Rod Dreher's Blog, page 537

Disney Gumbo? Oh Hell To The Neaux!

This is so wrong it’s … it’s … well, it’s just another example of how Disney is ruining America. THEY PUT QUINOA AND KALE IN GUMBO! Only people from Hell California would have done such a thing.

As you might imagine, this caused quite a stir in Louisiana.

The video is hilarious. The #GumboStrong movement has petitioned the White House in this matter. Excerpt from the WhiteHouse.gov complaint:

Gumbo is important. More so even than showering after swimming at Holly Beach. Or making sure the antenna is adjusted before the Saints play so your papa doesn’t get all angry at you. It is as important as confession and tastes better than three Hail Marys and an Our Father. Gumbo starts with a roux – it always starts with a roux – this is not debatable. Including tomatoes is allowed, mais, ça c’est fou. But kale and quinoa don’t never go in gumbo! So please stop Disney from slandering this important food’s name.

Happily, this will not have to become a federal issue. Tonight, Disney withdrew the offensive video.

Be sure to watch the video above to the end. It’s really freakin’ funny.

An Abomination Of Desolation

Sometimes, you just stare into the middle distance and tremble. From the BBC:

Scientists say early experiments suggest it may one day be possible to make babies without using eggs.

They have succeeded in creating healthy baby mice by tricking sperm into believing they were fertilising normal eggs.

The findings in Nature Communications, could, in the distant future, mean women can be removed from the baby-making process, say the researchers.

More:

Removing the need for an egg could have a wider impact on society.

Dr Perry said: “One possibility, in the distant future, is that it might be possible that ordinary cells in the body can be combined with a sperm so that an embryo is formed.”

In other words, two men could have a child, with one donating an ordinary cell and the other, sperm.

Or one man could have his own child using his own cells and sperm – with that child being more like a non-identical twin than a clone.

Dr Perry stressed that such scenarios were still “speculative and fanciful” at this stage.

Earlier this year in China, scientists were able to make sperm from stem cells and then fertilise an egg to produce healthy mice.

Dr Perry suggested that combining the two fields of research may eventually do without the need for sperm and eggs altogether.

We know how this movie ends.

We are already well underway in the commodification of human fertility. This just takes it to the next level. If this technology progresses, it is easy to imagine governments in the future manufacturing soldiers from the cells of the strongest and most intelligent males in society. Who will be the mother of these children? The father? (Not that it matters; by the time this technology becomes possible, the West will have deconstructed family and gender to the point where the terms are nearly meaningless.) What if someone harvests a cell from you without your knowledge or consent, and with the help of science uses it to make a copy of you?

This is Mengele-level stuff, in that it treats human life as nothing more than matter to be manipulated by scientists to impose their will. If we are lucky, somebody will find a way to destroy those laboratories. But we won’t be lucky. People will embrace this technology as one giant leap for human freedom and the conquest of nature.

When I tell people that we will get to the point in which Christians cannot in good conscience work in some fields because they cannot collaborate with the raw evil done there, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about.

I know someone, a Christian, who was a medical student at one of the nation’s leading medical schools, and working at one of its top research facilities. She quit following the research track, and shifted to another medical field, because she could not stand the ethos within the labs. She said that nobody gave much thought to the moral and ethical implications of what they were doing. It wasn’t that she saw any experiments that she believed were morally wrong (at least if she did, she didn’t tell me about it). Rather, it was the cutthroat competition for scientific success and grant money, a competition in which having moral scruples — even things as basic as being honest in your research and treating colleagues with respect — were an obstacle to one’s career.

Reading about the mouse embryos, I thought about that friend, and how no doubt the scientists working on this challenge don’t care about the moral meaning of their work. They just want to see if they can accomplish the task.

We know what genocide means: the deliberate mass killing of an entire people. We don’t have a word for the elimination of the concept of humanity, and human dignity, itself.

We will.

UPDATE: I know this post is in all italics. I’ve gone over it online, and there are no open italicised words or phrases. I don’t know why this is happening. I’m trying to find out.

UPDATE.2: Found it. Fixed it. It was in the photo caption.

Front Porch Republic @ Notre Dame

Hey, look at this, from our friends at Front Porch Republic:

Join us on October 8 at the University of Notre Dame (Bond Hall) for our 6th annual meeting. The title is Populism, Power, and Place. We’ve got a fantastic line-up of speakers and we’re going to have a great time.

Program begins at 9:00 and will conclude at 5:00pm.

Panel 1: Promoting Local Economies:

Philip Bess, Elias Crim, Susannah Black

Panel 2: Populism and Place:

Bill Kauffman, Jeff Taylor, Michael Federici

Lunch: Keynote Address: Patrick Deneen

Panel 3: The Benedict Option:

Rod Dreher

Panel 4: Beauty and the Revitalization of Culture:

Jason Peters, Andrew Balio, James Matthew Wilson

You won’t want to miss this one. Register here. Seating is limited, so don’t put it off.

I’ll be talking about stuff from the upcoming Benedict Option book, which you can pre-order here. This will be my second visit to Notre Dame, and this time, I promise to wear pants.

The Necessity Of Trust

David Brooks writes today that the country is buried under an “avalanche of distrust.”  Both presidential candidates are remarkably untrustworthy people, but they didn’t come from nowhere. Public and private trust is plummeting. Excerpt:

The true thing about distrust, in politics and in life generally, is that it is self-destructive. Distrustful people end up isolating themselves, alienating others and corroding their inner natures.

Over the past few decades, the decline in social trust has correlated to an epidemic of loneliness. In 1985, 10 percent of Americans said they had no close friend with whom they could discuss important matters. By 2004, 25 percent had no such friend.

When you refuse to lay yourself before others, others won’t lay themselves before you. An AARP study of Americans aged 45 and up found that 35 percent suffer from chronic loneliness, compared with 20 percent in a similar survey a decade ago. Suicide rates, which closely correlate with loneliness, have been spiking since 1999. The culture of distrust isn’t the only isolating factor, but it plays a role.

The rise of distrust correlates with a decline in community bonds and a surge of unmerited cynicism. Only 31 percent of millennials say there is a great deal of difference between the two political parties. Only 52 percent of adults say they are extremely proud to be Americans, down from 70 percent in 2003.

Reading this put me in mind of the fragmented world that produced Dante Alighieri. His exile in mid-life was the result of betrayal (specifically, by the pope). In the great poem he wrote from that exilic experience, the Divine Comedy, the Dante meditates at length of the importance of vows. Dante (both the poet and his fictional self) comes from a world where almost nobody can trust anybody else. Constant warfare has torn society apart. Urban dwellers lived in constant fear that during the night, a traitor in their midst might open the city gates and let in soldiers of the enemy city. Without trust, life became hell, and the Tuscans made it hell for themselves.

This is why the lowest circles in the Inferno — that is, the part of the pit of Hell closest to the bottom, where Satan dwells — is reserved for Traitors. There are four classes of traitor, the worst being Judecca, named for Judas Iscariot. All the damned punished there are frozen in ice, immovable for all eternity. In Dante’s imaginative scheme, the infernal punishments fit the earthly crime. A traitor lives and moves without loyalty to anything but himself. He is unconstrained by vows or obligations to God, his family, his lord, or anyone. In Hell, he cannot move at all, and has to endure the coldness that was in his heart, forever.

The collapse of social trust in medieval Tuscany had an enormous effect on social and political life. If you go to Florence today, you will notice that many of the oldest buildings look like fortresses. That’s because the wealthiest families of Dante’s day and afterward had to build their homes as towering refuges from attack by other Florentine families.

I wrote the other day in this space about sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “liquid modernity.” It’s his description of the condition we in the West live under, in which cultural change happens so fast that no customs or institutions have time to solidify. Bauman writes that liquid modernity produces people who do not make vows or any kind of lasting connections, because that would impede their movement, and thus their ability to succeed. What makes for a successful person in liquid modernity?

To refuse to be ‘fixed’ one way or the other. Not to get tied to the place. Not to wed one’s life to one vocation only. Not to swear consistency and loyalty to anything and anybody. Not to control the future, but to refuse to mortgage it: to take care that the consequences of the game do not outlive the game itself, and to renounce responsibility for such as do. To forbid the past to bear on the present. In short, to cut the present off at both ends, to sever the present from history, to abolish time in any other form but a flat collection or an arbitrary sequence of present moments; a continuous present. 

Once disassembled and no more a vector, time no longer structures the space. On the ground, there is no more ‘forward’ and ‘backward’; it is just the ability not to stand still that counts. Fitness — the capacity to move swiftly where the action is and be ready to take in experiences as they come — takes precedence over health, that idea of the standard of normalcy and of keeping that standard stable and unscathed. All delay, including ‘delay of gratification,’ loses its meaning: there is no arrow-like time left to measure it.

And so the snag is no longer how to discover, invent, construct, assemble (even buy) an identity, but how to prevent it from sticking. Well constructed and durable identity turns from an asset into a liability. The hub of postmodern life strategy is not identity-building, but avoidance of fixation. [Emphasis mine — RD]

How do you rebuild social trust when the values and structures (economic and cultural) condition people today to behave in ways that make that trust impossible to accumulate? In a culture that sees vows not as pillars of strength but obstacles to self-fulfillment, isn’t chronic suspicion a rational response?

Romper Room For Liberals

‘Once upon a time…’ (NZGMW / Shutterstock.com)

From San Francisco to Park Slope, Brooklyn, comes Drag Queen Story Hour. Excerpt:

A block from where that interaction is the home of the original Drag Queen Story Hour, at the Harvey Milk Memorial Public Library/Eureka Branch, a regular event created by the LGBTQA literary non-profit RADAR Productions to bring together two audiences with a natural affinity for one another: Kids and drag queens. (Both love dress-up and exuberance and confounding boring people’s expectations.)

Now, RADAR Productions is working with the Feminist Press and the Brooklyn Public Library to bring this bedazzled event to kids on the other side of the country. “Drag Queen Story Hour breaks down our most stifling ideas about gender while lifting up play, fierceness, and femininity for all,” said Jennifer Baumgardner, the Feminist Press’s publisher.

If there’s one thing little children need, it’s to have their most stifling ideas about gender broken down. That won’t mess with their heads at all. The writer sat for an interview with this particular story-reading drag queen, Lil Miss Hot Mess. More:

“Drag queens and kids are a natural fit, but also transgressive, duh,” she told me. “It’s the final frontier for drag queens! Kids don’t have the baggage of gender; they’re full of excitement around play and glamour. In San Francisco I was doing a shoot for an ice cream store and there was a little girl watching, just staring at me. I was like a princess or a superhero to her. Kids pick up on the extra bit of fantasy. We were introduced and she was so polite. [She said] ‘How do you doooo?’ as if I were the queen. She was clearly looking for the language to talk to me.”

Lil Miss Hot Mess is Jewish:

Lil Miss Hot Mess said that her feelings about Judaism became somewhat conflicted as she became involved in San Francisco’s Occupy movement, protesting Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. Perhaps, I suggested, her Jewish drag characters were a way to feel more embracing toward her religion. “It’s definitely a way of reconnecting with my Jewish identity,” she allowed.

Because masquerading as a woman is a Jewish thing? I had not heard that.

Perhaps San Francisco and New York can send drag queens as educational missionaries to us in the Deplorable-American community. Many of our children are horribly stifled by our outdated ideas of gender.

The Useful Myth Of Mighty Whitey

Politico has a couple of interesting interviews focusing on the question, “What’s going on with the white working class?”

[Politico‘s Glenn] Thrush: If we’re looking statistically—and who the heck knows what’s really going to happen, but Nate Silver is giving Hillary Clinton around an 80 or 90 percent chance of winning as of today—what becomes of these folks without Trump? How does this manifest itself in the political dialogue? Is this group going to go quietly into the good night?

[Emory University historian Carol] Anderson: No, we are going to be dealing with it after Trump because Trump merely tapped into what was already there. What Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” tapped into was a layer of resentment in what was then the solid Democratic South, as well as the working-class white ethnic enclaves in the North and in the Midwest. It was very targeted. It stirred that pot. It told them that your ills, your stunted economic growth and opportunities, are because of them. And the “them” becomes racialized, and it worked so well that we get to this point where now you’d get a Paul Ryan who realizes that when they talk about “we couldn’t directly go after Trump because we were afraid of turning off his base, of getting his base to turn on us,” that base is what the GOP has been nurturing since 1968.

Thrush continues the questioning in a separate interview with “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance. Excerpt:

Glenn Thrush: Obvious question, but an important one: Why do you think Donald Trump’s tone resonates so much with white working-class people?

J.D. Vance: His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. The no-bullshit tone, the anger …

Thrush: Why don’t Democrats, apart from Bernie Sanders, seem to get it?

Vance: I certainly think a lot of liberals are able to see what these people are going through, but there is this weird obsession—a preoccupation—with the belief that the Trump movement is all about racism. The Trump people are certainly more racist than the average white professional, but it doesn’t strike me that this is the 1950s. There is a certain amount of racial resentment, but it’s paired with economic insecurity, and a willingness to believe Trump and a lot of the things that he says, despite evidence that a lot of it isn’t true. I really worry if this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If he’s couching what he’s talking about in a racial resentment, and progressive elites are saying, “All these people are racist and xenophobic,” people’s attitudes are going to change and they are going to become more racist over time. That’s probably happening here. I actually think that Donald Trump is changing the way people think about other groups of people in a very negative way.

Read the rest of both interviews here.

There’s a lot that can be said about these interviews, but I’ve chosen these two excerpts to make a point. Notice how the Emory historian falls back on the tried-and-true narrative of how the GOP racialized the grievances of whites, and exploited them for political gain (“It told them that your ills, your stunted economic growth and opportunities, are because of them”). And there is no doubt some truth buried beneath all that. J.D. Vance is strong in his book on how poor whites sabotage their own prospects by believing that they are helpless pawns in somebody else’s game. It is not the case that some white guy in Breathitt County who can’t be bothered to show up for work faithfully is poor because a Mexican immigrant has taken his job. That’s on him. That’s the kind of thing Vance is talking about. In his book, Vance talks about how he personally saw poor white welfare cheats ripping off the system, while at the same time denying that they were doing so (and probably thinking that blacks are the real welfare scammers).

However, it strikes me that what Anderson points to is exactly what the Democrats and liberal elites (such as academics) do to black Americans. They point to whites and say to blacks, “Your ills, your stunted economic growth and opportunities, are because of them.” And we can’t deny that there is more than a little truth to that as well, in a historical sense. The problem is the same dynamic that J.D. Vance identifies in poor white communities: it removes any sense of moral agency, of self-responsibility, from the lives of poor black people. It is not the case that a black male who drops out of high school and cannot find reliable work is denied material progress because of white racism. A young black woman cannot have children out of wedlock and expect the road to stability and economic success to be anything but steep. Whites aren’t making her have babies. And so on.

We have this weird thing in American life in which many people, on both the left and the right, seem incapable of thinking in gray terms when it comes to race, class, and economics. It’s either 100 percent the fault of racism, or 100 percent the fault of lazy people who ought to be bootstrapping their way out of poverty. Why can’t both be true to some extent? That there really are structural and historical barriers to blacks (and poor whites) rising, but that individual initiative and individual moral choices (for both blacks and whites) really do matter as well.

And there’s this, discussed by TAC editor Dan McCarthy in his cover story for the magazine about class and current politics:

Sanders has been more in line with his party’s orthodoxy on that issue. But that didn’t save him from being attacked by Clinton backers for having an insufficiently nonwhite base of support. Once again, what might have appeared to be a class conflict—in this case between a democratic socialist and an elite liberal with ties to high finance—could be explained away as really about race.

Race, like religion, is a real factor in how people vote. Its relevance to elite politics, however, is less clear. Something else has to account for why the establishment in both parties almost uniformly favors one approach to war, trade, and immigration, while outsider candidates as dissimilar as Buchanan, Nader, Paul, and Trump, and to a lesser extent Sanders, depart from the consensus.

The insurgents clearly do not represent a single class: they appeal to eclectic interests and groups. The foe they have all faced down, however—the bipartisan establishment—does resemble a class in its striking unity of outlook and interest. So what is this class, effectively the ruling class of the country?

But, as usual, I digress. Here’s a very good Boston Globe story about what it’s like to be white in Norcross, Ga., a community that has undergone tremendous change in a very short time because of immigration. Here’s a section of the piece that resonated with me, because 13 years ago I interviewed people like this woman in Irving, Texas, a Dallas suburb:

Some longtime residents have turned to state and county officials to change zoning and housing laws in a bid to preserve the old ways.

A leader in this effort is Faye McFarland, who cleans homes for a living and keeps a US flag flying near her front door.

The 70-year old recalled living in Germany when her husband was in the Army. None of the Germans catered to her wants and ways then, and she doesn’t see why she’s expected to do so now.

Her main complaint came when a Guatemalan family moved into a tiny ranch house next door. She said she counted 15 people living there. But what really set her off was that the family seemed to be running a siding and roofing business out of the home. About a dozen cars would be parked outside and supplies would be piled up, an eyesore in a residential neighborhood.

She felt like she was living next to a warehouse, and at night there would be work trucks parked on the lawn. Her new neighbors, she said, would simply pay fines for violating the zoning law but didn’t change the way they were living.

“My quality of life was absolutely destroyed with all those folks and all of those vehicles,” McFarland recalled.

She began going to City Council meetings. Armed with photographs and persistence, she’d make her case over and over. “We would put up the pictures and say, ‘This is what I have to live beside,’ ” McFarland said.

The council finally passed an ordinance: Now only up to four cars can be parked on a driveway of a house in Norcross. Additional vehicles need a permit from the city.

Norcross Mayor Bucky Johnson said the ordinance has worked. “We had people parking all over the place,” he said. “We don’t have that situation anymore.”

And McFarland’s neighbors, perhaps tired of her calling various law and code enforcement agencies all the time, packed up and moved out.

“We have fought for this neighborhood,” McFarland says. “We have really had to fight.”

To a lot of people in power — both Republicans and Democrats — people like Faye McFarland are at best and embarrassment and at worst “deplorables.” The Faye McFarlands of the world have judged rightly that the Establishment doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about them. There will not be Emory professors offering theories about why the Democratic Party, academics, and liberals in the media — as well as big-business conservatives — frame the Faye McFarlands as enemies of what is good and right and decent, for the sake of disempowering them.

Bless Annie Linskey of the Boston Globe for simply giving them a voice in a news story. The Washington Post‘s great Stephanie McCrummen does this too, for poor whites on the fringe (remember this piece about Dylann Roof?). I’ve come to anticipate articles written by Mike Cooper, a lawyer and Democrat who lives in small-town North Carolina, and who writes with critical sympathy about the lives of the working-class and poor whites he sees. He has a new piece in US News about how Trump is a false idol for people who are truly suffering. Excerpt:

Trump’s followers are anxiously falling out of the middle-class and can’t afford to retire. Their jobs were destroyed by smartphones and they’re too old to enroll in community college with their kids.

Western civilization went from rewarding their hard work to rendering them useless, so Trump’s Americans mourn the economy they built with their own sweat. Their heart is broken and they feel no sense of honor in the call center or behind the counter of the dollar store. They don’t want welfare. They just want their dignity back.

The Democratic Party cut their cultural connection to these Americans, Republicans took them for granted and it took Washington almost a decade to realize working-class whites were dying from their own despair. It was too late.

Trump promised victories when no other politician seemed to care. But he’s a false idol taking advantage of honest fears.

I agree with this. The heartbreaking thing is that Trump’s not going to do anything for these people. Some of the problems they face are beyond any politician’s ability to fix. Here’s the thing, though: long after Trump has left the scene, they are going to continue being the Establishment’s villains. They wouldn’t put it in these terms, but many of them are aware that liberals in positions of power control public discourse to marginalize their voices, while granting privileges to other groups solely on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality. It’s called “celebrating diversity” when they do it, but called bigotry when these whites do it. This is not news. What is news this political year is that these slurs are starting to lose their power.

Don’t get me wrong: I have a strong aversion to political organizing around race and tribe, given the history of white supremacy in power in this country, and the heady power that comes with a mob mentality. But the identity politics embraced and proclaimed by the Left validates political organizing around race and tribe. And the way liberal and progressive elites tend to demonize everyone to their Right (don’t believe men should use the women’s room? BIGOT!), and attempt to dispossess them, may compel whites to organize that way simply as a matter of self-protection. God help this country if that happens.

By stigmatizing and/or ignoring people like Faye MacDonald, and valorizing others solely on the basis of racial, sexual, and gender identity, the Left has been inadvertently laying the groundwork for something very, very nasty in this country. And the decline of Christianity, especially among the working class, has removed a restraining factor. As Ross Douthat has said, if you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait to see the Post-Religious Right. It’s coming. The fact that Donald Trump defeated the entire GOP establishment to become the Republican Party’s nominee for president shows that it’s already here.

That Emory historian can say that white working-class racism is going to outlast Trump because the Republican party has been stoking it for decades, but she is blind to the role that progressive bigotries play in this process, because if she’s anything like most socially progressive elites in academia, media, business, law, and government, she sees those bigotries as virtues.

UPDATE: Forgive me for those rambling, inchoate comments. Like many of you, I’m struggling to understand what’s happening in US politics, and finding something to dislike and distrust about everything and everybody. I’m glad that a blog is just a writer’s sketchbook, not a place for polished work. For a much more coherent discussion of these themes, read Joshua Rothman’s smart, detailed, favorable New Yorker review of J.D. Vance’s great book. Especially these parts:

Why is hillbilly culture so defensive, insular, and frozen in time? Vance argues that—because no culture exists in a vacuum—hillbillies are only partially to blame. In the course of his journey from Middletown to the Marines to Yale, Vance finds that hillbilly pessimism is, in its toxicity, equalled by the disdain that metropolitan people feel for those they call “rednecks” or “white trash.” The Marine Corps is a genuine American melting pot and, for Vance, a transformative experience. But, at Yale, Vance learns that he’s better off hiding the details of his upbringing. He elides the fact that he was raised mainly by his grandparents (a normal circumstance where he comes from), and begins talking about his “grandmother” and “grandfather” even though, at home, he calls them “Mamaw” and “Papaw.” He braves Whole Foods, learns to make cocktail-party chitchat, and endeavors to keep his voice down in public (restaurant screaming matches are unexceptional among Middletown couples). He is shocked by the extreme and near-universal affluence of his classmates.

White poverty, Vance comes to feel, is a source of special shame: no one at Yale sees dignity in it. Instead, they define themselves in opposition to people like him. One professor says that, in his opinion, Yale Law shouldn’t bother accepting students from non-Ivy League schools, since it’s not in the business of “remedial education.” Vance takes a new friend to Cracker Barrel, one of his family’s favorite restaurants, but the friend can’t enjoy it—to him, it’s just “a greasy public health crisis.” There’s nothing Vance is prouder of than his service in the Marines, and yet his fellow-students routinely express contempt for the military—it never occurs to them that there’s a veteran in their midst. Vance often feels like a class traitor who’s grown “too big for his britches.” At the same time, he’s tempted to give up on the project of socioeconomic ascent. “It’s not just our own communities that reinforce the outsider attitude,” he concludes. “It’s the places and people that upward mobility connects us with.”

And:

It’s through these back doors of memory and family history that “Hillbilly Elegy” arrives at its broadest subject: our hopelessly politicized approach to thinking about poverty. At least since the Moynihan Report, in 1965, Americans have tended to answer the question “Why are people poor?” by choosing one of two responses: they can either point to economic forces (globalization, immigration) or blame cultural factors (decaying families, lack of “grit”). These seem like two social-science theories about poverty—two hypotheses, which might be tested empirically—but, in practice, they are more like political fairy tales. As Kelefa Sanneh wrote earlier this year, the choice between these two explanations has long been racialized. Working-class whites are said to be poor because of outsourcing; inner-city blacks are imagined to be holding themselves back with hip-hop. The implicit theory is that culture comes from within, and so can be controlled by individuals and communities, whereas economic structures exert pressures from without, and so are beyond the control of those they affect.

This theory is useful to politicians, because political ideologies function by identifying some people as powerless and others as powerful. The truth, though, is that the “culture vs. economics” dyad is largely a fantasy. We are neither prisoners of our economic circumstances nor lords of our cultures, able to reshape them at will. It would be more accurate to say that cultural and economic forces act, with entwined and equal power, on and through all of us—and that we all have an ability, limited but real, to harness or resist them.

Rothman concludes his reading of “Hillbilly Elegy” by saying:

As individuals, we must stop thinking about American poverty in an imaginary way; we must abandon the terms of the argument we’ve been having—terms designed to harness our feelings of blame and resentment for political ends, and to make us feel either falsely blameless or absurdly self-determining.

Please do read the whole thing. It’s worth it. And if you haven’t yet read “Hillbilly Elegy,” what are you waiting for?

Governing The Deplorables

On the day she is said to have been diagnosed with “pneumonia,” Mrs. Clinton delivered a notorious speech in which she denounced “xenophobes,” among others, as fit for a “basket of deplorables.” People who are for open borders and globalism have a habit of dismissing their opponents as xenophobes — that is, people who fear (and therefore loathe) foreigners.

A reader has sent in an essay by Georgetown professor Jason Brennan, in which he argues that we can avoid stupid decisions like the Brexit vote if we institute an “epistocracy,” system through which smart people who know things rule. Excerpt:

In an epistocracy, political power is to some degree apportioned according to knowledge. An epistocracy might retain the major institutions we see in republican democracy, such as parties, mass elections, constitutional review, and the like. But in an epistocracy, not everyone has equal basic political power. An epistocracy might grant some people additional voting power, or might restrict the right to vote only to those that could pass a very basic test of political knowledge.

A literacy test as a requirement of holding the franchise? How could that possibly go wrong? More:

Any such system will be subject to abuse, and will suffer from significant government failures. But that’s true of democracy too. The interesting question is whether epistocracy, warts and all, would perform better than democracy, warts and all.

All across the West, we’re seeing the rise of angry, resentful, nationalist, xenophobic and racist movements, movements made up mostly of low-information voters. Perhaps it’s time to put aside the childish and magical theory that democracy is intrinsically just, and start asking the serious question of whether there are better alternatives. The stakes are high.

During the Cold War, some of the smartest people in the West believed the most monstrous things. In 1982, the leftist intellectual Susan Sontag said this at a gathering of the left in New York City to show support for the Solidarity trade union:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

Any reader of Tolkien understands that simple Sam Gamgee is more important to the good of the world than the brilliant Saruman — and why. Knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing.

Jason Brennan further articulated his epistocratic views in a Chronicle of Higher Education essay that’s paywalled. Here’s an excerpt:

Voters are dumb because democracy makes them dumb. Democracy spreads power among a vast number of people; everyone gets an equal but tiny share — expressed through our vote — so small that none of us have an incentive to use our power wisely. The chance that an individual vote will make any difference in a national election is on par with the odds of winning Powerball. Voters have every incentive to remain ignorant about politics and to indulge their worst biases.

We cannot “fix” democratic ignorance, because we cannot change the incentives built into

democracy. But perhaps we can mitigate the problem by changing our political system. What if instead of trying to make voters better informed and more reasonable, we tried to screen out the least reasonable and most misinformed voters? What if instead of a democracy, we had an epistocracy?

Brennan is not wrong to criticize the flaws in democracy. Giving people the vote is no guarantee that they will use it wisely. But restricting the vote to the cognitive elite is no solution. I would rather be ruled by the first thousand people through the gates at the Daytona 500 than the people in that room Friday night with Hillary Clinton and Barbra Streisand. Guess who holds more power already in our society? That’s right: the cognitive elite. That’s how it works in a meritocracy. Prof. Brennan’s epistocracy would only give them more — for our own good.

Anybody stupid enough to think that rule by experts, by “the best and the brightest,” would make America a better place ought to be compelled to watch Errol Morris’s great 2003 documentary The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons From The Life Of Robert S. McNamara. And it’s less impressive but still interesting sequel, of sorts, The Unknown Known, about Donald Rumsfeld and the Iraq War. McNamara was tragic; Rumsfeld is simply smug. Neither man was stupid, nor were the people they surrounded themselves with, who took the nation, and people far less intelligent than they, into two foolish and unwinnable wars.

The reader who sent me the link to the Brennan essay is a professor at a major university. He writes:

Sad that an academic would trot out this tired old elitist b.s. at a time when we ought to be demonstrating some sort of ecumenical concern for our society rather than further distancing ourselves from any and all who don’t share our “enlightened” views. But I guess I’m not surprised.

I am no fan of racism, sexism, and the litany of deplorable thoughtcrimes that Mrs. Clinton mentioned on Friday. But I am genuinely frightened of powerful people like those gathered in that room who get to define what constitutes racism and all the rest, and use that as a way to destroy heretics who deviate from their puritanical gospel.

The denunciation of “xenophobia” by globalist elites is part of the broader project of what Roger Scruton calls “oikophobia,” or fear of the familiar. Rusty Reno elaborates on that point:

Today’s emphasis on multiculturalism and “diversity” participates in this vision of the future, one in which differences are overcome and borders are irrelevant. It’s species of utopianism, to be sure, but it has a powerful grip on the moral imagination of the West.

In this view, national interest is an impediment to progress. Concerns about identity are, by definition, forms of ethnocentrism bordering on xenophobia. This is why the upsurge of populist concern about immigration—which I take to be a synecdoche for wide-ranging anxieties about the long-term significance of many social changes—are so vigorously denounced by mainstream politicians, journalists, and political commentators. It’s also why Hillary Clinton doesn’t isolate Trump by employing a more moderate and sensible nationalist rhetoric. The same goes from Angela Merkel. She is almost certain to persevere, in order to remain true to what she believes will best serve the common good, not just of Germany, but of the whole world.

Globalization has a unifying dimension, which we rightly applaud. At the same time, though, globalization is associated with economic and cultural changes that are dissolving inherited forms of solidarity—the nation foremost, but local communities, as well, and even the family. This dissolution encourages an atomistic individualism, which in turn makes all of us more vulnerable to domination and control.

By my reading of the signs of the times, the dangers of dissolved solidarity in the West are far more dire than our present upsurges of ethnocentrism and nationalism. It is atomized societies that are susceptible to demagogues—not societies that enjoy strong social bonds and organic communal solidarity. Islamic extremism thrives where traditional Muslim societies are disintegrated by the pressures of globalization.

And so does Trumpism. As distasteful and even as dangerous as I find Trump, Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” comment to her Manhattan contributors reminds me that she is in some ways even more distasteful and dangerous, because she speaks for the Establishment, and all its collective power. If you are any kind of social or cultural conservative, or immigration restrictionist, and you think Hillary was not talking about you, but only the rough people, you had better think twice. She speaks for those who like to think of themselves as epistocrats, but who are really cognitive-elite oligarchs.

Lying Hillary’s Deplorable Weekend

Hillary Clinton has seen better weekends. Friday there was the “basket of deplorables” remark at the LGBT/Barbra Streisand fundraiser in NYC (can’t get more liberal elite than that), and then it was her whatever-it-was getting into the van yesterday. A couple of friends e-mailed me separately to say how freaky and/or amusing it is to watch liberals on TV and on social media deny that what anybody can plainly see happened, happened. That is, we all saw that Hillary Clinton had a strange, scary health episode in which she could not stand, and went stiff before collapsing forward into her van. It went from “no big deal” to “you are sexist for saying it’s a big deal” to “she’s got pneumonia, let’s move on.”

That woman might have pneumonia, but there is something much more serious wrong with her. Who ya gonna believe, spinning liberals, or your lyin’ eyes?

David P. Goldman, in a column addressing her obnoxious “deplorables” comment, writes:

Americans are by and large forgiving people. They’ll forgive Bill for cavorting with Monica “I did not have sex with that woman” Lewinsky in the Oval Office and imposing himself on any number of unwilling females. They might even forgive Hillary for losing tens of thousands of compromising emails on an illegal private server and then repeatedly lying about it in a way that insults the deplorable intelligence of the average voter. But the one thing you can’t do is spit on them and tell them it’s raining. They’ll never forgive you for that. They’re hurting, and they rankle at candidates who rub their faces in it.

Mitt Romney’s campaign was unsalvageable after the famous 2012 “47% remark,” by which he simply meant that the 47% of American workers whose income falls below the threshold for federal taxes would be indifferent to his tax cut proposals. The trouble is that these workers pay a great deal of taxes–to Social Security, Medicare, and in most cases to local governments through sales taxes and assessments. After a covert video of his remarks at a private fundraiser made the rounds, Romney spent the rest of the campaign with the equivalent of an advertising blimp over his head emblazoned with the words: “I represent the economic elite.” Clinton has done the same thing with the cultural elite.

There are racists and homophobes in the Trump camp, to be sure. Everybody’s got to be somewhere. Trump is no Puritan, however, and really couldn’t care less what sort of sex people have, or who uses what bathroom (as he made clear), or who marries whom. He built a new country club in Palm Beach two decades ago because the old ones excluded blacks and Jews. He’s no racist. He’s an obnoxious, vulgar, salesman who plays politics like a reality show. I’ve made clear that I will vote for him, not because he was my choice in the Republican field (that was Sen. Cruz), but because I believe that rule of law is a precondition for a free society. If the Clintons get a free pass for influence-peddling on the multi-hundred-million-dollar scale and for covering up illegal use of private communications for government documents, the rule of law is a joke in the United States. Even if Trump were a worse president than Clinton–which is probably not the case–I would vote for him, on this ground alone.

She really has done that with the cultural elite. The media should question her closely about what, exactly, qualifies someone for membership in her litany of Deplorables (racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, etc.). Where does she draw the line between decent people who hold opinions she considers wrong on issues related to these groups, and bigots? The truth, I believe, is that there is no line for her, as there is no line for many on the cultural left. The trend in leftist cultural politics is to demonize and no-platform anyone on the cultural right. You will have noticed in Hillary’s remarks, the Trump supporters she gave a pass to are those who don’t share his cultural views, but those who plan to vote for him because they are economically depressed. Me, I have been appalled by some of the things Donald Trump has said about members of these groups Hillary has singled out (e.g., I thought his attack on Khizr Khan was offensive), and heaven knows there are some genuinely nasty people in Trump’s camp. But I am certain that Hillary Clinton cannot distinguish between ordinary cultural conservatives and raging bigots.

Those “basket of deplorables” remarks struck a resonant chord within social and cultural conservatives, precisely because it confirms the evidence we have been seeing with our own eyes for a long time: that liberal elites see no enemies to the cultural left, and nothing but enemies to the cultural right. If Hillary is elected president, she will use the powers of the state to go after us and our institutions hammer and tongs.

Her fainting on Sunday also strikes a resonant chord, for reasons David Goldman cites in his first paragraph. The Clintons lie. That’s what they do. Their pattern is:

1. It didn’t happen.

2. OK, it happened, but it wasn’t a big deal, and we’ve got to get back to work doing the business of the American people.

3. Only haters say it’s a big deal.

We saw the same pattern emerge from the Clinton camp over the course of Sunday afternoon, regarding Hillary’s serious health episode. Presumably we are now not supposed to be concerned about whether or not she is leveling with the American people about her health situation because if you start asking those questions, Trump will win. Therefore, we must not ask those questions, and demonize anyone who does. You see the same thing in institutions with serious wrongdoing to hide, for example:

1. Priests did not molest those children.

2. OK, priests did molest those children, but it was only a few, and it shouldn’t distract from all the good work of the Church going on right now.

3. Only anti-Catholic bigots say it’s a big deal.

Apply this pattern to any similar situation involving a public figure or an institution, and you’ll see the same thing.

Regarding Hillary, it’s worth revisiting the late Christopher Hitchens’s 2008 case against Hillary, in her contest with Barack Obama. Excerpt:

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy “experience”—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim “worked” well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton’s memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.

Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: “It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.”

Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy. Yet isn’t it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn’t some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her “greatness” (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband’s uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?

What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time.

At some point, probably very soon, we are going to find out that Mrs. Clinton is much sicker than she has disclosed, and that she has known this for quite some time. We might get it from the Clinton camp, but we will probably get it from a Wikileaks document dump, the one Julian Assange claims is coming this fall. The stolen trove of State Department documents Wikileaks released earlier this year had within them a particular memo that Jake Sullivan, one of Hillary’s top advisers, sent to her as Secretary of State. It was only noted in late August by a few right-wing websites, most of them fringe-y, at the time, but it’s worth revisiting in light of Sunday’s events.

The State Department document (see the whole thing here) reports the results Clinton adviser Jacob Sullivan found from his research on the drug Provigil, a controlled drug used to treat symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s. Basically, it keeps you awake without being addictive.

Why would Mrs. Clinton have Jake Sullivan, her deputy chief of staff and a top foreign policy expert, research this drug? It is certainly possible that the Secretary of State was exhausted from her busy schedule, and needed a little help, especially when flying back and forth on overseas trips. But it is reasonable to ask if a Secretary of State who was so tired she needed a drug to keep going has the stamina to be president under any circumstances. More important, it is reasonable to ask, in light of Sunday’s health scare, if there is something more serious wrong with her. Does she have Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, or some other condition like it?

No matter what the Clinton spin machine says, these questions won’t go away. And when they are finally answered, I believe we are going to be confronted by the same old thing about the Clintons: the lies. Damon Linker says the campaign’s lies about Hillary’s health are a serious self-inflicted wound. He says that if you take the current Clinton campaign narrative about her health — that she was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, but continued on with her campaign schedule — that still makes the campaign deceptive:

So the campaign chose to lie. The potential reward was considerable: namely, an absence of politically damaging news stories about Clinton’s medical condition. But the risk was enormous — and it’s blown up in their faces. Because now the story isn’t just that Clinton is ill. It’s that, once again, she’s untrustworthy — and this time about her own health.

That’s why the announcement that she has pneumonia will only fuel more speculation about Clinton’s physical condition, with potentially no end in sight. The world saw her collapse, and 90 minutes later, the candidate looked America in the eye and proclaimed that she was feeling great. Except now we know that she wasn’t.

What if she doesn’t recover quickly?

If she appears weak and frail for more than a few days? Then, yes, she’ll face perfectly reasonable questions about whether she’s physically up to serving as president. But worse, she’ll confront lingering doubts about what, precisely, is ailing her. “It’s pneumonia,” the campaign will proclaim over and over again. To which a skeptical America will justifiably reply, “Yes, we can tell that you’d like us to think so. But we have no reason to trust that’s true.”

Political trust is a fragile thing. Once it’s gone, it’s exceedingly difficult to get back — and without it, there’s no basis on which to dismiss conspiracy theories that even normally level-headed observers will begin, for perfectly understandable reasons, to entertain.

Until this weekend, I thought Clinton health rumors were just right-wing conspiracy mongering. That confidence collapsed when Mrs. Clinton did, on the streets of New York. The story now has two narrative lines: 1) How sick is Hillary, really?, and 2) Why did she lie about it?

The Clintons lie to protect their power. Clinton partisans will tell themselves, and the rest of America, that whatever happened on Sunday, and whatever series of tales the Clinton campaign has been telling to manage the story, we have to push it all aside to keep Donald Trump from winning. Feminists did the same thing back in the 1990s with Bill Clinton’s abusive, exploitive relationships with women. But not everybody who dislikes Trump hates him so much that they are willing to overlook Clinton’s lies, especially if they are not about things that happened in the past, as with her husband’s lies in the 1990s, but about things that weigh on her ability to perform as president.

Plus, Bill Clinton had a lot of charisma with which he shielded himself. Hillary has none. People may admire her, but they do not love her. That matters.

Hillary’s lies about her health and her “deplorables” remarks do not make Trump a better person, or a better candidate. But they do make him a slightly more plausible one with some voters than he was going into the weekend. When an election is as close as this one, that kind of thing matters.

And, given the horrible-and-growing-more-by-the-day choice facing voters this fall, there’s this coulda, woulda, shoulda, in light of the elderly Democratic nominee collapsing on the street:

Imagine a 44 year-old GOP candidate today

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) September 12, 2016

Something Is Very Wrong Here

A new angle. That poor woman. Look at her, gone stiff. What on earth is wrong with her? Does pneumonia do that?

I believe she is much sicker than they’ve let on. I hope I’m wrong. This video is unnerving.

Life Before 9/11

My oldest child, Matthew, was not quite two years old on 9/11. He has no memory of the event, though it happened before our very eyes, including his. We were living in Brooklyn then, at the waterfront, with a clear view of New York harbor. We did not see either plane hit, but were inside our apartment when the second plane struck the south tower. We heard people on the street screaming just before the impact, heard the horrible sound, and felt our building shake from the concussion. I was a columnist for the New York Post then, and ran on foot out of the apartment and across the Brooklyn Bridge, hoping to get into lower Manhattan to cover the story. I stopped several times on the bridge to interview dazed people, some of them bloody, staggering out of the Wall Street district and across the bridge to safety.

It never once occurred to me that either tower would fall down. In fact, I ran into one of my Post colleagues, a reporter who wasn’t due to come to work till that afternoon, out riding her bike. We stood on the bridge together trying to make sense of what was happening. I told her I was going to get as close as I could.

“Don’t,” she said. “Those things are coming down.”

I looked at her like she had lost her mind, and told her no, that wasn’t going to happen.

Less than a minute later, the south tower fell. The sound was like a roaring waterfall. I ended up going back to Brooklyn. Julie, with baby Matthew in her arms, shrieked when I walked in, with a light coating of dust on me. She had not been able to reach me on my mobile phone (cell service collapsed when the north tower did), and did not know if I was alive or dead.

Driving to New Orleans on Friday for the concert, Matt, now approaching 17, asked me what life was like before 9/11. I had never thought about that. It was kind of like asking what life was like before the Internet. The Internet has become so much a part of daily life that it’s hard to recall when it wasn’t here.

I told Matt that I think the biggest change is that the country is far more anxious now than it was before. We had just come off the 1990s, a decade in which the Cold War ended, the economy was booming, and America stood astride the world as the lone hyperpower. That all ended on 9/11. The shock of the event is hard to convey to a young man who has grown up knowing war and global terrorism as part of his daily life (though thank God, not as a local phenomenon, at least not for him). I remember that fall of 2001, sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Manhattan with a friend, both of us talking soberly about what we would do with our families if terrorists set off a dirty bomb in Midtown. We were dead serious, and it was by no means a crazy conversation to have in those days. Once you’ve seen the unthinkable, you know that anything can happen.

I don’t have those thoughts anymore, and haven’t for a long time. But you never quite feel secure in the world after you’ve lived through something like that, at least not if you saw it up close (“it” being not only the event, but the aftermath; I remember the burning sensation in my nasal cavity that lasted for weeks, and was caused by something in the smoke from the pile at Ground Zero. Anyway, I told Matt that 9/11 showed us that we were not invulnerable after all. Then the Iraq War showed us that we were not a hyperpower capable of ordering the world according to our will. These were hard lessons to learn as Americans. And then, in 2008, came the economic crash, which revealed how unstable our economy was.

That terrible day inaugurated an era of great anxiety from which we have not yet emerged. I was thinking this morning about how strained the social fabric of America seems to be today, and thought back not to 9/11/01, but a year later. On that date, I walked from Brooklyn with a friend to the one-year memorial service at Ground Zero. Only dignitaries and family members of the dead were allowed onto the site; the rest of us gathered outside, along the perimeter of the hole, which was surrounded by fences. Eerily, at on or very close to 8:45 a.m., a year to the moment from when the first plane hit the Twin Towers complex, a strong, steady 45-mph wind appeared, blowing from the same direction as that plane. I remember the direction, because I observed before the wind started that had I been standing on that very spot a year ago, the plane would have entered the north tower directly above my head.

The wind seemingly came out of nowhere, and it started just as the ceremony began at Ground Zero. It’s the kind of wind that you associate with a storm front moving in. But there was no storm. The skies were clear. It blew with a freakish ferocity, all throughout the Ground Zero event, in which people present read aloud the names of all the dead. I had become separated somehow from my friend, and ended up a couple of hours later inside Trinity church on Wall Street, where the Archbishop of Canterbury led a memorial prayer service. The wind was still howling outside when I went into the church, just as it had been constantly since just before 9 that morning. At some point during the service, we heard the bells ring outside the church, at Ground Zero, signaling the end of the names ceremony. It wasn’t long before the Anglican service ended too. When I exited the church, the winds had stopped. I can’t say for sure that the gale ended as soon as the last name was read, bringing the Ground Zero ritual to a close, but it definitely ended after the Trinity service began.

Like I said, it was eerie.

Later that day, back home in Brooklyn, I received an e-mail from my friend, who lived at that time in my neighborhood. When she got home from Ground Zero, she noticed that a small antique American flag she had framed under glass and hanging on the wall of her office had torn in two, right down the middle. She found it unnerving, and invited me over to see it. She swore that it had never been like that, and to the best of her reckoning, had somehow come apart that morning, during the ceremony.

Understand: this antique American flag was inside her apartment, framed under glass, and hanging on her wall. Something tore it. True, it might have come apart earlier, and my friend only noticed it that day, but I don’t think so. She looked at that flag every single day. On this day, September 11, 2002, it was torn.

It unsettled us both, because it seemed so blatantly ominous. Over time, I forgot about it. This morning, on 9/11/16, it came to mind again. I think it was actually an omen, but even if it is just an accidental symbol, I think it reveals a lot about how America is different today than it was before September 11, 2001.

Anyway, I put the question to you: How is America different today than it was before 9/11?