Rod Dreher's Blog, page 599

Wipeout —Then a Reformed GOP?

Joel Kotkin bids farewell to the Republican Party. Excerpts:

Against weak and squabbling opposition, Trump has employed his crude persona, and equally crude politics, to dominate the primaries to date. But in the process he has broken not only the party structure, but also its spirit. Indeed, some of the party’s most promising emerging leaders, such as Nebraska U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, have made it clear they cannot support a candidate who seems to have little respect for the Constitution, or any other cherished principle.

In contrast, the Democrats, for all their manifest divisions, remain united by a desire to reward and parcel out goodies to their various constituencies. Hillary Clinton, as the troublesome Bernie Sanders fades, will gather a Mafia-like commission of Democratic “families” – feminists, greens, urban land speculators, public unions, gays, tech oligarchs and Wall Street moguls. Given the self-interest that binds them, few Democrats will reject her, despite her huge ethical lapses and appearance of congenital lying.

Kotkin blames economic elites for driving the GOP off the cliff:

Those most responsible for the party’s decline, however, are those with the most to lose: the Wall Street-corporate wing of the party. These affluent Republicans placed their bets initially on Jeb Bush, clear proof of their cluelessness about the grass roots – or much else about contemporary politics. They used to attract working- and middle-class voters by appealing somewhat cynically to patriotism and conservative social mores, which also did not threaten their property and place in the economic hierarchy. Now these voters no longer accept “trickle down” economics or the espousal of free trade and open borders widely embraced by the establishments of both parties.

The fecklessness of the party leadership has been evident in the positions taken by corporate Republicans. Reduce capital-gains taxes to zero? Are you kidding, Marco? New trade pacts may thrill those at the country club, but not in towns where industries have fled to Mexico or China.

And then there’s immigration.

It didn’t have to be this way, but the mandarins couldn’t see what was happening to them, and reform themselves. Kotkin is not a Trumpkin (“The election of Trump would elevate an unscrupulous, amoral and patently ignorant bully to the White House”), and he believes that though Trump will draw some blue-collar white Democratic vote away from Hillary, she will win — and Democrats may well win the Senate, too

… leaving Clinton a clear path to dominate the Supreme Court. This will strip away the only barrier to ever more intrusive rule by decree. Clinton has already made it clear that, unlike her husband, she is ready to circumvent Congress if it dares decline her initiatives.

In this way, the rest of the country will increasingly resemble what we already have in California – a central governing bureaucracy that feels little constrained about expanding its power over every local planning and zoning decision. The federal republic will become increasingly nationalized, dispensing largely with the constitutional division of power.

Centralism, as known well in California, comes naturally to a one-party state. Businesses, particularly large ones, faced with uncontested political power, will fall in line.

Read the whole thing. Lots to chew on there. Kotkin says that if the GOP loses the White House for the third time in a row, it will be shattered. The only hope for conservatives is that the country will be so fed up with Hillary overreach after four years that it will elect a decentralizing president and Congress in 2020.

Hey, you take hope where you can find it. And for religious conservatives like me, a Hillary victory would be a catastrophe. She is fully on board with pro-abortion feminism. Remember when she gave the speech last year saying that religious beliefs worldwide had to be changed to make abortion more widely available? And her going all-in for the LGBT agenda means she would be an unmitigated disaster for religious liberty. She has already endorsed the Equality Act. Andrew T. Walker explains what that means for dissenting religious institutions, like colleges:

The reality or effect of the Equality Act would be to cudgel dissenting institutions whose views on heavily disputed categories, such as sexual orientation and gender identity, do not line up with government orthodoxy. In effect, if an institution takes sexual orientation or gender identity into account, it is seen as violating federal non-discrimination law. The conflict this poses for religious institutions that do not agree with the morality of LGBT ideology, which would be protected in federal law, is enormous.

The conflict is reflected in the now-infamous exchange heard in the Obergefell oral arguments:

Justice Alito: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax­exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same-sex marriage?

[Solicitor] General Verrilli: You know, I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is — it is going to be an issue.

“It is going to be an issue.” Never has a government lawyer been so forthcoming.

Consider this: Scalia is gone, and his seat will be filled either by Obama this year, or Hillary, if she wins. Either way, a Democrat. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83 and in poor health. She is likely to retire or expire in the next president’s term. Justice Kennedy is the second-oldest justice, at 79. It would not necessarily be a loss to religious liberty and other causes dear to social conservatives, but it would give President HRC an opportunity to appoint a younger liberal to sit on the court for decades. Justice Breyer is 77, and if he so pleased, could retire knowing that a Democratic president would replace him with a liberal.

And if Hillary gets a Democratic Senate, she’ll be able to name whoever she wants to the Supreme Court. If Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Breyer leave the court, she could lock in a solid 6-3 liberal majority for a very long time.

Get your Benedict Option plans ready, folks.

Wipeout — Then A Reformed GOP?

Joel Kotkin bids farewell to the Republican Party. Excerpts:

Against weak and squabbling opposition, Trump has employed his crude persona, and equally crude politics, to dominate the primaries to date. But in the process he has broken not only the party structure, but also its spirit. Indeed, some of the party’s most promising emerging leaders, such as Nebraska U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, have made it clear they cannot support a candidate who seems to have little respect for the Constitution, or any other cherished principle.

In contrast, the Democrats, for all their manifest divisions, remain united by a desire to reward and parcel out goodies to their various constituencies. Hillary Clinton, as the troublesome Bernie Sanders fades, will gather a Mafia-like commission of Democratic “families” – feminists, greens, urban land speculators, public unions, gays, tech oligarchs and Wall Street moguls. Given the self-interest that binds them, few Democrats will reject her, despite her huge ethical lapses and appearance of congenital lying.

Kotkin blames economic elites for driving the GOP off the cliff:

Those most responsible for the party’s decline, however, are those with the most to lose: the Wall Street-corporate wing of the party. These affluent Republicans placed their bets initially on Jeb Bush, clear proof of their cluelessness about the grass roots – or much else about contemporary politics. They used to attract working- and middle-class voters by appealing somewhat cynically to patriotism and conservative social mores, which also did not threaten their property and place in the economic hierarchy. Now these voters no longer accept “trickle down” economics or the espousal of free trade and open borders widely embraced by the establishments of both parties.

The fecklessness of the party leadership has been evident in the positions taken by corporate Republicans. Reduce capital-gains taxes to zero? Are you kidding, Marco? New trade pacts may thrill those at the country club, but not in towns where industries have fled to Mexico or China.

And then there’s immigration.

It didn’t have to be this way, but the mandarins couldn’t see what was happening to them, and reform themselves. Kotkin is not a Trumpkin (“The election of Trump would elevate an unscrupulous, amoral and patently ignorant bully to the White House”), and he believes that though Trump will draw some blue-collar white Democratic vote away from Hillary, she will win — and Democrats may well win the Senate, too

… leaving Clinton a clear path to dominate the Supreme Court. This will strip away the only barrier to ever more intrusive rule by decree. Clinton has already made it clear that, unlike her husband, she is ready to circumvent Congress if it dares decline her initiatives.

In this way, the rest of the country will increasingly resemble what we already have in California – a central governing bureaucracy that feels little constrained about expanding its power over every local planning and zoning decision. The federal republic will become increasingly nationalized, dispensing largely with the constitutional division of power.

Centralism, as known well in California, comes naturally to a one-party state. Businesses, particularly large ones, faced with uncontested political power, will fall in line.

Read the whole thing. Lots to chew on there. Kotkin says that if the GOP loses the White House for the third time in a row, it will be shattered. The only hope for conservatives is that the country will be so fed up with Hillary overreach after four years that it will elect a decentralizing president and Congress in 2020.

Hey, you take hope where you can find it. And for religious conservatives like me, a Hillary victory would be a catastrophe. She is fully on board with pro-abortion feminism. Remember when she gave the speech last year saying that religious beliefs worldwide had to be changed to make abortion more widely available? And her going all-in for the LGBT agenda means she would be an unmitigated disaster for religious liberty. She has already endorsed the Equality Act. Andrew T. Walker explains what that means for dissenting religious institutions, like colleges:

The reality or effect of the Equality Act would be to cudgel dissenting institutions whose views on heavily disputed categories, such as sexual orientation and gender identity, do not line up with government orthodoxy. In effect, if an institution takes sexual orientation or gender identity into account, it is seen as violating federal non-discrimination law. The conflict this poses for religious institutions that do not agree with the morality of LGBT ideology, which would be protected in federal law, is enormous.

The conflict is reflected in the now-infamous exchange heard in the Obergefell oral arguments:

Justice Alito: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax­exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same-sex marriage?

[Solicitor] General Verrilli: You know, I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is — it is going to be an issue.

“It is going to be an issue.” Never has a government lawyer been so forthcoming.

Consider this: Scalia is gone, and his seat will be filled either by Obama this year, or Hillary, if she wins. Either way, a Democrat. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83 and in poor health. She is likely to retire or expire in the next president’s term. Justice Kennedy is the second-oldest justice, at 79. It would not necessarily be a loss to religious liberty and other causes dear to social conservatives, but it would give President HRC an opportunity to appoint a younger liberal to sit on the court for decades. Justice Breyer is 77, and if he so pleased, could retire knowing that a Democratic president would replace him with a liberal.

And if Hillary gets a Democratic Senate, she’ll be able to name whoever she wants to the Supreme Court. If Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Breyer leave the court, she could lock in a solid 6-3 liberal majority for a very long time.

Get your Benedict Option plans ready, folks.

It’s Trump’s Party

Terrible news for the GOP establishment out of the CBS News/New York Times poll. Donald Trump is solidifying his hold on the party.

Forty-six percent of primary voters said they would like to see Mr. Trump as the party’s nominee, more than at any point since he declared his candidacy in June. Twenty-six percent favored Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and 20 percent backed Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.

Fully three-quarters of Republican primary voters expect Mr. Trump to be their party’s nominee.

What’s more, when pollsters asked Republicans what they would do if each of the three candidates remaining became their party’s nominee, Trump got the greatest number of “enthusiastically supports” (35 percent, to Cruz’s 29% and Kasich’s 27%), and — get this — more Republicans said they would not support Cruz at all (19%) than feel that way about Trump (17%). Only 13% said they would not support Kasich under any circumstances.

Conservatism, Inc. may be freaking out about Trump, and they are right to. The GOP is becoming his party. Their favored candidate to stop Trump now, Ted Cruz, is less popular among Republican voters than Trump.

UPDATE: Here is the transcript of Trump’s meeting today with the Washington Post editorial board. This is just idiocy, pure self-aggrandizing idiocy. Excerpt:

HIATT: Just back to the campaign. You are smart and you went to a good school. Yet you are up there and talking about your hands and the size of private …

TRUMP: No …

HIATT: … your private parts.

TRUMP: No, no. No, no. I am not doing that.

HIATT: Do you regret having engaged in that?

TRUMP: No, I had to do it. Look, this guy. Here’s my hands. Now I have my hands, I hear, on the New Yorker, a picture of my hands.

MARCUS: You’re on the cover.

TRUMP: A hand with little fingers coming out of a stem. Like, little. Look at my hands. They’re fine. Nobody other than Graydon Carter years ago used to use that. My hands are normal hands. During a debate, he was losing, and he said, “Oh, he has small hands and therefore, you know what that means.” This was not me. This was Rubio that said, “He has small hands and you know what that means.” Okay? So, he started it. So, what I said a couple of days later … and what happened is I was on line shaking hands with supporters, and one of supporters got up and he said, “Mr. Trump, you have strong hands. You have good-sized hands.” And then another one would say, “You have great hands, Mr. Trump, I had no idea.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I thought you were like deformed, and I thought you had small hands.” I had fifty people … Is that a correct statement? I mean people were writing, “How are Mr. Trump’s hands?” My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay? No, but I did this because everybody was saying to me, “Oh, your hands are very nice. They are normal.” So Rubio, in a debate, said, because he had nothing else to say … now I was hitting him pretty hard. He wanted to do his Don Rickles stuff and it didn’t work out. Obviously, it didn’t work too well. But one of the things he said was “He has small hands and therefore, you know what that means, he has small something else.” You can look it up. I didn’t say it.

MARCUS: You chose to raise it …

TRUMP: No, I chose to respond.

MARUS: You chose to respond.

TRUMP: I had no choice.

MARCUS: You chose to raise it during a debate. Can you explain why you had no choice?

TRUMP: I don’t want people to go around thinking that I have a problem. I’m telling you, Ruth, I had so many people. I would say 25, 30 people would tell me … every time I’d shake people’s hand, “Oh, you have nice hands.” Why shouldn’t I? And, by the way, by saying that I solved the problem. Nobody questions … I even held up my hands, and said, “Look, take a look at that hand.”

MARCUS: You told us in the debate ….

TRUMP: And by saying that, I solved the problem. Nobody questions. Everyone held my hand. I said look. Take a look at that hand.

MARCUS: You told us in the debate that you guaranteed there was not another problem. Was that presidential? And why did you decide to do that?

TRUMP: I don’t know if it was presidential, honestly, whether it is or not. He said, ‘Donald Trump has small hands and therefore he has small something else.’ I didn’t say that. And all I did is when he failed, when he was failing, when he was, when Christie made him look bad, I gave him the– a little recap and I said, and I said, and I had this big strong powerful hand ready to grab him, because I thought he was going to faint. And everybody took it fine. Whether it was presidential or not I can’t tell you. I can just say that what he said was a lie. And everybody, they wanted to do stories on my hands; after I said that, they never did. And then I held up the hand, I showed people the hand. You know, when I’ve got a big audience. So yeah, I think it’s not a question of presidential …

MARCUS: He said he regrets …

HIATT: Okay, let’s move on here. Let’s move on.

Even when Trump is right about something — and he sometimes is — he gives the impression of just being a loudmouth sitting on a barstool.

Look, I sympathize with the nationalist point of view on trade, and I sympathize with Trump’s earlier indications that he was going to be a realist on foreign policy. But this guy just says whatever comes to mind. There are no principles there. There are quite a few of us on the Right who can’t stand the Republican Party, and who desperately want someone different. Hey, I do! But we want to believe so badly that Trump is the guy that we are willing to overlook his massive flaws — such as, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He just talks.

How The Right Created Trump

I was in Italy when Conor Friedersdorf published this article about the Trump phenomenon, and missed it. In it, Conor argues that Conservatism, Inc., cannot easily divorce itself from the vulgar, sometimes abusive rhetoric employed by Donald Trump. It has been exploiting this kind of thing for years, for the benefit of the GOP. Excerpt:

For years, I’ve argued that talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and websites like Breitbart.com pose a significant threat to movement conservatism. All movements are vulnerable to populist excesses and the self-destructive impulses of their core supporters. Good leaders can help to mitigate those pathologies. Bad leaders magnify them.

Within movement conservatism, hugely popular intellectual leaders abandoned the most basic norms of decency, as when Mark Levin screamed at a caller that her husband should shoot himself; stoked racial tensions, as when Rush Limbaugh avowed that in President Obama’s America folks think white kids deserve to get beat up by black kids on busses; and indulged paranoid conspiracy theories, as when Roger Ailes aired month-after-month of Glenn Beck’s chalk-board monologues.

Erick Erickson now complains that many Republicans are supporting “a man of mountainous ego” who “preys on nationalistic, tribal tendencies.” But this is what happens when millions of people spend a decade with Bill O’Reilly in their living rooms each evening and Ann Coulter books on their nightstands for bedtime reading. Let’s not treat it as a mystery that their notion of what’s credible is out of whack.

And the more respectable conservatives have rationalized it. Conor cites a 2009 Jonah Goldberg column defending the crackpot conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, then in his heyday. Read the Friedersdorf piece for the quote, but Goldberg basically says this kind of rhetoric is not that big a deal, and besides, it’s for a good cause (conservatism).

More Friedersdorf:

Today, the very pathologies that conservatives who should’ve known better indulged as a matter of shortsighted convenience are being exploited by a reality-TV populist whose agenda is far from “libertarian.” His ascension poses an existential threat to movement conservatism. And he cannot be stopped in part because, over many years, conservative media trained its audience to respond to tribal signaling more than rigorous debate; to reflexively dismiss any complaints about speaking disrespectfully about others as bogus “political correctness;” to respond to mainstream-media criticism of public figures by redoubling their trust in them ; to value the schadenfreude of pissing off ideological opponents more than incremental policy gains; and to treat Sarah Palin as a credible candidate for the vice-presidency.

This is true. Read the whole thing.

You can’t build a movement on the rage and unreason of radio talkers and expect that the weaponized grievance will stay pointed at liberals only. I deeply sympathize with what the prominent anti-Trump conservative radio talker Erick Erickson is going through now, having to hire security guards to protect his home after threats from Trump fanatics. As someone who has been in the same position, but having to deal with an LGBT fanatic who objected to my columns, I know how difficult that is to deal with. Nobody, on the right or the left, should have to deal with it, should be made to feel unsafe in their own home.

Let me be clear: I do not blame the victim — Erickson — for this kind of thing. But folks like him should reflect on what they have done to create the kind of atmosphere in which conservatives feel they are justified in behaving this way. (To be sure, the left is guilty too, but that’s their problem; this is on us). Here’s the most infamous example of his rhetoric, from years ago, when he was running RedState:

The nation loses the only goat f*&king child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court in David Souter’s retirement.

Now, I’m sure he regrets having tweeted that. A year ago, Molly Ball at The Atlantic did a good piece on Erick, talking about how he burned out on the anger, and entered seminary. Excerpt:

He knows he has a tendency to get worked up and take things too far. He regrets calling Souter a child molester—he apologized for the comment back in 2009 and still considers it his biggest mistake. “At times, I need to do better,” he told me. But he is of two minds about this, because he also refuses to kowtow to the perpetual-outrage machine of modern politics, and he suspects that many of his critics only pretend to be offended in order to discredit him. “I could say the sky is blue and someone somewhere would get mad,” he said.

He also told me he has matured under the public eye. “If you read my more recent stuff, as opposed to my older stuff, I’ve grown up,” he said. During the Ferguson protests in August, he wrote a sensitive and outraged blog post titled “Must We Have a Dead White Kid?” decrying police-state tactics. “Given what happened in Ferguson, the community had every right to be angry,” he wrote. “Just because Michael Brown may not look like you should not immediately serve as an excuse to ignore the issues involved.” Many RedState commenters objected, insisting that Brown was a lawbreaker who got what he deserved.

“A lot of conservatives are now where liberals were after 2004—hysterically angry about things they have no business being angry about,” Erickson told me. “I think if you believe in a heaven, a hell, a savior who died and rose again, and a last day on which you’ll win because he wins, you probably should spend a lot less time getting worked up over the temporary politics of the here and now.”

I asked him about his increased focus on religion. What was he searching for? Erickson said he felt “called” to learn more about the faith that forms the backbone of his world view. “Some of my most-read posts involve faith,” he said. “At some point, I just accepted that I have a ministry, even if I never get in a pulpit.”

But:

He says that, and then he goes right on throwing stones. In September, while substituting for Limbaugh, Erickson opined on the radio that minimum-wage workers didn’t warrant sympathy, because they were mostly either high-schoolers or people who deserved to be where they were. “If you’re a 30-something-year-old person and you’re making minimum wage, you’ve probably failed at life,” he said. The week before that comment, Erickson had begun his seminary courses.

Again, please do not misread me: I am not saying that people who use inflammatory language deserve to be threatened in their own house. No, no, no. What I am saying is that Conor Friedersdorf is right: if conservative Establishmentarians fear and loathe the coarseness of Trump’s rhetoric, they need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask why they didn’t object to it when it was helping them raise money and elect Republicans.

I think it’s also true that Democrats who don’t object to the foul rhetoric from left-wing activists are going to come to regret it when it gets turned on them one day. On campus today, you can see the old-school liberals shouted down by the young radicals. Sooner or later there is going to be a left-wing candidate who does not have the decency of a Bernie Sanders — and he’s not only going to be taking aim at Republicans.

So, how about it, Erick? How about a piece reflecting on the role of populist emotionalism on the Right, in creating the Trump phenomenon?

Culture Clash On The Prairie

Reader Leslie Fain sent this Washington Post piece in. It came out last fall, but I missed it. It’s a haunting portrait of the race and class divide in America, which is, at its heart, a cultural chasm that seems irresolvable.

It tells the story of a poor black family from New Orleans, displaced by Katrina and settled in a small Nebraska town that welcomed them with open arms. But things went badly wrong for the family there. Excerpts:

The town of Auburn, population 3,200, had provided them with a car, a four-bedroom house, job leads and free medical checkups. The Ladies Club stopped by with homemade casseroles. Goodwill delivered jeans and pearl-snap shirts.

“You’re one of us now,” a city councilman had written to them, even though no one else in Auburn was black, Southern, urban and poor. “We’re a close community that leaves no one behind in a time of need. You’ll be taken care of here.”

In the days after Hurricane Katrina, this was what Auburn wanted to believe of itself, and what so many Americans wanted to believe of their own communities, too.

A decade later, the councilman’s note was at the bottom of a closet, buried underneath the paperwork of what the Williamses’ time in Nebraska had become: police reports, doctor’s bills, grievance letters to the NAACP and dozens of collection notices. They owed the city for water, gas, trash collection and school supplies. They owed $15,000 to the hospital for Troy’s first round of cancer treatments, which he was supposed to be getting every week but instead was receiving only every three months at a clinic in Lincoln that had agreed to give him infrequent treatments at no charge.

“This matter concerning the Williams’ family has exhausted our patience,” read one bill, for $60, from an appointment to check Troy’s blood levels.

“We cannot and do not operate as a charity,” read another.

More:

How quickly had some people in town started expecting them to leave? How suddenly had so much generosity begun to unravel? During their third week in Auburn, the dealership had replaced their new Expedition with a used minivan, explaining that the Expedition had been a short-term loan. During the fifth week, their oldest son had been sent home from school for wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt. “A drug culture we don’t embrace here,” the administrator’s note had read. During the seventh week, the city had asked them to start paying rent on the four-bedroom house, $520 a month, which they couldn’t afford on Troy’s salary as a machine operator. During their eighth week, vandals had carved “Niggers” into the Halloween pumpkins on their front porch, and they had gone for the first time to see the police.

The community newspaper published all police activity each week in a section called “The Docket,” and soon the Williams family had become regulars. There was Andrea, ticketed for speeding 7 mph over the limit. There was Troy for failing to pay the trash. There was Troy again for driving under the influence, his first offense.

Troy got three more DUIs.

A 27 year old nephew, Smoky, moved in with them; he fled New Orleans after being shot in a dispute, and fearing that the shooter was going to try to finish the job. Smoky immediately started causing trouble. He couldn’t hold a job:

He’d been fired from his first job at a car dealership for what he remembered the manager describing as “cultural differences,” and then from a downtown cafe for flirting with the waitresses, and then from a barbecue restaurant for “aggressively talking back.” Now he was starting his fourth job, at Casey’s General, where he had applied to work in food prep but was instead being trained to wash floors and unload delivery trucks.

“They’re acting like I can’t wrap a sandwich,” he said now. “I keep telling them I went to culinary school, but they don’t listen.”

“See, that right there is why we don’t associate,” Troy said. “The more you try to explain and interact in this town, the worse it gets.”

“Don’t say nothing to them,” Andrea said.

“But I’m a social person,” Smoky said. “I’m just trying to show them how their thinking is backwards.”

The most neutral thing you can say about Smoky’s attitude towards his employers is that he has a problem with authority.

Here’s the thing: their kids seem to love it there. One of their daughters, Tierra, arrived in town as a barely literate fifth grader, and is now a star college athlete.

She was also the first to lose her Southern accent, to correct her parents’ grammar and to say what they rarely said: that she liked living in Auburn. She liked the town and loved the people, so much so that sometimes she chose to stay with friends instead of going on the family’s occasional trips back to New Orleans. Her college boyfriend was German. Her best friend lived in Spain. And even though Troy and Andrea referred to her success as an example of what was possible for their other children — even though they preserved each one of her certificates and news clippings in a folder labeled “Way to go Tierra!” — the way she credited those accomplishments sometimes hurt.

“This town basically saved my life,” she said now, in the living room.

There’s an anecdote her folks tell about how they went to a high school football game and cheered so loud that people told them to settle down. They cite this as evidence of racism. Tierra tells the reporter, though, that her folks (or at least her dad) would drink whiskey before the games, and yell so much that she moved away from them in the bleachers.

The clincher moment in the piece is when Smoky gets sent home from work for not obeying his boss’s instructions to use American cheese on the sandwiches he was making instead of provolone. He concedes that he disobeyed, but insists that he knew better than the boss.

Most people would say, “Smoky, you can’t disobey your boss, tell your boss he’s wrong, and expect to keep a job. What is wrong with you? This keeps happening.” It’s just plain common sense. Cause and effect.

But that’s not how Aunt Andrea reacts:

“I bet they did it on purpose. They’re setting you up for a fall,” she said, and then she stomped out her cigarette and started walking up the road toward Casey’s with Smoky trailing behind her.

Read the whole thing.

What’s so interesting about this piece is it reveals that this family really does have it hard (e.g., the landlord who doesn’t keep their Section 8 apartment decently), but more than anything else, it shows that the family is culturally deficient. They believe the world owes them, and are not willing to take responsibility for themselves. Their college-age daughter Tierra tells her parents to stop blaming everybody else for their problems and take responsibility for themselves. They tell her she’s acting white.

That final act, the clincher, explains so much. The troublemaker Smoky cannot keep a job, and he keeps losing his jobs for the same reason: insubordination. But his mother figure, Andrea, blames other people. Racists, setting Smoky up to fail.

What does society owe to this family? What does this family owe to society? I can easily imagine what a culture shock it is to go from living in New Orleans to living out on the Nebraska prairie. Hell, I live in a Louisiana town half the size of Auburn, Nebraska, and I can imagine I would find it hard to adjust to life there. South Louisiana is culturally a very different place. But good grief, when everything you have has been taken from you, and there are people who are very different from you, but who are offering you a chance to start over, you do what you have to do to make it work. Tierra did, and she’s soaring. Her mother and father are going to always be living chaotically, blaming others for their problems. The fault for their condition is primarily within themselves. No doubt they did encounter racism, but if racism was the primary reason the family was stuck in poverty after a decade, how do they account for their daughter Tierra’s thriving?

At least that’s how I interpret this story. What do you think? Leaving race aside, to what extent do you think this story sheds light on how personal culture causes poverty, or at least stands in the way of rising out of it?

Benedict Option Conference

Photo via www.clearcreekmonks.org

One of the communities I’ll be featuring in my upcoming Benedict Option book is the Clear Creek Abbey, a traditionalist Benedictine monastery, and the lay community that has grown up around it. I’m pleased to pass on the news that the folks there are having a Ben Op conference from May 20-22, called “The Idea Of A Village.” Look:

In the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, Christians gathered around the communities of religious in monasteries of the Benedictine tradition for spiritual succor and stability. Likewise, many of today’s Christians, discouraged by the corruption of our own declining empire, desire a similar spiritual support.

Some of these families have informally settled around Clear Creek Abbey, a thriving monastery of Benedictine monks, and are, in the words of Abbot Philip Anderson, O.S.B., seeking “to recommence the business of building a just and healthy form of social life, ‘from the ground up.’ ”

While some have heard of this idea as “the Benedict Option,” it might more simply be thought of as the pursuit of sanity in a world gone crazy. Come and join us for contemplation and conversation, feasting and festivities.

Follow the link above for more information, and to sign up. Speakers include the Mighty Ralph C. Wood, Andrew Pudewa, Abbot Philip Anderson, Prof. John Nieto of Thomas Aquinas College, and Your Working Boy. Yes, there will be much talk of John Senior. Here is the schedule. It sounds like it’s going to be an event very much in the Walker Percy Weekend vein: talking about ideas, but also feasting — and in this case, mass with the Benedictines at the abbey.

Tickets are strictly limited, so don’t wait. 

USMC vs. Human Nature

It has come to this:

Marines across the Corps will be challenged on their unconscious prejudices and presuppositions as women get the opportunity to become grunts for the first time.

The Marine Corps is rolling out mandatory training for all Marines before the first future female rifleman hits boot camp, aiming to set conditions for a smooth transition and head off cultural resistance.

Mobile training teams will be dispatched to installations across the Corps throughout May and June to offer a two-day seminar to majors and lieutenant colonels, Col. Anne Weinberg, deputy director of the Marine Corps Force Innovation Office, told reporters Thursday. Those officers will then train the Marines under them.

Topics include unconscious bias, which focuses on how people prejudge others based on factors such as race and gender, and principles of institutional change. The seminar will also walk officers through the elements of the Corps’ plan for opening ground combat jobs to women and include vignettes featuring challenges units might encounter.

“You’re in the field, you only have this certain amount of space for billeting and you’ve got three women and six guys. How are you going to billet?” Weinberg said, describing a potential vignette. “Just some of these common sense things that these units probably haven’t had to deal with so that ground combat units haven’t had to deal with, but we’ve been dealing with in the rest of the Marine Corps for generations.”

Get this:

A Center for Naval Analyses survey of 54,000 Marines recently obtained by The Washington Post gives context to the need for training on cultural and institutional resistance as female Marines go infantry. The report found that a significant majority of male Marines at every rank opposed the decision to have women serve in ground combat jobs. The resistance was strongest among male junior officers in the ranks of captain and below, who opposed women in ground combat jobs at a rate of more than 72 percent. At least a third of female Marines at every rank were also opposed to the idea.

Notice that the objection is not to women in the Marines. It’s to female Marines serving in combat roles. Read the whole thing at Military.com. 

And yet, the US military is going ahead with this deeply unpopular policy anyway, because hey, we’re going to re-engineer human nature according to egalitarian ideals. Note that the story says the survey reveals “the need for training on cultural and institutional resistance” — not that it reveals “that the decision to put women in ground combat positions was unwise and at least premature.”

Back in February, Military Times reported:

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa — a retired Army Guard lieutenant colonel and the only female veteran serving in the Senate — said she supports opening all jobs but said it could take a generation before real integration occurs.

“This has been pushed quite rapidly by the administration, by the secretary of defense,” she said. “Not having well-thought-through implementation plans that have been thoroughly vetted could end up setting women back even further, instead of advancing them.”

“We need to make sure we have thought through this,” Ernst said.

Ernst emphasizes that she “fully supports” opening all combat jobs to women. Her 22 years in the military included a deployment to Kuwait and Iraq in 2003, and she says she wishes she had a wider range of opportunities during her career.

But she also said the top concern she hears from men and women in the ranks is the potential for watering down standards to help women qualify for combat jobs, a move that could risk readiness and safety.

Military leaders have repeatedly promised that won’t happen.

Right. Because standards are never lowered for politically correct reasons, anywhere. What this mandatory training is going to do is teach male grunts how to avert their eyes and keep their mouths shut. And boy, what a great idea it is to throw men and women into combat situations together. Hard to imagine sexual assault or misconduct anything going wrong.

There is nothing we won’t destroy for the sake of egalitarianism.

UPDATE: Reader Charles Curtis writes:

The problem with women in the military isn’t primarily about physical standards. I mean, that’s an issue – I’ve spent quite a bit of time tossing girls over ten foot walls on obstacle courses, walls that none of them would have been able to get over alone without the guys helping them, but hey, we can knock a couple few feet off the walls? Problem solved, right? And they can’t run anywhere as fast on average, and can’t carry anywhere near as much weight, but they can do sit ups a little better than guys. That’s big.

The problem isn’t even that women’s rate of attrition is several times greater than men’s, that they get hurt (“broken” as we used to say) far more often than men. It’s not that they also can get pregnant, which is a free ride home that men can never take, but hey, that’s cool.

No. The problem with women – and open homosexuals – serving is that sex subverts the chain of command, and wrecks unit cohesion. I was an Army 98G/C – Arabic linguist/voice intercept analyst/cryptographer – an intelligence job, one that was fully integrated. People who served in combat MOS’s probably don’t yet appreciate how much sex can pervert things – how it leads to abuse of power, coercion and fraternization. I’ve been impacted by this personally. My drill sergeant in AIT had an affair with a girl in our platoon, and it was a total disaster. Thank God no one was shooting at us as it all unwound..

18 to 35 year old men deploy for months at a time, and live in extremely intimate conditions while engaged in massive acts of systemic violence. Sex has absolutely no place in the middle of that, and when you add women and gays to the mix sex will be everywhere. Not to forget what the enemy is going to do to captured female soldiers. Rape is going to be used as psychological warfare.

And you can’t just quit the military when you’re being threatened and harassed like you can a civilian job. Your chain of command has life and death authority over you, and your commanding officers also have the primary judicial role under the UCMJ. *The same people who will be adjudicating your sexual harassment case could also be – and probably will be – directly complicit in the situation, either as the abuser, or else supporting the abuser.*

Fraternization, adultery, and until recently open homosexuality, have all been outlawed under the UCMJ to prevent people like General Petreaus doing what he did – using his massive power to coerce sex with a subordinate’s wife and then protect himself. Think David sending Bethsheba’s husband Uriah to his death so he could sleep with her.

This stuff – open homosexuality, coed combat units – is going to get people killed. It’s going to degrade our readiness and capacity to fight. These idiots in Washington are going to have a lot of blood on their hands.

USMC Vs. Human Nature

It has come to this:

Marines across the Corps will be challenged on their unconscious prejudices and presuppositions as women get the opportunity to become grunts for the first time.

The Marine Corps is rolling out mandatory training for all Marines before the first future female rifleman hits boot camp, aiming to set conditions for a smooth transition and head off cultural resistance.

Mobile training teams will be dispatched to installations across the Corps throughout May and June to offer a two-day seminar to majors and lieutenant colonels, Col. Anne Weinberg, deputy director of the Marine Corps Force Innovation Office, told reporters Thursday. Those officers will then train the Marines under them.

Topics include unconscious bias, which focuses on how people prejudge others based on factors such as race and gender, and principles of institutional change. The seminar will also walk officers through the elements of the Corps’ plan for opening ground combat jobs to women and include vignettes featuring challenges units might encounter.

“You’re in the field, you only have this certain amount of space for billeting and you’ve got three women and six guys. How are you going to billet?” Weinberg said, describing a potential vignette. “Just some of these common sense things that these units probably haven’t had to deal with so that ground combat units haven’t had to deal with, but we’ve been dealing with in the rest of the Marine Corps for generations.”

Get this:

A Center for Naval Analyses survey of 54,000 Marines recently obtained by The Washington Post gives context to the need for training on cultural and institutional resistance as female Marines go infantry. The report found that a significant majority of male Marines at every rank opposed the decision to have women serve in ground combat jobs. The resistance was strongest among male junior officers in the ranks of captain and below, who opposed women in ground combat jobs at a rate of more than 72 percent. At least a third of female Marines at every rank were also opposed to the idea.

Notice that the objection is not to women in the Marines. It’s to female Marines serving in combat roles. Read the whole thing at Military.com. 

And yet, the US military is going ahead with this deeply unpopular policy anyway, because hey, we’re going to re-engineer human nature according to egalitarian ideals. Note that the story says the survey reveals “the need for training on cultural and institutional resistance” — not that it reveals “that the decision to put women in ground combat positions was unwise and at least premature.”

Back in February, Military Times reported:

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa — a retired Army Guard lieutenant colonel and the only female veteran serving in the Senate — said she supports opening all jobs but said it could take a generation before real integration occurs.

“This has been pushed quite rapidly by the administration, by the secretary of defense,” she said. “Not having well-thought-through implementation plans that have been thoroughly vetted could end up setting women back even further, instead of advancing them.”

“We need to make sure we have thought through this,” Ernst said.

Ernst emphasizes that she “fully supports” opening all combat jobs to women. Her 22 years in the military included a deployment to Kuwait and Iraq in 2003, and she says she wishes she had a wider range of opportunities during her career.

But she also said the top concern she hears from men and women in the ranks is the potential for watering down standards to help women qualify for combat jobs, a move that could risk readiness and safety.

Military leaders have repeatedly promised that won’t happen.

Right. Because standards are never lowered for politically correct reasons, anywhere. What this mandatory training is going to do is teach male grunts how to avert their eyes and keep their mouths shut. And boy, what a great idea it is to throw men and women into combat situations together. Hard to imagine sexual assault or misconduct anything going wrong.

There is nothing we won’t destroy for the sake of egalitarianism.

The Past Determines The Future

I don’t have anything to say about this e-mail that came in, but I think there’s a lot of grist for the comment mill in it, and wanted to share it with you:

First off, I just want to thank you for the important work you are doing with the Benedict Option project. I am nineteen years old, and an orthodox Catholic, or at least striving to become more of one every day. As you might imagine, I am more inclined to the “Deneenian” or “radical Catholic” take (obviously more in line with your project) than with the Murrayites (although many days I really wish I could be more convinced by them, especially in an election year, but i digress). In some respects I have come from a very mainstream MTD type Catholic environment, and in others I am a statistical anomaly, so for whatever it is worth, I would like to share some thoughts inspired by this piece and the comments to add to your tapestry of BenOp “data”, for lack of a better word.

My mothers side (particularly she and her sisters) are pretty much the textbook East Coast Irish Catholic family that is quite well off through the fruits of the GI bill with my Granddad, then never left the Democratic party (or at least questioned it) after it took up the baton of 60’s liberation movements, and now lets it dictate their worldview. They are the people who “stood with Margie”, the grade school theology teacher who was fired for being openly in a homosexual relationship. They care more about banning smoking and McDonalds than abortion and pornography. I literally asked my mom over spring break if she dissents from even one aspect of the Democratic party platform, and she could not name a single one. Her answer was that “the GOP just has become so radical” (of course, she didn’t think it was any bit less “radical” before the rise of the tea party). The point is, particularly in post 60’s American Catholicism, politics informs their faith before the faith informs their politics. And this applies to some of the Murrayites also, in my opinion, with their fetishization of markets and the founders.

But what is important to note, as Ross Douthat pointed out in a response to a reader in a recent First Things article, is that my Mom probably believes in God even more strongly than I do on most days, and would come out as part of what Charles Murray called “the religious core” of America under nearly any reasonable national polling criteria. For the family members of my Dad’s side (I will explain shortly), she is their window into all things Catholic, at least until I develop the confidence to publicly stake the claim of orthodoxy (I jest, but only somewhat). She goes to mass every week and is involved in many quite important institutions in the Church’s everyday operation. She and her demographic cohorts are not simply “nominal” Catholics; they genuinely care about what the Church teaches (even if for the time being it is not binding on their consciences) and use the institutional authority that Vatican II bequeathed to them in order to try and usher in a Vatican III. I should also note that this cohort, in my experience, has very few men. My Knights of Columbus chapter doesn’t have squishy Catholics really. Many of the devout men my age are squishy in a different way, but not with respect to obedience to the magisterium. Those men who do reject Church teachings seem simply indifferent, and mostly just stay out of her institutions (CYO sports being the only exception).

My dad’s side is comprehensively secular. They are in academia (my father being the exception) and certainly check off on all the relevant boxes. My dad himself is rather unclear actually about what he believes concerning nearly anything. I suppose it’s just something fathers and sons struggle to talk together about. He has been quite supportive, however, of my mother raising my brothers and I Catholic and sending us to Catholic school, and for that I will be eternally grateful. If he hadn’t done this, as your article suggested, it could have ended pretty poorly for my faith.

I too would have fit into the MTD group mentioned above until not long ago, although more along the lines of indifference than proactive heterodoxy. My becoming a traditional Catholic is a pretty peculiar, statistically improbable one. I once supported SSM, and really didn’t understand how any reasonable person could oppose it. Then I found out who Robert George was about two years ago and realized how false I was and how uncritically my whole generation bought into this particular lie. While I actually reject his “analytical natural law” in favor of the classical version now, the point is that in reading “What Is Marriage”, I felt the thrill of being liberated from ignorance. Once you get your foot in the door, and change your mind on that first controversial issue, the rest of the anti-MTD stuff is pretty easy, be it the falsity of other religious claims, the existence of hell, the immutability of one’s sex, etc.

I apologize for such a long set up, but I personally think its important for us orthodox Christians to understand how we have come to be where we are. I also don’t know if you hear too much from people my age, so perhaps it adds a new perspective. The thing that this leads me to is Catholic high schools, of which I am a recent graduate.

One commenter said he went to Catholic school and learned nothing about the faith. I couldn’t agree more.

I went to your standard archdiocesan high school and the “theology” classes are a complete joke. The problem wasn’t that the teachers dissented from Church teachings, they really didn’t. The problem is that, as someone who has now encountered the tradition and looks forward to exploring its depths for the rest of my life, you would think that their objective is to shield the students from all the intellectual heavyweights throughout Christian history. These forty minutes of theology class per day are their one chance to give the faith a fair hearing which it will not get elsewhere. My “Basic Problems of Philosophy” class in college had me quite riddled for a little about the coherence of any worldview at all, Christian or otherwise. Of course, after more reading and courses, I’ve realized it might as well have been called “Introduction to the Philosophy of David Hume”. The cosmological argument was set up in the most caricatured way possible, and nearly every “problem” was set up as a false dichotomy between rationalists and empiricists. And yet, after 13 years of Catholic education, we never once discussed the relation of faith and philosophy. I really wouldn’t be surprised if I am one of only two kids out of 250 in my class (the other being one who went to the seminary) who know what a “preamble of faith” is.

These are just quick examples of important neglected topics; I could go on. But the point is that we are taught fideism, and so most students will be MTDs, while the more enquiring minds will tend to choose to drink their secularism with no chaser. The English classes don’t help either. By the end of high school, kids don’t know that there have been really bright Christians throughout history, and theology is reduced to “merely poetry”, as Lewis warned against. Obviously, kids can’t read all of, say, Augustine and Milton by the end of high school. But the schools don’t even attempt to show students that such intellects are even out there in the first place. Perhaps one year, every student should just read, say, Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man. That seems like a manageable task. While for most students, the ideas in books like these will still probably slide off like butter, because the anti-culture is so strong, there may be a couple out there for whom a light switch turns on, and they can embrace a comprehensive Christian worldview.

One other thing I have been wondering, just out of curiosity, is why Evangelicals you have talked with don’t see the Benedict Option as a threat to their tradition. It would seem to me that much the same as the marriage of Aristotelian theology and philosophy with Christianity was the crowning intellectual achievement of Catholicism, the Enlightenment is Protestantism’s gem. While one may object “well this or that Enlightenment guy is bad, but Locke and Smith are good”, he is just making the same argument as the Murrayites. Are Evangelicals not worried that if they embark on a journey that rejects so much of modernity, they are wading through some distinctively Catholic waters, save perhaps Augustine and some of the patristics. On second thought, perhaps I just answered my question somewhat there. But it still seems difficult, if one were a Protestant, to reject the (it would seem to me) chief intellectual accomplishment your tradition has made.

Culture Vs. Education

A reader writes:

My wife is a teacher, a very highly regarded teacher with many accolades to her credit. When she first started teaching, she chose the lowest socioeconomic middle school in our district, because according to her, they needed her more. Well, she was right, they needed her, but much to her disappointment one teacher, one program, or even one school full of programs and motivated teachers isn’t enough the vast majority of the time. Sure she’s helped some, she has correspondence recounting success, and inspiration from kids she did reach, and who did go on to achieve above their previous condition, unfortunately she sees evidence of all those who could not be reached in the news.

I will never forget the first year she taught at that school, about a third of he way through the year she came home one night (most good public school teachers get home pretty late in the evening), and I could tell she was pretty upset. When I questioned her, she told me that a student had asked her “why do I need to know all this?” She asked which “all this” in particular he was referencing so she could better answer his question, to which he replied: “any of it that y’all teach in this school”. With a great deal of confidence my wife explained how education could open the door to so many positive things in life, how it could put him on the path to fulfillment, and accomplishment, or at the very least a job that could improve his station in life. He promptly replied that neither of his parents had a job, and they were fine… My beautiful, idealistic wife, who wanted so badly to make a difference, looked at me with tears rolling down her cheeks, and asked me how she was supposed to combat that. I had no answer…still don’t.

My wife battled uncooperative parents (even had one refer to their own child as a n-word), parents who didn’t care, parents who were unable to control or influence their own children, and parents who looked to shift responsibility to anyone else as long as it wasn’t them. She struggled with an administration who only cared about getting students through standardized tests, and catering education to the lowest common denominator. She was forced to dedicate a disproportionate amount of her time to disruptive, uncooperative students, leaving those with a real interest in learning and a drive to succeed under served.

My wife’s programs and accomplishments had led to her receiving job offers every year from a variety of schools, but for many years she steadfastly resisted, insisting that she was needed where she was. Finally a student threatened to visit physical harm on my wife, and I’d had enough. Until I got pretty loud and adamant about it, the district hadn’t even planned on doing anything about it, didn’t even intend to remove this student from her class! The parent made excuses and directed blame in every direction imaginable. Very little was done.

This incident was a turning point for my wife, she accepted a position at a prestigious private prep school, and although she’s still conflicted about leaving the students who she still feels need her more, she ultimately had to accept that the culture that many of the kids who need a hand up live in, prevents them not only from taking that hand, but often from even recognizing its been offered. Again, I have no clue what the solution is…

UPDATE: If you don’t read the post about the dysfunction among rich white people schools, you’ll miss this comment by Mister Pickwick. You shouldn’t miss it, so here:

This post highlights the problem that drove my daughter out of teaching. She taught first in a low income, majority Latino school. Then she taught in an affluent white school. It was the parents of the affluent white kids that drove her out of the profession.

She was willing to work hard to help low income kids, kids with disabilities and such. But the affluent white parents (mostly professionals) made her life miserable. When my daughter would discipline the bratty affluent white kids (whose behavior was WAY off the charts in terms of disrespect, violence, sexualization and such), the parents would storm into her classroom the next day with a lawyer. And when my daughter would tell one of these affluent white parents that their kid was NOT qualified to be in a Talented and Gifted program, the parents would verbally abuse her and threaten her (one lawyer dad had to be escorted from the school by the cops and banned from school property).

When she was in the low income, majority Latino school, she had to deal with extremely serious issues concerning the kids (fetal alcohol syndrome, hunger, domestic violence, neglect, etc.) But the parents (often illegal immigrants, usually not able to speak English, sometimes illiterate even in Spanish) were better to work with than the affluent white parents, because the Latino parents showed my daughter some respect. The affluent white, professional class parents showed my daughter no respect at all. They were determined that their kids were going to get into Ivy League schools, and no one was going to stand in the way.

Incidentally, my daughter taught second grade. She couldn’t believe the level of violence, foul language, sexualization and disrespect those affluent white second graders displayed. Second graders!