Rod Dreher's Blog, page 559

Woman’s Work, Second Class?

Christianity Today managing editor Katelyn Beaty thinks God wants women working outside the home, and no, being a stay-at-home mom doesn’t count:

“I’m wanting to tell wives and mothers that there is so much inherent goodness in the call to work and that we needn’t pit certain types of roles against each other,” Beaty said. “There are ways to be a devoted wife and mother and a devoted CEO. In the church, we need to make space for women who feel called to both at the same time.”

She’s 31, no kids, and has never been married. More:

“All women are called to have influence—cultural influence outside of the private sphere of the home,” Beaty said. “It wouldn’t necessarily have to be a career track, but certainly all Christians, including all Christian women, are called to have cultural influence outside the home.”

This begs a question: What about stay-at-home moms? While Beaty said she wants to affirm the value of the labor of motherhood, she considers it a separate category. While she isn’t willing to call full-time mothering “sinful,” she encourages women with children to assess their talents and put those to use outside of their households.

“When you talk about scales of influence or scales of societal influence, a woman who is staying at home with [her] children isn’t going to have as much influence on the direction of culture,” Beaty said. “We can talk about motherhood as a specific type of calling, but I’m not ready to professionalize it.”

Read the whole thing.

Well, I probably should just sit back and watch Erin Manning handle this one. But as the husband of a stay-at-home mom who homeschools our kids and manages our family’s business, I will say with as much restraint as I can manage that what Katelyn Beaty doesn’t know about motherhood, family life, and what matters is a lot.

Look, I agree with her that the workplace ought to be more friendly to working moms. And it is definitely the case that not all women are cut out to be homeschoolers, or stay-at-home moms. What I strongly object to is the idea that a woman whose work is solely in the home is somehow a second-class worker, because her work doesn’t “influence the direction of the culture.”

Really? Who says? And besides, what kind of value system holds “influencing the direction of the culture” as more important than raising, nurturing, and forming the hearts, minds, and souls of one’s children? It’s not sentimentality when I say that my wife has a more important job than I do. I don’t mean to put my job down. She couldn’t do what she does with the kids if I didn’t make enough money on my own to support us. Most people don’t have that kind of privilege, and we are grateful for it. We work as a team with the mission of raising our children. One flesh, as they say.

Any good that I’ve done “influencing the direction of the culture” is in large part thanks to what my own mother and father gave me. Daddy was a health inspector, and Mama drove a school bus. They raised a journalist and a teacher. If Ruthie were still here, I know she would credit the raising we had at home with the good she was able to do in the classroom. My mother did more to affect the culture by the way she brought us up than she did by driving a school bus, for heaven’s sake.

What a weird metric for judging the worth of a woman’s vocation, or a man’s vocation, for that matter: “influencing the direction of the culture.” Who thinks like that? Beaty and I are lucky in that as journalists, we have more cultural influence than many people, but the hidden bias in her statement is that people who have minimal cultural influence — electricians, Wal-mart checkout clerks, lawn care guys — are somehow less valuable to the Kingdom because they are in vocations that lack cultural impact.

I wonder if this is an ecclesiology thing. I see us all connected in a web of purpose, usually hidden from ourselves. I get so many nice e-mails from people almost every day thanking me for what my work has meant to them in their daily lives. I’m so grateful for that, and it makes me think about how my work would not be possible if not for a constellation of people — first of all my wife, but also my pastor, my friends, many others — who do the same thing for me. Cultural impact? Whose work do you think matters more in the sight of God: the culturally-impactful Kim Kardashian’s, or the anonymous man who cleans the floors at a nearby college after coming home from his days job, having supper, and putting his kids to bed — this, so he can support his boys?

(That man — Amos Pierce — raised a son who became a famous and enormously talented actor. Such was his cultural impact, even though he worked in a department store by day, and scrubbed floors at night.)

What a trite and blinkered way to measure the worth of a woman’s labor. I’m pretty sure that my views on marriage and work are more egalitarian than Owen Strachan’s, but I agree with this remark he made to Jonathan Merritt, who wrote The Atlantic piece on Beaty:

What shapes culture? People shape culture. How are people themselves shaped? They are shaped at least in part by mothers. If you want to influence culture in a very serious way in the future, one of the best things you can do is build the world’s first institution, the natural family, and launch children, who love God and neighbor.

Amen. And, I would add to fathers, don’t sacrifice your family for your career. This is something I’ve got to do better on in my life. But think about it: which is more God-honoring — to be a CEO, or to have a much lesser job in the eyes of the world, but to be there for your kids in a way you couldn’t be if you were the CEO?

One of the big lessons of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is the hidden worth of people who do the job God gave them to give, no matter how small in the eyes of the world. I knew that there was nothing at all wrong with being a small-town teacher, but what I didn’t know until after my sister had died, and I started to people whose lives she touched and changed, what a powerful influence for the good she was. We just never know. St. Benedict didn’t set out to change the world. He just wanted to get to a place where he could be still and serve out his calling. And the little book he wrote, and the movement that arose from it, ended up saving Europe, pretty much.

Again: you never know.

Our kids are getting older, and all three will be starting classes this fall in a classical Christian school that works on the hybrid classroom/homeschool model. I’m proud to say that my wife will be teaching classes there this fall. She’s very good at this — she did it in Philly — and I’m thrilled that she will once again be able to share her gifts with others, and that we are at a place in the life of our family in which she is able to do this.

But boy, does it chap my backside to think about how extremely hard my wife worked to educate all our kids, especially our older son, who has had a world of special-needs challenges that even a Harvard Medical School physician said probably would never be overcome. She — and our son — proved him wrong, and are proving him wrong every damn day. This didn’t just happen; aside from paying the bills, I had very little to do with it. It was her. It was her tireless, active love for that kid, day in and day out, and having to take joy in one small victory amid every five large defeats. It was her resilience, and determination. I’m getting tears in my eyes now thinking about it, and I’m sorry, but I cannot be sanguine when a 31-year-old Millennial woman who has never raised a child assigns second-class status to what Julie and mothers like her have done and do every day, just because they don’t draw a paycheck, don’t have a byline, don’t have a business card, and don’t have followers on Twitter.

Having said that, I like reading Katelyn Beaty’s journalism, and my guess is that she hasn’t thought this issue through. And it is surely true that there are insufferable women (and men) who automatically look down on career women, without taking into consideration that not every woman is called to be a wife, a mother, or a stay-at-home wife and mom. Let us consider too that women who stay at home but who don’t homeschool may well serve their communities in ways that are not easily quantifiable. Case in point: you know who makes the Walker Percy Weekend happen? Stay-at-home moms, mostly, who have time and energy to give back to their community through volunteering for the public good.

Anyway, sorry. Emotional moment there. This comes on an afternoon in which I am manically scrambling to finish a book by deadline and to prepare for teaching writing workshops next week, which means I’ve had to offload the sudden search for housing for our family to Julie, now in Baton Rouge looking, as if she didn’t have enough to do with having to get the family packed by month’s end. If that Benedict Option book has any cultural impact, I want you to know right here and right now that its production has been made possible by the tireless efforts of a hard-working stay-at-home wife whose name does not appear on the cover of any of my books, but whose books they are too.

Now, over to you, Erin Manning…

UPDATE: A mutual friend of mine and Katelyn Beaty’s writes to say that the book is more complex than it may seem from this piece:

I have read Katelyn’s book and she spells out the meaning of cultural impact more there. I think the kind of education work (and community work) Julie does and that the Walker Percy SAHMs do is exactly the kind of cultural impact Katelyn is talking about for SAHMs. In her book, she basically says that women have always worked (in a pre-industrial age–think: Wendell Berry’s idea of home as a place of economy and industry) and that the idea of women obsessed with children alone (mommy-war judgy moms who swear that if you ever leave your kids or make them sleep in a crib or don’t nurse till they’re 3 that you will damage your children) as a profession is a new idea. She says that SAHMs contribute to culture not only with their work at home but with “public” work like volunteering, neighborhood associations, etc.

If that’s true, that puts Beaty’s quotes in this interview in a different light. I’d like to believe that, because I have always liked Beaty’s journalism, and it seemed strange to me that someone with her reputation was so clueless about the work of women in the home. Anybody else read the book and can offer an informed opinion?

Forget It Jake, It’s Clintontown

I concur with my colleague Daniel Larison:

Clinton won’t be indicted for breaking any laws, but Comey’s statement is nonetheless an indictment of her poor judgment, negligence, and recklessness. This should be very damaging for Clinton, and maybe it still could be, but it can hardly come as a surprise to anyone that remembers how the Clintons have operated over the years. The sloppiness, sense of entitlement, and disregard for consequences are all only too familiar. We can expect several more years of this sort of behavior from a future Clinton administration.

Andrew McCarthy is stunned. He says the FBI director has refused to indict her on a premise that is not required for an indictment to be issued. And:

I was especially unpersuaded by Director Comey’s claim that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case based on the evidence uncovered by the FBI. To my mind, a reasonable prosecutor would ask: Why did Congress criminalize the mishandling of classified information through gross negligence? The answer, obviously, is to prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor asks: Was the statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton’s conduct caused harm to national security? If those two questions are answered in the affirmative, I believe many, if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the case.

It is somehow comforting to find that one’s pitch-black cynicism is vindicated. I did not believe that official Washington would indict Hillary Clinton, not in a presidential election year, and not when she’s the only thing standing between Donald Trump and the White House.

The thought of four more years of those people, the Clintons, in the White House, with all their sleaziness, their drama, their sense of entitlement — it’s sick-making. What a country. What a year.

Deep Brexit

In a very long but rewarding essay, the British writer Alastair Roberts carefully compares and contrasts the Leave side with the Remain-ders. It’s the best thing I’ve yet seen explaining the culture and worldview of both sides. Excerpts:

In many parts of the country where the population is overwhelmingly White British, genetic study has revealed the remarkable stability of their population over at least the last 1400 years (Celtic populations in the British Isles date back over a millennium more). One can still trace the borders of ancient kingdoms in the genetics of regional populations. Before the modern wave of immigration, the Anglo-Saxons were the principal newcomers—the Norman invasion in 1066 didn’t bring about a great demographic change. These unsettling and violent waves of immigration and invasion were generally from ethnic, geographic, cultural, religious, and political near neighbours (for instance, William the Conqueror, who led the Norman invasion, was the first cousin once removed of Edward the Confessor, giving him some claim to the English throne).

The last 70 years have witnessed a demographic upheaval on a scale unprecedented in well over a millennium, which has introduced a remarkable degree of ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity beyond anything witnessed in any previous period of our history. Against the popular political trope of Britain as a nation of immigrants, the reality is that, apart from relatively small trickles of immigration—mostly to London and the South East and largely intra-European immigration of culturally and religious proximate populations—most of the country has been ethnically stable and relatively unchanged for many hundreds of years.

This is something we Americans cannot comprehend. Nor would most of us want to even try. But think about it: what is wrong with those people wanting to keep their country as it has been for 14 centuries? More:

Cosmopolitans tend to be post-nationalist supporters of the market state. A market state is a neoliberal entity, which typically maximizes the market choices and autonomy of all persons within it, whether citizens or not. The borders of such a state are largely open and function on little more than an administrative level. Individual opportunity, unrestricted choice, and validated autonomy are core values and, consequently, freedom of movement between nations is prized. The ideal citizen of a market state is a deracinated universal subject, belonging both everywhere and nowhere, all differences reduced to a level of indifference. For the citizen of the market state, the most important matter is the expansion of the conditions for autonomous self-realization and the market that sustains that. The market state neither excites nor demands much in the way of loyalty. The economy and the technocratic structures that secure a realm of radical and relatively unconstrained possibility for the individual are the primary political structures. Progressive values that affirm all individuals in their autonomous choices are sacred.

By contrast, provincial persons typically favour the nation as the political entity (they also have extremely strong attachments to their regions, towns, and neighbourhoods). The borders of the nation protect and project specific communal identities that exceed and enfold individuals within them. Such nations privilege and prioritize some identities over others. They emphasize cultural, historic, ethnic, religious, familial, locational, and social forms of belonging over autonomy. The intergenerational continuities of family and people, tradition, institution, history, and heritage are central to the shared life. Individual choice, autonomy, and agency are curtailed and subordinated to communal belonging.

As they have been defined by deeply rooted situatedness persisting through time, the frictionless movement of peoples is profoundly corrosive of and threatening to such communities. Rather than celebrating the absolute autonomy and the unconstrained possibilities of the individual’s choices, such communities typically celebrate and inculcate very particular ways of life and forms of practice.

The EU is the epitome of a neoliberal political entity, committed to free markets, encouraging the unrestricted movement of undifferentiated labour, and upholding the value of the socially fungible self-defining individual. The maximization and validation of individual autonomy may be a sacred value for contemporary progressivism, but this is not what ultimately drives the neoliberal market politic. Rather, individual autonomy is celebrated because individual autonomy is that which permits the maximization of the reach and strength of the market and the wealth and power of those who most control capital. This is rule by the market, where the interests of the market, and those whose power it extends, triumphs over all else. The weakening of national sovereignty, democratic accountability, and political representation is all part of a larger picture in which bankers and transnational corporations are empowered and the forces that would resist them are enervated.

Heightened individual autonomy also leads to the crumbling of national, regional, local, class, cultural, religious, and other solidarities and loyalties, removing resistance and friction. Broken down by the neoliberal market government, persons are deracinated and homogenized. While cosmopolitans experience this as a liberating and unshackling impulse, provincials experience it as an assault upon their settled ways of life. The ‘growth of the economy’—the great neoliberal imperative—takes priority over the thriving of the community; ‘individual autonomy’ takes priority over social solidarity; the movement of a radically depersonalized, departicularized, and homogenized ‘labour’ takes priority over the rootedness and the preservation of socially dignifying forms of local industry.

Here is something very telling. Has a people in this condition, so contemptuous of its past, ever existed?:

These differences of ethical outlook lead to contrasting and typically opposing senses of what it means to have a stake in the nation and in the determination of its destiny. A telling indication of some of these differences could be seen in the anger among many on the Remain side towards older people, who disproportionately supported Brexit. It is, such Remain supporters have contended, a gross injustice that persons who will probably have to live with their decision no more than a couple of decades more should sabotage the futures of young people who will have to live with it for the rest of their lives. Implicit in such statements is the moral intuition that the weight of one’s voice in determining the destiny of our nation should be proportionate to the length of time that one has left to enjoy it.

This is profoundly revealing of a particular notion of a nation and what it means to have a stake in it. The assumption is that the nation entirely belongs to the living and that the nearer one moves to death, the more one must relinquish one’s stake in it. We relate to the nation as if consumers to an object of consumption.

Yet this is an exceedingly tendentious and perhaps rather novel notion of what it means to have a stake in a nation. This notion is one typically dependent in no small measure upon a denial of and resistance to the possibility of human transcendence, the denial that any greater entity, purpose, cause, or value exists that could give meaning to our lives beyond our own subjective pleasure, self-realization, and fulfilment.

Most societies have understood the political bond more in terms of a logic of sacrifice. The nation isn’t merely an object to be consumed, but something that has been forged through past sacrifice and labour, sacrifice and labour whose meaning is fragile and contingent upon our sense of duty in the present to consolidate the labour and be true to the sacrifice. To scorn this duty is to nullify the sacrifice and labour of those who went before us in a shameful and profoundly dishonourable manner. In passing on the nation to us, our forebears entrusted us with securing the meaning of their sacrifices and their labour. Our land and nation—a priceless and sacred bequest—must be preserved and enriched by our own sacrifice and labour and we must, in our own turn, entrust it and the realization of the meaning of our lives to generations yet to be born.

It is such a logic of sacrifice that can be seen in our honouring of the lives of those who laboured, fought, or died for our freedom. Past sacrifices give a particular perceived value to those things for which they sacrificed, perhaps especially to the lives of those who are their descendants. Once again, ethnicity, when it identifies persons as belonging to the historic native British peoples, is rendered a discriminating factor between groups, privileging some inhabitants of our nation over others in a manner deemed ethically intolerable by many.

The instinctive moral force of this logic for many is profound. To such persons, the subjection of the nation to market forces and the associated freedom of movement can seem to be the despising of our birthright for a mess of potage, the dishonouring of past sacrifices. Likewise, compromising national sovereignty, rendered sacred by virtue of the blood historically spilled to protect and assert it, for the sake of current economic and political expediency is sacrilegious.

I will quote one more passage from this very, very long — but again, very, very rewarding — essay:

For the neoliberal market state vision, the state is a formal and administrative entity, guaranteeing and celebrating the autonomy of the individual. The market state does not protect and project the particularities and substantial realities of the unique cultural and historic identities of a specific people and their place, but articulates its values in only the vaguest and most purely formal terms. ‘British values,’ for the neoliberal market statist are the progressive values of tolerance, liberty, equality, diversity, inclusivity, etc. These values all eschew a particular substance or shape to British identity, advocating instead radical indeterminacy and the primacy of unrestricted yet affirmed choice and autonomy as society’s core value.

This same indeterminacy is illustrated in the EU’s failure to provide a robust definition of the fundamental term qualifying its union—‘European’. The distinctiveness of Europe, a peninsula of the Asian continent, is by no means immediately geographically apparent. The particular identity of European civilization has principally arisen historically through such things as its cultural dependence upon a Graeco-Roman patrimony, its existence as Christendom, the ethnic interrelatedness of its peoples, its struggle against hostile external forces such as Islam, the history of the Western Church, its various shared cultural, ideological, institutional, and scientific developments and experiences, and its existence as a realm of cultural interchange.

However, acknowledging these things would curtail the protean autonomy and freedom of the market and the neoliberal subject that grounds the EU’s identity. The EU is built, not upon a substantial and organic shared peoplehood, but upon the sharing of a market. That the accession of a country like Turkey to the EU would be considered is expressive of the EU’s understanding of what Europe means and political union involves.

Cosmopolitanism’s eschewing of a particular European identity, the collapse of Europe’s cultural spirit following two world wars, and the rejection of transcendence in atomized consumerist societies has resulted in the loss of a sense of European civilization as something distinct, worthy of our devoted love, labour, loyalty, faithfulness, and sacrifice. This enervation of spirit is one of the reasons for the deep popular concern in the face of Islamization.

Contemporary Europeans can presume that problems are all ultimately socio-economic, to be addressed with the economic and technocratic solutions of the managerial state. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why Leave voters are so hard for many Remain voters to understand. The fact that people might want something more than the material benefits of personal wealth, a strong local economy, and effective social services—that they might yearn for communities once again animated by spiritual values such as faith, hope, and love—cannot easily be processed within an imaginary that has expelled all such elements. That some people might be so animated by devotion to a meaning that transcends them that they would kill and die is terrifying to a civilization that has largely lost its own faith. Surrounded by the relics of a past that witness to a once forceful conviction, we are reproached and haunted by the faith that has departed us.

Read the whole thing.  Do especially read to the last section, where Roberts reveals that he grew up as an English Protestant immigrant to a small Irish town, and suffered as an outsider there. He writes about loving his native land, England, but never quite being able to fit in because though a citizen, he wasn’t raised in England. It’s a thoughtful rumination from someone who, one gathers from reading the piece, voted Leave, but is conflicted about it. (Roberts voted Remain, as two readers pointed out. Sorry for the mistake.)

He sounds like me, to be honest: a cosmopolitan whose sympathies lie with the parochialists, even though I have personally suffered much from the effects of parochialism in my own family. As a fundamental principle, I favor the local and the particular — even when the local and the particular strikes me as wrong. When I was starting out life as a young man, I couldn’t wait to get out of the provinces and go to the city, where things would be different. And they were different! I love city life, and if I had never married and had children, would certainly have spent the rest of my days there. I resented that my family back home resented me for loving the city. It was not a happy time.

But I came to understand that the city was full of people who resented the provinces and looked down on them. In particular, cities hosted people like me: exiles from the provinces who hated where they were from, and had no sympathy for the people back home. Well, that’s dishonest in my case, and in the case of most Louisianians I met in the East Coast cities where I lived. Leaving Louisiana left a hole in our hearts that nothing else could fill. We spoke fondly of her, even as we lamented the lack of career opportunities for ourselves there. We had all made a choice for cosmopolitanism, but I don’t recall hearing a single Louisiana expat putting Louisiana down. That might be my poetic memory at work.

In general, though, I recall the vibe among people in their 20s and 30s, toward their provincial hometowns, gratitude that they had gotten out. Nothing wrong with that if you were unhappy there, but it becomes a real problem when you let that gratitude slip into spite towards the values of the people who stayed. (And of course it’s a problem for parochials when they let their love of their own land, so to speak, poison the love for those who left it. All of this is quite human, on all sides, of course.)

In general, I think the provinces aren’t wrong to think that the city people are out to get them, but they’re not out to get them in the way that the provincials think. They’re out to get them by default. They never think of the provincials, or if they do, it’s to think of how sad it is that they’re so backward, but in no case should their backwardness stand in the way of progress (“progress” defined in the neoliberal way). I don’t think most cosmopolitans are aware of it, to be honest. But it’s a real thing, and Alastair Roberts has illuminated how this dynamic works in his own country.

Fun With America’s Ruling Class

The Kennedy family had a piñata of Donald Trump at their Fourth of July weekend party https://t.co/uzfPGTBY27

— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) July 4, 2016

Is there any snotty-tottier place to spend the Fourth of July than at the Kennedy family compound? And now this. If I were Trump and believed in God instead of myself, I would thank Him for this political gift.

Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati Day

Photo by Marco Sermarini

While we Americans have been celebrating our Independence Day, our friends the Tipi Loschi, in San Benedetto del Tronto, have been observing the anniversary of the passing of the Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died on this date in 1925. It’s also an occasion for them to celebrate G.K. Chesterton, their other unofficial patron saint. I asked Marco Sermarini to explain the concept of “Eternal Revolution” that they mark above. He responded:

“If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution.” — G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.

Another shot of the group. A priest celebrated mass today from that stage:

They brought in their friend John Kanu, a Distributist and Chesterton enthusiast, from Sierra Leone. Here is John teaching a class to the Tipi Loschi:

From a story about John and Chesterton:

Among the Oxford professors, Kanu found Stratford Caldecott, director of the Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture. They became friends, and the Englishman introduced Kanu to Chesterton’s thought. “Three themes struck me in particular: the need for, as much as possible, the wider distribution of property among all members of society; the importance of the local economy and the artisans who live by the work of their hands; and the vision of the family as the main unit of society and consequently the base of a more extended multi-generational family. I told myself, ‘This is the best of the traditional African culture, reflected in the economic philosophy of a Catholic writer born at the end of the 19th century. And we are about to lose him.’ I started to think that, when I returned to my homeland, I would found a Chesterton Society in Sierra Leone”.

And that is exactly what happened.

I continue to be amazed and delighted by this Benedict Option community in Italy. They celebrate the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Emphasis on celebrate. 

View From Your Table

Lorman, Mississippi

Lunch at the Old Country Store, on the side of Highway 61, in the Mississippi Delta. I drove up last week to meet my friends Philip and Barbara Bess for lunch. Philip is the well-known professor of architecture and design at Notre Dame. He regularly takes his students on architecture tours of the South. When he can, he stops at the Old Country Store for a soul food lunch.

It’s funny, but what most people outside the South call “soul food” is just Southern country people food. Country white people eat the same thing, or at least they used to. I grew up with this stuff: fried chicken, mustard greens, field peas, cornbread, and so on.

Phil and Barbara were celebrating their 40th anniversary. Arthur “Mr. D” Davis, the proprietor and fried chicken impresario, serenaded Barbara with a Motown classic. Unfortunately I couldn’t get both Barbara’s face and Mr. D’s in the same shot. But what a great moment!:

Here’s an external shot of the store:

And here’s a clip from Mississippi Public Broadcasting, featuring Mr. D:

That’s some good food there. While we were eating, a friend of mine from St. Francisville (90 minutes to the South) walked in. He said he had been in El Dorado, Arkansas, on business that day, and wanted some fried chicken before he got home. Well, the Old Country Store sure is the place! He was headed out after lunch to search out the ghost town of Rodney. Ah, the South…

Cultured Hicks

Ross Douthat says that the true divide in Western politics is now between globalists and nationalists — and this divide is tribal. He explains the identifying markers of the Cosmopolitan tribe, i.e., what makes them different from the nationalist tribe (among them: their “out group” is Evangelical Christians). Douthat says there’s not necessarily anything wrong with this. A propensity for tribalism is part of human nature. More:

But it’s a problem that our tribe of self-styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly as a tribe: because that means our leaders can’t see themselves the way the Brexiteers and Trumpistas and Marine Le Pen voters see them.

They can’t see that what feels diverse on the inside can still seem like an aristocracy to the excluded, who look at cities like London and see, as Peter Mandler wrote for Dissent after the Brexit vote, “a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations.”

They can’t see that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools.

They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world.

Strong stuff. Read it all. He’s right, though. I talked recently to someone who lives in West Virginia. This person told me stories of the state’s chronic poverty, social dysfunction, and hopelessness, and said that Trump signs are everywhere. Even if you’re against Trump, you had better recognized that he didn’t come from nowhere. As David Frum says in a good essay about the future of the GOP:

None of this is to rationalize a vote for Donald Trump in November 2016. I won’t cast such a vote.

But once safely excluded from the presidency, Donald Trump will no longer matter. His voters, however, will. There is no conservative future without them. There is no quitting the questions: How to win them back? How to deliver them solutions that will actually improve their lives? How to speak to other Americans too, enough to form a presidential majority again? How to remain true to core convictions while emancipating a great national party from the radical dogmas and crass self-seeking of a narrow-minded few? Hard questions all. The right answers win the right to govern—a right more precious and more precarious than all the grim consolations of “I told you so.”

I think Trumpism without Trump would be a powerful force. By “Trumpism,” I mean simply nationalism, in the sense Douthat’s talking about.

Anyway, back to Douthat’s point. His column made me think about why it was so damn satisfying to watch Christiane Amanpour, the epitome of globalist tribalism, melt down on air interviewing Ray Finch, one of Nigel Farage’s lieutenants, shortly after the Brexit win was announced. You might not have seen her spluttering hysteria when later she spoke with Brexiteer Daniel Hannan, who kept his cool and made her look like a screaming mimi:

Shorter Christiane Amanpour: How dare you?!”

On a different interview, she spoke with the UK’s foreign minister, a Remain campaigner. The ever-irate Amanpour demanded that he explain why Cameron blundered into putting EU membership to a vote of the British people. The minister explained that European elites no longer enjoy the confidence of the people they govern, and that the Cameron government believed it was right to consult the British people about their future in the EU. It was not the result Cameron wanted, he said, but the British people have spoken, and we must abide by that.

Amanpour was angry at this. The minister had to explain to her that Britain is a democracy, where the people are sovereign. What’s so fascinating about that exchange is that it never seems to have occurred to Amanpour that the people should have a say in the way they are governed in their own country.

This is the way of her tribe, the Cosmopolitans. They don’t see what’s happening around them. This past weekend, a reader of this blog passed through town, and asked if I had time for a cup of coffee. I did. He’s in his thirties, and lives in a sizable city in another Southern state. When I found out what he did for a living, it seemed to me that he is either upper middle class or close to it. I tell you that so you’ll have some context for what follows.

Somehow we got to talking about the moral collapse of the white working class in this country, and how underappreciated it is by elites in government, journalism, and elsewhere. He said that in his office, there are some white working-class women who do clerical work. They’re all in their twenties, unmarried, with one or more children, and a series of boyfriends. Tattoos all over them. Though this man’s city is in the Deep South, and is a fairly religious place compared to other cities its size elsewhere in the country, religion is an alien thing to these young women.

The man was not putting them down. To the contrary, he was simply observing the Charles Murray-ish chaos in their lives, and wondering how on earth they get out of this hole they’ve dug for themselves.

We agreed that the Sexual Revolution has devastated the working class. My visitor said that it bothers him a great deal that elites who push the Revolution in media and elsewhere seem completely oblivious to the way their values ruin the lives of working class people.

It’s not just the Sexual Revolution, of course. Which is Douthat’s point. The Cosmopolitans are blind and entitled. I say that as someone who moves comfortably within the Cosmopolitan world, and whose tastes and sensibilities are much more Cosmopolitan than Nationalist. But I come from a Nationalist world, and live in that world now. It has its self-inflicted problems, heaven knows, and prejudices against Cosmopolitans. But the one thing these Nationalists get right about the Cosmos is that they, the Nationalists, are completely invisible to them. To the extent that they ever cross the Cosmo mind, it’s as objects of scorn and derision.

Amanpour asks one of her guests, either Daniel Hannan or the UK foreign minister, can’t remember which, what is wrong with the Leave people. Don’t they like their strong economy? It has not occurred to the stateless, rootless, global-citizen Amanpour that people might prefer their own customs and sovereignty to getting rich. Having no loyalty to any particular place, Amanpouristas find the love of one’s people, land, and traditions simply bizarre. So they denounce it as racist. I don’t believe this is cynical. I think they honestly believe it. And here is why it’s tribalism: they see anyone outside the tribe as barbarian. The fact that they see themselves as sophisticated and advanced instead of mere partisans of a different tribe, with their own prejudices and limitations, is what makes them so hard to take. Technocratic liberalism is their religion, and its god is a jealous god.

UPDATE: Colonel Blimp, swinging for the outfield bleachers:

I wish to goodness Wilhelm Ropke were around to see this. This convinced Christian, one of the few economists who understood human beings as people rather than adding machines, fled the Nazis for life in exile in Turkey and then in Switzerland. One might have thought he would have been drawn to the Adenauer/Schuman dream of a united Europe in response to this. Yet, he was dead against it, because, for him, the centralisation of political and economic power and the obliteration of local loyalties and identities would reap a baleful toll. And that was his answer to pretty limited ideas for integration in the 1950s, nowhere near on the scale of today’s EU.

I’ve said it before, but the governing class of the western world, and the upper middle classes below them are warriors for a crazy Kantian worldview that they are utterly resolved to impose on everyone else. They believe religious faith, cultural traditions, provincial and national loyalties and the very idea of ethnicity are idiotic concepts from a benighted past that must now be forgotten. The particular must, MUST, be annihilated; only the universal must remain, and this ‘universal’ is a unified anglophone global civilisation of consumer capitalism, sexual libertinism and obliterated nature. Imagine the whole world united in a Manhattan ziggurat a la Ghostbusters. Imagine it as part hedge fund, part orgy, part Glee concert. Imagine peoples who resist being bombed and droned into submission with Madonna providing the mood music. Imagine Clinton and Trump as Zuul and the Marshallow Man. Imagine fighting these gnostic zealots with all the strength you’ve got because your back is to the wall and they’ll give you no quarter anyway.

‘They Were‘

After liturgy, St. John the Theologian Orthodox Mission, July 3, 2016 (Photo by Rod Dreher)

Today was the first Divine Liturgy our mission parish celebrated since we learned we were losing our priest. Things were subdued, to say the least. I found myself paying much closer attention than usual, aware as I never have been of the preciousness of what I was seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, and, receiving the Eucharist from Father Matthew’s hands, tasting.

The pain of loss is strongly felt among us. But last night in vespers, and today during the liturgy, I felt a strange and most welcome sense of calm. To be honest, it was the same feeling I had in the final days of my father’s life, even at the moment he drew his last breath. It was a strong intuition that this must be, and that all will be well.

Last night, I e-mailed my friend Evgeny Vodolazkin, the Laurus author, to share with him the sad news. When I came home from church today, he had responded:

Yes, dear Rod, it is sad news indeed. But you know, a great Russian poet Vasily Zhukovsky wrote once, that about good friends one should not say with pity: they are no more with us, but should say with gratitude: they were.

Аминь.

Amen.

Of Duterte & Trump

A reader in the Philippines writes:

I’d like to tell you a bit about some very alarming political developments that have taken place recently here in the Philippines, and how they signify what I believe to be a great threat to what remains of the Christian culture of the Philippines, and that is how much of Filipino population has embraced the culture of death by electing Rodrigo Duterte as the republic’s president.

If you haven’t heard much about Duterte (who was just inaugurated this past Thursday), let me fill you in.

Duterte was the mayor of Davao City, the Philippines’ third largest metropolitan area. When he first became mayor in 1988, Davao was infested with gangs, communist rebels, kidnappers, and other cutthroats. Although he is credited with cleaning up Davao and making it into one of the safer and more orderly cities in the Philippines, this success has come at a very high price. Human rights groups have accused him and his police force of tolerating and even encouraging a wave of vigilantism that has claimed the lives of nearly 1,500 alleged criminals and delinquents since 1998. That number includes over a hundred minors–the youngest known being 12 years old–and a couple of journalists who were outspoken against Duterte and the vigilante gangs (which have been dubbed the Davao Death Squad by the media). Although there is no “smoking gun” that proves that the DDS operates as Duterte’s hit squad, he often speaks quite favorably and enthusiastically of summary executions and extrajudicial killings, and documents published by Wikileaks even reveal that U.S. State Department personnel believe that Duterte is “clearly behind” the vigilante group.

Duterte’s signature method of fighting crime with crime had been the most prominent issue of his presidential campaign. He has promised to kill hundreds of thousands of those he deems criminals, and to make the fish of Manila Bay fat from feeding on their corpses.

More recently, as president-elect, Duterte has made pronouncements encouraging both police and citizens to kill alleged criminals, and he plans to start rewarding bounties to those who shoot first and ask questions later. He will also aggressively attempt to reinstate the death penalty in the Philippines, and insists that it be carried out by hanging.

Even now as I write this, it is being reported that he also plans to make drug addicts deemed non-rehabilitable victims of his killing spree. His justification? They will just go on committing crimes if allowed to live, he says. So now, in Duterte’s perverted little universe, it is not only justifiable to kill someone presumed to be guilty of crimes in the past, but also someone presumed to commit crimes in the future!

In answering the criticisms against his methods, Duterte says that the notion of criminal rehabilitation is just a Western concept that is fundamentally alien to Far Eastern cultures (which betrays his apparent belief in cultural relativism and racialism).

And if Duterte’s disregard for the rule of law isn’t enough, there are also indications that he may soon be showing little tolerance for freedom of the press and freedom of religion.

On the matter of the free press, I should first explain that the Philippines is considered one of the world’s most dangerous country for journalists. It is common for journalists who do investigative work into the corrupt dealings of politicians and businessmen to end up as victims of assassination, and the bulk of those murders go unsolved. When asked about this problem, Duterte responded that if you’re a journalist and you get offed, it’s probably because you were doing something wrong!

On the matter of religious liberty, Duterte is considered a friend to the much-marginalized Muslim minority in the Philippines, but he has grown strongly adversarial against the Catholic Church, particularly the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. He plans to boldly implement a three-child policy, as well as aggressively enforce an already existing controversial family planning (i.e., population reduction) law, and is ready to fight the Church on this.

Learning these things about Duterte, it is quite easy to be quick to blame the Philippine electorate for voting for such a man. It is necessary to therefore know the conditions that created this rough beast, which are not all that unlike the conditions that have created Donald Trump.

The Philippine government is ranked among the most corrupt in Asia, and the country functions a lot more like an oligarchy and a vassal state for Western neocolonial interests than a sovereign democratic republic.

Six years ago, in the last presidential election, the Filipinos elected Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, scion of the famous political dynasty that opposed the Marcos regime in the 1970s and ‘80s. Despite Aquino’s promises to drive the government along a “straight path”, his administration has suffered many scandals that expose its outrageous corruption and incredible incompetence. And while it is true that Aquino has presided over some of the highest GDP growth in Southeast Asia, the average Filipino has felt no change to his abject living conditions.

Duterte has thus come in as a kind-of man on a white horse, promising sweeping change of the government. Like Trump, he and his campaign team have done a magnificent job at portraying him as an anti-establishment politician who will champion the cause of the forgotten man, and it has worked quite marvelously: His reputation as a strong man who can get things done has made him a hero to many of his supporters, and thus to many average Filipinos, having such a savior lead their country to the promised land greatly overweighs any concerns about human and constitutional rights, the rule of law, or the due process of law. After all, if the country’s judicial system is hopelessly corrupt, what good is the rule of law, anyway? Might as well go back to the law of eye for an eye, right?

Thus, as bad as having Duterte occupy the Philippine presidency is, his popularity is merely a product of a breakdown in Philippine politics and society as a whole. One political commentator has argued that the Duterte’s support from the masses signifies the Catholic Church’s utter failure to impress upon her flock one of her most important teachings: that all human life is sacred and to be defended.

Indeed, for now it seems that no matter what he says or does, Duterte is set to remain wildly popular. For example, if you were to peruse the comments section of any online news article reporting any of Duterte’s most outrageous statements, you will see the majority giving their enthusiastic approval. And in an infamous video clip of Duterte making a vile joke onstage about raping an Australian missionary woman who was murdered in Davao in 1989, his audience responds with laughter.

Yet, what will happen to the Philippines under Duterte’s administration remains to be seen.

Some dismiss his extreme rhetoric as just the hyperbole of a flamboyant politician who is simply intentionally projecting a caricature of himself, and his spokespersons often defend him by saying his controversial remarks are just jokes or cases of the press taking his words out of context. I, however, believe that the man is a psychopath who probably suffers from delusions of himself as a “Dirty Harry” type who can clean up the streets simply by slaughtering all the bad guys. Such a person obviously has no business being the head of state of any nation.

In any event, for now the Philippines still has a constitutional system very similar to that of the U.S. (although it is a unitary republic rather than a federal one), and as long as it remains–Duterte has threatened to create a revolutionary government and dissolve congress–he might not have such an easy time.

Additionally, there are already some rumblings of opposition forces growing against Duterte’s penchant for vigilantism and his desire to reinstate the death penalty, particularly from people close to the Catholic Church and the CBCP.

However, even if Duterte is successfully defeated, or even ousted, the societal and political climate that produced him will remain, and the country could go simply back into the hands of the corrupt oligarchs. Much work will still need to be done to cure this ailing the Far East’s first democratic republic and only major Christian nation.

I ask for your prayers for the Philippines.

UPDATE: Reader Raskelnikov writes:

The reality is governments supply ORDER. That is their job, their only job. If they can’t supply order, they are failed states (Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, etc.).

The Philippines is on the brink of failure. Now I don’t know that Duterte will bring order, and root out crime and corruption, but if he does, his sins will be forgiven by the masses.

Civil liberties and efficient bureaucracies and an independent judiciary, and rule of law, these are all very good things, but they can only be effectively implemented if the conditions of ORDER exist in the first place. Otherwise, you have pretty words and practices that are diametrically the opposite and things continue to rot, and you are likely to get pushed aside by someone willing to do the job.

It is very easy for Americans, living in a country with a strong tradition of democracy, rule of law, prosperity, high levels of education, relatively low levels of corruption and the like to impose our view of how things should be on other countries, because we presume ORDER exists and will continue to exist, and its just a matter of filing the burrs off the sharp edges.

But this is ludicrous. Its not true here–order has a cost, and if people aren’t willing to pay it, it breaks down. It is certainly not the way it works in the Philippines. When there is revolt, out-of-control crime, corruption, societal breakdown, the axe gets untied, and when the crisis is solved, (hopefully), the axe gets tied up again.

You don’t get heavy handed government unless you have pervasive social disintegration, and you get heavy handed government when that happens, because in part the people want it. If you want to preserve civil liberties, you don’t need to subsidize the ACLU, you need to insure low crime, low levels of civil unrest, reasonable levels of economic inequality, collective security.

Trump won’t be Duterte because American society has not disintegrated to anything like the crime and corruption in the Philippines. Trust me, if America did have that level of dysfunction, all our white liberals of today would be cheering for the death squads–because that’s just what people do. Further, whoever did the job would get his or her face up on Mt. Rushmore next to Lincoln, who if you actually read the history, acted like a dictator (suspending habeas corpus, jailing newspaper editors for hostile editorials, unleashing Sherman to commit acts of rape, torture, murder and arson on American civilian populations).

Berlusconi with an admixture of Nixon, that’s closer to what you will get with a Trump Presidency. It is unclear that Trump will even be able to get anything through Congress.

Lots of reasons why that may be problematic for some people, but he is not Dutrete.

More From SJWs Under Arms

Here are a couple of extraordinary letters from readers in response to the “SJW Pentagon” thread. Here’s the first:

I feel an urgent need to speak out in defense of the retired Marine, and to buffet his statement with my personal observations during my service with the U.S. Navy. I have slightly modified some information in order to protect my identity.

I served five years on board an East Coast aircraft carrier, with my time ending in the 2010s; during this time I deployed to the Mediterranean thrice. I was a deck seaman, and by the time of my departure I advanced to the rank of second class petty officer. While my service is substantially different from that of the Marine- I honestly take my hat off to him and cheer him- I can directly attest to the dire (and very real) impacts of social engineering on the military at the division level, meaning at highly localized levels.

By the time I arrived for duty, the policy of co-ed commands, especially with women serving with men aboard the “flat tops”, had been in effect since 1994. No doubt, the brass of our chain of command, both on board the ship and in Washington DC, lauded this program as a stunning success story of gender inclusion. However, this is what I directly observed:

* Sexual encounters on board the ship in berthings and other darkened spaces (both in port, out to sea, and on deployment). And, on the third deployment, the captain did NOT hold these sailors, both men and women, accountable. The Love Boat was tolerated and tacitly encouraged.

* Within a year of our second deployment, I personally knew over 30 female sailors who left our ship due to pregnancies. Over 30 SAILORS possessing a variety of skills that then had to be urgently replaced, right before a major deployment. Our division lost six (6) females within SIX MONTHS of the second deployment. Another left two days prior, and one was flown off the ship one (1) week later.

And the thing is, there are no repercussions for skipping out on deployments for these sailors. No Page 13s, nothing- they get to avoid sea duty for up to a year. Is that acceptable? Is that a Fleet we want and deserve as a nation?

* Unequal physical and body standards between men and women. Meaning, my lowest PT scores would amount to average, or even great, standards for most female Sailors.

* Females sailors are granted 18 weeks of maternity leave (now lowered to 12 weeks since I left), whereas men only have 10 days.

* Overall, I arrived to a Fleet where men and women are treated extraordinarily differently. In order to benefit women, men were given the short end of the stick. Some equality, eh! This is not a strong culture for the military. This modern military would not have survived one month during World War Two. Camaraderie is dead, except for the bastions of the Special Forces.

Let me be absolutely clear: I am NOT stating that women should be booted from the service and denied entry into the military henceforth. Women have served honorably for decades in this nation’s military. What I am saying is that men and women should NEVER serve together, especially not in forward deployed bases and sea going ships. The temptation for sexual fraternization, sexual encounters, flirting, favoritism, and all other absolutely inappropriate behavior far outweighs the need for military units to be morphed into Boys and Girls Clubs.

In order to restore good order and discipline, we need to return to gender separate commands. To detractors of this idea, I say that women have proven themselves completely capable of holding their own and leading their own commands. So, they don’t need men to succeed in this modern military.

Rod, I was hoping to honorably serve our nation for 20 years plus. But in this era of rampant political correctness, I could not fulfill this objective. The social engineers are out to completely emasculate the mighty Armed Forces of the United States. Overall, these radical ideologues have been successful. In terms of the Navy, the final objective of their demented social plans is to dismantle the strength of the U.S. Navy Seals, the last bastion of of traditional camaraderie and masculinity within the Fleet. The traditions and identity of the SEALs drive these ideologues completely insane. What is hindering them is a promise to not “lower the standards,” as the vast majority of these brave MEN do not wish for their lives to be carelessly destroyed because of sophomoric social policies.

However, lowering standards is the goal. Ray Mabus, political appointee and Secretary of the Navy, said that the SEALS should bring women into their ranks under, get this, FAIR standards. “Fair standards” is obvious code for lowered standards. The social engineers will not be satiated until the SEALS resemble a transgendered, half male, half female multicultural college team.

Does the Navy have a fleet of warships, or is it a fleet of fertility clinics at sea? Are we the mighty Navy, or Match.com Afloat?

Find the article here:http://www.navytimes.com/story/military/careers/navy/2015/05/27/navy-secretary-ray-mabus-women-female-seal-navy-combat-exclusion/27653965/

Here’s a follow-up from the retired Marine:

Didn’t expect you to use my entire email almost verbatim, needless to say I was quite surprised this morning, along with the passionate comments for and against my views on the matter. Had I known you were going to publish my words, I probably would have polished my arguments and language a bit more, but I stand by my sentiments, couched as they are in the language of the barracks. I wrote the email in a white hot heat, and I think you saw that the authenticity and the earthiness would probably provoke a lively response. I know now what you mean when you say you come across differently on the blog than in real life-I sound bitter, angry and reactionary, although I apologize for none of it. I spoke for the men in the ranks, in their idiom.

As to some of the commenters, I was pleased to see a lot of anecdotal evidence from fellow combat vets and families of combat vets supporting my views. The opposing viewpoints, however, came from people who clearly had no idea what that world I lived in for four years was like, or were intent on whipping the dead horse of the folly of intervention in Iraq, implicitly tarring me as a pro-war, pro-interventionist neocon, or a knuckle dragging, grunting Neaderthal (and probably a Trump redneck to boot), so let me remove the guise of the “grunt”, put on my academic face, and provide a nuanced, scholarly, missive, more palatable to those readers who have never had to squat in a fighting hole in the night with the stench of war in their nostrils, filthy, exhausted, and throwing the dice with death. I was what Kipling would have called a “gentleman ranker”, with a degree in history and a minor in military history before I enlisted in February 2001 and was thrown into a recruit training platoon on Parris Island with the poor kids, the immigrant kids, the rednecks and the ghetto refuse. It was sublime. I found myself there, and I fell in love with the Corps, the uniforms, the rifles, the fierce pride to earn the right to wear an Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, and be called Marine. The traditions of the brotherhood, the unbroken continuity stretching back two centuries, all were instilled in us as exempla to emulate, to never cause dishonor to our Corps and be like the men who had preceded us, as the names of our past battles and long dead heroes were recited. It was indoctrination, and it worked. Those traditions, those archaic concepts of honor, formed the bedrock of setting ourselves apart as a warrior elite. It was based on turning a heterogeneous collection of individuals into a homogeneous band of brothers.

Read Martin van Creveld’s The Culture of War. He argues that the culture of warriors has been disassociated, disconnected from the Western elites, the politicians, the businessmen, the arbiters of culture and in a newest twist, the very commanders of that military as well. The drones, the technology, has insulated war (and the warrior at the point of ground combat) from the people directing it. They see war as factors of technology, sanitized and clean. Look at Obama and Clinton and their hangers on watching the footage of the bin Laden kill. Voyeurs watching a snuff film, pretending that it’s just an “operation” that they can sip coffee in the “War Room” in their bespoke clothing and see a video game with little ants on a screen in night vision, laughing as real men kill and die before their eyes. It’s not real to them. Those dead men in Benghazi were just things to Clinton. “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport…”

In their hearts they despise us, as Creveld calls them “Gremlin like creatures who really think war is the continuation of politics…and nothing else. Never having served, they are oblivious to the fact that war calls for the highest sacrifice of all, and that those who wage it are made of flesh and blood. Ensconced in their offices, they deal with mere abstractions…Pundits who, whether out of ignorance or snobbery, refuse to take the culture of war seriously are committing an error so momentous as to cast doubt on anything else they may say, do, or write about it. It all comes down to this foolish question, how to win’ (emphasis mine)

And this dichotomy has also fractured the military itself. The American military tradition since 1918 has been to emphasize firepower and technology over the infantry and combat arms. The technocrats believe that technology will render infantry moot in every war and conflict, and thus the “best and the brightest” (to steal a phrase from Halberstam) are not at the tip of the spear. Ground combat forces get neglected, starved of resources and innovators to the worshipers of the newest tech. Every war, they were proved wrong. Bombing Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Balkans, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia does not materially affect the ability of enemy ground forces from holding ground or doing what they want to civilians under areas they control. Airpower and firepower is transient. It can inhibit enemy actions but never can fully eliminate them, only make it more difficult for them to accomplish their goal, be it moving supplies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail or murdering millions of Jews in Poland. Only the infantry can take and hold ground from an enemy. Since the vast budgets go to tech, there isn’t enough to field more divisions of well trained infantrymen to effectively control ground. Thus we have enclaves of ground troops who cannot properly blanket an enemy country and squeeze the life out of insurgency on a local level. Thus we have to rely on half trained, barely motivated auxiliaries to make up the manpower deficit from the locals such as the ARVN or whatever opportunists come out of the woodwork in the Muslim world. The only answer the military gives is “more firepower, applied from 10,000 feet”- which means the grunt fights on and on, finding himself estranged from his own commanders, who know the path to promotion is in the tech side espousing “innovation” and increasingly indecipherable gobbledygook from the bureaucracy. The warrior is isolated from the controllers of the tech, and increasingly bitter that some pimply, overweight computer gamer sitting in some air conditioned office thinks he’s a equal because he pilots a drone and kills from half a world away, and this is the crux of the matter. That isn’t “war”- war is the kid with a rifle who has to hump 100 pounds of weapons and gear up hills and through the maze of some sun blasted foreign city and shoot some jihadist animal in the face. That means he has to entrust his brothers with his life. That means he has to know that the grunt beside him won’t get pregnant, have a vaginal infection, and has the upper body strength to drag 200 pounds of wounded rifleman out of danger. It means that lowering physical and mental standards doesn’t produce better soldiers, but a Bowe Bergdahl, who deserts his brothers when they need him most (Bergdahl failed to complete Coast Guard recruit training before managing to enter the Army even though his discharge stated he was “unsuited” for the military-what he was doing in a supposedly “elite” army unit is beyond me, as his commanders knew there was something desperately wrong with him)

Not that I’m in favor of interventionist wars and more infantrymen to fight them. Far from it. I had to fight in one, and one was enough for me.The question becomes, firstly, to stay well clear of foreign wars like George Washington warned so presciently in his Farewell Address. If, however, war is forced upon us, then we fight it ruthlessly to victory and get out. I don’t care about “nation building”, nor do I care about how nations order their own affairs internally. Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine to make the world safe for democracy has no appeal to me when I came home to a country far less free and democratic after fighting her war, and with a head full of demons and a broken body. Congress hasn’t declared war since 1941. Instead we get these small, quasi wars and insurgencies, that burn on and on and on. We live in a situation where, for ten years, part of the country (the lowest socioeconomic class, white and black and brown) served in the infantry and fought, in the regulars, and came home alone, while the rest of the country just paid lip service to “supporting the troops” by dragging out the flags and some pogue who shuffles paper in some National Guard unit to stand awkwardly and receive adulation at the 50 yard line on a football field. War was the background to those of my peers who stayed home and built careers and families and got fat and happy while we suffered in obscurity half a world away, who look upon us with incomprehension, disdain, or pity now, as the veterans of my war commit suicide at a runaway pace, including Marines I served with. I remember the day when Fallujah fell to ISIS, and needing to, called a brother Marine. We sat quietly, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer on the patio of a local bar. Sam looked at me and said, with a tinge of sadness, “Well, now we know what those Vietnam guys felt like.” As we sat there, wrapped in our thoughts, I looked around at the other patrons. To them it was just another day, and the word “Fallujah” meant nothing at all to them, and everything to us. We felt betrayed, bitter, and alone.

As for the “racial integration worked, so Mr. Marine is just a racist/misogynist/homophobe” argument, again, it obfuscates the real issue. Racial integration is a non sequitur. Whatever color they are, combat infantry were men, with men’s bodies. You wrote a story recently about an Alaskan teenage boy who claims to be a girl dominating track and field as a “female”. The male MMA fighter who became a “woman” and beats his opponents mercilessly has been mentioned before as an example. Do you think it’s sexism that there are no female players in the NBA, the NHL, or the NFL? Its because professional sports is intensely, violently,  physical, and women cannot compete when put on that field. People who have never been an infantryman, an artilleryman or a tanker have no conception of the physical demands placed on your body. It isn’t just pulling a trigger. (if marksmanship was all that war was fat guys who can shoot paper targets would then be our best soldiers, no?) The reason that women think they can play in the big league of war is that we automatically stack the deck in their favor. Women do not have to perform at the same physical standard of men right from the beginning of recruit training. I linked the article, by a female Marine, no less, who lays out the case on barring females in combat units on a physical and practical level.

But It goes beyond that merely physical argument, and into the meat of the issue of transgenders, homosexuals and women into the heretofore exclusively masculine world of combat. It strikes at thousands of years of culture, across societies all over the world. War, real war, is a supremely physical endeavor, but our recent Western obsession with feminizing men and masculinizing women has completely ignored this basic fact of biology. However, combat is not just physical, but mental. Men are, by and large, hardwired to be violent under certain circumstances and cultural taboos. I challenge any anthropologist to find any tribal society, now or ever, anywhere in the world, where the men were gatherers and the women hunters, or where the women were warriors while men raised children. It flies in the face of human development to claim women can be trained to hunt and kill other humans like men can. And there, in places where the bureaucrats don’t like to go, is where the heart of war lies. It’s getting blood on your hands.

However, the problem that all these meddlers in human nature fail to get is the deep, mystical psychology of combat. Real men should be ashamed that we are sending their daughters, wives, and mothers into harm’s way, to be exposed to that brutality, or as Shakespeare said, “to hold their manhoods cheap” while they allow women to do what men should do-protect women and children from harm. I don’t hate women. In fact, I love them so much that I was willing to kill and die for them. I dated a girl once who’s mother asked me over a dinner why I was dead set against women in combat. I looked her straight in the eye and said “I was expendable. Your daughter is not.”

As for the “Spartans were homosexual and they were great soldiers” argument some are so fond of quoting, lets be clear on just what Spartan homosexuality was. It was most emphatically not the “love wins” rainbow flag homosexuality of today. Essentially, the agoge was enforced child rape from around age 12 or so. Ancient Greek, Persian, and Roman homosexuality (and the Muslim kind practiced in Afghanistan etc.) was more of a prison rape than a consensual act. It was about exercising dominance and penetrating anything seen as “weaker”-such as male and female slaves or social inferiors. Coincidentally, using the Spartans also demolishes the premise that homosexuality is innate or genetic instead of learned behavior, unless we are to think that 100% of Spartan men were born gay. Homosexuality was also seen as a stage permissible only before a Spartan warrior married a woman. Thenceforth he was expected to sire children and thus perpetuate more Spartan hoplites. The agoge system aimed to do exactly the opposite of the homosexual and transgender and female policy of the DoD today-that is, weld men into a ruthlessly efficient killing machine.

Whatever anyone says, what they miss, and what I know is that a combat unit is not just interchangeable parts. A solid combat unit has a personality, based on the smallest components and working up. Four men in a fire team must learn to trust each other, rely on each other and bond intimately together to survive. That extends upward to the squad, the platoon, and finally the company. The introduction of any element that does not mesh completely with that, that stands in any way differently physically, mentally or socially from the majority, and is given special privileges above and beyond the others, will wreck a unit. Sexual politics replaces combat efficiency. Promotions and punishments are no longer performance based, but gendered or transgendered. Above all, it wipes out that trust necessary to fight on a battlefield.

In a follow-up note, the writer adds:

I bear no ill will towards homosexuals. Those dead in Orlando were Americans too, and they did not deserve to be slaughtered by another Islamic barbarian. I fought for them, too, to live as they wish. What I did not fight for was to have their lifestyle or beliefs imposed on me, or anyone else. All they deserve from me is tolerance, and that is what I voluntarily give, but no more. I will not be coerced. I bow to no man on this earth. What really scraped me raw about the transgender DoD announcement was the tone of it, just like the Obergefell decision. The smug, triumphant, veiled truculence of imposing their will on those they deem regressive, the celebratory lighting of the White House in rainbow colors, it smacks of the self satisfied smirking of Trotsky as he tells the Constituent Assembly in 1917, “You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on, into the dustbin of history.”

This Marine is a very, very good writer. He sent me a photo of himself in Iraq, on deployment.

UPDATE: From the mailbag, related to this entry:

Didn’t add this in comments in hopes of staying mostly anonymous as well.

I am an Air Force officer on active duty orders and, without rehashing what was posted, I can attest to the truth of these statements.

A mere four years ago, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was official DoD policy. Now, we have an entire month dedicated to Pride celebrations. I do not begrudge gay men and women serving this country nor do I think they are incapable of service. As anecdotal proof and for what it’s worth, I rated a lesbian as my top troop which earned her a promotion. Furthermore, I had a gay civil servant who worked for me who I also, on her annual appraisal, rated extremely highly, maximizing her annual bonus.

I say that only to say that 1) I haven’t personally held any merited individual back and 2) sadly, if my religious views on this particular matter were to be made known, I would likely not be granted the same tolerance. The same individuals I held as examples to their peers could easily lodge equal opportunity complaints against me that affect my ability to lead, to be promoted, and, ultimately, could result in my discharge from the military. I reiterate, it’s been four years since gays have been able to openly serve and, in that short time, they’ve gone from facing potential discharge to wielding so much power that anyone who does not wholly affirm their lifestyle could now potentially face discharge through equal opportunity complaints.

Needless to say, eggshells are being walked upon by me and by others holding orthodox religious views.

I have gone from fully expecting to serve an honorable military career to questioning whether or not it’s in good judgment to stick this out. I’m considering using what’s left of my GI Bill to learn a skill or trade suitable to a Ben Op lifestyle, a decision that would be not of convenience or even preference, but of necessity.

Remember kids, the Law of Merited Impossibility: It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.

There was a second e-mail. This one was full of highly identifying personal information, which I’ve totally excised. The writer is in the US Navy Reserve, having served on active duty until recently. He finds himself drawn to return to active duty to serve his country, even though he’s part of running a business now, living among his extended family, in a beautiful part of the US. He writes:

So here I am, on the cusp of disappointing my parents and sister to go back and serve my country, give up my pretty lucrative business (or at least alter it significantly), uproot my wife and children, move to Norfolk, VA (no paradise like [where I live now]), and now I have to deal with the idea that not only will I have to lead sailors who are mentally ill (according to the DSM), and not only lead them, but will be reprimanded, ranked lower, and lose all chances of promotion (and maybe be thrown out before the golden retirement) if I don’t play into their fantasy that they aren’t the gender their genitalia and chromosomes clearly dictate.

On top of my own personal situation, I have to think about the fact that integrating less than 1/10th of 1% of the population into the military, and all the costs of training and time associated with this (berthing, medical, training videos and presentations, logistics, lost work days) is more important than spending the money necessary to adequately supply the fleet with parts and supplies to meet readiness needs. Furthermore, I’ve seen DOZENS of great sailors kicked out for what’s called high-year tenure, whereby they don’t meet promotion criteria and quotes and are therefore let go, despite being pretty good sailors (who maybe can’t take a written test well, or don’t meet physical standards enough) only to see, again, people with a mental disorder being celebrated and ushered in. We’re downsizing, doing more with less, and we’re importing more problems into the military because this administration (and the other powers that be – corporate, government bureaucrats, etc.) wants to play social experiment with my beloved Navy.

Rod, maybe this is a blessing in disguise that this happens now instead of in a few months when I’m committed to full time active duty. Where I’m struggling however is this – am I a coward for not going in as a Christian witness to help spread the gospel no matter the consequences. Plenty of brave men did so as Christianity was spreading like wildfire through the Roman Legions despite the imminent danger to themselves and their families. All I stand to lose, for now, is my career. Is it worth the potential blaze of glory? Or, should I put my family first and just completely resign my commission? I’m probably at the point where it’s one or the other – in full time or out completely, because this reserve stuff is ridiculous and I can’t go back and forth.

Am I just a coward for not standing up to this nonsense? The stakes are high. I’ve served my country honorably. The job I had in the Navy is a dream come true for me. I love the Navy. But the Navy isn’t the same, and it might destroy my life now if I choose it as a career again and I can’t comply with the agenda.

What do I do?

God help this man decide. I think if he goes back, he will eventually be compelled to violate his conscience, which he will refuse to do, and will therefore be discharged. His life may not be ruined, but he will be in a mess. Not worth it, not to me. You can’t stand up to this nonsense. The DoD, now owned by the LGBT lobby, will flatten you.