Rod Dreher's Blog, page 58

Postcard From Prague

Finally, I’m online again! In my infinite good fortune, I checked Matt and me into a hotel in old town Prague that has unworkable WiFi. I haven’t been able to log on with my laptop since Monday. I found a nearby Starbucks, and here I am. I will get to approving all the comments that piled up later on today, when I’m on the long train ride back to Budapest.

Matt goes back to America on Saturday, and wanted to see at least a bit of Prague before he took off. It’s also the case that his favorite beers are Czech pilsners, especially Pilsner Urquell. For my part, I wanted to see the old Benedict Option crew — my translator and publishers — and to pay a visit to Kamila Bendova, to once again thank her for all she has done for me, and for the cause of helping us all prepare for what’s to come.

On my first night here, I met with a couple of journalists for beer. One of the men had been very, very pro-American over much of his career, and is now suffering from a sense of dislocation. It was with these two men that I first heard a version of a question that recurred in every meeting I had with Czechs: What is happening to America?

They all follow us closely. It is hard to overstate the prestige the US has long had here, because of our opposition to Soviet communism. My experience is only anecdotal, of course, but it was disconcerting to see the pained puzzlement in the faces of my Czech friends. They really do fear that America is tearing itself apart. What could I tell them? I think so too. The transgender thing, I find, is the most mystifying to Central Europeans. They struggle to understand it as a phenomenon, and really struggle to understand why a society like America’s would celebrate this disorder, and even privilege it.

What can I say? They’re right. To find oneself abroad, in conversation with Europeans who love America, and who are looking for assurance that she has not lost her mind, and to be unable to reassure them, is to realize how bad off we really are. They also know that whatever starts in America eventually comes here. I spoke to a Czech from a small village far from the capital. He said that he has an old friend back home whose older teenage daughter recently announced that she’s a lesbian, and whose younger teenage son just announced that he’s a girl. These are country people from the village, but even that was not far enough to escape this thing. I was sharing this yesterday with a Czech friend back in the US, a man who hated Communism so much he fled to America when he was young. This man said, “We live an a patently evil world and at the end it was the US — not the USSR — who made it possible.”

If he were a standard leftist saying that, it would be one thing. But he’s not. He’s a fierce conservative and Christian who really did think America was a land of hope. He married and had kids in America. He is living through disillusionment now, but knows that he doesn’t have the luxury of despair. He is preparing for very hard times ahead, and reminds me from time to time that he’s actually more pessimistic than I am. It’s probably because he lived through Communism, knows what it’s like, and knows that the ideological madness that has America in its grip is going to play out in similar ways. In fact, he was a nominal Christian until the Great Awokening made him aware that the only way through what is here, and what is to come, is through a deeply committed, sacrificial relationship to God.

Anyway, back in Prague, I met a friend for lunch at a restaurant near the Prague Castle. I had one of my favorite Central European dishes: thin-sliced cucumbers in sour cream:

After lunch, Matt and I went over to visit Kamila at her flat. Her English is not great, so she invited a childhood friend who speaks perfect English over to interpret. I can’t emphasize how much it meant to me to be able to introduce my son to this hero. “She is living history,” I told Matt, who is a history major. Kamila welcomed us into her high-ceilinged parlor, which was the site of so many dissident seminars and meetings under Communism. The secret police bugged this room. Here is a passage from Live Not By Lies:

Kamila Bendova sits in her armchair in the Prague apartment where she and her late husband, Vaclav, used to hold underground seminars to build up the anti-communist dissident movement. It has been thirty years since the fall of communism, but Bendova is not about to lessen her vigilance about threats to freedom. I mention to her that tens of millions of Americans have installed in their houses so-called “smart speakers” that monitor conversations for the sake of making domestic life more convenient. Kamila visibly recoils. The appalled look on her face telegraphs a clear message: How can Americans be so gullible?

To stay free to speak the truth, she tells me, you have to create for yourself a zone of privacy that is inviolate. She reminded me that the secret police had bugged her apartment, and that she and her family had to live with the constant awareness that the government was listening to every sound they made. The idea that anybody would welcome into their home a commercial device that records conversations and transmits them to a third party is horrifying to her. No consumer convenience is worth that risk.

“Information means power,” Kamila says. “We know from our life under the totalitarian regime that if you know something about someone, you can manipulate him or her. You can use it against them. The secret police have evidence of everything like that. They could use it all against you. Anything!”

Kamila pointed out to me the scars along the living room wall of her Prague apartment where, after the end of communism, she and her husband had ripped out the wires the secret police used to bug their home. It turns out that no one in the Benda family uses smartphones or emails. Too risky, they say, even today.

Some might call this paranoia. But in light of Edward Snowden’s revelations, it looks a lot more like prudence. “People think that they are safe because they haven’t said anything controversial,” says Kamila. “That is very naive.”

Here is a photo I took yesterday of Kamila, with a portrait of her young self:

Kamila and Jan, her friend, wanted to know: What is happening to America?  So I told them. I watched Kamila’s face grimace, and then later, when I told her about how we have created a culture in which the Left praises people who denounce their friends and family for ideological errors, she shook her head and laughed. I’m sure this old Cold Warrior, whose husband went to jail for his dissident activities, never imagined she would live to see this again, much less in the United States of America. 

I asked Kamila about a book once published in Czechia, a collection of her and her late husband’s letters from when he was a political prisoner. She showed me the copy. I told her I would see if we could get it translated and published in America. People need this information! If you are a publisher interested in this, e-mail me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and I’ll put you in touch with the Bendas.

That woman, that Iron Lady, kept her family together despite her husband being imprisoned by the state. When the Communist regime offered to set him free if he would agree to go abroad with his family, she told him to refuse the offer. If we leave these people behind to save ourselves, she said, we will violate the principles for which we have been suffering. Her husband refused the offer. When the Communists imprisoned Vaclav Benda, he left Kamila to raise six children, the oldest of whom, Marek, was ten. The burden she carried was enormous. Think of it! But she did it, and did not bend, and did not break.

From the 2018 interview, here’s Kamila:

We were also pulling [our children] into our struggles. Sometimes when we wanted to send something confidential, it was a child who was sent because it was less likely that he would be captured. So he would go to the park, and the other person would go to the park also. So if he was not arrested by the police, he could go through the park and give the message. There were small messengers among families. When the secret police came to inspect the house, the children were the first ones to be sent outside to go to the phone booth to call the people around to warn them. And also carrying the small pieces of paper that we sometimes had to swallow. There was an inspection in the house, and my husband had to bring something, to speak about the fact that we are here doing the inspection, and the word is out already. And the police would say it’s the children, always running around spreading the information. For example, when they arrested my husband, my son Martin’s teacher at school was concerned about his dad. And she would say, “Martin, I heard something happened at home.” And he would say, “Yes, he was arrested. It was legal number this and that. Apartment this and that.” So in that way, he would inform her what happened.

Can you imagine growing up like that? In that same interview, Kamila said she and her husband taught their children to be more afraid of lies than of the state. Heroes, I tell you. A family of heroes. There should be a movie of this couple’s marriage, of this family’s life. Think of all the stories like this all over Central and Eastern Europe, from the Communist period — none of them told by Hollywood. I hope the team raising money now for the Live Not By Lies documentary can manage to get over here to interview Kamila and her generation of heroes while they are still with us. Their stories, and their advice, are absolutely needed today.

Back in 2018, when I first interviewed her, Kamila told me that her husband Vaclav joined the anti-communist movement after the Soviet invaders burned down his favorite bookstore in 1968. “When they did that, it was the moment we had to resist,” she told me then. In 1977, they formally joined the Charter 77 movement. For people of conscience, she said, “it was impossible not to join.”

Think about that today, in our situation. They are cancelling books in America, but few people are resisting it, and God knows the gutless literary establishment isn’t. My friend Justin Lee posted an extraordinary thread on Twitter yesterday:

On woke hysteria in New York publishing:

My friend, a POC, was told by his high-powered agent that NY won’t touch his novel—a gritty, urban coming-of-age story informed by personal experience—unless he rewrites the protagonist to match his own ethnicity. 1/

— Justin Lee (@justindeanlee) July 13, 2021

 

What are we doing, people? What are we doing to ourselves? Brave men and women like Kamila Bendova are trying to wake us up!

After we said our goodbyes, I walked Matt over to Wenceslas Square, so he could see the balcony from which Vaclav Havel addressed the throng during the Velvet Revolution:

Then I took him to the top of the square, by the national museum, to see the spot where, in 1969, Czech student Jan Palach set himself on fire to protest Communist repression and the 1968 Soviet invasion. Here is a newsreel clip from his funeral:

According to a doctor who was the first to treat the severely burned young man, Palach did not set himself on fire to protest the Soviet invasion per se, but rather to wake up the demoralized Czech people:

It was not so much in opposition to the Soviet occupation, but the demoralization which was setting in, that people were not only giving up, but giving in. And he wanted to stop that demoralization. I think the people in the street, the multitude of people in the street, silent, with sad eyes, serious faces, which when you looked at those people you understood that everyone understands, that all the decent people were on the verge of making compromises.

Here is the memorial on the spot where Jan Palach killed himself:

I hope Jan Palach will pray for America. Our fate is not determined in advance — but it will be determined as long as good people stay silent, and allow these wicked people to rule us, to take the minds of our children and ruin their lives, and to make us hate each other on the basis of race. Fight! This is not going to be short and easy … but like Kamila and Vaclav Benda in 1977, what choice do we have?

I find that my Czech friends are shocked by how many copies of Live Not By Lies we have sold — 125,000 — and by the fact that there has been no major media interest. I tell them that the media have a clear interest in making sure that the voices of those who survived Soviet communism go unheard today. If people listened to them, they would realize that the woke project to which our Pravdas and Izvestias are devoted is totalitarian, and is going to destroy the nation.

The post Postcard From Prague appeared first on The American Conservative.

Arpad & The Uses Of History

Good morning. I’m on the train to Prague with my son Matt, who goes back to the US on the weekend, but who wants to see the Czech capital first. Had a fantastic weekend on the Slovenian coast. It has been five years since I was last at the beach. I’m not much of a beach person, but boy, the Adriatic has its charms. The water was cool, the sun was warming, the people were lovely, and the grilled calamari and octopus were perfect. More people should know about Slovenia. More people should go there.

My friend John O’Sullivan and I came back to Budapest with a nice professional driver I’ll call Sandor. We talked all the way back. I really liked him, and learned a lot about Hungary from talking to him. He’s 40 years old, a former teacher who left the classroom mostly because the pay was lousy, and he can make more money driving clients around the region.

After we got to know each other a bit, Sandor said there was another reason he left the classroom. “I don’t want to offend you, but one of my jobs was teaching English. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I realized that I was teaching my students how to speak a language that would make it possible for them to get jobs elsewhere and Europe, and they would leave the country.”

It is true that Hungary suffers from an outmigration of its young. Salaries here are lower than in western Europe. Last night in a pub, watching the England-Italy match, I talked to the bartender, who is demoralized by the economic situation here. She said you have to work so much longer just to make ends meet than you do in the rest of Europe. Sandor resists English as the language of cultural imperialism. He didn’t use those words precisely, but that’s exactly what he meant.

Talking to him, I realized like I had not yet done in my three months in Hungary what it feels like to be a citizen of a small, beleaguered country — beleaguered not only by politics (the European Union is always at Hungary’s throat), but also by the sense of loss. Nobody else in the world speaks your language. Your population is shrinking, both from emigration and lack of replacement. It’s a rotten place to be in.

Sandor is angry at the Orban government. He believes it overinvested in football stadiums and underinvested in teaching. Yet he expects to vote for Orban’s party, Fidesz, in the 2022 election. He says the opposition has nothing to offer, other than that they are Not Orban. Besides, he sees Hungary’s identity at stake. Sandor has thought a lot about globalization, in ways that Americans, and people of bigger, richer countries, rarely do.

He doesn’t understand the people in Hungary who are eager to imitate the West, particularly the young. Don’t they know that if Hungary is dissolved and assimilated, there will be no getting it back? Why, he wonders, do they never think about what it means to have a home, a place where people speak your language, and share your own history? He didn’t think about this either when he was young, but now it means a lot to him. He could go abroad in Europe and look for a better job, but Hungary is home. There is no other Hungary.

Why does the West demand that Hungary imitate it? He says that Hungary has had to deal with this kind of thing for a long time. The Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa, he says, ordered Hungarian schools to suppress history lessons that told the Hungarians about their pre-Habsburg ancestors — this, in an effort to control the cultural memory of the subject people, the Hungarians.

“If you don’t know who you are, it is easier for others to control you,” Sandor says. Yes, I tell him, I write about this in my latest book. Sandor’s words brought to mind this fascinating Harper’s magazine piece from 2019, about the contemporary move in Hungary to recover the Magyar people’s distant past for current uses. It begins at a big annual festival celebrating the barbarian history of the Hungarians. Excerpts:

Fidesz’s sponsorship is also why László Kövér, the speaker of Parliament, was addressing festival attendees in the conference tent shortly after I arrived. He began by welcoming the “heirs and worshippers of Attila and Árpád’s people,” the latter name invoking the chieftain who formed Hungary’s first royal dynasty, and in a few short minutes laid out his own version of the conspiracy preventing Hungarians from knowing their true past. Once upon a time, he explained, the Huns broke their enemies with their ferocious mounted archers. Today, the enemies of the homeland employ a more insidious strategy: they attack the mind. They falsify history and sow confusion about people’s “gender, family, religious, and national identities” until they don’t know who they are or where they are from. But Kövér knows. Hungarians are “the westernmost Eastern people.” Their real roots are on the battlefield, on the steppes, with the nomads. With Attila the Hun.

More:

Almost every country in Europe has a moment in its deep past that serves as its symbolic origin. These speculative beginnings are usually placed in the age of barbarians, where documentation is conveniently sparse. Along these lines, France has Clovis the Frank and “our ancestors the Gauls,” while the Germans celebrate Arminius, who beat back the Roman legions in the Teutoburg woods. Across the Atlantic, even the United States once flirted with the idea of Dark Age roots. Thomas Jefferson originally wanted to place Hengist and Horsa, the two ur-­Saxons who launched the post-­Roman conquest of Britain, on the Great Seal of the United States, arguing that they exemplified the “political principles and form of government we have assumed.”

The Hungarian version is only a little more extreme, although, as far as canonical history is concerned, Hungarian origins are already fairly spectacular. The early Hungarians appeared in ninth-­century Europe as a collection of migrating tribes who raised hell across the continent for a century before settling down in the flatlands of the Carpathian Basin. As a result of their migration from points far to the east, Hungarians speak a language that is virtually unique in Europe. (Their closest linguistic relatives are a handful of tiny tribes living in central Russia, and they also share a distant link with the Finns.)

However, the mythology on display at the Kurultáj posits that Hungarians, rather than being the orphans of Europe, are members of a great inter­ethnic brotherhood, whose heroes include everyone from Attila to Tamerlane to Genghis Khan and whose territory stretches all the way from Budapest to Manchuria. Huns are this brotherhood’s shared ancestors, as are Scythians, Parthians, and scores of other nomadic would-­be world conquerors. Thanks to this shared inheritance, the thinking goes, one can find traces of Hungarian kinship and influence in Turkey, in Mongolia, in Azerbaijan, even in Japan. This is why representatives of all these peoples and more were gathered in a field outside Bugac—to celebrate their common heritage as horse lords from the grassy heart of Eurasia, received history be damned.

Read it all. It’s pretty fascinating. There is some kitsch mixed in with this, some political nationalism, and some real history. The writer makes it clear at the end that the revival of Hungarian ethno-nationalism, rooted in a semi-mythical past, is all about trying to figure out if Hungary should lean into the West, and modernity, or into the East. I brought this essay up in conversation with Sandor, and told him that I strongly sympathize with the Hungarians who wish to resist the West, and its modernity, but that I also recognize that the Nazis leaned heavily on a mythologized pagan past to rally the German people around their rule. I don’t think that’s what Orban is doing (and in any case, as the essay makes clear, this kind of nationalism comes from the 19th century), but I think it’s worth bearing in mind.

Sandor did not realize that the Nazis had done this, and anyway he rejects the comparison. Again, I sympathize with him, though if we had had more time, I would have shared with him my concern that this project centers Hungary’s national identity in a pre-Christian, pagan past. Hungary has been Christian since St. Stephen received baptism around the year 1000, but today, most Hungarians are only nominally Christian. A Christian has reason to worry about where this might go.

Nevertheless, this discussion with Sandor resonated with me because of the way I’ve become much more defensive of Hungary, Poland, and other Central European countries and peoples who are under pressure from the globalist, post-Christian EU establishment to abandon their traditions and assimilate. Sandor is right to consider the EU, and the West more generally, to be a culturally imperialist power (though he bristled when I pointed out that Hungarians did this to non-Hungarian people’s under their rule in the “Magyarization” project of the late 19th and early 20th century). It seems to me that Orban’s outreach to China can only really be understood in light of his urgent wish to protect Hungary and Hungarian identity from EU assimilation, and more broadly from the annihilating aspect of liquid modernity. Any American religious or social conservative faced with the soft-totalitarian drive of wokeness should be able to understand how the Hungarians feel.

I finished over the weekend an excellent book, The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. They are forthrightly liberal academics who explore in its pages the reasons why liberal democracy has had such a rough go of it in Central Europe and Russia since 1989. They also discuss Donald Trump and Trump populism as part of the same anti-liberal phenomenon.

Krastev and Holmes talk about how liberal democracy, led by Americans, was a missionary project to the rest of the world. The Soviets, of course, saw Communism in the same way, as did Mao’s China. According to Krastev and Holmes, it was the fate of the world’s non-democratic countries eventually to embrace democracy, liberalism, and capitalism — this, according to the way Westerners see it. The world must be shown that the American way of understanding politics and culture was the correct way. This is why you see the EU coming down on Hungary like a ton of bricks over its recent law regulating LGBT education and speech aimed at kids. To the EU, this isn’t simply a matter of Hungary, which is more socially conservative, choosing how to educate its own kids in line with its own cultural values. This is a counterrevolutionary insurrection that must be ruthlessly suppressed.

Modern China is not like that. It is certainly an imperialist power, in that it wants to spread its influence around the world. But unlike America “in the heyday of liberal hegemony,” they write, China doesn’t care what kind of government its allies have. It only wants to know that they will act favorably to China’s interests. “The expectation that others should adopt Western-style liberal democratic institutions and norms seemed as natural as the rising of the sun,” they write. That day is over. The liberal hegemony of the European Union, with its demands that Hungary accept its policies regarding LGBT, migration, and the rest, is driving a Western country, Hungary, into the arms of China, as a means of assuring national survival.

There is something to learn here about how our own internal politics work in the US. We are all living right now through the internal colonization of our country by the woke, who control nearly all the major institutions of American life. The woke are ruthless missionaries determined to exterminate ways of living and seeing the world that conflict with their ideological model. We see what they are doing in schools, but consider also the immense power of woke capitalist corporations, accountable to no one, to nullify the decisions of democratically-elected state legislators when those decisions conflict with woke principles. And with respect to the ethnos, the woke and their powerful, well-funded soldiers are making war on the received history of the American people, and in particular on the histories and experiences of white European peoples, trying to inculcate shame and self-hatred so that whites will become demoralized and accept woke totalitarian rule. (Whites, of course, appallingly did the same thing to Indians they conquered in North America, as the Anglo-Americans did to the Cajun French; no conquering culture’s hands are clean.)

Anyway, my driver Sandor correctly understands that economic globalism and liberal cultural hegemony wish to dissolve nations and peoples, and make everyone into deracinated consumers who have cast aside religion, traditions, and all impediments to “diversity,” by which they mean whatever the progressive ruling class says diversity means today. I don’t know if the strategies by which Hungary’s political leaders have chosen to fight this are correct, or at least usually correct. But I admire that they are at least fighting. It is certainly true that nationalist-populist politicians can use these ideas, and histories (real, invented, or a mixture of both), for disreputable, even wicked, ends. But it is also true that the ruling ideology of the West — liberal, democratic, free-market, wokeness — is far too often the enemy of sovereignty, of tradition (especially European), of religion, and of national self-determination. Flawed though it sometimes is, I prefer the way Orban is fighting back to the way our own conservative American politicians are not fighting back. The Hungarians know, in the particular way that people of a small country do, how much depends on the answers to the questions, “Who are we? What are the stories we live by? Who gets to tell them?”

 

The post Arpad & The Uses Of History appeared first on The American Conservative.

Today In Soft Totalitarianism

Check out this abstract of a recent paper in medical ethics:

Got that? Maura Priest, the philosopher writing here, says that Love Will Not Win unless parents have no right to say whether or not their children can be injected with sex hormones, have their breasts removed, be treated with psychotherapy to convince them that they are the opposite sex, and so forth. Here’s a link to the abstract; I can’t access the whole paper. In 2018, Maura Priest made similar points in a bioethics seminar captured on video here; she claims, for example, that children should be seized from parents for sex changes on the same principle that allows the state to force blood transfusions on the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses, over parental objections.

Maura Priest has been going on about this for some time. In 2019, Wesley J. Smith analyzed an earlier paper of hers. Excerpt:

The American Journal of Bioethics is a mainstream professional publication with wide distribution among members of the bioethics movement and within the medical intelligentsia. If advocacy appears in AJOB, it is considered respectable; it is considered defendable; it is considered justifiable.

Which is why the article I am about to describe should alarm the hell out of everyone. A bioethicist named Maura Priest, from Arizona State University, argues that children with gender dysphoria have the right to have their puberty blocked medically — and that if parents don’t consent, the state should push them aside and do it anyway. From, “Transgender Children and the Right to Transition:”

The formal argument runs as follows:

1. The state has a duty to protect minors from serious harm inflicted by their caretakers.
2. Harm that leads to suicide is a serious harm.
3. Transgender youth with non-supportive parents are at a high risk of psychological harm leading to suicidal tendencies.
4. Therefore, the state should pay special attention to, and has a duty to protect, transgender minors from psychological harm inflicted via their caretakers.

Notice that the concept of “harm” is turned on its head:  Parents are harming their children who identify as the other sex for refusing to permit radical, body-altering transitioning interventions wanted by the child before puberty, i.e., long before children have decision-making capacity. Why, refusing to block puberty promotes suicide!

This is utterly nuts. Parents can love and support their gender-dysphoric children in many ways beyond yielding powerlessly to a child’s desires. A gender dysphoric kid’s suffering and despair can be compassionately addressed while refusing to allow their child to be injected with strong drugs and hormones.

Besides, blocking puberty is itself a harm. It should be seen as unethical human experimentation, the long-term health consequences of which cannot be known given that it has only been clinically applied for the last few years. Preventing the natural development of secondary sex characteristics and normal maturation can also cause immediate deleterious side effects, such as a loss of bone density.

And guess what: Some dysphoric children move past their other-sex gender identification and go on to live happily as the sex they were born biologically.

That could happen less if Priest gets her way. Rather than treating the condition, she would reinforce gender dysphoria in those so afflicted.

Which is why Priest argues that the state should propagandize dysphoric children to want this radical intervention, and moreover, to strip objecting parents of their right to decide:

My strategy for defending the formal argument above revolves around arguing in favor of two normative claims:
1. Transgender youth should have access to treatment that is not dependent upon parental approval.
2. There should be state-sponsored, publicly available information regarding gender dysphoria, transgender identification, and means of appropriate treatment.

More specifically, Priest argues that schools should propagandize for transgenderism and provide medical and psychological interventions without parental consent:

Implementing this policy only is half the battle. Transgender youth without supportive parents are not helped unless they access health care clinics and counseling that will help with the transition. Hence, there is an additional duty of the state to help facilitate sharing this information with vulnerable youths. I argued that one of the first places this should be done is in public schools. In addition, information should be available at publicly funded health clinics.

Eventually, as you knew she would, the ironically named Priest shouts her bigotry against traditional faith values:

One objection to my proposal is simply a concern about the intrusion it imposes on the autonomy of the family. Imagine that parents have religious values against children expressing transgender dress and behavior. Are not parents allowed to raise their kids according to their own religious values? And if so, how can I argue that parents must be forced not only to accept, but to facilitate, transition?

The mistake here is in thinking that parents have rights to raise their children according to their religious values, full stop. Like nearly all rights, the right of parents to raise children according to their own values is not absolute. Rather, parents have such authority up to and until the point at which a given decision or practice threatens serious harm. According to some religious sects, after all, girls who are raped should be put to death. Obviously, parents have no right to do this regardless of whether doing so accords with their religion.

Good grief. Refusing to allow your child to be the subject of experimental interventions is equivalent morally and should be legally, she says, to killing a child who was raped? That’s just flat-out nuts.

It turns out that the Trans-Industrial Complex and its medical enablers really are coming for your children. A friend in Texas snapped this photo in the Barnes & Noble section for toddlers over the weekend. He said, “There was a whole display about it.”:

Seriously, people: in a major medical journal, they are now talking about why it is necessary to essentially kidnap children from parents to turn them into the opposite sex. This is not Nazi Germany. This is liberal America. And we just keep on chewing our cuds, thinking that It Won’t Happen To Us.

Meanwhile:

Rat out your own family members to the FBI. Wow. A reader e-mails:

The whole push for citizen informants was mysteriously missing from the ISIS terrorist attacks in the US and Europe from 2014 to present. It illustrates how the left is incapable of targeting jihadists but exceedingly eager to turn them on conservatives.

I’m going to keep saying it: Read Live Not By Lies and start preparing for the future. For example, we need to start building underground railroads now to help dissident families keep their children from being set upon by these Dr. Frankensteins.

Along these lines, let me commend to you Abigail Shrier’s latest newsletter, this time commending Christopher Rufo for his powerful and effective work fighting back against Critical Race Theory. Shrier contrasts Rufo’s methods with the lame methods of other conservatives. Her title says it all: “Want To Save America? Don’t Act Like A Conservative”. Excerpts:

And while academics and other pedants quibble over whether “Critical Race Theory” is the right term, Rufo is out there identifying the problem, alerting the public, and sounding all available alarms. If he hasn’t yet slain the beast, he has at least awakened American parents from their coma, convinced them that they cannot trust the teachers and administrators and school boards who treat children, not as students, but as recruits for their revolution.

How did Rufo do it? By gathering evidence and pointing out the glaring harm in clear, unapologetic (but never crass or rude) language. He speaks not to the elites, but to Americans, and he makes an intelligible argument: “Anti-Racism” is just racism in progressive clothing; it’s teaching our kids to hate themselves and each other.

Rufo engages with the culture in the straightforward manner of a gentleman soldier. He neither grovels to the intellectual class nor strains to fit his arguments into the warped mold of their lingo. And he doesn’t pick fights for their own sake.

In other words, Rufo has thus far sailed clear of the Scylla and Charybdis conservatives so often pinball against: hyper-polite fecklessness on one side of the boat and chest-thumping ignorance on the other. When parents ask me how to combat Gender Ideology in their schools, this is the course I tell them to follow as well.

Contrast this approach with Republican Senator James Lankford’s June 10th questioning of HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. Mr. Lankford noted that the HHS had “shifted in places from using the term ‘mother’ to ‘birthing people’?”

Why the change? Senator Lankford wanted to know.

“I’d have to go back and take a look at the language that was used in the budget,” Secretary Becerra said, as if this were a technical matter of budget arcana—“But I think it simply reflects the work that’s being done.”

“I definitely get that,” Senator Lankford replied affably. “I would only say the language is important always. We don’t want to offend in our language. I get that. But would you at least admit calling a mom a ‘birthing person’ could be offensive to some moms?”

“Senator, I’ll go back and take a look at the terminology that was used,” Secretary Becerra replied.

Consider the scene: The HHS deletes the word “mother” and the Republican response is to muse aloud about this—as if the HHS has done nothing more than referred to “cookies” as “biscuits.” It’s a clip worth watching because it exemplifies decades of Republican failure in culture wars that have seen Leftists wipe the floor with them.

More:

Aw Shucks Conservatives are willing to disagree with the Left, but they first want to get all the terminology right—“Now, which is it again: is ‘non-binary’ the same as they/them? Or ‘she/they?’” They don’t understand that the chaos is the point. While they strain to avoid a faux pas, they don’t even feel the dagger going in. They chuckle with their buddies that Woke beliefs are “nonsense upon stilts,” to use Bentham’s term—and that voters will surely respond in the next midterm election. They do not fight Silicon Valley—they are confused about whether their belief in free market economics allows it. They do not fight for women—not if it means any mud splashed on their full-break trousers. They have lost every important cultural battle and – if given over to their protection – we would lose America.

They pine for a return to debating the Kiddie Tax or privatizing Social Security. They are polite and naïve. To the activist Left, they look like a meal.

There is another sort of conservative, of course—the youthful, chest-beating, triumphalist sort. It lacks neither fight nor heart. It relies heavily on mantras. Some of its instincts are correct—but it rarely seems to know why.

Chest-Beating conservatism offends on purpose, as if offense itself were an argument. It ham hocks the Left’s grist—CRT or Gender Ideology—into an overstuffed and unappetizing conservative burrito: “This is all because of gay marriage!” “This is all because of Roe!” “Ban in vitro fertilization!” “Blame Caitlyn Jenner!” and the like.

Think what you want about abortion or same-sex marriage, but neither has anything to do with the crisis at hand—or how to repair it. Abortion is an important moral and political question—but not every other serious issue we face bears upon it or derives from it. And neither same-sex marriage nor Caitlyn Jenner poses any threat to children.

Conservatives were handed a political gift they did not win and do not deserve—the disaster of the Left’s ascent. The activist Left’s policy agenda is widely disliked. Its positions veer between unreasonable (Defund the Police), unlivable (indulge looters, larcenists, and vandals), unsustainable (open the borders), and untenable (transwomen are women). Almost no one actually agrees with any of this. But rather than find common cause with moderates who would join the fight, Chest-Beating Conservatives would rather heap contempt on moderates, score points for Team Red, and sully themselves in rudeness. They can have no lasting impact on a culture they are quick to condemn but lack the curiosity to engage.

The Left wages war every day, in every school system in America and, no doubt, many a summer camp. It knows the stakes are high and it comes prepared to fight. It has an uncomplicated revulsion for Judeo-Christian religion, American traditions, American symbols, our founders, and individual rights. It despises the nuclear family, like good Marxists do—which is the real reason it cannot abide the words “mother” and “father.” (It understands no one was ever moved to family formation by the dream of becoming a “gestational parent.”) It does not disguise its plan to replace all of these things.

The Aw Shucks Conservatives meet the Left reluctantly and meekly, praying like hell the other side will forfeit. (It won’t.) They allow themselves to be convinced that the current madness will burn itself out, or that they could not possibly respond to even the most outlandish of Woke claims—like whether biological men’s participation is healthy for women’s sports—without a PhD in kinesiology. They dream that America will come to its senses.

The Chest-Beating Conservatives at least do not underestimate the task at hand. But they lack discipline and restraint and occasionally even seem to revel in ignorance. They find their personification in Marjorie Taylor Greene, the greatest thing to happen to the Left since Roy Moore.

Far too impatient to comprehend America’s current crisis, they howl “This is insane!” over and over, until they are the ones who seem unhinged. It is no accident that they are error-prone: they do not believe facts are important and they never bother to learn them. They think the gist of an argument is enough. They win claps from the same smarting-red hands and never manage to persuade a single open mind.

Read it all. It’s so, so good. I don’t agree with every aspect of it, but man, is it ever necessary reading for the Right. We are losing our country, and the Republican Party is either unwilling to fight the actual battle we are in, or its factions are too emotional, undisciplined, and given over to grift to do the hard, hard work of resistance. As I have said here many times in the past, people on the Right are far too easily satisfied by emotionally satisfying outbursts of anti-liberal contempt that actually change nothing.

That can change. It had better. Parents have got to start loudly and insistently fighting back, and asserting our rights. It would be mighty nice if some GOP politicians could find the courage to help us.

The post Today In Soft Totalitarianism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Justice Through Public Degeneracy

Writing in the Boston Review, Joseph J. Fischel says that if we don’t allow kinky sex and nudity at Pride events, Love won’t Win, but racism and homophobia will. Excerpts:

All this talk of public sex acts that violate can make one lose sight of the more sanguine correlate: the varieties of public sex practices that we might want to revalue as benign, amusing, mildly to moderately inconvenient, or, finally, politically potent. We might then think about the wicked intentions of the flasher as an exception to a norm of public sex accommodation. For whatever the intentions of Pride participants, whether we are wearing wedding rings or dog collars, we are there to celebrate queer love, queer family, and queer sex; we parade not to humiliate others but to dignify ourselves.

Turning, then, from the question of what can make “sex” in “public” wrong (or not), let us focus upon the more generative question: Why might some “sex” in “public” be right and good?

Gender studies scholars Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant conclude their queer cri de coeur, “Sex in Public” (1998), by describing a scene in which a man induces a younger man to vomit, pushing milk and food down his throat, onstage, at a leather bar in New York. Berlant and Warner are not exalting public puking as an antidote to heteronormativity. But they use this extreme example of nonreproductive, nongenital erotics to redefine “sex” and “public” and to occasion reexamining our norms and rituals. When we go to a leather bar for its weekly talent show, or to Pride for its yearly parades, is this not what we came for, to be shook and shocked, to be introduced to alternate pleasures and publics? And what kinds of harmful intrusions do we invite by asking that these acts be regulated by the state or shamed back into the “private” bedroom?

What a sicko. Fischel is saying that if queer people aren’t allowed to have sex in public, then America is right back to the closet. There can be no difference between public and private life when it comes to displaying sexuality. If you believe there is, he explains, then you are racist. You’ll have to read the whole thing to encounter the pathetic sophistry he undertakes to make that claim.

Here’s the “coming for your children” part:

Over at Vox, my friend and colleague Greta LaFleur has less patience for the kink-at-Pride debate than I do, averring that the full-throttle corporatization of Gay has defanged Pride of any political promise or power. I suppose I see another payout. My argument, all along really, has been for the children.

Like Robin Dembroff, another friend and colleague quoted in that same Vox article, I believe queerness is anchored in “political resistance to hegemonic ideas of how humans ought to be.” Leather chaps and nipple clamps and boys kissing boys and girls kissing girls—even on an otherwise unexceptional Bank of America float—model modes of living and loving that many kids and teenagers attending Pride have never seen, or have just seen online, and only as pornography (not that there is anything ipso facto wrong with pornography, but the more models of queerness, the better). When parents or people ventriloquizing parents oppose public indecency at Pride on the grounds that it may upset children, the opposite is more likely the case: their children might like it, and that upsets the parents, not the children. What is the presumptive harm if a child happens upon a guy sporting a chest harness, or sees an adult’s butt cheeks, or even an adult’s genitals or breasts? Would such children necessarily feel violated, or might adults be feeling violated on their behalf? Might the child be as likely to respond with curiosity?

The “problem” with gay sex or kink in public, like the “problem” of early twentieth-century young Black women carving slices of pleasure and intimacy out of brutal city life, is that it models how to have gay sex, or how to be kinky, or how to squeeze fun (or a living) out of socially mandated misery. For an antiracist, democratically hedonic, and more just future, we ought to celebrate kink, butts, and boobs at Pride. And we should do so especially for those kids whose opportunities and curiosities are stifled by racist violence, economic inequality, or their heterosexual nuclear family.

There it is. Fischel argues that gay sex in public is necessary to fight racism, poverty, and the nuclear family. When confronted by kink at Pride, he says, “Might the child be as likely to respond with curiosity?”

This. Is. Grooming. There it is. Grooming as liberation. Read it all. 

This is not new. Gayle Rubin is an academic cultural anthropologist and sadomasochism enthusiast. Her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex” is considered a founding text of queer studies. In it, she defends all sexual expression, including pederasty. Excerpts:

She is doing to fellow progressives what Joseph Fischel is doing: attempting to shame them into permitting and affirming kink. In the essay, Rubin laments that “no tactic for stirring up erotic hysteria has been as reliable as the appeal to protect children.” And then she defends adults who have sex with children:

 

And here she defends adult incest and sadomasochism:

 

So, when the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus trills that they will “convert your children,” what they mean is that they want to corrupt their moral imaginations. I was given one idea of what this means the other day in Slovenia, talking to a man who came to hear my Live Not By Lies lecture. He told me that his 11-year-old daughter made contact over the Internet with some people on the US West Coast who have convinced her that she has to choose her sexual identity now, before biology does it for her. He said she has been paralyzed by this thought, and can think of nothing else. They offered her 26 different identities, and now the child is terrified that she will choose wrongly, and is obsessed with the topic. The father sees her in torment, and rues the day he ever let her get on the Internet. I asked him why he did, and he said that all the kids had to have computers to do their school lessons under Covid restrictions. Anyway, the thought has already been put into this poor kid’s head, and it is breaking her.

Don’t come at me with the usual “Dreher is just nutpicking again” crap. This very issue was discussed on the op-ed page of the Washington Post the other day, in an op-ed arguing that children should see kink at Pride, because it will be good for them. This is what we are dealing with. You have to be willfully blind to not see where this is headed in our suicidal culture. We can be grateful to Joseph Fischel for saying the quiet part out loud.

What we are seeing here is a sign of civilizational collapse. There will soon be violence. Count on it. I wrote last year:

Over the weekend I finished reading Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins (only $7.21 on Kindle). It’s as good as people say; thank you Rob G. for recommending it. Eksteins is a (now retired) Latvian-born Canadian historian who specializes in German culture. This book is a cultural history of the West from the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (the ballet choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, and produced by Serge Diaghilev) till the death of Hitler in 1945. Eksteins focuses on the transgressiveness of Western culture in Modernism. I found this passage especially interesting:

Diaghilev’s ballet enterprise was both a quest for totality and an instrument of liberation. Perhaps the most sensitive nerve it touched—and this was done deliberately—was that of sexual morality, which was so central a symbol of the established order, especially in the heart of political, economic, and imperial power, western Europe. Again, Diaghilev was simply an heir to a prominent, accumulating tradition. For many intellectuals of the nineteenth century, from Saint-Simon through Feuerbach to Freud, the real origin of “alienation,” estrangement from self, society, and the material world, was sexual.

“Pleasure, joy, expands man,” wrote Feuerbach; “trouble suffering, contracts and concentrates him; in suffering man denies the reality of the world.” The middle classes, in particular, of the Victorian age interpreted pleasure in primarily spiritual and moral rather than physical or sensual terms. Gratification of the senses was suspect, indeed sinful. Will, based on moral fervor, was the essence of successful human endeavor; pure passion, its opposite. That the issue of sexual morality should become a vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values for the modern movement was inevitable. In the art of Gustav Klimt, in the early operas of Richard Strauss, in the plays of Frank Wedekind, in the personal antics of Verlaine, Tchaikovsky, and Wilde, and even in the relaxed morality of the German youth movement, a motif of eroticism dominated the search for newness and change. In the United States Max Eastman shouted, “Lust is sacred!”

The sexual rebel, particularly the homosexual, became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment. Of her Bloomsbury circle of gentle rebels Virginia Woolf said, “The word bugger was never far from our lips.” André Gide, after a long struggle with himself, denounced publicly le mensonge des moeurs, the moral lie, and admitted his own predilections. Passion and love, he had concluded, were mutually exclusive. And passion was much purer than love.

And:

Despite a fascination among the avant-garde with the lower classes, with social outcasts, prostitutes, criminals, and the insane, the interest usually did not stem from a practical concern with social welfare or with a restructuring of society, but from a desire simply to eliminate restrictions on the human personality. The interest in the lower orders was thus more symbolic than practical. The search was for a “morality without sanctions and obligations.”

Hannah Arendt said something similar about pre-totalitarian culture. She said intellectuals and artists were happy to see the habits of civilization destroyed just for the fun of transgression. That worked out well for us, didn’t it?

Certain liberals in this blog’s comments section love to scratch their heads and puzzle over why social and religious conservatives are so preoccupied with sex. They ought to read a little history. Sexual revolution was at the core of the Modernist revolution. In the 1960s, Philip Rieff, the great interpreter of Freud, said this cultural revolution — of a morality based on feeling, and of forbidding to forbid — was more significant than the Bolshevik Revolution, because the Bolsheviks, atheists though they were, still believed in a binding transcendent order.

With the Eksteins passage above in mind, take a look at Carl Trueman’s latest in First Things. He’s writing about Critical Theory, of which Queer Theory is a part. Excerpts:

What exactly is the endgame here? What do these people want in terms of positive philosophical and political construction? I eventually concluded that the answer was really quite simple: The purpose of critical theory is not to establish anything at all. Rather, it is to destabilize as potentially oppressive any claim to transcendent truth or value. Its target is the destruction of all metanarratives, and thus the bombastically rebarbative prose is itself part of the “argument.” Leaving readers hopelessly confused about even the simplest things is an important part of the game, pellucid simplicity being one way the oppressors made their oppression seem natural.

Trueman explains why the acceptance of transgenderism and queerness is so extremely radical, far moreso than many people (especially Christians) realize. More:

The debate over LGBTQ issues is not a debate about sexual behavior. I suspect it is not really at this point a debate with the L, the G, or the B. It is the T and the Q that are carrying the day, and we need to understand that the debate is about the radical abolition of metaphysics and metanarratives and any notion of cultural stability that might rest thereupon. Until we clarify that and adjust our strategy of engagement accordingly, we cannot develop the arguments needed to persuade our fellow Christians of the truth, let alone anyone else.

Read the whole thing.

It is important that you — that we — understand the meaning of what we are seeing and hearing and living through. These “blessings of liberty.”

UPDATE: Thinking further about what people like Fischel and Rubin are after reminds me of Tanner Greer’s important recent piece, “Culture Wars Are Long Wars.”In it, he says:

Generational churn helps account for the “gradually, then suddenly” tempo of social revolution. Cultural insurgents win few converts in their own cohort. They can, however, build up a system of ideas and institutions which will preserve and refine the ideals they hope their community will adopt in the future. The real target of these ideas are not their contemporaries, but their contemporaries’ children and grandchildren. Culture wars are fought for the hearts of the unborn. Future generations will be open to values the current generation rejects outright.

This will not be apparent at first. Beneath the official comings and goings of the cohorts above, a new consensus forms in in the cohorts below. Ideas will fester among the young, but their impact will be hidden by the inability and inexperience of youth. But the youth do not stay young. Eventually a transition point arrives. Sometimes, this transition will be marked by a great event the old orthodoxy cannot explain. At other times it is simply a matter of numbers. In either case, the end falls swift: the older cohorts suddenly find themselves outnumbered and outgunned, swept up in a flood they had assumed was a mere trickle.

For them it was a trickle. They spent their time with members of their own cohort. The revolution occurring below did not echo in their souls. It won no converts among their friends, nor even among their rivals. The new values remained the preserve of weirdos and extremists. Not so for the rising generation!

Might the child be as likely to respond with curiosity? writes Fischel. This is the heart of the matter. Many people here “we’re going to convert your children” and think “they want to have sex with my kids.” I don’t think this is what these revolutionaries mean. They rather want the youth to embrace the full spectrum of sexual desire, including perversion, as liberation. They not only want to create children who grow up into kinky adults; they want to create children who grow up to be adults who think it’s progressive and wonderful to take children to Pride parades to watch perverts lead their catamites around on leashes like dogs.

Think about that Slovene girl whose mind is occupied by tormenting thoughts about what her sexual identity should be. This should never have been allowed to happen. Any society that allows its children to be possessed by such thoughts has failed them, and is failing itself. I wonder if we in the decadent West are even capable of pulling back from this particular brink.

The post Justice Through Public Degeneracy appeared first on The American Conservative.

Liberal Hypocrisy & ‘Magyar Man Bad’

Hello from Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, where I will be giving a Live Not By Lies talk tonight. I had never been to this small city, and boy, is it ever a jewel. I can’t wait to come back. Driving down from Hungary yesterday, I found northern Slovenia, with its hills and mountains, breathtaking. And the old city at the heart of Ljubljana is like a fairy-tale version of a Middle European city. If you’re in the city this evening (Thursday), come hear my speech at 7pm at the publishing house, Družina, at Krekov trg 1. Here I am there this morning with Andrej Lokar, who translated the book:

I was just having lunch with some Slovenian folks, and getting a read on the situation here, politically and culturally. Slovenia, they say, is very much on the Left. Last night, in my welcome dinner here, my hosts told me that after the fall of Communism, most of the apparatchiks and their networks remained in place, only now they were posing as liberal democrats. This is not uncommon in the former Soviet bloc countries. Ryszard Legutko, the Polish philosopher and statesman, has written about how that works in Poland. Whenever you read in the Western media about right-of-center governments replacing judges, keep in mind that they are often replacing judges that were holdovers from the Communist era.

Today, our group was talking about how outmanned conservatives are in this country. Because the Left has held the government for so long, and holds a commanding position in almost all the institutions of civil society, and because state funding of private institutions is normal here, government money goes to pay for left-wing cultural organizations. Recently the Left in Hungary and elsewhere has been raising hell over Hungarian PM Viktor Orban’s decision to move a big chunk of public funds to cultural and educational organizations of the cultural Right. The thing outsiders don’t understand is that it is normal for the state to subsidize cultural and educational organizations. It’s just that the Left run almost all of them, everywhere, and left-wing partisans see this as in the natural order of things.

My friend and colleague John O’Sullivan and I were explaining to our Slovenian hosts that in both the UK and the US, the only institutions where conservatives run things are institutions of the state. This is a remarkable thing when you think about it. The left-wing parties have traditionally been the party of government, while the right-wing parties have been the parties of society. That has more or less flipped.

I mentioned to a conservative writer here that a couple of Hungarians told me that if Orban had not engineered the takeover of a number of Hungarian press titles by his friends and allies, there would be no conservative media presence at all in Hungary — this, even though conservative voters are a majority. Whenever you hear people on the Left demanding government intervention to guarantee “equity” — meaning equal outcomes — remind them that that is pretty much what Viktor Orban did with the Hungarian media landscape. I should say that I have serious misgivings about the media operation Orban pulled off, but the de facto monopoly the Left has on the media, especially in a small country like Hungary, tempers my criticism. Orban is far more realistic about the world people on the Right actually live in, I think.

Which brings us to this write-by-numbers Atlantic piece on how the 2022 election might be the last time to stop Hungary from turning into an Orban autocracy. It’s typical of the coverage you see in the Western media: no interest at all in trying to understand the nuances of the issues in play. It’s all Magyar Man Bad. As I have said repeatedly, if you come to Hungary with an open mind, and spend any time, you may not come away thinking pro-Orban thoughts, but you will come away realizing that the situation here is far, far different from the picture you see in the Western media.

For example, here’s this from the Atlantic piece:

[Opposition coalition leader and Budapest mayor Gergely] Karácsony told me (via an interpreter) that, for a long time, opposition parties simply couldn’t overcome their deep-seated political differences. It wasn’t until after Orbán’s third consecutive victory in 2018, by which point his consolidation of power was well under way, that they began to take the idea more seriously.

Nowhere in this Atlantic piece do you learn that the opposition coalition includes the Jobbik party, which until the day before yesterday was openly anti-Semitic, with some of its leaders referring to the Hungarian capital as “Judapest.” Why does the Atlantic writer not care to point that out, or to ask Karacsony how he and the other left-wing politicians justified getting into bed with open Jew-haters? I don’t expect that magazine’s readership to favor Orban, but shouldn’t they at least be interested in learning why he remains popular in Hungary, after 11 years in power?

The fact is, it is nearly impossible to write favorably about Orban in the Western media. A conservative website commissioned a piece from me last week making a case for Orban. I talked about his faults, but also about why, on balance, he is on the right side of the most important issues. I made several requested changes, but the website’s top editor still spiked the piece. There are some things that just cannot be said on the Respectable Right. I’m telling you from unhappy personal experience: do not be so sure you can trust conservative Anglo-American conservative publications to tell the truth about Hungary, or the European Right in general.

Happily, The Spectator is not one of those publications. Here, from its Cockburn columnist, is a fantastic rebuke to that pathetic Atlantic piece. Excerpts:

Blasting across Cockburn’s email feed recently was a new piece from Yasmeen Serhan for the Atlantic, titled ‘The Autocrat’s Legacy.’ The piece is about the unfathomable wickedness of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. He’s the autocrat.

Orbán doesn’t stick his opponents in jail or ban political parties or rig the votes in elections. He’s a much deadlier kind of authoritarian: the kind who wins elections but believes wrong things.

More:

‘Orbán doesn’t follow the classic authoritarian playbook of jailing opposition politicians, arresting journalists, or violently cracking down on protesters, as is so often the case in places such as Russia or Belarus,’ Serhan writes. So, in other words, Orban is not an authoritarian. He’s just a guy who wins elections.

What, then, are the Magyar Monstrosity’s offenses against the noble goddess of Democracy? Well, he expanded the franchise and gave the vote to more people. Wait, isn’t that a good thing?, you ask. Fool! Orbán is letting ethnic Hungarians who live abroad vote in their homeland’s elections. That’s very undemocratic, unlike letting in 10 million illegal immigrants and then amnestying them for the express purpose of remaking the electorate. That’s empowering.

Cockburn goes on like this, pointing out that the kinds of things liberals and progressives hate about Orban are the kinds of things they do all the time. Here’s the kicker:

More than ever before, Western elites simply equate democracy with their own power. In a time when Western power seems shakier than ever, they tell the public that democracy means they are the only acceptable choice to lead. So, who is really putting democracy in peril?

Read it all. 

This is exactly right. Patrick Deneen makes the same point here:

The same people who keep saying “democracy” is under attack. Note well, when they say “democracy,” they mean “liberalism,” and believe it should be imposed by any necessary means. https://t.co/yz9D0CiDwS

— Patrick Deneen (@PatrickDeneen) July 8, 2021

Yes. The thing about Viktor Orban is that he fights, and he often wins. That, and he knows exactly the kind of people he’s facing. He knows that when they talk about “democracy,” they don’t mean pluralism and diversity; they mean woke autocracy. Ask yourself: why is it the European Commission’s business to threaten Hungary in this way because its democratically elected parliament voted to impose popular standards on sex education for children, and children’s media? If the Hungarian people — who are not very religious, but who are socially more conservative on sexual matters than Western Europeans — don’t like it, they can vote them out next year. It is no more the business of Europe how Hungary educates its children, and governs their media exposure, than it is the business of Hungary how any other European country does so.

In the US, we have seen woke oligarchs who run major corporations undermine democracy by threatening economic punishment of states whose legislators vote for social policies that they (the oligarchs) dislike, even though these policies have nothing at all to do with business. These oligarchs are not accountable to any voters, yet they use their immense economic power to fight democracy, when the democratic outcomes are not to their liking. It’s a sham, and the way the EU and the Western media treat Orban’s Hungary reveals what’s really going on.

American conservatives should pay attention. I can’t say it often enough: Orban is not a saint, and his Hungary is not the Athens of Pericles. He is certainly fair game for criticism, as any politician is. But the criticism thrown at him is often in such bad faith. You should know this. What’s going on in Hungary has a lot to do with the way the Left gaslights conservatives back home in America.

In the Atlantic piece, prominent liberal Orban critic Peter Kreko is quoted harshly slamming the Prime Minister. I interviewed Kreko earlier this summer. He’s an academic, and a really smart guy. I liked him. I told our mutual friend that I wanted to meet an Orban critic who was not hysterical, and he recommended Kreko. It was a good choice. I learned a lot talking to him. But as I have mentioned in this space before, one thing Kreko said at the beginning of our interview was that he hates the Orban government for banning gay marriage and gay adoption. But, said Kreko, he is not so much in favor of transgender rights claims. I told him this was the general liberal opinion in the US ten or fifteen years ago.

Toward the end of our interview, he said that despite all his problems with the Orban government, he can stand in his classroom in Budapest and say whatever he wants, and never have to worry about the state retaliating. I pointed out that the same thing is true in the US: the state won’t bother you. But if you said in your classroom that you’re a full supporter of gay rights, but not really on the trans train, you would be loudly condemned by your students, who would report you to the college administration. That administration would probably fire you, and your name would be so tainted in American academia that you might never work again. So who, I asked, is more free? An academic in Orban’s Hungary, or an academic in Biden’s America? If you are a social conservative, chances are you would rather live in Orban’s Hungary than in Ursula van der Leyen’s Europe. But you wouldn’t have the slightest clue about that from reading Western media coverage.

This is the kind of question that no Western media people ever ask. They simply assume that Hungary must be a fascist-adjacent state. They have no interest at all in exploring ways that Hungarian life and culture are more free than American life and culture. If they did so, they would have to face their own left-wing illiberalism. And that is more than they can handle.

The post Liberal Hypocrisy & ‘Magyar Man Bad’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Gay Group: ‘We’ll Convert Your Children’

By the time the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus figures out that this too-cute-by-half stunt rubbing the noses of normies in their queer bitchiness was a bad idea, I hope a thousand of you will have copied this video so it can’t ever be taken down. The San Francisco group deleted it today:

… but somebody else has reproduced it. Watch it. Just watch it all the way to the end. It is billed as “A Message From The Gay Community,” and is a song titled, “We’ll Convert Your Children”:

It starts with this line:

“You think that we’ll corrupt your kids/Fine — just this once, you’re correct/We’ll convert your children/Happens bit by bit/Quietly and suddenly and you will barely notice it.”

And:

“And you’ll be disgusted/When they start finding things online/That you’ve kept far from their sight.”

So it goes. Seriously, watch it all. And tell me that Hungarian PM Viktor Orban was wrong to pass the law keeping LGBT media from targeting kids. They are making his case for them. This thing ought to be played all over Hungarian media.

What these smart-asses in San Francisco did was make a satirical song and video that would win them plaudits in their own circles by making fun of normies. They posted this online on July 1. My guess is that they began hearing back today from LGBT people outside of safe blue districts telling them that they are out of their damn minds. This is confirming the worst possible stereotype: the gays are targeting our kids. I say fantastic: the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus said the quiet part out loud. Sure, they say in the video that they’re talking about converting them into being “tolerant and fair,” but that is not at all how it will be received. And that, I’m sure, is why the fools took it down.

Meanwhile, today, China kicked a bunch of pro-LGBT student group accounts off social media, with no explanation. Hmm. I guess when the Dutch Prime Minister gets finished “bringing Hungary to its knees,” he can turn to China.

UPDATE: If this tweet is correct, the China ban is much broader:

The People’s Republic just banned all LGBTQ activist groups from social media. None is left. pic.twitter.com/Fs0NWRHnDB

— Manju Baturu (@Xongkuro) July 6, 2021

UPDATE.2: I’m still flabbergasted by how idiotic this was. These childless men apparently have no idea at all how most people feel about their children.

UPDATE.3: Reader CrossTieWalker:

The point is the hostility projected by this group of gay men toward parents with children. At this late date, most people with teenagers are probably under 50, that is, they were themselves brought up in a world already quite accepting of gay people. But the deal sealing that acceptance was that each side would strive to show the other that putative threats from their own side were overblown.

This performance punctures that peace deal.

Parents of troubled and confused teens do not need a gaggle of childless activists intruding and getting in the way of dealing with teen development issues, however things turn out with those teens sexually.

Yes. The contempt these men show towards parents who don’t think like them is at the heart of this. The taunting that says, whatever your religious beliefs, we are going to steal the hearts and minds of your children, and there is nothing you hicks can do to stop us. It gives the game away. It gives the game away for them, and for all their corporate allies.

Meanwhile, Andy Ngo (who is gay), reports:

"We'll convert your children," the SF Gay Men's Chorus (@SFGMC) sings in a new video. "We're coming for your children."

The song was written by @RosserandSohne. Last year the duo apologized for writing music accused of endorsing Afghan child sex abuse. https://t.co/IwVxmlRFbC

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) July 8, 2021

Receipts. https://t.co/eAU1zDnb8V pic.twitter.com/b8MTE7X3Fi

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) July 8, 2021

A close-up:

Those guys are funny, all right. Pedophile rape of boys — oh my, that’s hilarious! San Francisco values…

The post Gay Group: ‘We’ll Convert Your Children’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Wreckage Of The American Empire

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?:

American forces left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield over the weekend without notifying the new commander from the Kabul government — giving looters precious time to swipe anything that was not bolted down, shocking photos show.

The US announced Friday that it had vacated Bagram as part of a final withdrawal the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August. It is Afghanistan’s largest airfield and was the hub of America’s 20-year campaign to remove the Taliban from government, track down Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda cohorts, and keep the country’s fragile elected government in place amid a Taliban resurgence.

However, they apparently forgot to tell the Afghans, cutting the electricity within 20 minutes of their departure and plunging the base into darkness. That acted as a “go” signal for teams of looters who smashed through the north gate and ransacked barracks and storage tents before security forces who had been patrolling the perimeter managed to evict them.

From the Washington Post‘s 2019 scoop on The Afghanistan Papers:

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

Click any underlined text in the story to see the statement in the original document

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.

More:

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced thateverything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

The interviews are the byproduct of a project led by Sopko’s agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as SIGAR, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.

Read it all.Read all the gritty details.

Our military is led by liars. Our civilian leadership for the past 20 years? Liars. Close to one trillion dollars, down the rat hole. Over 2,300 dead American soldiers, and 20,000 wounded US troops. For what? So Afghanis can loot our abandoned bases, and the Taliban, whom we could no more defeat than the Soviets could defeat their fathers, can have nice new weapons?

There was no reckoning after the 2008 financial collapse. There will likely be no reckoning after this disaster. Who in the military will be forced to answer for the lies that kept us there for so long? Who in the civilian leadership?

From 2006:

Coalition and Afghan forces hunting a Taliban commander said that they killed an estimated 30 extremists Tuesday in a raid on a hide-out in southern Afghanistan as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, visiting Kabul, expressed confidence that the insurgents would be defeated.

The firefight came a day after a U.S. warplane bombed another militant hide-out in southern Afghanistan, killing more than 40 Taliban fighters, the military said. Wounded Afghans from Monday’s raid said that women and children were killed.

The renewed violence came as Rumsfeld made an unannounced visit to Kabul on Tuesday for talks with President Hamid Karzai on the escalating violence.

At a joint news conference with Karzai, Rumsfeld said that militants “don’t want to see a country like Afghanistan have a successful democracy.” He added: “They won’t succeed.”

Rumsfeld is dead. The Taliban are about to be the next government of Afghanistan.

From 2010:

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday he is guardedly optimistic about the U.S.-led military campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared at a Senate hearing in support of the Obama administration’s request for additional funding for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Gates says that while most of the 30,000 additional troops President Obama has ordered sent to Afghanistan have not yet arrived, there are reasons to hope that the tide may be turning against Taliban forces.

Gates and Secretary of State Clinton appeared before a  Senate Appropriations subcommittee in support of more than $35 billion in supplemental funding for this fiscal year, mainly to support a surge in both U.S. military and civilian personnel in Afghanistan.

From 2017:

The Secretary of Defense outlined his current assessment of the conflict in Afghanistan – which was generally positive. He said that all six Afghan corps were on the offensive against the Taliban. Mattis outlined the new Afghanistan strategy by introducing a new acronym – R4&S.  He went on to emphasize the continued support of NATO and Coalition partner nations involved in the fight. He estimated current troop levels at 11,000 U.S., 6,800 NATO / Partner Nations, and about 320,000 Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF). He believed that the new Trump administration’s strategy has provided renewed confidence in the Afghan government and military that they will be supported by the U.S. and NATO over the long-term.

Remember that for the last twenty years, Congress and the American people were told by US military officials and administration officials that things were going well, and we were doing a swell job building up the Afghan military (which is on the verge of collapse).

Who can possibly trust these people again? 

Who can send their sons and daughters to fight under the command of such an institution led by liars? I hate to say that, but what else can you say, when faced with the evidence of your own eyes? And now the top military brass, in all its wisdom, has decided that wokeness is the way of the future for our military, which has been so badly treated by its leadership, both civilian and uniformed.

Do you want to send your sons off to fight to make the world safe for wokeness? Here’s the part of the new US Army recruiting ad in which a currently serving soldier, Emma, says her military service is an extension of her childhood spent marching in gay pride parades with her lesbian moms:

I don’t want to see Emma sent off to fight some useless war either, led by senior brass who lie about their prospects for victory. I don’t want to see anybody sent off to fight under the command of a senior leadership who believes that military service is a form of social activism. The cause of queering the Donbass is not worth even the sweat of a single Alabama infantryman.

How schizophrenic it is to be a conservative today. All our instincts say to rally behind the country, and to support the military. But look what the military and civilian leadership for the last twenty years has done with that trust! It’s infuriating.

I’m going to post something separate about this Tanner Greer essay a reader pointed me to, but I want to quote one part of it in this context.

Culture wars are fought for the hearts of the unborn.Future generations will be open to values the current generation rejects outright.

This will not be apparent at first. Beneath the official comings and goings of the cohorts above, a new consensus forms in in the cohorts below. Ideas will fester among the young, but their impact will be hidden by the inability and inexperience of youth. But the youth do not stay young. Eventually a transition point arrives. Sometimes, this transition will be marked by a great event the old orthodoxy cannot explain. At other times it is simply a matter of numbers. In either case, the end falls swift: the older cohorts suddenly find themselves outnumbered and outgunned, swept up in a flood they had assumed was a mere trickle.

For them it was a trickle. They spent their time with members of their own cohort. The revolution occurring below did not echo in their souls. It won no converts among their friends, nor even among their rivals. The new values remained the preserve of weirdos and extremists. Not so for the rising generation!

The rising cohort has many reasons to thirst for new ideas. Old orthodoxies, designed to solve the problems of a past age, will have difficulty explaining crises in the new one. These events will be formative for the new generation; a group of insurgents who can explain these formative events in terms of their own program will win converts to the cause.

The 2008 financial collapse destroyed confidence in global capitalism. Obviously global capitalism is still with us, and is doing good things for people. But gone are the days when the uncomplicated confidence in it was generally held. Why do you think so many of the young are socialist, or socialist-friendly? People my age and older can talk until we are blue in the face about why Reagan and Thatcher were necessary, because of the stagnation and decline of the postwar order, but the young are incapable of taking that seriously. The confidence that my generation had about the free market does not explain adequately the post-2008 economic world.

This doesn’t make us older folks wrong — Reagan and Thatcher were needed in their era — but it doesn’t make the young wrong either. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not making excuses for their socialism, not at all. I am saying simply that this is why rehashing Reaganism no more works with the young today than rehashing FDR did with my generation.

My generation (I was born in 1967, so am Gen X) has no memories of Vietnam. The older ones of us remember the humiliation of America in the Iran hostage crisis, and how after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, we felt that our country was feeble. Then came Reagan. You had to be there to appreciate what a change he made. We felt that we could believe in our country again. It was a heady feeling. Then his successor, George H.W. Bush, won the Gulf War, and presided over the peaceful transition out of Communism. What a time to be alive! Bill Clinton completed the Democrats’ transition to a free-market party. For those on the Left who criticize Clinton, let me remind you that the Democrats had to have a pro-market presidential candidate to win. Reagan won that argument decisively.

Both the Reagan Republicans and the Clinton Democrats proved to have been very wrong about their faith in Wall Street, as 2008 demonstrated. Reaganism died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the 2008 financial crash. Reagan-era dogmas — most of them taken up by Clinton Democrats — did not survive the George W. Bush administration. Reaganism could no longer explain the world we were in. Everything that has happened since 2008 — Obama, Trump, wokeness — has emerged from the shattering of that worldview.

And now Afghanistan. I don’t know what’s coming next for our country. Maybe we will all just forget about it, and then sleepwalk into the next war led by leaders who don’t deserve our trust gaining it anyway, and telling us that this time, it’s going to be different.

All those Americans who died in Afghanistan, or who came back wounded. Pray for them and their families. They deserved better than this country’s leaders gave them. At least Joe Biden has stopped the bleeding. I’ll give him that.

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Eating Waffles On A Gloomy Day

[Readers, it occurs to me that I don’t often post non-news-related things in this space. Here is a portion of one of my subscription-only Daily Dreher Substack newsletters from last week, when I was in Vienna with my son Matt. I hope you find it diverting and pleasant amid the torrent of gloom and doom here. — RD]

Yesterday Matt and I spent a long morning in the Kunsthistorisches Museum here in Vienna. It was glorious! I discovered a painting I had never before seen reproduced anywhere. It’s “Gloomy Day” by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. It’s about a village dealing with early spring storms. Notice the destruction all about … but also notice that the storm doesn’t bother the men and the child on the bottom right hand corner. The kid is still wearing a crown from Carnival celebrations, and the man on the right is eating waffles.

 

I am the Waffle Man! The world is falling apart around me, but I’m still gonna eat waffles and kibitz with the Carnival goers.

Here’s my son Matt with Brueghel’s “Tower of Babel”:

And here he is with Brueghel’s “Hunters In The Snow,” which is one of my favorite paintings of all time. I did not realize that it was in the Vienna museum, so discovering it here was a great surprise:

 

My second-favorite painting in this museum is this self-portrait of Rembrandt. Look at this detail below; I could stare into his eyes forever. This is a man who knows the world:

I can’t remember who the artist of the canvas from which this detail is taken, but the image is of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. Look at the desolation in his face:

Here are two details of a Rubens painting of St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, refusing to let the Emperor Theodosius into his church until the Emperor repents of a mass killing he carried out in Thessaloniki. Notice the look on Ambrose’s face. It is the look not of an angry man, but of a loving father correcting his son. The sense of authority the great bishop had when facing down the Emperor is stunning:

 

 

Ambrose, in the end, prevailed.

You know who had a bad day? Medusa. This is her severed head, as painted by Rubens. This is one of the most horrifying images ever. The intensity of her evil is so vivid:

 

I was so struck by this painting of the Holy Eucharist wreathed by fruits and vegetables. What a marvelous symbol of bounty! I can’t remember who painted it.

Before we went into the picture galleries, Matt and I went through a special exhibition the museum has on:

It’s about how humanity has, across all eras and cultures, tried to establish a relationship with the divine. It was not only about religious and devotional objects, but also about worldly symbols of authority believed to have been granted to earthly rulers by God, or gods. And there was a strong element of people connecting to the divine in an attempt to control Nature — mostly to ward off its danger.

There were some frightening pagan pieces in the exhibition (the 19th century Amazon tribal costume for a storm demon was the stuff of nightmares), but also some charming ones. For example, in Thailand, there is a traditional folk belief that spirits inhabit the natural world. If one wants to build a house, then one must construct a small house in one’s garden for the spirits who inhabited that place before you to live in.

The strong impression the exhibit left me with was the ineradicable religiosity of man. From majestic objects created for religious rituals, to minor charms and fetishes, we can’t help filling objects with transcendent meaning. (What, after all, is an art museum anyway?) One of the most moving objects in the entire exhibition was probably the most humble: a segment of bright red string that the owner (who loaned it for the exhibit) received from a Tibetan lama on a visit to Nepal. The lama gave it to her, she said in the exhibition commentary, to remind her not to lose the through-line of her life.

Isn’t that beautiful? I thought so, anyway. This exhibit made me feel in a fresh way the sacramentality of creation, and how it mediates between us and God. Even the least sacramental religions — I’m thinking of Protestantism, Islam, and Judaism — can’t fully escape the impulse to declare some places and some objects (a Bible, a Koran, a Torah scroll) holy.

The thing is, as an Orthodox Christian, I don’t believe that this is only something we impute to material objects. I believe that a priest is the channel through which God’s grace is mediated in a particular way, but the grace is an actual spiritual force. I know that the divine is truly present in some things and places, and not in others. I also believe that the demonic is likewise present in some things and places. I once interviewed a woman who could not get books to stop flying off her shelves in her house until she burned and buried the ashes of two little humanoid wooden figures she and her late husband had bought at a bazaar in rural Indonesia on a vacation. She had not imagined it, but those objects had been used in some kind of wicked ritual. When she placed them on her bookshelf, she would wake up the next morning to find all the books splayed on the floor.

If you have ever been part of an exorcism or a deliverance rite, you know that holy water is not the same thing as water that comes out of the tap. People who are demon possessed, it burns them. A couple of years ago, I was in Manhattan visiting friends. The wife of the family is (or at least was at the time) possessed, and under the care of an exorcist. When her husband brought out a blessed object he had concealed, she reacted badly, her face changing, and a voice not her own coming out of her, cursing the presence of this object. I saw this with my own eyes. The poor wife apologized, and said, “I’m sorry, that’s not me.” [I wrote about it here.]

My point is, there is a great mystery present in the metaphysical connection between spirit and matter. No one can fully understand it. This museum exhibit, though, made me better aware of how natural this kind of thing is to the human experience, even today, in our supposedly disenchanted world.

After we left that museum, Matt and I repaired to a restaurant for a restorative cold, crisp Austrian lager:

 

 

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The Two Americas

Watch certain members of the US National Women’s Soccer Team turn their back on an elderly World War II veteran as he plays the National Anthem prior to their send-off match for the Olympics:

98-year-old World War II veteran Pete DuPré played the national anthem on a harmonica before the @USWNT’s Olympic send-off match pic.twitter.com/wnrOnZJhkC

— ESPN (@espn) July 5, 2021

The US women’s team is the overwhelming favorite to win the gold in Tokyo, but after this stunt, I’m rooting for anybody who plays against the US, because I don’t want to see those two ungrateful creeps shame this country by doing that stunt on the platform in Tokyo.

Now, this:

The country that is most loved by those it despises most. Such a strange thing. pic.twitter.com/UQsvqJXGwx

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) July 5, 2021

UPDATE: Several of you say I’m reading this wrong, and that there was no protest. For example:

Rod, I’m afraid you’ve been duped by a clickbait story designed to gin up outrage. First off, you have your facts quite literally backwards. As it happens, the players you highlight in the photo are facing TOWARD the veteran playing the anthem. If you watch the whole video of the anthem, the musician is standing in front and to the left of the line of players (the early part of the video in the embedded post doesn’t make this super apparent, to be fair, but the layout is quite clearly visible if you fast forward to the 1:39 time mark). The players who are accused of “turning their back” are actually the ones standing to the left of the players you’ve singled out–all of whom are vehemently and correctly denying this story on Twitter, pointing out that they turned solely face the large, highest flag to their right. Due a design quirk of Rentschler Field in Connecticut and/or poor planning on positioning the anthem musician, it was physically impossible to simultaneously face the musician AND the most prominent flag at the same time given the way that anthems are played at soccer matches.

Why should you believe this denial? Well, beyond the video evidence that corroborates their account, and the fact that players who regularly protest during the anthem have never been shy about doing so, there’s this: The players in the video who supposedly “turned their backs” were–to a woman–players who have consistently stood for the anthem and been vocal about their reasons for doing so (Carli Lloyd, Abby Dahlkemper, Tobin Heath, Lindsay Horan and others). Meanwhile, the players you single out in the photo, Crystal Dunn and Christen Press (along with a few others) have often knelt or otherwise protested during the anthem, but here are facing the musician. For the version of events that you’ve amplified here to be true, you’d have to believe that the entire team decided to do an anthem switcheroo, with every player who has made a point of standing for the anthem turning their back on a WWII vet, and every player who has made a point of kneeling for literally years suddenly overcome with patriotism and respect. Do you really find that plausible?

If you want to be mad at players for protesting, fine–but no one in this video did anything remotely close to turning their backs on a WWII veteran except to face the flag (which, I imagine, is what Pete DuPre would want them to do!). In fact, the players who didn’t face the flag notably chose to forego their common practice of kneeling for the anthem and remained standing out of respect. Again, If you want to criticize Press, Dunn and others for, ironically, NOT facing the flag, fine. But the smear that they disrespected a nonagenarian veteran has already garnered some of these players a lot of online flames, and realistically more than a handful of death threats with an outrageous allegation is that equally outrageously false. It’s disappointing that you’ve chosen to signal boost this without watching the whole video. Given your enormous platform, please consider amending this post.

The US Soccer Federation has said that there was no protest at this event, that players were simply facing in different directions haphazardly. That being the case, I apologize for drawing the wrong conclusion. We are accustomed to the women’s soccer team protesting at public events (e.g., they did so last year), and the disgraceful recent Gwen Berry protest have put a lot of us on edge. Still, I was wrong, and I apologize. I would have done better to put Gwen Berry there; her protest was unambiguous:

The post The Two Americas appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Magyar Man Bad’

Sit down, folks, this is going to be a long one.

When we hear the term “Deep State,” we tend to think of people staffing the federal bureaucracy. I want to suggest to you that that is an incomplete way to think about it. The Deep State in Western liberal democracies consist not only of government bureaucrats, but also of the leadership in major corporations, leading universities, top media, medicine and law, science, the military, and even sports. A more accurate way to think about what we are dealing with comes from the Neoreactionary term “the Cathedral,” which NRxers use in more or less the same way that 1950s Beats used the term “the Establishment.” I like the term “Cathedral” because it entails the religious commitment these elites have to their principles. You can no more debate these principles with them than you can debate with a religious fundamentalist. They adhere to them as if they were revealed truths.

Yet they still like to pretend that they are liberals — that they favor open, reasoned discourse. This is, in fact, a lie. It is a lie that they depend on to conceal the hegemonic intolerance that they wish to impose on everybody under their authority.

Note these remarks by Prof. Carlo Lancelotti:

It is true that no society can tolerate everything. What the Cathedral is now doing is radically limiting discourse, and demonizing as heretics all those within its purview who dissent, no matter how reasonable their objections. (And now Facebook is incentivizing some of its users to report their friends as potential “extremists.” Please get off Facebook now!) The Cathedral seeks to make all of society over in the mold of a college campus. The Cathedral is growing ever more radical. In recent months, we have seen the US military embrace wokeness (to use the slang term for the most vibrant and activist form of the Cathedral’s religion). You would think that it makes no sense for the leadership of a racially diverse armed forces to embrace and indoctrinate its officers in a neo-Marxist theory that causes everyone to see everyone else primarily in hostile racial terms, but that is exactly what has happened. In time — and not much time, either — we are going to see young people who were once from families and social classes that once were the most stalwart supporters of the military declining to join the armed forces in which they are taught that they are guilty by virtue of their skin color.

We have watched the Cathedral’s militant votaries sack universities and render once-mighty media institutions into Cathedral parish newsletters. I wrote last week about the disgusting op-ed in Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, in which a degenerate mother in Philadelphia wrote about how excited she was for her small children to see gay sadomasochists whipping each other at the local Pride parade:

It was good to see lots of people in the comments under that op-ed objecting to it. The point is, though, that the leadership of the Post‘s newsroom judged that a piece of filth like this belonged in the paper, because it is a reasonable part of our discourse. In this part of the Bezos empire, a writer is allowed to advocate for public BDSM displays for children; in another part, Ryan T. Anderson’s book critical of transgender ideology is not allowed to be sold.

That’s the Cathedral and its values. The Cathedral has also taken over corporate America, and the professions. I hardly need to elaborate on this further, not for regular readers of this blog. It was a hard knock this past week to see that the US Supreme Court, which some of us had thought would be the last line of defense for anybody traditional in this soft-totalitarian Cathedral theocracy, refused to take on the Gavin Grimm case, and the Barronelle Stutzman case. The Cathedral line in favor of privileging LGBTs over religious people and secular people who don’t accept the full LGBT gospel is hardening.

The Supreme Court is not going to save us. Nor is Donald Trump. The more people on the Right perseverate over Trump, the weaker we will remain in the face of hardening soft totalitarianism.

I realized over the weekend why I have been so affected by the experience of being here in Hungary these past three months. It has clarified for me the nature of this conflict. First, take a look at this powerful piece by Angela Nagle, writing about the views of Irish intellectual and cultural critic Desmond Fennell. Excerpts:

To this day we are still grasping around for words and concepts to describe the thing we sense we are living under – liberalism? neoliberalism? technocratic capitalism? libertinism? authoritarianism? woke-something? – and we still haven’t quite found it. Years ago Fennell wrote an essay in which he tried to theorise the general sense many now feel intensely, that we live under a nonsensical and absurd regime, a permanent revolution of rules built upon a shaky moral and metaphysical foundation that is self-contradictory and mysterious to us or which may not exist in any stable sense. Some now call it Clownworld. Conspiracy theories abound in an attempt to grasp what it is.

Although its vision was distinct from the other utopias and kept American exceptionalism intact, in his view it was the most profoundly radical of the revolutionary utopian experiments, which benefited from having never formally recognised the end of the old regime and the arrival of a new. He compares this to ancient Rome, in which the Republic’s replacement with the Empire was not spoken of as having amounted to a revolution until Ronald Styme’s 1939 book The Roman Revolution. The second American Revolution began in the 1930s, he argues, and was complete by the early 1970s. All the other radical 20th century experiments perished, he says, “only that resulting from the Second American Revolution – the system in which we now live in the West – remains.”

When Fennell uses the term sense or sense-making he is describing a binding and holistic system of values through which a people make sense of the world and their lives, which is strong enough to outlast all the other changes and crises. He defines civilization as “a grounded hierarchy of values and rules covering all of life and making sense, which a community’s rulers and ruled subscribe to over a long period… because the community is motivated to keep reproducing itself by the sense, and therefore goodness, that it finds in its framework for life.”

Fennell argues that the first part of the 20th century began a revolution that was more utopian and effective than any other (cf. Philip Rieff, who argued in 1966 that the therapeutic revolution in the West was more significant than the Bolshevik Revolution). What we now have, says Fennell (in Nagle’s telling), is a society based on rules pronounced from on high, but without any real grounding. More from Nagle:

The ethos of the sexual revolution is today simultaneously ultra puritanical and ultra libertine depending on the context, so that the abandonment of your wife and children is now less of a social faux pas than asking someone out on a date at work – you can only get publicly disgraced and fired for the latter. Most just trundle along confused but hoping that we can survive unscathed through correctly intuiting what elites decide the new rules will be in any individual case. This now reaches into every aspect of life and the imposition of new rules is becoming ever more strange to us, which is already manifesting in ways that Fennell alludes to, and will one day bring the experiment crashing down, he claims.

“For the most part we experience it as senseless unreflectively, in that depth of our being where countless generations of human beings before us have trained us by heredity to assess – in a combined act of reason, feeling and intuition – any presentation purporting to be a framework for life. And that encounter with senselessness, when our minds and hearts are seeking sense, sends distress, a pain of the soul, pressing into our consciousness.” Nothing more natural, then, he says, than that we would want to stop reproducing this society altogether by becoming childless and sterile and to commit self-injury and the annihilation of consciousness through drugs, self-harm and suicide, even as we simultaneously believe this is the greatest model of life that has ever existed.

Having surpassed “its more conservatively post-western Soviet counterpart” he says “for as long as the buying and doing power of governments and consumers continues to increase, and the teaching that this contemporary western life is morally the best life ever known continues to have some force for some, the West’s senseless post-European system will continue to function.” But “with no sense-making respected set of rules to fall back on as a comforting matrix of order in the reduced material circumstances, the inevitable will happen. The chaos of the prevailing values and rules will be transformed into a violent social chaos without many precedents in history.”

Read the whole thing. I appreciate the reader who sent it to me.

Solzhenitsyn said, in his 1983 Templeton Address:

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire 20th century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: “Men have forgotten God.” The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it. It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.

This is where we are today. For example, only a godless nation can permit the sexual mutilation and sterilization of its children, and call it good.

What does this have to do with Hungary? Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his government have brought down the wrath of European Union leaders over Hungary’s recent law restricting sex education for children, and information about LGBT presented to children. The prime minister of the Netherlands, in extraordinarily bellicose language, threatened to “bring Hungary to its knees” over the law. I am reliably informed by an American source in a position to know that in Washington, even among conservative elites, Viktor Orban is seen as nothing but a fascist. I have been writing all summer about the radical disjunction between Hungary as it is, and Hungary as described by Western elite discourse (media and otherwise). This is by no means to say that Orban’s government is flawless — it certainly is not; corruption, for example, is a big deal here — but to say that there has to be some reason why Western elites of both the Left and the Right despise Hungary so intensely, and slander it so.

There’s a lesson in all this, I believe, for where conservatives and traditionalists in the West are, and where we are likely to go. I have come to believe that the standard left-liberal and right-liberal critiques of Orban — “Magyar Man Bad” — are just as shallow as the “Orange Man Bad” critique of Donald Trump. I say that as someone who was critical of Trump myself, though I credited him for smashing the complacent GOP establishment. I write this blog post in the spirit of Tucker Carlson’s excellent January 2016 Politico piece titled, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right.”

I’ve been reading lately a 2019 book, The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. Both men are liberal scholars who undertake to explain why liberalism failed in Central Europe and Russia after the fall of the Cold War. It’s a remarkably insightful book, one that any conservative with an interest in the problem should read, even though its authors are liberal democrats. They write:

A refusal to genuflect before the liberal West has become the hallmark of the illiberal counter-revolution throughout the post-communist world and beyond. Such a reaction cannot be casually dismissed with the trite observation that “blaming the West” is a cheap way for non-Western leaders to avoid taking responsibility for their own failed policies. The story is much more convoluted and compelling than that. It is a story, among other things, of liberalism abandoning pluralism for hegemony. [Emphasis mine — RD]

You would have thought that in any reasonable pluralistic polity, a sovereign nation choosing to restrict what its children can learn about human sexuality would be of little interest to other nations within that polity. After all, Hungary is not France any more than Estonia is England. There is an immense amount of diversity in Europe. But see, the Cathedral’s liberalism — whether in America or in the EU — is not pluralistic, but hegemonic.

Krastev and Holmes (henceforth, “the authors”) point out that after 1989, the West expected Central European countries to imitate them in every way. The authors — who, remember, are liberals — write:

Without pressing the analogy too far, it’s interesting to observe that the style of regime imitation that took hold after 1989 bears an eerie resemblance to Soviet-era elections where voters, overseen by Party officials, pretended to “choose” the only candidates who were running for office.

More:

A feeling of being treated disrespectfully was also fomented by what can be reasonably identified as the central irony of post-communist democracy-promotion in the context of European integration: the Central and East European countries ostensibly being democratized were compelled, in order to meet the conditions for EU membership, to enact policies formulated by unelected bureaucrats from Brussels and international lending organizations. Poles and Hungarians were told what laws and policies to enact, and simultaneously instructed to pretend that they were governing themselves. Elections started looking like “a trap for fools,” as Rudyard Kipling would have said. Voters regularly threw the incumbents out, it is true, but the policies — formulated in Brussels — didn’t substantially change. Pretending to rule themselves while being ruled by Western policy-makers was bad enough. The last straw was being disparaged by visiting Westerners, who accused them of merely going through the motions of democracy, when that was exactly what political elites in the region thought they were being asked to do.

The authors explain that the reforms demanded by the West weren’t like “grafting a few foreign elements onto indigenous traditions,” but rather “put inherited identity at risk” and stoked “fears of cultural erasure.” From my perspective, this is what you see when you get over here and start looking more closely at what George Soros and people like him, both within and outside of government, did, and seek to do. And so, as the authors put it:

[P]opulism’s political rise cannot be explained without taking account of widespread resentment at the way (imposed) no-alternative Soviet communism, after 1989, was replaced by (invited) no-alternative Western liberalism.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about Viktor Orban. After the 2008 crash, Western governments bailed out banks left and right. When Orban came to power in 2010, he chose not to do that, instead taking the side of hard-pressed Hungarian homeowners who had been allowed to take out home loans in Swiss francs. He and his party passed a law to protect homeowners at the expense of the banks. Excerpt from the NYT report:

Speaking in Parliament earlier this month, the prime minister, Mr. Orban, said he “expected that international organizations will attack us in international forums.” He said that “in case of unfavorable judgments, we will react with suitable countermeasures.” He did not say what those might be.

But even if Hungary is slapped down, Mr. Orban has captured an antibank and antifinancier spirit that is much more widespread.

And from a follow-up in the Times:

The government says half the households in the country ended up with foreign currency loans. And the situation was made worse by a lack of effective bank regulation. That enabled the banks to make a lot of money — until the disaster left them weak and the public furious.

More:

But most of the loans were denominated in Swiss francs, simply because interest rates — and therefore initial monthly payments — were lower. When the Swiss franc appreciated relative to the euro after the financial crisis began in 2008, those borrowers were in even more trouble than those who borrowed in euros.

In nearby Poland, the government imposed some regulations. Foreign currency borrowers had to be better off than many borrowers and therefore better able to withstand the risk. The banks were limited in their discretion in choosing exchange rates and had to follow market interest rates in making adjustments — something that has helped tremendously. Polish borrowers have still suffered, but nothing like those in Hungary.

There, it turned out, only the banks were paying close attention to the details of the loan agreements people were signing. They gave the banks considerable discretion in determining the exchange rates they would follow and the interest rates that would be charged. The banks used that discretion to their own benefit.

Viktor Orban, the populist who has been Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, has tried a variety of measures to reduce the pain for the borrowers, including a moratorium on evictions of destitute homeowners and a scheme that reduced monthly payments but increased the amount owed. The government has imposed taxes on banks based on their assets, not their profits, of which there are not many.

The authoritarian tendencies of the Orban government have drawn criticism in other European capitals, but its promise to hold the banks accountable has not hurt its popularity at home.

(I know this sounds digressive, but I’m trying to show you where Orban’s popularity comes from, and to give an illustration of what Krastev and Holmes are talking about.)

Krastev and Holmes say:

Being an imitator is often a psychological drama. But it becomes a shipwreck if you realize midstream that the model you have started to imitate is about to capsize and sink. Fear of catching the wrong train is commonly said to haunt the collective psyche of Central Europe. Thus, political and economic instability in the West has both energized and justified the revolt against liberalism in the East.’

Remember, they wrote this in 2019, but think of this principle applied to now. If you are Viktor Orban, and you look to the West in 2021, you see a United States that is destroying itself with Critical Race Theory wokeness, which is starting to come to Western Europe. You see the Left here in Hungary starting to embrace it (e.g., the Black Lives Matter statue the liberal Budapest city government erected earlier this year), and you know that it will be bad for your country if this poisonous ideology takes root. So you encourage Hungary’s national soccer team not to take the knee before matches.

You also see Western countries destroying themselves and the next generation with this insane transgender ideology, which in the UK alone saw the number of kids being treated for gender dysphoria rise 4000% in a decade. You can perfectly well see how this gender ideology is being spread in the schools and in the media, especially media directed to children. You may also recognize that transgenderism is not the same thing as homosexuality, but that in the West, the two are deemed inseparable, and to accept one has meant accepting the other. You don’t care what the rest of Europe does, but you don’t want that for your country, so you pass a law against it.

And so, the disintegrating West, headed towards shipwreck, is going to bring Hungary to its knees for trying to protect itself.

Then there’s the immigration issue. Here are Krastev and Holmes on the 2015 decision by German chancellor Angela Merkel to open Germany’s doors to a million migrants from the Middle East:

“I think it is just bullshit,” commented Maria Schmidt, Viktor Orban’s intellectual-in-chief, adding that Merkel “wanted to prove that Germans, this time, are the good people. And they can lecture everybody on humanism and morality. It doesn’t matter for the Germans what they can lecture the rest of the world on; they just have to lecture someone.” But this time Central Europeans were not about to curtsy submissively as their German neighbours lectured them condescendingly. National sovereignty means that every country has a right to decide about its own absorption capacity. This was the moment, in response to what they saw as Merkel’s decision to roll out the red carpet to cultural diversity, when Central Europe’s populists issued their declaration of independence not only from Brussels but also, more dramatically, from Western liberalism and its religion of openness to the world.

More:

The underlying weakness of political liberalism, according to these “counter-revolutionaries,” is revealed by the West’s inability to take seriously the difference between members and non-members of a nation and therefore to invest aggressively in hardening the territorial borders that give the member/non-member distinction its practical significance. The facile optimism of liberals who believe that different ethnic and cultural groups can be assimilated, American-style, into European civilization is proving to be the undoing of the West, they assert. From this deeply anti-liberal perspective, a society with a post-national identity into which non-European migrants are welcomed has unilaterally disarmed and risks losing whatever remains of its cultural coherence.

The authors go on to say that what it means to be a good Western liberal is changing so fast that people in the East never know for sure what vision of society they are supposed to imitate. Think about what it was like for us Americans. I was born in 1967, and educated by schools, by the media, and by every aspect of culture to believe in Dr. Martin Luther King’s colorblind vision. I took it seriously, and I believed in it, and do believe in it. But now the same liberals who argued for that are now arguing that this vision was wrong — that to truly be against racism, you must train yourself to think in exactly the same categories that white segregationists used prior to the Civil Rights revolution. It makes no sense. You come to understand that you have been conned. Never, ever believe liberals: they will change the rules on you, and blame you for your own confusion.

The authors go on to say that sex education in the schools has been a huge flashpoint of conflict within Central and Eastern European societies. It has to do with parents losing the ability to transmit their values to their children. In the flush of post-1989 enthusiasm, young people didn’t so much rebel against their parents as to feel pity for them, and to stop listening to them. The young took their catechism from the Western cathedral. Sex ed was a neuralgic point of the overall struggle between Central European populists, who believed that the traditions and the national heritage of these countries were in danger of being wiped out by the West. Imagine, then, what Hungarian voters must think when they hear the Dutch prime minister threaten to bring their country to its knees because he knows better what they should be teaching their children than they do.

The authors tell a story about how Viktor Orban, at the time an up-and-coming liberal from the countryside, was publicly humiliated by a well-known liberal MP from Budapest’s urban intelligentsia, who adjusted Orban’s tie at a reception, as if doing a favor for a hick cousin.

They go on to explain Orban’s illiberalism by quoting his criticism that liberalism is “basically indifferent to the history and fate of the nation.” Liberal universalism “destroys solidarity,” Orban believes. (“If everybody is your brother, then you are an only child.”) Orban believes that liberal policies will lead to the dissolution of the Hungarian nation because liberals by nature think of the nation as an impediment to the realization of their ideals.

The authors go on to say that Orban has long campaigned on the abuse of the public patrimony by the regime that governed Hungary after 1989, when Communist insiders used their connections to plunder what was left of the public purse, and left the weak to fend for themselves. This attitude explains Orban’s hostility to the banks after the 2008 crash. “[I]n Central and Eastern Europe, defending private property and capitalism came to mean defending the privileges illicitly acquired by the old communist elites,” they write.

(Readers, did you know any of this context about Orban and other critics of liberalism from Central Europe? Doesn’t it make you wonder what more you’re not being told?)

Krastev and Holmes talk here about something illiberal Polish president Andrzej Duda said in a 2018 speech:

Poland’s national sovereignty and Catholic heritage are being erased by the EU’s project of incorporating the country in its post-national and anti-religious confederation [said Duda]. Seen from this preposterous perspective, there is no real difference between communist authoritarianism and liberal democracy. Both “impose,” with or without tanks, the will of a godless foreign minority on “ordinary Poles.”

What’s preposterous about it? I know these guys are liberals, but what Duda identifies is the difference between soft totalitarianism and hard totalitarianism. In both cases, the Poles don’t get to decide for themselves.

There’s more to the book, but I’ll stop here for today. You don’t have to believe that Viktor Orban or any of these other politicians are saints in order to understand why they believe what they believe — and why people vote for them. The Cathedral did the same thing to Trump and to Trump’s supporters. Yes, there were some Trump voters with disreputable motives, and in any case Trump was by and large not an effective president. But the anti-Trump opposition’s passionate belief in its own righteousness rendered it helpless to understand why so many people hated it, and do hate it still. Trump’s own incompetence made it harder to take that critique seriously.

Trump lost, and most everything he did was wiped away by his successor. Viktor Orban wins — and that is the unforgiveable sin in the eyes of the Cathedral.

Here is the radicalizing thing, though. As you will know if you’ve been reading this blog, Viktor Orban appears to be building a conservative deep state in Hungary. His government has transferred a fortune in public funds and authority over some universities to privately controlled institutions. It is difficult to accept this, at least for me. At the same time, it is impossible for me to look at what has happened in my own country, with the Cathedral now extending its control over every aspect of American life, and to criticize Orban for this. The alternative seems to be surrendering your country and its traditions to the Cathedral, which pretends to be liberal, but which is in fact growing even more authoritarian and intolerant than anything Orban and his party stand for.

It is becoming harder to think of liberalism in the sense we have known it as viable anymore. Me, I would actually prefer to live in a more or less liberal, pluralistic society, where California was free to be California, and Louisiana free to be Louisiana, and so forth. This is not the world we live in. I remind you of liberal commentator Kevin Drum’s point: that the Left is responsible for the culture war:

Drum warns that the Left — his own side! — is courting political disaster with its extremism. This dovetails with the radicalizing point. For those with eyes to see, Orban’s moves only reveal the illiberalism of those on the Left who still think of themselves as proper liberals. They can’t, or won’t, see how they have discarded pluralism for woke hegemony, but Orban understands that, and is not prepared to play by their rules. With the Left having become so illiberal, and exercising hegemonic power across society, the only effective pushback to it seems to be right-wing illiberalism. The only conservatives who will be spoken well of by liberals today are those who surrender. The liberals — including conservative liberals (e.g., UK Tories and establishment Republicans) — believe that everybody accepting their view of the world is in the natural order of things. Magyar Man, for all his flaws, is an extremely tough and competent politician who is not for surrendering. If we in America are not to be absorbed by the Cathedral, we are going to need our own version of Magyar Man. Given how deep our own Deep State goes, it is unreasonable to think that a single political leader, no matter how brave and skilled, can turn things around. But at least we would have a fighting chance.

The controversy around Viktor Orban is not only about an obstreperous Hungarian politician who doesn’t play well with others. It’s about the future of the West.

UPDATE: To put it succinctly, we might need soft authoritarianism to save us from soft totalitarianism.

 

 

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