Rod Dreher's Blog, page 530

Where Trump Voters Come From

From the current issue of The New Yorker, a humor piece by Douglas McGrath called “The Pences Visit Manhattan”. Excerpt:

Governor Mike Pence was having a romantic dinner with the love of his life, Mrs. Mike Pence, at the Red Lobster in Times Square. The Governor knew that as Vice-President he would have to attend foreign banquets, so he and Mrs. Pence were trying to broaden their palates. Luckily, they had already found a couple of dishes at the Red Lobster which they liked. Governor Pence was saying a blessing over their chicken wings and mozzarella cheese sticks when the first three notes of “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” chimed on his phone, signalling a text. As he read it, Mrs. Pence popped a sizzling cheese stick into her mouth and blew out little puffs of steam. “Look at me!” she said gaily. “I’m a steamboat!”

But the Governor didn’t laugh. Mrs. Pence took his hand and said, “What’s wrong, helpmeet?”

“I’ve been called to Trump Tower. It’s an emergency.”

From the same issue of the magazine, a reported piece by Larissa McFarquhar titled “In The Heart Of Trump Country,” about how West Virginia, which used to be heavily Democratic, became the most pro-Trump state in the Union:

Like most West Virginians, Rick Abraham was angry with the President for hastening the decline of the coal industry with what he regarded as excessive environmental regulation. Like most Trump voters, he considered Obamacare a scourge, and since he selects insurance policies for Mine Lifeline’s forty-odd employees he could argue in detail that nearly everyone in his company was worse off than before.

And yet in other ways he is not the Appalachian Trump voter as many people elsewhere imagine him—ignorant, racist, appalled by the idea of a female President or a black President, suspicious and frightened of immigrants and Muslims, with a threatened job or no job at all, addicted to OxyContin. Those voters exist, but the political thinking of many others in Trump country is more ambivalent and complicated and non-inevitable than is apparent from signs hung on Main Street or carried at rallies. The perception that people in West Virginia are voting for Trump because they are racist or ignorant is significant, though, since it’s one of the reasons they’re voting for Trump in the first place. “When people talk about Trump, they talk about how they don’t like the establishment or the élites,” Charles Keeney, a history professor at Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College, in Logan County, says. “When they say that, they mean who they see on television—they envision people in New York City making fun of them and calling them stupid. Every time you leave the state, you get it—someone will say, Oh, you’re from West Virginia, do you date your cousin? Wow, you have shoes, wow you have teeth, are you sure you’re from West Virginia? So when they see that the media élite is driven out of their mind at the success of Donald Trump it makes them want to root for him. It’s like giving the middle finger to the rest of the country.”

Holy J.D. Vance, Batman. They really don’t get it, do they? Their contempt. They really do believe they’re punching up, when in fact they’re punching down.

If Trump wins this election, the only comfort I will take from the victory is knowing that Douglas McGrath and the editors who find that snotty condescension towards middle Americans funny will be wailing and gnashing their teeth.

A Left-Wing Trump

Ross Douthat has a good piece up today talking about how Democrats shouldn’t be too smug about the GOP’s problems with Donald Trump. They might be facing their own version someday. Excerpts:

Trumpism represents the conquest of the still relatively staid world of politics by tabloid seaminess and the reality-television carnival. But that seaminess, that carnival, is hardly limited by ideology or partisan affiliation. Democratic voters swim in the same cultural sea as the “Apprentice”-watching Republicans who helped make Trump the G.O.P. nominee, and most of the culture’s major celebrities — from C-listers like Machado all the way up to Hollywood royalty — will be pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton this November.

Douthat says right now it would be hard for such a figure to arise in the Democratic Party, in part because the party elite have not lost the confidence of the base, as the GOP leadership did.

But what’s true today might not be true forever. The differences between the Democratic Party’s younger, poorer, browner base and its older, whiter, richer and more moderate leadership are a potentially unstable equilibrium. The anger coursing through left-wing protest politics could find a cruder, more nakedly demagogic avatar than Bernie Sanders. A Hillary Clinton administration could supply various betrayals and compromises or foul up in some disastrous way, encouraging a sense that the professional class that dominates liberalism’s upper reaches needs to give way to a revived (and larger) version of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition — a “real American future” analogue to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” appeals.

If Trump has thrived by imitating Europe’s right-wing nationalists, a Trumpism of the left would imitate the left-wing populists of Latin America and Asia — the Chavismo of Alicia Machado’s native Venezuela, or the Trumpian socialism presently being served up by the ranting, trigger-happy president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte.

Read the whole thing.

It seems that it was only yesterday when Democrats lamented the messiness of their party, versus the GOP, which by contrast seemed so disciplined, and its voters so willing to accept the judgment of the party’s leadership class. Last year at this time, a lot of GOP watchers assumed that Jeb Bush was going to be the nominee because he was so representative of the GOP establishment, and the base usually goes along with the establishment’s favorite. Most of the conservative elite thought Trump was a passing phenomenon. And now look. Whatever happens on Election Day, the Republican Party won’t be the same, and who knows? It may not be at all. In the storm of recriminations that would follow the party losing the White House to Hillary Clinton, whether or not the Trump and anti-Trump factions can live together in the same party is an open question.

As to the future of a Democratic Trump, it’s useful to consider the case of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. Corbyn was a marginal figure in Labour politics, and was only persuaded to put his hat in the ring for party leadership at the last minute. He gained control of the party because of voting rules that opened up the party election to a wider group of people. Young people, galvanized in part by social media, flocked to the party to vote for Corbyn, who, as we know, won a stunning upset victory over the candidates of the Labour establishment.

To be sure, Jeremy Corbyn no Trumpian demagogue. The point is that his unlikely campaign fired up a passionate segment of the Labour base, and it propelled him to power. Nobody in Labour saw him coming. Is it really so hard to imagine that a Democrat may emerge one day outside of the party apparatus, and rides an unconventional campaign to primary victory? After all, the party cannot control its own voters. And as Trump has shown, a candidate who knows how to work the media has a strong advantage. If the Democrats produced a billionaire (a Silicon Valley type, say) who ran an anti-Establishment campaign on left-wing populist themes, and made a point of routinely saying outrageous things on the campaign trail, you would see the media doing the same thing they did for Trump.

I don’t believe that a putative left-wing Trump would campaign on economic demagoguery. He would be the left-wing mirror image of Trump on racial and cultural issues. That is, he would use identity politics to fire up the Democratic base. If you want to see what a left-wing Trump would be like, look at the campus left. It is already indoctrinated in open anti-white racism (for example), approved by university administrators and promoted by certain faculty. We know that the administrative class at universities are fairly gutless to stand up to the promoters of this stuff. The left in this country is normalizing it. And the SJWs have something Democratic regulars don’t: passion.

Given the fast-changing demographics in this country, the day may well be coming when a Democratic outsider candidate goes full SJW in his presidential bid, powering his campaign in part by an unwillingness to respect the norms of American political discourse. Depending on the structure of the race, he need not win outright majorities of primary voters, not at first. Like Trump, he would only need to beat everybody else in the field, until his opponents melted away. Like Trump’s Republican opponents, his Democratic rivals will likely be unwilling to take him on directly, hoping and thinking that when he ultimately fizzles out, they will be able to scoop up his highly motivated voters. We see how well that worked out for Ted Cruz.

Trump’s campaign has to a large degree been about white identity politics. He didn’t come from nowhere, though it seemed like it to the media and conservative elites. The ground had been prepared for him for a long time by conservative media, especially talk radio, which normalized a politics of passion, and by popular culture in general — the same popular culture that leftists and liberals grow up in, as Douthat observes. Though the left doesn’t have talk radio, identity politics (black, Latino, gay, feminist, etc.) are becoming ever more mainstream in liberal discourse. The only thing that keeps them from taking over Democratic politics are the same taboos that kept them from dominating Republican politics. It only took one very skilled media performer to kick them over, and there wasn’t a damn thing the GOP gatekeepers could do to stop it.

It shouldn’t be hard for white conservative readers to imagine how they would react if that kind of Democratic demagogue were elected president. Put yourself in the position of liberal readers of all races, and imagine their reaction to a Trump presidency. Same thing. You think California’s not going to be restive if Trump is elected? We are in for some very bad years in this country, I fear, and like the former Yugoslavia, we are going to learn the downside of diversity in a country where people’s identities are not based in shared ideas, but in tribalism. If Democrats think their party is immune to that sort of thing, they’re dreaming.

‘God Is Dead, And We (Boomers) Have Killed Him’

A reader sends in this WSJ book review by D.G. Hart, of veteran religion journalist Kenneth Woodward’s latest book, Getting Religion, tracing the evolution of American religion in the postwar era. Excerpts:

In the 1950s, he writes, “Catholics inhabited a parallel culture that, by virtue of their numbers, ethnic diversity, wide geographical distribution, and complex of institutions mirrored the outside ‘public’ culture yet was manifestly different.” As Mr. Woodward sees it, Catholics were surrounded by a membrane that intermediated between the worlds of American society and the church. The “powerful sense of community” nurtured within this membrane has virtually disappeared. Now Americans “journey toward adulthood” not through relationships formed by families, neighbors, teachers, pastors and community organizations but through the effort of discovering “an inwardly derived, original, and authentic self,” one autonomous from “institutionally structured relationships.”

How this change happened is the subject of the book, and Mr. Woodward’s reporting put him on the front lines of the transformation.

More:

Throughout all these accounts the contrast between 1950s religious life and the subsequent decades abides. The baby boomers were looking for a religion that “had nothing to do with ancient texts, gender wars, or institutions”; they wanted instead “the experience of their selves as sacred.” Since most of Mr. Woodward’s subjects encountered faith as he did, in an institutionally rich environment, the author relies on recent sociological data to show where boomer religion has led. The rise of the “nones,” those young Americans without a religious identity, indicates that millennials “do not readily identify with any institutions—political, civic, academic, or religious.” When these young Americans do check a religion box, they inevitably affirm what the sociologist Christian Smith has called “moralistic, therapeutic deism.” This is an ethic that says “what is right for me may not be right for you but no one has the right to judge anyone else.”

I’d like to read that Woodward book. The title of this blog post refers to the well-known line from Nietzsche, put into the mouth of a madman. Well, maybe not as well-known as it ought to be. Most people have heard the phrase “God is dead” attributed to Nietzsche, who certainly believed it. The complete line — “…and we have killed him” — is necessary to understand what Nietzsche was getting at. It certainly sounds like it could apply to the Baby Boomers.

I don’t say this as another shopworn anti-Boomer rant. We’ve all heard it before. What this passage from Hart’s review brings to mind are the posts the Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner published about the “Anthropocene” age. From the first one:

In light of such a “bigger picture,” I believe that the recent debate in our churches over same-sex marriage has been a distraction from a more fundamental challenge Christians must face. Not that same-sex marriage is unimportant, or should not be opposed. But it is hardly an anti-evangelical Rubicon. At worst, same-sex marriage is a late-stage sign of a far deeper, wider, and long-rooted set of cultural and social changes that have completely reoriented human existence away from its prior and universal understanding of purpose. These changes have engulfed almost all Christians in the world, largely because they are global changes, systemic in every respect, complex, and voracious.

Aspects of these changes have, in themselves, little moral character. Others are intrinsically repugnant. Taken together, however, they constitute an attempt at reinventing what it means to be human. They thereby profoundly obscure our true human character as creatures of God; indeed, they have obscured from our eyes God himself. Since Christians are also bound up in these vast socio-cultural changes, our calling to clarify the truth in their face has been made very difficult indeed: in speaking the truth, we are criticizing ourselves. We are all caught up in the dynamics of the anti-human in major and profound ways, whatever stand we take on individual issues. There is no safe place in the world or in our churches within which to be a Christian. It is a new epoch.

Yes. As I’ve been saying for some time now, same-sex marriage is not a cause of anything, but the clearest indicator of a profound change that has already occurred. More:

The generational divide on these matters is not a surprise: younger Christians mostly accept same-sex marriage. After all, the young are fully formed in the culture their parents have raised them in. And it remains the case that most traditional Christians simply live and accept the alternative views of their offspring. Hypocrisy is not the issue here – although it is sometimes that. Traditional Christians are mostly living with a false sense of purpose, as if saying “no” to the Anthropocene in this one place — sex — will turn the tide. It won’t.

There is no safe place. “The whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian,” St. Jerome once wrote about the strange ways that the Church in the 4th century almost wholly lost its way on a fundamental truth about Jesus. We are now, arguably, in a worse place: we have woken up — or have we? — to find the whole world (read Church) become idolators.

This is a very, very important point about the Benedict Option. If you’re one of those people who think I’m promoting some sort of escapist utopia, hear me clearly: Radner is right — there is no safe place. What I propose with the Benedict Option is a set of practices that will strengthen Christians and their communities for this trial now upon us. That’s the best we can hope for: the strength of endurance.

Radner’s other two posts in this series are here and here. I do not agree with all his conclusions, but I strongly recommend reading them.

The Real War On Christmas

Evgeny Vorobyev/Shutterstock

The last week in September, I was in a Rite-Aid drugstore, and was shocked to see Christmas decorations on the shelves. I’ve gotten used to seeing Christmas stuff out in October now, but the holiday commercial creep has now made it to September. I don’t know about you, but I find it incredibly dispiriting.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, our little town didn’t put up its Christmas decorations until the day after Thanksgiving. We lived for that day, us kids, eager for the visible signs that we had entered the holiday season. Last night, my mom told me that when she was a little girl growing up in Woodville, Miss., the merchants downtown would cover their storefront display windows with brown paper on the night before Thanksgiving, and either on that Friday (or maybe Saturday, can’t recall), they would take the paper down to reveal their Christmas displays. Mama said that all the kids couldn’t wait to go downtown and see the signs of Christmas. I can well imagine it, can’t you?

Now there’s nothing all that special about signs of Christmas coming, thanks to the stores. If you’ve been looking at Christmas decorations in the stores since a month before Halloween, by the time you get to mid-December, you’re worn out with it. At least I am. There oughta be a law.

‘The Whip Of God’

Here’s a rather pungent jeremiad from a Russian Orthodox priest, saying that the Islamic invasion is God’s judgment on godless Europe. Brace yourself, this is strong stuff:

For all the mistakes and errors the migrants’ Muslim faith might have, by far not all of what they believe is false. What is false can only be seen in comparison with the Gospels. But in comparison with the liberal catechesis and moral situation of the modern West, we see the falseness of the latter. The Muslim looks preferable. The Muslim believes in the future life, in heaven and hell. This is something unseen for him until the time of its reality. The European laughs everywhere at such “archaism”. For the Muslim the body is what will resurrect on the Last Day. The body must not be defiled while alive or burned after death. For the European it is the other way around: Debauchery during one’s lifetime is the norm, and after death—throw it into the fire with no thought for the resurrection. The Muslim does not value his own biological life above all, and he especially doesn’t value the biological life of his ideological opponent. Above all for him are the laws of the Most High—as they have been explained to him. Therefore he is not afraid to die, or to kill. The post-Christian European knows no other values besides biological existence. Meeting face to face with a culture that looks differently at death is threatening and unbearable for the post-Christian European. So he loses the battle halfway down the road to this meeting.

Well, and the further it goes the worse it gets. Next come the issues of gender, childlessness, abortions, nudist beaches, and shameless women—everything that evokes hatred and religious wrath in the migrants. Yes, they came to a foreign country. They are “newcomers”. But forget it. Enough. They’ve already arrived. “It is forbidden to sunbathe without a bathing suit in front of other people,” they say as a noisy crowd of them arrives at the nudist beach with firearms. Now we have an argument going on with a deaf person. The European raises his eyebrow indignantly and says, “How dare you try to teach us? After all, we gave you shelter.” At which Yusif or Ali reply unperturbed, “You are doing what is forbidden. You have no faith, no shame, no conscience. You didn’t simply invite us here as guests. First you bombed our cities. Just wait and see—we will teach you yet to honor God.” And no matter how sorry we may feel for Kurt or Fritz, we have to recognize some truth in Yusif and Ali’s words.

More:

The day is not far off when Arabs and Africans will want to live not in refugee camps and migration centers but in the apartments of the current owners. They will want to live like the formers owners lived, and not near them but in their place. Of course, in order to uphold the European standard of living there has to be knowledge and labor. Electricians, doctors, engineers, pilots and so on are needed. Hundreds of professions and succession of order and government are needed. That is why the future of a tattered Europe is dark. The majority of migrants will not care to study and work. The majority wants to take what is not theirs by force, to trample underfoot the miniature, man-made paradise as Attila the Hun trampled and plundered Rome. They have little interest in what will come later. They are only the axe in the hand of the wielder, and an axe is not accustomed to thinking. But that will come later. For now the migrants are the same “whip of God” for Europe as the barbarians were for the Eternal City. Even those immigrants who have gone corrupt in the European manner (for they do get corrupted in Europe) will not become tolerant. They will remain as religiously motivated foreigners, mystically hating the godless whites who are fattened and paralyzed.

In Europe a right flank is possible and expected. Various ultras and fascist youths, boiling racism, is being born in places such as soccer fields. But this will not save the situation in and of itself. This will be agony. The situation can only be cured if Europe returns to its ancient Christian religiousness. Victory has to take place in the spirit. But this only antidote has to be recognized as impossible. Europe does not have the strength for a Christian renaissance.

Read the whole thing. The Russian is onto something. I hope he’s wrong about Europe’s spiritual weakness. I was just thinking about Saint Genevieve of Paris, and how she went out and faced Attila the Hun when the men of Paris had fled — and turned him away from the city. Nothing is impossible.

Jason Stanley Epilogue

Just had to share this with you. After accusing another philosopher of child murder for criticizing a paper of his, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University took down his Facebook page, it appears. You may be thinking, “That’s crazy! No Yale philosophy professor could possibly behave that way in public.” Well, yes, he did. Clearly, Yale has a problem child on its hands:

A Lesson From Colombia’s Vote?

A reader writes:

I’m a Colombian living in the States who is an avid reader of your blog!

Yesterday Colombia had a plebiscite regarding the peace agreement with the Marxist guerrillas and, incredibly, the No won…

It’s is hard to explain all the reasons why this happened (even those who opposed the plebiscite “knew” it was going to be approved)…

Political leaders in some areas did not push their constituents into voting (they didn’t have anything to lose). The Caribbean coast, for example, is known for its corruption and how local leaders literally buy votes. However this time, there was not money for that…

The agreement was giving unprecedented concessions to the guerrillas: a given number of seats in the congress, and no jail time for their leaders (even those guilty of human right violations). Most of us want the peace in our country but believe that justice and jail time for those guilty of terrible crimes…

Interestingly I find an analogy with the ongoing situation with the presidential elections here in the States. Everywhere around the social media [in Colombia] you can read the outcry of those who voted yes.The ones who voted no stayed pretty much closeted until yesterday, and are now being called warriors and peace haters, bigots and so on (by the way the peace agreements had their fare share of LGBT ideology, so many conservatives also voted no for this reason).

Colombia right now is in the limbo, and maybe in five weeks America will be too…

Just like Brexit. The NYT analyzes why the No voters won this shocking upset. Excerpt:

The narrow defeat of the deal shocked Latin America, where the end of Colombia’s 52-year war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, had seemed all but guaranteed.

Months of polling had predicted a wide margin of victory for the agreement, creating such a sense of confidence that the government had already held a public signing in front of world leaders before the vote took place.

Now, Colombia’s humbled leaders are asking: What happened?

Lulled by the polls, the government failed to drive Colombians to the ballot box, resulting in anemic turnout in places that favored the deal. President Juan Manuel Santos had staked his legacy on achieving peace, but his approval ratings were so low that his endorsement may have actually hurt the deal’s chances.

Then came Hurricane Matthew, which drenched the northern coasts supportive of the peace deal, leading many to stay home.

But for many others, the reason the deal failed was an emotional one. The agreement had always been a tug of war between peace and justice, and in the end, the demand for justice won.

“Sometimes, it even seemed like they knew they got off easy,” Diana Hurtado, 37, a dog walker in the capital, Bogotá, said of the rebels. “When you see photos from Havana, they are laughing.”

The Times says that No voters could not accept that there would be such a widespread amnesty for guerrillas who had terrorized so many for so long.

Now, do you think that the Colombian reader might well have a point about Trump underpolling? Me, if I were going to vote for Trump, I wouldn’t tell a soul, not even my wife, and for sure not a pollster. And, Trump voters do seem a lot more motivated than Hillary voters.

Somebody sent me via social media this set of charts from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. It’s the Obama years. Though it’s easy to see the argument for voting against Trump, it’s a lot harder to see the argument for staying the Democratic course. Maybe the Colombian reader is on to something…

Charts from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Kukla Clan: The Poem

The inimitable Erin Manning has written a poem about fellatio-commanding Georgetown philosophy perfesser Rebecca Kukla and her allies, and the contretemps over their potty-mouthed condemnation of an eminent Christian philosopher and his defenders. In an earlier post, I referred to that lot as the “Kukla Clan”. For readers who slept in that day in lit class, Erin’s verse is a riff on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”:

Kukla Clan

In Georgetown U did Kukla Clan

A state of hissy-fit decree:

Where Angst, its sacred lifeblood, ran

Through screenshots shared from man to man

Down to a Twitter feed.

So vice now blooms in fertile ground

Where scat-tongued scholars gathered round;

And there were fearful Facebook messages

With whispers of right-winged conspiracy;

And here the f-word tossed to shock: it fails,

Revealing minds in second infancy.

“But oh! Our foes are not aware they’re slanted

“Down through the ages giving privilege cover!

“Those savage haters! Depressing yet defended

“As always with anonymous donors vaunted

“By chortling alt-right gremlin Limbaugh-lovers!”

So from this chasm, with ceaseless leftist seething,

As if philosophers, with vomit heaving,

A mighty fount of profane speech burst forth:

Amid whose childish spittle-flecked weird curse

Strange rudeness pelted like pinging email

Or bouncing pop-up ads for psychic kale:

And mid these belching tweets captured forever

It threw up Angst, the hissy-fit’s fair river.

Five hours on Facebook, then with pixeled motion

Through blog and site the messy river ran,

Then reached the screenshots shared from man to man,

And sank in shame, and rose to cause commotion;

And ‘mid this tumult Kukla heard from far

Some right-wing voices promising a war!

The murmur of the fit of hissiness

Echoed faintly on the screens;

Where was seen the dawn of prissiness

From the font of cursing adult-teens.

It was a spectacle of weird advice,

The hissy-fitters saying, “Now, be nice!”

A writer with a Macbook Air

In a vision once I saw:

He was a crunchy sort of chap

And on his Macbook Air he tapped

Wearing the keys quite bare.

Could I recall completely

His blog posts short and long

I would relate concretely,

And with outrage right or wrong

I would those screenshots share:

Forward: Forward! Screeds of vice!

And all who clicked would see them there,

And some would laugh, and some would glare

To see professors rudely swear!

Shrug your shoulders once or twice,

And roll your eyes or shake your head

For they on tenure-teats have fed,

And raised the fools’ tuition price.

Erin Manning is a genius. Here’s a link to her blog. 

Rallying The Kukla Clan

You’ll recall last week’s kerfuffle over the talk that esteemed Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne gave at a recent meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers. To my knowledge, the full text of Prof. Swinburne’s lecture has not been made public, but a person who was present at that talk sent me an outline of Swinburne’s lecture. In it, Swinburne explored the rationality (or lack thereof) of particular divine commands in the Bible, including the prohibition against divorce, sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, and other acts. Reportedly, Swinburne opined that the Biblical prohibition on homosexual acts is rational, because homosexuality is a “disability” that should be “cured,” if possible. Obviously that is not a popular view today, but it is well within the bounds of the Christian moral tradition, and it should have surprised exactly no one at the SCP that a Christian philosopher took that point of view (especially given the broader context of his talk about rationality and divine commands).

Some people present for the talk melted down when confronted by Swinburne’s view. The president of the SCP, Michael Rea, apologized for all the butthurt caused by the discussion of Christian ideas in a gathering of Christian philosophers. But when word of the controversy got out to the broader philosophy community, some prominent philosophers reacted with anger — at Swinburne’s defenders, and those who were angry that the SCP president had apologized for Swinburne’s speech. Among the critics was Georgetown’s Rebecca Kukla:

So Swinburne, one of the world’s most prominent philosophers, is guilty of “hate” and “privilege,” as are his defenders — this, according to Kukla, a Georgetown philosopher who is also senior researcher at the Jesuit university’s Kennedy School of Ethics.

Well, Kukla went on to post the following comment — now deleted — on the Facebook page of Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, under a remark in which he denounced Swinburne and his defenders this: “F–k you, assholes.” Said the editor-in-chief of the Kennedy Institute’s ethics journal:

I apologize to readers for offense caused by the coarse language here, but it’s important to know exactly what passes for critical discourse among academic progressives near the top of the philosophy profession — especially given that the statement has disappeared down the memory hole.

Over the weekend, a conservative blog that comments on Georgetown events criticized Kukla’s remarks and expressed doubt that the university would do a thing about them. Excerpt:

We also bring it up because we suspect the Georgetown administration probably won’t do anything either since the intolerant hater in question is on the left side of the culture wars, and we all know universities like Georgetown are supposed to provide people like “xir” safe spaces and sanctuary while keeping out and maintaining hostility towards those on the right.

This sad affair is just another reminder that when it comes to the Oppression Olympics, you can more or less do anything, no matter how rude or inappropriate, so long as your target is someone considered more “privileged,” which is not defined as actual privilege, but simply having the wrong skin color, sex, sexual orientation, or religion, which at least in this case, means being white, male, heterosexual, and Christian.

Now, if the shoe were on the other foot and it was a Christian straight male employee telling, say, a queer anti-Catholic female to go ahead and suck his big giant cock, well, we have no doubt President Jack DeGioia would immediately make a formal statement condemning the man; the head of Campus Ministry would send everyone a letter firmly stating “THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE!”; CSE and CAPS would mobilize and offer “support” to any students traumatized by the whole incident; the Philosophy department and Kennedy Institute of Ethics would open a joint investigation looking into the matter; GU Pride members would rally in Red Square and accuse publications like TGA of creating a hateful climate in which hate crimes occur even when they don’t; GUSA would pass a condemnatory resolution and hold a moment of silence; both The Hoya and The Voice would write editorials calling for the professor to be suspended if not removed from campus; and ultimately, after a few University-sponsored symposiums and teach-ins and a lot of public hand-wringing, there would be a reallocation of funds, perhaps in the form of new identity group mafia programs or yet another administrator, because tuition isn’t high enough already.

Oh yeah, and the administration would fire the employee.

Well, yes. Just imagine a male Georgetown professor saying words like that in public to people he regarded as his enemies. Bear in mind that Kukla directed her profane comments to Christian philosophers who either defend what the Catholic Church teaches is true about homosexuality, or at least defend the right of a Christian philosopher to embrace that position.

Today, Kukla writes on Facebook, rallying her academic clan:

Oh, bull. Here is what she objected to (original post on the Rightly Considered philosophy blog here):

Kukla’s ex post facto rationalization for “suck my queer cock” is hilariously weak. More from Kukla’s Facebook post today:

Well, look, nobody should direct vulgar comments to Prof. Kukla, or to anybody else. But she’s trying to evade scrutiny for some incredibly ugly remarks. Exactly nobody claimed that profanity was a greater threat to civil discourse than homophobia, whatever that is. The Rightly Considered philosophy bloggers were simply pointing out that those defending Swinburne’s talk and/or the validity of discussing the issue philosophically were not hateful or uncivil, but the anti-Swinburne people were engaging in vicious, inciteful rhetoric. Kukla piled on with her “queer cock” remark. Kukla is now trying to claim that extreme rhetoric in the offense against homophobia is no vice. Or in other words, she’s a bigot, but for the Left.

What’s interesting about this is that this is how certain philosophers talk publicly about Christians and conservatives in general, even their colleagues. And, in Kukla’s case, her rage against other philosophers who hold views she considers homophobic is so unhinged that she has no moral or ethical scruples preventing her from speaking so hatefully and profanely in public, to other philosophers. If I were a Christian, Orthodox Jew, or Muslim in her classes, I would not say a word in defense of my belief about human sexuality, for fear of being cursed at by the professor, humiliated in front of the class, and out of concern for my grade. What must students like that taking her classes be thinking now? Is Georgetown University a place where conservative students, or Christian conservative students, can feel free to express their opinions in class without being assaulted verbally by their professors (as distinct from being challenged, which is what the classroom experience is supposed to do) or suffering a bad grade because their professor hates people like them? How can Georgetown guarantee that?

Why is this important? Because the Left uses the concept of “safe spaces” to bully others and to police campus discourse. That’s what they’re doing here — and they got caught in an especially foul-mouthed, crude attempt at it. Rebecca Kukla posted her remarks in public, with an intention to provoke. Mission accomplished. Now that people have been provoked, and are calling attention to her vile insult, she’s trying to backtrack, and claim that she’s being harassed by a “far-right” group.

It gets better. Yale philosopher Jason “F–k You, Assholes” Stanley is also attempting to defend himself by claiming that he’s the victim of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. From his comments on Kukla’s (public) Facebook page:

That’s pretty funny. It’s as if they are so far in their own bubble that they don’t understand that when they say things in public, on the Internet, other people can read them, and may even have a negative reaction. There’s no conspiracy here, darlings. I got onto the story because a reader of my blog knows I write a good bit about the attack on free speech and freedom of inquiry on campus, and thought I would like to know about the Swinburne incident. This blog has a very large readership. And there’s this thing called Twitter that spreads news and commentary. Is it really the case that the obnoxious and unprofessional behavior of Stanley, Kukla, and others is so clearly right to them that they can only imagine widespread public objection to it as guided by a conspiracy? What loons!

One thing that ticks critics off is the double standard on campuses. The Georgetown Academy people are absolutely right. If any professor defending a conservative cause or belief had made the same remark as Kukla did, that person would be fighting for his job, and the campus would be coming apart. I don’t think Kukla should have to fight for her job (though surely some professional discipline is in order), but I do think campus administrators and academic liberals should stop and think about the environment they have created on campuses and in their profession. When grown men and women, holders of PhDs and prestigious professorships in philosophy, respond to ideas they don’t like by saying things like “suck my queer cock,” and get away with it, something has gone very bad in the academy.

Recall Jonathan Haidt’s address to the American Psychological Association this summer, in which he talked about how polarization is tearing the country apart. In his talk, he mentions his own discipline, psychology, and how very far to the left it is. From my post on Haidt’s talk:

Haidt says we don’t need “equality” — that is, an equal number of conservatives and liberals in the academy. We just need to have diversity enough for people to be challenged in their viewpoints, so an academic community can flourish according to its nature. But this is not what we have. According to the research Haidt presents, in 1996, liberals in the academy outnumbered conservatives 2:1. Today, it’s 5:1 — and the conservatives are concentrated in engineering and other technical fields. Says Haidt: “In the core areas of the university — in the humanities and social sciences —  it’s 10 to 1 and 40 to 1.”

The Right has left the university faculties, he said — and a lot of that is because they got tired of the “hostile climate and discrimination”

“People who are not on the left … are often in the closet,” says Haidt. “They can’t speak up. They can’t criticize. They hear somebody say something, they believe it’s false, but they can’t speak up and say why they believe it’s false. And that is a breakdown in our science.”

Until they repent (my word, not his), university professors will continue to be part of the problem, not the solution, says Haidt. He ends by calling on his colleagues to “get our hearts in order.” To stop being moralistic hypocrites. To be humble. To be more forgiving, and more open to hearing what their opponents have to say. Says Haidt, “If we want to change things, we need to do it more from the perspective of love, not of hate.”

A thought for the Jason Stanleys and Rebecca Kuklas of the world. I am not a Trump supporter, but I sympathize to a large extent with people who are, and I wish I could bring myself to vote for him. For a lot of people, voting for Trump is their way of answering the likes of a degenerate Georgetown professor who taunts her ideological enemies by telling them to “suck my queer cock.”

UPDATE: As many readers point out in the comments section (thanks!), First Things has republished Prof. Swinburne’s paper. I am going to comment on the paper separately.

By the way, I think “Kukla Clan” is a great name for a mob of politically correct academics.

UPDATE.2: Actually, I won’t write a separate post on Swinburne’s paper. Having just read it, it strikes me as thoroughly dry and unremarkable. I don’t mean that as a criticism; I mean it’s just normal philosophizing, it seems to me, and unquestionably within the Christian tradition. As Swinburne says in his section analyzing homosexuality, nowhere before the 20th century is there any Christian writing approving of homosexual sex. I’m going to leave all this as a comment on the Kukla Clan post so you readers can see exactly what kind of ordinary philosophizing gets condemned with screeching public profanity and denunciation.

The paper begins:

As we all know, traditional Christian teaching on many moral issues, but in particular on sex, family, and life is regarded by all non-religious and some religious believers as totally and evidently mistaken. Of the issues in this area, I shall take time to consider and only very briefly the issues of adultery, divorce, fornication, homosexual sexual acts, contraception, abortion, suicide and euthanasia, all which have been declared morally wrong by traditional Christian morality; and also the traditional teaching that the husband is head of the family, and so wife and children have an obligation to obey him. My main concern will be with the general principles for determining whether and why traditional Christian teaching on these issues is correct, rather than with the particular solutions to each issue. In this paper I seek to analyse the general structure of any plausible defence of traditional views on these issues. All arguments begin from premises, and my arguments in this paper begin from many premises, some of them much disputed. They are however all premises which can themselves be defended by arguments quite independent of the issues of the present paper; and I have myself tried to defend all of them at some time or other.

Having established and explained his premises, Swinburne (who is an Orthodox Christian convert) says, “In my view only adultery, late abortion, suicide and so euthanasia are intrinsically wrong.” This makes him more liberal than official, magisterial Roman Catholic teaching, which holds that homosexual desire is “intrinsically disordered.” Just wanted to make that clear.

His remarks on homosexuality, which caused the poor Kukla Clan to swoon and take to the bed, are here:

I come next to homosexual sexual acts ( between consenting adults). It has been traditional to assume that the Bible and subsequent Christian tradition has condemned such acts. I’m going to assume, despite the effects of many to show that the Bible and various theologians all meant something different by (what seems to many of us to be) apparent condemnations of such acts, that some such passages as I Corinthians 6:9-10 and Romans 1:24-27 and the continuing weight of subsequent tradition does condemn such acts. Where, after all, do we ever find before the twentieth century any explicit approval of such acts by any theologian orthodox in other respects?

So I pass to consider what reason God would have for prohibiting such acts; and I suggest that the same kind of consideration applies to the prohibition of homosexual acts as  to the prohibition of divorce or extra-marital intercourse. Having homosexual orientation is a disability – for a homosexual cannot beget children through a loving act with a person to whom they have a unique lifelong commitment. Of course some homosexuals do not want to beget children, but the behaviour of other homosexuals indicates that they clearly do; and a disability is a disability whether or not the disabled person minds about it. (If they didn’t have the disability, they might realize that it is good for them that they don’t have it.)

It might one day be possible for some complicated operation to combine the genetic material from two sperms or two eggs so as to produce a fertilized egg, though there are very considerable difficulties to be overcome before this could be achieved. But if it could be achieved, then two lesbians could only produce another female. And two gay men would need an egg from another female into which their genetic material could be inserted, and the womb of a surrogate mother in which the fertilized egg could grow into a baby. Then the whole process would mean that the resulting baby would have three or four ‘semiparents’, some of whom might not have any subsequent role in nurturing them. And, as I read the much disputed evidence available on line about whether children nurtured by homosexual parents flourish as well as other children, the balance of that evidence seems to me to indicate that children whose nurturing parents are also their male and female biological parents in a happy marriage flourish better than all other children. And so that is the kind of reproduction and the kind of marriage which we should be encouraging; and those who cannot provide it for their children have a disability. The possible development of this kind of genetic engineering would not alter this fact.

Disabilities should be prevented. The evidence seems to me to indicate clearly that genes and environment (nature and nurture) both play a role in determining sexual orientation; and also that this orientation is sometimes to a considerable extent reversible10. So if there was a general recognition in society of an obligation to abstain from homosexual acts, that would prevent homosexual behaviour being presented as an option for young people of equal value to the 13 heterosexual one which makes possible procreative marriage. That would deter the young from wondering whether they are really homosexual when previously it would not have occurred to them, in consequence experimenting with homosexual sexual acts, getting accustomed to such behaviour and so developing a homosexual orientation. Such a climate of opinion that homosexual acts are wrong,would encourage those who have begun to develop such an orientation to go no further; and it would encourage research into how the orientation can be cured. Medicine has made great strides in recent years. Diseases of mind or body hitherto believed incurable have proved curable; it would be odd if sexual orientation was the only incurable condition. But it looks as if for many homosexuals, but probably not for all, their condition is now incurable; and sympathy, not censure, must be our first reaction – as it must be for all those who find themselves in any situation not of their own choice where their sexual longings cannot be satisfied in a happy marriage.

Yet if older and incurable homosexuals abstained from homosexual acts that would have a great influence on young and curable ones; and the older ones would be doing a great service to others, and one which would help to make them themselves saints. But of course, if I’m mistaken in supposing that the climate of clear, yet sympathetic opinion would make any difference to the sexual orientation of any humans who would otherwise acquire a homosexual orientation, we would need to look for some other reason why God would prohibit homosexual sexual acts, or to look again at the meaning of biblical texts and supposedly authoritative church tradition. But I stress that inability to discover a reason why God might have prohibited one kind of act would hardly count much against the reliability of the Church’s moral tradition that God had prohibited acts of this kind- although inability to discover any reasons why God might have prohibited any of the kinds of acts which I have been discussing would, I think, count significantly against the reliability of the Church’s general moral tradition.

Swinburne ends the paper on a note of humility:

I should add in conclusion that if I am right in claiming that most of the moral obligations which I have been considering are obligations only because God has commanded them, there is no point in rebuking non-Christians for not conforming to these obligations; the only way to get them to conform is to get them to become Christians, and then they may begin to appreciate arguments for conforming to them.

In other words, he’s saying that he might be wrong about this stuff, but even if he’s right, these arguments don’t apply to non-Christians.

Clearly, the man is Triple Hitler.

Read the whole paper.  I am not philosophically sophisticated enough to evaluate the soundness of Swinburne’s paper, so I can’t say for sure how much of it I agree with. But this I know: if it is considered an outrageous moral offense to philosophize in this key, then there is no place for orthodox Christians in academic philosophy any more than there was a place for Thomists at Moscow State University during the Soviet years.

Saul Alinsky, A Gift From America?

Over the last five years, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has funneled $5 million to the small Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, through George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. That seemed strange to me. I thought USAID was all about spending money to fight poverty and disease abroad. Shows you what I know. USAID does fight poverty and disease, but it considers promoting Western-style liberal democracy to be part of that. From USAID’s website:

Similarly, our cross-cutting efforts in promoting democracy, rights and good governance, empowering women and girls, advancing prosperity, building resilient societies, and mitigating climate change are all essential to ending poverty.

Resilient, democratic societies don’t simply maintain stability: they are essential to sustaining development progress. Resilient, democratic societies feature broadbased economic growth; healthy, well-nourished, and educated populations; and environmental sustainability. They embrace not only elections, but also legitimate, inclusive, and accountable institutions that effectively deliver services to all of their people, respect and promote human rights, and strive to advance freedom, human dignity and development. They have the ability to manage conflict, mitigate the impact of natural disasters, and forestall crisis that otherwise roll back development gains. These societies are equipped to ensure that pathways out of poverty are sustained.

That sounds … okay. I mean, which American wouldn’t want to see all nations develop civil society institutions, and to see nations advance in freedom, human dignity, and development? Ah, but what do those words really mean here? As I wrote last week, USAID is using taxpayer dollars to hire mercenaries to fight the culture war in Macedonia, on behalf of Western liberals.

That culture war also includes the publication and dissemination of propaganda. In 2014, Soros’s Macedonian foundation translated and published Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals, and promoted it with an event in Skopje, the nation’s capital, livestreamed around the nation on the Internet. Look:

 

 

You’ve probably heard about Rules For Radicals, given that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were influenced by it. But you probably haven’t read it. It’s a tactical manual of subversion, a book of direct advice for radical street organizers who want to change things. It included “rules” like:

“Whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.”

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

With that last line, Alinsky means that whenever you can, identify a person as your enemy, and make them responsible for whatever policy or practice you seek to change. By personalizing it, you expose the network of that person’s defenders within the system, and cause polarization within it, weakening it. Alinsky explains that you cannot be fair to the target, not if you want to win.

You can read the entire text of Rules For Radicals here.

I don’t have clear evidence that USAID money went into translating, publishing, and disseminating this manual for subversion within Macedonia. I’m trying to confirm that. Still, the Soros organization in the country is unapologetically doing this, with the clear intention of undermining Macedonian values and institutions that conflict with its left-wing secular worldview. National Review‘s Jay Nordlinger went to Macedonia last year, and wrote about it:

Macedonian conservatives say that we have picked sides in the politics of their country: the SDSM or “post-Communist” side. They say this has happened during the presidency of Barack Obama. We have tilted sharply and shamefully to the left.

Others say, Nonsense. The United States does not choose sides — its only side is democracy. Americans are an honest broker in Macedonia, holding everyone to account. The Right should stop complaining and scapegoating, and get its own house in order.

Be that as it may, Macedonian conservatives are wounded — pained — I can tell you. They are distressed at American relations with Macedonia in the Age of Obama. “We’re the pro-American, pro-Western party!” they say. “The Left has always been with Moscow. And you’re driving us conservatives into the arms of the Russians!”

You should read Polish dissident Ryszard Legutko to understand how the West is treating the postcommunist East. What USAID is engaged in here is blatant cultural imperialism, and, with its partnership with the Soros people, a flood-the-zone attempt to change the political and social reality in Macedonia, under the guise of spreading democracy and aiding a developing nation. We like development, so long as these countries develop to become more like us secular liberal Westerners.

US taxpayer dollars are going to undermine traditional religious and moral values in Macedonia, and to support a left-wing philanthropy spreading radical propaganda to teach Macedonian citizens how to overthrow the traditions and institutions of their society. Amazing.