in this post is the temptation the church faces in the Trump Era: embracing a weaponized Eisenhower-era civil religion masquerading as Christianity. Because it worked so well for us in the 1980s.

Trump, Globalism, Nationalism

Well, this didn’t take long:

Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016

Think about it: here’s a guy who just won the presidency in the most stunning political upset in American history, and he’s going to send a pissy tweet about the media and protesters. See, this is the main reason I worry about him as president. He’s unhinged. [Nixon’s insecurity x 500] – Nixon’s smarts = Donald Trump.

I concede that there’s a lot to be worried about regarding the future of a Trump-led America. Still, it’s been hard for me to feel sorry for the liberals falling to pieces over it. What, exactly, do they think the Hillary Clinton win we all expected would have done to the feelings of religious conservatives? Like many people like me, I was gearing down for four more years of losing ground to aggressive efforts by progressives in government to take away our religious liberties in the name of anti-discrimination. I’m not happy that Trump is going to be our president, but I would have been even more miserable had Hillary Clinton been chosen, because of what four more years of Democratic rule in the White House would have meant for my own community. Point is, I have empathy, but it’s limited. I know I’m supposed to feel like a winner, but I don’t; Trump has probably solved the biggest problem facing us, from my point of view, but his ascension will have caused others. Trump’s tweet above gives us a preview of the rest of this decade. It’s going to be one damn thing after another.

Anyway, one of the key voices to read over the next four years is social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. His new piece “How Nationalism Beats Globalism” is must reading. Excerpts:

Globalization and authoritarianism are both essential parts of the story, but in this essay I will put them together in a new way. I’ll tell a story with four chapters that begins by endorsing the distinction made by the intellectual historian Michael Lind, and other commentators, between globalists and nationalists—these are good descriptions of the two teams of combatants emerging in so many Western nations. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front, pointed to the same dividing line last December when she portrayed the battle in France as one between “globalists” and “patriots.”But rather than focusing on the nationalists as the people who need to be explained by experts, I’ll begin the story with the globalists. I’ll show how globalization and rising prosperity have changed the values and behavior of the urban elite, leading them to talk and act in ways that unwittingly activate authoritarian tendencies in a subset of the nationalists. I’ll show why immigration has been so central in nearly all right-wing populist movements. It’s not just the spark, it’s the explosive material, and those who dismiss anti-immigrant sentiment as mere racism have missed several important aspects of moral psychology related to the general human need to live in a stable and coherent moral order. Once moral psychology is brought into the story and added on to the economic and authoritarianism explanations, it becomes possible to offer some advice for reducing the intensity of the recent wave of conflicts.

Haidt brings up the complicated question of patriotism, and how cosmopolitan internationalists and nationalists understand its meaning. The European migration crisis brought it all to a head there:

But if you are a European nationalist, watching the nightly news may have felt like watching the spread of the Zika virus, moving steadily northward from the chaos zones of southwest Asia and north Africa. Only a few right-wing nationalist leaders tried to stop it, such as Victor Orban in Hungary. The globalist elite seemed to be cheering the human tidal wave onward, welcoming it into the heart of Europe, and then demanding that every country accept and resettle a large number of refugees.

And these demands, epicentered in Brussels, came after decades of debate in which nationalists had been arguing that Europe has already been too open and had already taken in so many Muslim immigrants that the cultures and traditions of European societies were threatened. Long before the flow of Syrian asylum seekers arrived in Europe there were initiatives to ban minarets in Switzerland and burkas in France. There were riots in Arab neighborhoods of Paris and Marseilles, and attacks on Jews and synagogues throughout Europe. There were hidden terrorist cells that planned and executed the attacks of September 11 in the United States, attacks on trains and buses in Madrid and London, and the slaughter of the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris.By the summer of 2015 the nationalist side was already at the boiling point, shouting “enough is enough, close the tap,” when the globalists proclaimed, “let us open the floodgates, it’s the compassionate thing to do, and if you oppose us you are a racist.” Might that not provoke even fairly reasonable people to rage? Might that not make many of them more receptive to arguments, ideas, and political parties that lean toward the illiberal side of nationalism and that were considered taboo just a few years earlier?

Of course. You can only tell yourself that what you see with your own eyes is a lie for so long. Eventually, you stop believing the narrative that cultural elites in government, media, and academia tell you. Here’s a very important paragraph, about why the left’s standard slur intending to shut down debate — “racism!” — obscures rather than explains:

But that is not all we need to know. On closer inspection, racism usually turns out to be deeply bound up with moral concerns. (I use the term “moral” here in a purely descriptive sense to mean concerns that seem—for the people we are discussing—to be matters of good and evil; I am not saying that racism is in fact morally good or morally correct.) People don’t hate others just because they have darker skin or differently shaped noses; they hate people whom they perceive as having values that are incompatible with their own, or who (they believe) engage in behaviors they find abhorrent, or whom they perceive to be a threat to something they hold dear. These moral concerns may be out of touch with reality, and they are routinely amplified by demagogues. But if we want to understand the recent rise of right-wing populist movements, then “racism” can’t be the stopping point; it must be the beginning of the inquiry.

More:

So authoritarians are not being selfish. They are not trying to protect their wallets or even their families. They are trying to protect their group or society. Some authoritarians see their race or bloodline as the thing to be protected, and these people make up the deeply racist subset of right-wing populist movements, including the fringe that is sometimes attracted to neo-Nazism. They would not even accept immigrants who fully assimilated to the culture. But more typically, in modern Europe and America, it is the nation and its culture that nationalists want to preserve.

The importance of this point cannot be overstated. If the left characterizes all of this nationalism and populism as an expression of bigotry, it relieves itself of the responsibility of having to understand it. There’s no reasoning with bigots, after all. We on the traditionalist side of the marriage debate had to deal with this constantly, especially coming from the media. The only possible reason in their minds for our traditionalism was sheer bigotry, end of story. They were rolling over us — are rolling over us — and expecting us to be ashamed of our resistance, as if all we wanted to protect was our hatred.

Haidt, drawing on the work of Karen Stenner, explains the difference between pro- and anti-Trump conservatives:

One of Stenner’s most helpful contributions is her finding that authoritarians are psychologically distinct from “status quo conservatives” who are the more prototypical conservatives—cautious about radical change. Status quo conservatives compose the long and distinguished lineage from Edmund Burke’s prescient reflections and fears about the early years of the French revolution through William F. Buckley’s statement that his conservative magazine National Review would “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’”

Status quo conservatives are not natural allies of authoritarians, who often favor radical change and are willing to take big risks to implement untested policies. This is why so many Republicans—and nearly all conservative intellectuals—oppose Donald Trump; he is simply not a conservative by the test of temperament or values. But status quo conservatives can be drawn into alliance with authoritarians when they perceive that progressives have subverted the country’s traditions and identity so badly that dramatic political actions (such as Brexit, or banning Muslim immigration to the United States) are seen as the only remaining way of yelling “Stop!” Brexit can seem less radical than the prospect of absorption into the “ever closer union” of the EU.

Boy, this is good. Describes me perfectly. Everything in me is suspicious of Trump, and that has not changed with his victory. But on the question of religious liberty, there is reason to believe that he will act to give Republicans a damn spine, and a voice. I hope so.

Where to go from here? Haidt quotes Stenner:

[A]ll the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness…. Ultimately, nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions, and processes. And regrettably, nothing is more certain to provoke increased expression of their latent predispositions than the likes of “multicultural education,” bilingual policies, and nonassimilation.

Read the whole essay. Seriously, do. This is vital wisdom for our time.

Can the left, and the globalists on the right, absorb it and act on it? Don’t know about the right, but I doubt the left can. This is their religion. There’s a reason neoreactionaries call it the Cathedral. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I will be. And as Ross Douthat has said, if you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you get the Anti-Religious Right.

Finally, a word for my fellow conservative Christians. Assuming that Trump will govern in a way more or less consonant with what we believe — and this is not an assumption I, personally, make — Donald Trump won’t live forever, nor will Trumpism, whatever it means. Our norms are increasingly out of step with post-Christian America’s, and we are likely to be increasingly a minority in this country. Donald Trump’s election is not going to stop history’s currents. If Trump and the GOP majority overstep in forcing their own values onto unwilling groups, the backlash against us is going to be horrific when the left comes back to power. We are going to be scapegoated, and made to be outliers and freaks, threats to the common good. The public square may be governed like a left-wing college campus. One reason I keep harping on the Benedict Option is that we need to exercise what power we may have under the Trump administration prudently, and we also need to avoid putting our trust in princes. If we are wise, we will use this interlude as a time of preparation.

Commies Yes, Trads No

So says Pope Francis. First, this:

Asked about the liturgy, Pope Francis insisted the Mass reformed after the Second Vatican Council is here to stay and “to speak of a ‘reform of the reform’ is an error.”

In authorizing regular use of the older Mass, now referred to as the “extraordinary form,” now-retired Pope Benedict XVI was “magnanimous” toward those attached to the old liturgy, he said. “But it is an exception.”

Pope Francis told Father Spadaro he wonders why some young people, who were not raised with the old Latin Mass, nevertheless prefer it.

“And I ask myself: Why so much rigidity? Dig, dig, this rigidity always hides something, insecurity or even something else. Rigidity is defensive. True love is not rigid.”

And, in an interview with the Eugenio Scalfari, the former editor of La Repubblica and a left-wing atheist, the Pope said:

[Scalfari:] You told me some time ago that the precept, “Love your neighbour as thyself” had to change, given the dark times that we are going through, and become “more than thyself.” So you yearn for a society where equality dominates. This, as you know, is the programme of Marxist socialism and then of communism. Are you therefore thinking of a Marxist type of society?

“It it has been said many times and my response has always been that, if anything, it is the communists who think like Christians. Christ spoke of a society where the poor, the weak and the marginalized have the right to decide. Not demagogues, not Barabbas, but the people, the poor, whether they have faith in a transcendent God or not. It is they who must help to achieve equality and freedom”.

Your Holiness, I have always thought and written that you are a revolutionary and even a prophet. But it seems that now you would like the Popular Movements and especially the poor to enter directly into politics proper.

“Yes, that is correct. Not petty politics – squabbling over power, selfishness, demagogy, money – but higher, creative, politics, the politics of great visions. That which Aristotle wrote about”.

Okay.

Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired Archbishop of Hong Kong, recently had some harsh words for Pope Francis, who is reportedly pushing for a concordat with Beijing, allowing it to have some say-so over picking China’s bishops:

“Pope Francis has no real knowledge of communism,” the cardinal laments. He blames Francis’ experience in Argentina, where military dictators and rich elites did evil while actual or accused communists suffered trying to help the downtrodden. “So the Holy Father knew the persecuted communists, not the communist persecutors. He knew the communists killed by the government, not the communist governments who killed thousands and hundreds of thousands of people.” (In China it was tens of millions.)

“I’m sorry to say that in his goodwill he has done many things which are simply ridiculous,” the cardinal says of the pope. These include his approaches to both China and Cuba, the other communist state he has courted at the apparent expense of human rights. But still he’s the pope, so even if he signs a bad deal Cardinal Zen says he won’t protest once it’s done.

His message to the faithful in that case: You’re never obligated to act against conscience. “You are not bound to join the Patriotic Association. You can pray at home if you lose your churches.” An underground priest who loses his flock can go home and till the soil. “You’re still a priest anyway,” he says. “So wait for better times. But don’t rebel against the pope.”

Interesting times.

Leftists Make A Post-Election Trump Voter

This just in from a friend in New Orleans, a buttoned-down guy who never cusses. I have sanitized it for your protection:

So, angry groups of leftists have been marching down the streets every night, spray painting public buildings and private property, breaking out the windows at the bank on St. Charles Avenue, and I have to hear another fu**ing radio story about how people of color, women and the LGBTQ community are the ones who are under threat. I did not vote for that piece of sh*t Donald Trump, but this is the kind of sh*t that almost makes me wish I had.  They are saying that a twice-divorced atheist is going to impose a form of Christian sharia on the country. And this is on NPR, not the megaphones of the idiot sociology majors that have been marching in front of my office every night.  Have you seen the things they have been writing on the Robert E Lee monument? Every night, they paint it up more. The guy who had to scrub clean the building next to mine said that the cops told him they wanted to arrest the vandals, but had been given instructions not to make any arrests at the protests. No wonder people voted for that motherfu**er.

 I’d say we have a political convert there. Good job, leftists of New Orleans.

When Politics Becomes Your Religion

Here’s some insight into what the Trump election is doing to one small community. Me, I could not imagine — literally, could not imagine — deciding I could not be friends with someone over his or her political views, absent their being a Nazi or a Stalinist sort. But not everybody is like this. A friend passes this email on, which he received from a church pal. The church pal gave permission to publish it, as long as I obscure the names and identities, which I’ve done:

I just got off of the phone with my mother who was a bit distressed after a very awkward night at [restaurant]. She went to dinner with no other thought in her mind except to see her fellow church-goers and friends for dinner. When she walked in and headed towards the others…they ignored her. They would not even look at her. She was a bit confused…so she just went to the line to pay her money to the basket and pick up her plate of food. Then [woman] came up to her and said: “I see you’re wearing black because you’re in mourning”. To which my mother responded: “Umm…no, I’m not in mourning. Why do you say that?” And [that woman] just said “OH” and walked away. Then, [man] came up to her and said…”Oh yes, you’re one of those Republicans, aren’t you” …of course, in a half joking manner. And that’s when my mother realized why this was happening.

She said everyone in the place was down trodden, heads half bowed, and moping around as if someone just killed the cat. So, she went and sat down at a table by herself. Finally, [woman] and a new couple came and sat down with her. She said they were kind, nevertheless.

But, here comes the fun part. [The pastor] got up to the lectern and began her melancholy speech. She started by saying: I know many of you are grieving right now, but I just want to let you know that we’re going to get through this. She told a story about how they had to cradle her children in their arms and “somehow” tell them that evil is upon us and we just have to accept it for a while. And to top things off, she and one of the [family name] went into the kitchen and…get this…came out with bread and a bottle of grape juice. She said to everyone that they had a great idea for those grieving. They would have a communion right then and there. WHAT?

The last thing she said was that she wasn’t prepared to speak about all of this tonight, but she’s putting her thoughts together for later.

My mother, mouth on the floor, said to herself; “This is NOT what communion is about” and she got up and left. So, I expect a funeral service will be planned for Sunday.

I just had to let someone know how we, as conservatives, are being treated in this church. Luckily I am gone…but, to disrespect my, more than kind, mother that way is something I need to ponder. My mother, of course, said it wasn’t a big deal…but, she can find the good in a serial killer.

Of course I know it wasn’t egregious, but these little snips at her and the fact that people she’s known for numbers of years just ignore her? That’s just wrong.

My friend adds:

Rod, this is the way that Christians are treating their fellow Christians!

Here is my response to the letter:

All I can say is “wow!”

I continue to be amazed at how even our life-long “friends” could so willfully misread and misunderstand the motivations of so-called conservative Christians. It’s almost as if their own faith had no connection to two thousand years of church history.

That was sarcasm, of course.

I will be in church on Sunday to witness this hissy-fit meltdown—I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Donald Trump wasn’t my first choice for president, but as vulgar and crude as he may be, he’s absolutely right about the effects of the globalist vision on Main Street, USA. The consequences of that vision have laid waste to what was perhaps the finest collection of self-reliant villages and towns ever to grace a continent. And even if Mr. Trump doesn’t understand the economic theories explaining what’s happened, he at least had the vulgarity to see the consequences and call them what they are. In an age in which the typical politician will studiously avoid speaking any truth which will not see him re-elected, the only vision capable of such appears to be that of the vulgarian—someone crude enough and fearless enough to say what is plainly true, and which everyone is too afraid to acknowledge aloud.

At any rate, the conservatives among us have been in mourning for eight years–and I don’t remember being offered Holy Communion once for my sackcloth and ashes or my misery in the fact that “things didn’t go my way.”

And….your observations about your “more than kind” mother are spot-on. I could understand these “friends” giving me that treatment. After all, I’ve occasionally been unkind enough to point out the inconsistencies in their theological power-grabs. And…I can take it.

But to treat [name of mother] in this manner transcends mere rudeness. It goes to the very core of their soul-sickness, revealing the rot and decay in a faith which can no longer love. This, to me, is the surprising thing, to step into a place of worship, with old friends, and instead find it filled with faithless strangers.

I’ll make it a point to sit with your mother next Sunday!

My friend passed on the email he sent to his pastor. It said, in part:

There are certainly times when Christians should don sackcloth and ashes to mourn the state of political affairs — but I very much doubt whether it is Christ-like to do so with every change of a political regime. Christians are, instead, created to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The critical part of that destiny is that we walk through it! If being a Christian means anything, it means that you don’t linger in that oppressive valley feeling sorry for yourself. Your destiny is something different—eternal fellowship with our Creator. Your walking stick is Christian Hope — the Paraclete — who constantly encourages us to make it through the valley to our true destiny.

Rather than be a retreat from the world — i.e., a “safe space” — worship should be that place where we come in closest contact with the Paraclete so that we may be fortified for our unavoidable journey through the valley.

We all have a lot to think about, and the temptation to take an election that didn’t go our way as a justification to linger in misery is a powerful one. But it cannot be the response of the Christian, whose destiny lies beyond this vale of tea

Who does that to people they’ve gone to church with for years and years? Who allows that to happen within their congregation? People for whom politics has become their religion, that’s who. A congregation that has degenerated into nothing more than a political party at prayer. Repent!

How The Narrative Is Made

Michael Cieply, who left The New York Times this summer after 12 years as a reporter and editor there, reflects on why the newspaper got the Trump story so wrong:

For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”

It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”

The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”

Er, wow. This is like some right-winger’s parody of what the NYT is like. But there it is, from an insider.

Steve Sailer writes of this story

You can see this in agenda-driven stuff like World War T and the Military / Campus Rape Culture hysterics. These are not news, they are planned campaigns of psychological warfare.

Ain’t that the truth. It’s funny: I read the Times in part to learn about the world, but mostly to learn about the Narrative, and have done for years. I mean, I read the paper for the same reason Kremlinologists in the old days would have pored over paragraphs in Pravda: not for a picture of the Soviet Union as it actually was, but for a picture of the Soviet Union as its ruling elites wanted to think of it, or at least wanted everyone else to think of it.

I’m not being snarky or facetious here. I smile, with Cieply, at the Times‘s ridiculously high self-regard, captured in that anonymous quote. Most people in my part of the world don’t know or care what the Times thinks about anything. But there’s more truth in that editor’s words than I wish there were. The mass media that people in my part of the world do consume — not just news media, but entertainment media — is driven by what appears in the Times, or at least by people who share the same basic mindset as Times editors.

Anyway, to the extent that what Cieply reports about the Times is true — that it’s an editor-driven newspaper — isn’t it obvious how foolish it is to think that you can report accurately on a country as big and as diverse as this one from a Manhattan mothership?

Back in the 1980s, a Dutch friend who had just finished his mandatory military service told me that he didn’t fear Warsaw Pact forces nearly as much as he did before serving. How come? I asked. Because, he said, NATO trains its troops to think for themselves, and to be creative on the battlefield, when conditions change. The Warsaw Pact commanders don’t trust their soldiers. Those guys don’t know what to do without orders from on top. They’re totally dependent on superiors who are in some cases far removed from the battlefield to know what to do next.

Hmm…

Trump Troglodytes May Breed Subhuman Species

Ricki Lewis, a science writer with a PhD in genetics, wonders if Trump voters are turning into a different species of human. Excerpt:

Do the deep differences between the two groups of voters in any way reflect underlying genetics? I’ve dismissed studies purporting to identify gene variants associated with political party or conservatism. But now I fear they might be onto something, in the big picture.

No one will say it out loud, connect the dots, but the pieces of evidence leading to an obvious conclusion have been zipping around social media for months:

1. Educational attainment differs on the sides of the new divide. Yes, I know that PhDs can be idiots, and those with little or no post-high-school education, like Bruce Springsteen, can be gifted geniuses. But if educational level is even an imperfect surrogate for intelligence, we may be in trouble. The Wall Street Journal is one of many to point out this disturbing evidence: “The clearest dividing line in this year’s presidential election now falls along educational lines: Whites without a college degree have consolidated behind Donald Trump and those with a four-year degree are tending to back Hillary Clinton.” I’d love to see the breakdown in IQ or some other measure of achievement, and for groups other than whites.

2. Letters such as “375 Top Scientists Warn Us Not To Vote For Trump” and “Hundreds of Economists Say: Do Not Vote For Trump” alarm me. Being smart, it seems, no longer matters, and maybe never did. I fear especially for the fate of the Precision Medicine Initiative, and have to wonder if the new president has even heard of it. President Obama has a long-standing interest in genetics and would periodically invite the top minds in my field to the White House to pick their brains.

3. The all-important reproduction quandary is perhaps the most disturbing, in the long run that underlies evolution: “He Likes Trump. She Doesn’t. Can This Marriage Be Saved?“

And herein lies the seeds of speciation: a difference in a trait that genes influence – intelligence – affecting reproduction patterns. Coupled with policies of exclusion – building a wall, breaking up families to deport undocumented immigrants, targeting specific religious groups unified by their ancestry – the population sorting that may begin over the next four years could, with time and if sustained, alter the segregation of gene variants in a way that sets us on a path toward an unstoppable divergence.

Elite scientists predicting emergence of subhuman species based on stoopid Trump voters breeding? What could possibly go wrong with that? Where would we be without elite scientists…