Rod Dreher's Blog, page 601

‘Despair,’ ‘Alarmism,’ & the Benedict Option

My friend the philosopher James K.A. Smith gave a talk the other day at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Faith Angle Forum. In the Q&A, the Benedict Option came up. Here’s a link to the audio clip. The Ben Op discussion comes up at shortly past the 20 minute mark.

When someone in the audience asked Jamie (as his friends call him) to comment on the Benedict Option, he asked to go off the record because he’s a friend of mine. Someone — Mike Cromartie, I’m guessing — said no, keep it on the record, because “he can handle it.”

Of course I can handle it! I thrive on honest, genuine criticism. It helps me hone my own thinking. But I think Jamie gets some basic things wrong.

Jamie begins by saying that the Benedict Option is often misunderstood, but then goes on to add to that misunderstanding. I can’t really blame him for that. Until I publish the book (Spring 2017, if you’re waiting), it’s going to be impossible to have a well-informed discussion about the Ben Op. I can’t expect a busy philosophy professor to keep up with everything I’ve written about it on this blog. But let me clear up some misperceptions.

Jamie says that the Benedict Option is “clearly catalyzed” by the Obergefell decision, “which is one of the reasons why I feel like it’s suspect. … There’s a certain reactionariness about it that I find narrow and uninteresting.”

Well, let’s stop right there. I didn’t start talking about this stuff after Obergefell. I’ve been talking about the Benedict Option for at least 10 years. It’s in my book Crunchy Cons, which came out in 2006. And I have said over and over on this blog that the Benedict Option would be urgently necessary for Christians even if there were no such thing as gay marriage. Alasdair MacIntyre wrote After Virtue in 1981, decades before there was any serious talk about same-sex marriage. The Ben Op community in Italy that I visited recently, and wrote about here, had its beginnings in the early 1990s. They’ve been going strong for a long time, and were not catalyzed by gay marriage (which only very recently — as in three weeks ago –came to Italy in the form of same-sex unions.) People who reduce the Benedict Option to a reactionary response to Obergefell are simply wrong.

In fact, Jamie was present in September 2014 when I gave this paper at a small gathering at First Things magazine. Follow the link to the version that appeared a year ago in the magazine. It’s mostly about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, and the need for the Ben Op to hold on to what Christianity actually is, in a culture that is colonizing orthodox Christianity and destroying it. I wrote:

You may not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is definitely interested in you. Christian Smith’s research leads us to the indisputable conclusion that for at least two generations, American Christianity has mounted no sustained, substantive challenge to the ongoing cultural revolution now blessed by MTD.

True, the more vigorous, engaged sectors of American Christianity—Evangelicals and orthodox Roman Catholics—produced more Republican voters, at least for a while, but that’s not the same thing as standing athwart the cultural revolution yelling, “Stop!” In fact, insofar as those Christian voters allowed Republican ideas about freedom and the primacy of the individual to dominate their thinking about the relationship of Christ to culture, they have been part of the problem.

Smith’s research reveals that our Christian institutions—churches, schools, colleges—have collaborated in the death of Christian culture in our country. I do not accept the easy blame-shifting to institutions alone, though. Too many Christian clerics and educators, within churches as well as church institutions, have told me how much resistance they get from parents when they try to teach a more vigorous, theologically substantive form of the faith.

If by “Christianity” we mean the philosophical and cultural framework setting the broad terms for engagement in American public life, Christianity is dead, and we Christians have killed it. We have allowed our children to be catechized by the culture and have produced an anesthetizing religion suited for little more than being a chaplaincy to the liberal individualistic order.

As Michael Hanby recognizes, gay marriage has been a watershed in this regard, revealing how far we have fallen from any kind of recognizable Christian orthodoxy about what it means to be a person.

Read Michael Hanby’s paper — which my paper was a response to, and George Weigel’s paper — to understand more. Gay marriage is not the catalyst, but rather a condensed symbol of the collapse of the Christian moral order. This is not nothing! In fact, the perpetual optimism of many conservative Christians drives me crazy, because they seem to believe that Something Will Turn Up. I think, frankly, that it’s a failure of imagination.

No kidding, as I was writing this post, I had a text conversation with a friend who teaches in a Christian school, and lives every single day with the younger generation. I mentioned to him what I was working on tonight, and he said, with reference to this kind of optimism, “Heads are in the sand. The Boomers went back to church, sort of, after they had kids. My generation, not so much. The next generation? Hell no. We are living at the draw down, I think. I don’t know how they can keep up their optimism.”

Me neither. Jamie said, in his remarks:

“I think if you actually have the long history in perspective — I spend most of my time reading St. Augustine in the fifth century, and nothing surprises me. Nothing surprises me today. I don’t feel that oh my God, the sky is falling because the Supreme Court decision or something like that.”

Well, hang on. There’s a reason why Obergefell — actually, the Indiana RFRA fight a few months before it — was such a Waterloo for religious and cultural conservatives. For one, read the “condensed symbol” link above. Second, read Prof. Kingsfield’s post-Indiana interview here.  The Indiana RFRA loss was huge because for the first time, Big Business took a side in the culture war — and demolished the socially conservative position. Now you cannot expect the GOP at the national level to defend religious liberty, if only because it offends the business community and the GOP donors. Again: this is not nothing! 

Second, because of the way civil rights laws work in the US, the Obergefell decision means that orthodox Christian institutions — such as the college where Jamie Smith teaches — are going to face profound challenges to their ability to function. Just last week, a coalition of 80 LGBT activist groups petitioned the NCAA to kick out Christian colleges seeking Title IX exemptions from new federal requirements granting transgender students protection. Christian colleges who don’t share the emerging orthodoxy on LGBT may well find themselves having to choose between their athletic programs and their faith. There are many other religious liberty issues that are no longer going to be theoretical.

We are talking about the freedom of religious colleges and other institutions to run themselves according to their own understanding of moral truth. In what sense is the sky not falling for those institutions? What’s more, mores are changing within churches, religious communities, and religious institutions, such that orthodox Christians are finding themselves marginalized as bigots because they adhere to the traditional belief.

This is not nothing.

Nor is it nothing that so many Millennials are discarding the faith, becoming Nones. In that same First Things colloquium Jamie and I attended, Russ Hittinger observed that there was a palpable divide in the room between older Catholics (like George Weigel, Mary Ann Glendon, and himself) and the younger Catholic college professors. The older ones, who had been raised on John Courtney Murray, still believed that it was possible to integrate orthodox Christianity and the American order. There seemed to be real doubt among the younger professors. If my memory serves, the source of that doubt was the profound loss of Catholic consciousness and basic knowledge among the young. They know little or nothing about what the Catholic faith teaches and expects of them. These kids have been failed by their families, by their churches, and by their schools. Sociologist Christian Smith — the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism guy — wrote a book about this, too. Here are excerpts from a review in Books & Culture:

Disagreement with the Church’s most controversial moral teachings is also common: 33 percent of young Catholics consider abortion OK for any reason, 43 percent consider homosexual sex not wrong at all (one of few numbers that has changed markedly), and more than 90 percent reject the Church’s ban on premarital sex. As the authors conclude, “whatever religious decline that may have happened must have taken place before the 1970s,” most likely during the upheaval following the Second Vatican Council and the 1968 release ofHumanae Vitae, the encyclical reiterating the Church’s longstanding ban on artificial birth control.

Since that time, Catholics’ religious practices and moral views have hardly differed from those of their non-Catholic peers. In other life outcomes, from mental health and family relationships to educational attainment and volunteer activities, the same story broadly applies. Today, even young adults who were raised unequivocally Catholic—as teens they had Catholic parents, attended Mass regularly, and self-identified as Catholic—say that you don’t need the Church to be religious (74 percent) and that it’s OK to pick and choose your beliefs (64 percent). They do not accept the Church as an authoritative teacher of Christian doctrine and do not consider the Church necessary to their spiritual lives at all: by baptism they are Catholic but by belief, they are effectively Protestant.

More:

Smith and his coauthors set out to analyze, not to advise, the Church, but Catholic priests, educators, and parents who care about young people’s faith can draw many lessons from their findings. First, parents and other older adults with strong ties to teens and emerging adults have enormous influence over their faith—probably more than they realize—and should act accordingly. Without close relationships to practicing Catholic adults, typically their parents, Catholic teens are extremely unlikely to remain or become devoted Catholics as young adults. In addition, having just one Catholic parent (typically the mother) is not enough. Having “a committed Catholic father seems to be a necessary [but not sufficient] condition” for young Catholics to remain actively Catholic as adults. Growing up with a devout mom and a skeptical dad may contribute to some young men’s belief that faith is something “feminine, and thus to be kept at a distance.”

Second, for young people to maintain their faith into adulthood, they must find their faith important in daily life and internalize Catholic doctrines—processes that are guided, again, by parents, other relatives, and role models. Youth group leaders and Catholic school teachers could also contribute to this formation. Third, religious practices such as attending Mass, reading the Bible, and praying regularly exert a strong influence on teens’ future religiosity. Once more, parents and other adults can model these practices themselves and urge young people to do the same.

I’ll come back to that last section in a second. Let me say that while the worst stories about falling away from faith I hear come from Catholics, I have heard similar things said by professors at Evangelical colleges, though the collapse does not seem to be as profound. I could be wrong, and I welcome correction if I am. I would remind you, though, that the initial MTD findings of Smith and his colleague Melinda Lundquist Denton found that MTD is the baseline religion of all American teenagers — even Evangelicals, though Evangelical teens were significantly more orthodox than Mainline Protestants or Catholics. And that MTD study came out in 2005, based on research that had been completed earlier that decade. That was over 10 years ago. I am unaware of any research showing that the trends it documented have been arrested. According to 2015 Pew data, 51 percent of Millennial Evangelicals accept same-sex marriage — a fact that means a lot in terms of what this says about their view of 1) the authority of Scripture, 2) what marriage is, 3) what sex is for, and most profoundly, 4) what it means to be a person.

This is not nothing.

Jamie describes the Ben Op, accurately, as being

“about prioritizing an intentionality — within Christian communities, in this case –to be much more intentional about formation, and so on, and less confident that they will be able to steer, shape, and dominate wider culture. … It’s actually a refusal of the culture wars, as well.”

True. We’ve lost the culture war. Time to figure out how to live and thrive under occupation without being assimilated.

Jamie also says:

“It also comes off as alarmist and despairing in ways I find completely unhelpful.”

Well, I’d like to know more about this conclusion. Why is he not alarmed? And very much to the contrary of “despairing,” I think the Benedict Option offers realistic hope for us Christians. It’s the end of a world for us, but not the end of the world. Anybody who thinks the Ben Op is despairing should go spend time with the Ben Op folks in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy. They are completely undeceived about the nature of the times, the challenges facing orthodox Christians, and the necessity of a radical response. But they are happy — joyful, even — and confidently countercultural.

We need to be like them!

 

I can’t read Jamie’s mind, so I’m genuinely interested in learning why the Ben Op is “completely unhelpful.” Unhelpful to what? How is it unhelpful?

He continues:

“What Rod is advocating as this new thing we should be doing just sounds like what the church was always supposed to be doing. It comes a little bit across as here’s the next great thing, but it’s only because we failed to do what we’re supposed to be doing.”

I agree, and have written exactly that thing on this site. The Ben Op is about the church re-learning how to be the church in a time of chaos and collapse. Jamie talks about how reading Augustine, who was writing amid the slow-motion collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and the sense of deep order and certainty that went with it, keeps him from being too surprised by what’s happening today. Augustine died in the year 430. Benedict of Nursia was born in 485, after the Empire had formally, and finally, fallen (476). The Rule of St. Benedict was Benedict’s plan for how monks — not laypeople, monks — should live faithfully, come what may. To make the point clear: Benedict responded to the collapse that Augustine witnessed, and because Benedict responded as he did — by writing his Rule, and by seeding communities that, over the centuries to come, preserved the faith and evangelized throughout western Europe — Benedict’s fidelity made the Christianization, and re-Christianization, of Europe possible.

The faith in the West didn’t survive on its own, post-Augustine. It survived because men and women did some things and not other things. It’s that way with us too. Doing the thing that stand a chance to make us resilient begins with a recognition of how serious the situation is. In Norcia a couple of weeks ago, Father Cassian, the prior of the monastery, told me that we in the West are very much like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water. We don’t recognize how much trouble we’re in, and it’s going to destroy us precisely because our quietism is irrational in the face of the challenge.

Though it was meant for monks, there is a lot of spiritual wisdom in the Rule that we lay Christians — Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox — can draw from it. One of the key insights — and this is where it overlaps with Jamie Smith’s work — is on the critical importance of practices in forming the Christian conscience, especially amid a broader culture whose practices and ways of construing the world are counter-Christian. The Benedict Option project, as I see it, is about building (or revitalizing) communities and structures of hope in which Christians can be formed in the orthodox faith in a culture whose communities and structures are increasingly antithetical to the practice of that faith, or even its remembrance. We can only remember who we are and what we must do if we do so in community. That is one of the lessons of the Rule. I refer you once again to the seminal 2004 First Things essay by church historian Robert Louis Wilken, in which he describes the church as a culture that forms its people. Wilken says:

In my lifetime we have witnessed the collapse of Christian civilization. At first the process of disintegration was slow, a gradual and persistent attrition, but today it has moved into overdrive, and what is more troubling, it has become deliberate and intentional, not only promoted by the cultured despisers of Christianity but often aided and abetted by Christians themselves.

He goes on to say about the early Christians in the Roman catacombs (keep in mind that Wilken is one of the nation’s top historians of the early Church):

Significantly, Christian culture first takes material shape in connection with caring for and remembering the dead. Memory, especially of the faithful departed, is a defining mark of Christian identity. The living joined their prayers with the saints’ prayers, which, according to the book of Revelation, were “golden bowls full of incense.” In organizing the community to construct a burial place and in decorating it with pictures depicting biblical stories, Christians were fashioning a communal public identity that would endure over the generations. As the Apostles’ Creed has it (in its earliest meaning), “I believe in communion with the saints.” Their aim was not to communicate the gospel to an alien culture but to nurture the Church’s inner life.

This is where we are today: in desperate need of nurturing the Church’s inner life. In fact, Wilken says:

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture. The unhappy fact is that the society in which we live is no longer neutral about Christianity. The United States would be a much less hospitable environment for the practice of the faith if all the marks of Christian culture were stripped from our public life and Christian behavior were tolerated only in restricted situations.

This is where we are fast heading today. I simply do not understand the failure of Christians to be alarmed by what’s happening, and the speed with which it’s happening.

Here’s a short passage from that essay in which Wilken brings up Augustine:

In his magisterial Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, historian Henri Marrou describes the grammatical and rhetorical milieu in which Augustine was educated in the Roman Empire of the late fourth century; he reports that in Augustine’s day educated Christians were the beneficiaries of an educational system that had been in place for hundreds of years. When Augustine wrote his treatise On Christian Doctrine (an essay on interpreting and expounding the Scriptures), he could assume that his readers knew Latin grammar and the standard rhetorical techniques.

But a hundred years later such knowledge could no longer be taken for granted. [Emphasis mine — RD] Few cities could any longer meet the expense of paying teachers and maintaining schools. Beginning in the sixth century a number of distinguished educators emerged in the Church, persons such as Boethius, Cassiodorus, Benedict of Nursia, Isidore of Seville, and the Venerable Bede. Their task was not, as Augustine’s had been, to transform what had been received; it was, rather, to preserve and transmit what was being forgotten or to translate what could no longer be read. [Emphasis mine — RD].

There is the difference. At the First Things meeting at which Jamie and I were among the few non-Catholics in attendance, the gap between the older Catholics and the younger ones centered around the effect of the post-1960s collapse in American Catholic life. Young Catholics today can no longer remember what it is to be authentically Catholic, and cannot even “read” the past to grasp how far they’ve diverged from orthodoxy. And it is the same with the rest of us Christians in these post-Christian times.

Jamie told the EPPC audience that it’s odd for him to hear me keep saying that I draw on his work to articulate the Benedict Option — I do; his forthcoming book You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit is fantastic, and I can’t recommend it highly enough for people interested in the Ben Op — because the Benedict Option “comes with a grumpy alarmist despair that I don’t want to be associated with.”

OK, that’s fine. Don’t associate Jamie Smith with the Benedict Option. Don’t misread me here: I don’t say that in a bitter tone, but rather in an informational one. It’s not fair to hold him responsible for how I interpret his work. There will no doubt be people who take my Benedict Option book, when it comes out, and put it to use in ways that I don’t want to be associated with. It’s an occupational hazard when you deal with ideas in the public square. I want only to add that “hope” is not the same thing as optimism. When I was in Norcia, at the Benedictine monastery, last month, I remember one conversation with a monk who spoke of martyrdom with a smile on his face. He was trying to convey to me the conviction that to die in Christ is gain — and every single day of the monk’s life is dying to self so that he may live in Christ. That is authentic Christian hope. It is not optimism. Optimism, frankly, is bullsh*t in these times. We need something more durable. We need hope.

Jamie concludes his remarks on the Benedict Option with a humorous reference to that forthcoming book of mine:

“Well, that will be one book blurb I won’t be writing.”

Ha! Maybe not. I know now not to ask. But let me state again, for the record, that I have no hard feelings against Jamie for speaking his mind. Mike Cromartie was right: I can certainly take criticism, and indeed I welcome it, as long as it’s honest, and given in good faith. It’s the only way to get better. I feel passionately about the Benedict Option, and want it to be as clear and as helpful as I can make it. It would be extremely helpful going forward if we could put aside this completely groundless belief that the Ben Op is all about, or even mostly about, gay marriage.

One thing I’m definitely going to do: let the most joyful among the Ben Oppers speak for me. People like Marco Sermarini, and Leah Libresco. Italians, for the win!

What Is A Good Society?

Reader Geoff Guth has a great comment:

I recently moved back to Arizona to (finally!) complete my education. Until the semester begins, I’m supporting myself by driving a tow truck. So I’ve got an interesting perch to observe some of the problems of the working class first hand.

There’s a guy I work with I’ll call Steve. he’s probably about my age, The sweetest guy you’ll ever meet: friendly, generous with his time and effort if you need a hand. He works hard, consistently scores well on his evaluations. And he’s found his niche, because he pretty clearly has some kind of learning disability. He’s good at his job, but he’s never going to advance any further. He’s not going to go out and start a business.

Can we not have an economy that works better for him? When you talk about the problems with privatising social security, I think about Steve and nod my head. When I think about the virtues of single payer health coverage, I think about Steve, who is absolutely not equipped to navigate all of the choices and variables of the private health insurance system we have.

Then there’s “Joe”, who was born into the dysfunctional kind of environment you’ve been discussing with KDW. He’s got a past that includes drug abuse and prison and association with some really bad people. He’s a great teacher, very conscientious at his work. He’s raising kids on his own. He works nights so he can be there during the day. He picks up extra shifts (for which he doesn’t get paid overtime due to a loophole in the law) to make ends meet. He has made the choices to repent and to turn towards a better path.

In exchange for about 50-55 hours a week, these two guys can expect maybe $30k at most. By any measure, they’re doing the right things, making the right choices.

And this is work that is absolutely vital to the community. If we don’t do our job, your commute doesn’t happen.

Contra KDW, who seems content to throw up his hands when confronted with these problems, we know, from the experience of other nations, that there are ways of helping my co-workers live better and with more security.

That is not to suggest that we don’t have an issue with the culture or that we shouldn’t encourage people to make better choices. I’ve had that I. my own life and I’m deeply grateful for it. But we also need better encouragement and better support for people who are doing the right thing.

A $15/hour minimum wage would give every man Jack at my workplace, many of whom are doing the right thing by supporting their families, a pretty substantial raise. Canadian-style single payer (which I have seen first hand and which I know works fairly well) would lift a major burden from them. Maybe there are better solutions that these; maybe there are market reforms that would work better. But all too often, these arguments to the culture from conservatives strike me as nothing more than an excuse to do nothing.

Which brings us back to the attraction of Trump: he has actually correctly diagnosed the problem that the working class (emphasis on working) needs help and support and they have not been getting it.

This is a very good comment. I once read a remark apocryphally attributed to either Peter Maurin or Dorothy Day, I forget which, that defined the “good society” as a society that makes it easier to be good. By that standard, we should structure our society, including our economy, in ways that make it easier for people in it to be good, to do the right thing.

But to do that requires agreeing on what goodness is, and what it looks like in community. This is not something we are prepared to do. If we can’t really agree on a goal, even a broad goal, then we can’t even talk about what we have to do collectively to reach it. Reader Chris Rawlings makes a good point about how the way the most successful (socially and materially) Americans live can be extremely alienating to others:

I also think that one big impediment to the upward mobility of working class whites is how unattractive American success these days really can be. America’s cultural standard is hugely alienating, even to Americans. When working class whites see “success” they see 19 year-olds in New Haven marauding against “microaggressing” professors at one of the country’s most prestigious schools. They see tech designers in skinny jeans and ironic t-shirts modeling the newest iPhone, iWatch, or iWhatever. They see grown men—Olympians!—being feted in the media for supposedly “courageous” decisions to live as women. They see a lot of things that don’t make sense and don’t seem right (and, in fact, are not right).

The same phenomenon is at work throughout the West. French leaders continue to grapple with the challenge of integrating millions of Muslims who find crepes, egalitarianism, and pristinely-spoken French to be bothersome relics of an imagined French moral supremacy. And, conversely, you have plenty of German and French voters, as a reaction to that, who also want to throw aside traditional European pluralism for a meatier nationalism that likewise roots itself in something other than le “triomphe” de l’egalite.

The reality is that the same culture that conservatives’ wildly free market has created has become an odious farce, devoid of anything substantive and transcendent enough to inspire people to cultivate and safeguard it. And without a national, cultural “center,” you have a kind of societal chaos that we have now, where nationalists, technocrats, and nihilists tumble together toward a post-liberal future.

All that Reagan-era language from conservatives about “freedom,” without any reference to what freedom is for, has helped produce this mess. Remember Barbara Bush’s 1992 GOP convention speech, in which she tried to blunt the culture war rhetoric of Pat Buchanan? She said, “However you define family, that’s what we mean by family values.” She surely meant well, but that line showed how vacuous the Republicans were about this stuff. They wanted to instrumentalize the language of moral traditionalism to drive votes, but didn’t really want to affirm moral traditionalism if it contradicted with Freedom, and Individual Choice. A society in which Individual Choice is the highest good, not what is chosen, is one that cannot do anything other than fragment.

Hence the secession movement among moral traditionalists who are ceasing to identify the good life with shoring up the American imperium.  Reader Dominic1955:

[Quoting me: “If you aren’t troubled by KDW’s question — “Why didn’t someone say something?” — then you aren’t thinking about it hard enough. If I saw a situation (again, non-criminal) in which children were suffering and the parents, or parent, appeared neglectful, there’s not the slightest chance that I would say a thing to them.”]

I wouldn’t either. At best, they’ll just think something like “Who the hell does that guy think he is and what kind of nerve does he have telling me how to do X?!” more likely they’ll just tell you to eff off, at worst it might come to blows.

I’m thinking strategic retreat is about the best option as well, and no liberals, that is not merely “I got mine social Darwinism”. I did get mine, but while the working poor might be a new set of tires away from disaster, I’m not there but I’m a bad car wreck or a serious illness away from disaster. I do have to look out for number 1, its my duty as a husband and a father. I got mine and I would be derelict of duty to decide to go trying to “save” other people from their largely self-inflicted vicious poverty.

Other people in my group think the same way-one could say we were “privileged” in that we were raised by responsible people who imparted to us some degree of work ethic and morals but regardless of the nuts and bolts of it, we need to preserve it against any and all encroachment. That isn’t just material things, its also culture, its also religion, its also philosophy and thinking. That’s why I’m in favor of a Benedict Option, I see it happening all around me in embryonic form as we type.

The poor we will always have with us-same with dysfunctional and self-destructive. Sinners all of us, we can only do so much with what we all have. We will never “fix” the whole world or our own country and its a dangerous pipe dream to start down that road to Utopia. Whether people are honest about what they are doing or not, and most progressives will never cop to chasing Utopia, the tendency must be rejected.

And not only the poor, but the dissolute middle and upper classes. As I was writing this post, a reader e-mailed this. I’ve slightly edited it to obscure certain details, for the sake of privacy. The reader knows people directly involved; she’s not just passing on hearsay:

Last week, a high-school honors teacher at [a very upscale school in the reader’s area] discovered his honors students—nearly all of them—were involved in a cheating ring. The administration arranged a sit-down with all of the students and the teacher who had uncovered the cheating conspiracy. Rather than dressing down the students and devising a punishment and process for restitution, the administration invited the students to tell the teacher how they felt after having been found out. Of course, this turned into a free-for-all roast of the teacher—he was too tough, they were driven to cheat by his unrealistic expectations, etc.—after which the students felt much better and “relationship was restored.” And their parents, apparently, were pleased with how the administration handled the crisis.

To borrow a phrase from Chris Rawlings, that rich school, and that wealthy community, has become “an odious farce, devoid of anything substantive and transcendent enough to inspire people to cultivate and safeguard it.”

What kind of children are those wealthy parents and the administrators of that school raising? If my children were attending that school, I would do everything possible to get them out of it, because I would not want them corrupted by the values of the students and parents who make up that community. It takes a village to raise a child — and when the village has gone bad, all the money and appearances of bourgeois stability in the world will not save it.

What is a good society? What are we prepared to do to defend it, and pass it on to our children? Hard choices are upon us, and they’re going to get harder.

Of Pigpens And Paradise

Kevin D. Williamson responds to his critics, including me. He points out that he comes from the world he criticizes so harshly:

It is, in fact, about half of the original piece, the other half being autobiographical material on my own experience with that world and its pathologies.

More:

I think Dreher’s argument is in the end sentimental: We have moribund, economically stagnant communities whose social and economic problems are not going to be changed by any public policy, and Burkean-Kirkian arguments about affection for local particularities, true now as they always have been, do not address those problems, either. The culture of the white underclass in America is horrifying. It’s brutal. And its products are obvious. To understand this plainly and to write about it plainly is not callous, despite Dreher’s insistence to the contrary.

I think this is a mostly fair criticism, one that I probably brought on myself by writing at such length about the issue in yesterday’s post. I tend to work out what I think as I write, so my essays are at times less the product of someone setting out what he already thinks and more the instance of somebody working his way around to a conclusion.

There’s less distance than it seems between KDW’s position and my own. My own essay amounts to trying to think through the problems of the declining white working class by seeing it through the eyes of my late father, who grew up in rural poverty and was culturally working class even though he had a university degree (and had he gone to work at the mill, like his friends, instead of to college and then into the civil service, he would have made a lot more money). My father had a ruthlessly moralistic — I would say realistic — eye for moral failure among people, especially the poor and working classes. When you live in a rural parish (county) in the Deep South, you see it all the time. All the time. As I said the other day, he held people who would not work, and who lived morally dissolute lives, in contempt — especially if they had children who suffered because of it. He grew up in the Great Depression with his father gone most of his early childhood, on the road making what money he could to send home to support the family. He knew firsthand how much stress children had to deal with when things weren’t solid at home. He hero-worshiped his mother for keeping the family together during that trial, but the truth is he, as a little boy, along with his older brother, had to work hard to achieve the same end.

And they did it. They weren’t the only ones, either. Having come through something as crushing as the Great Depression left my father with a diamond-hard work ethic, and a corresponding disdain for people who complained about how hard they had it, and how that somehow justified feeling sorry for themselves.

I think there would be no daylight between my dad’s views and KDW’s views on the dissolute poor (white, black, or whatever). I saw my dad fighting mad once when, in the 1970s, in his job as the parish health inspector, he went out to the elementary school, and checked in on one of the bathrooms. The urinal was one long trough built into the floor. Little boys would take two steps up onto a raised platform, and pee against the wall, along which a constant stream of water ran, into the trough. When my dad walked in, a little black boy, a kindergartner, was squatted atop the platform with his bare butt hanging out over the trough. He was trying to defecate.

This poor child — and he was almost certainly materially very poor — did not know how to use the toilet. Chances are he came from a home that still used an outhouse. My dad, who grew up using an outhouse, pitied that poor little boy, and helped him. But he raged with contempt for the five janitors — also black — who were sitting nearby, and who saw the kid, but wouldn’t get out of the chair to help him. Either they thought the boy was funny, or they just didn’t care. Rarely did I ever see my father so angry as he was recounting that story to my mother. What enraged him was the indifference with which those adults regarded that little boy’s ignorance.

When KDW identifies “the culture of the white underclass in America” as “brutal” and “horrifying,” I am certain that he’s right. My objection to his original essay was that he seemed to take the worst elements for the whole. In the Washington Post piece about the white working class Trump backer in Canton, there was nothing brutal or horrifying in that man’s life, at least not that we saw in the story. He was struggling to raise his kids alone, and believed, rightly or wrongly, that Trump was going to deliver him and America from misery. But there’s a world of difference between that guy and the poor white trash that Williamson condemns. My sense of his piece is that it was too sweeping in its condemnation of Trump voters (which, by the way, was the genesis of the KDW essay, which remains behind paywall and inaccessible to those who aren’t NR subscribers, or willing to pay a quarter to read it). What I tried to do in my own response was to discern the difference between the no-account rabble and honest working-class people who have fallen on hard times, and can’t seem to get a leg up no matter what they do.

KDW is 100 percent right, though, to say that it is not merciful to talk around the problems, to euphemize them, or to politely pretend they don’t exist because it makes us uncomfortable to talk about them. When I was living in north Texas, and now that I’m back in Louisiana, I had friends who were teaching in public schools where most of the kids were impoverished, and racial minorities. My friends were (are) white, and often they were (are) liberal, so they visibly struggled to talk, even privately, about the things they saw and dealt with every day in the classroom, because they didn’t want to come across as racist. But these things were horrible. These things broke children. These things amounted to a massive failure of culture, and there was no way that school could fix these things.

Even in my own parish, which has one of the best public school systems in the entire state, things are tough for some. In The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, I wrote about helping my sister, then starting her teaching career, grade papers. I told her I couldn’t believe these 6th graders were having so much trouble with such easy questions. She told me that I needed to understand the background of these kids. She pointed to one paper and said that that little boy — a white kid, if it matters — was a mess because a year or two earlier, his mother had dropped him off on his grandparents’ doorstep on Christmas Day, and disappeared. He was struggling so hard just to keep it together in the aftermath of his abandonment, and his grandparents were trying hard too to figure out how to raise him. Ruthie told me that just coming to school intact in the morning was an achievement for that poor kid, who had been so badly failed by his mother and father.

This is why I get so angry at my fellow conservatives who blame bad schools and incompetent teachers for the poor educational results among the impoverished. Children are not empty receptacles into which we can insert knowledge. If they live in homes filled with noise, chaos, violence, and contempt, it doesn’t matter what race they are, they are going to be very lucky to make it. This morning, a reader who comments under the name “Richard Parker” left this on a different thread:

“She would say that, by the time that children got to the public schools, it was already too late for them. They had already become dysfunctional.”

I did some enrichment work for a chartered inner-city school that did everything Right! Dedicated staff, attractive physical plant, strong principal, emphasis on academics, enrichment programs.

It didn’t seem to matter. Every night these kids walked home to their neighborhood and their families and their mass culture. And every school morning they arrived as ‘blank slates’ as if the previous school day had not happened. Nothing seemed to ‘stick’.

Maybe this school helped a few kids escape from this neighborhood. But it is likely that a select few kids would escape anyway due to personal and/or family qualities.

I don’t have the answer.

The truth is, we can’t even talk plainly about this stuff. I got an e-mail yesterday from a white reader who said she’s solidly in the middle class, but has members of her extended family who are mired in self-inflicted misery. She has no patience with other middle-class people who tell her that she has no right to criticize because she doesn’t know what it’s like to be poor. She writes:

Invariably, none of these people are actually struggling with it in their own families, trying to figure out how the hell you save your ten year old cousin from what looks like certain doom, knowing that it didn’t have to be this way. Those of us who actually care about these folks as human beings, rather than a social science abstraction, know that it’s way more complicated than just opening up a good paying job and some social programs. There’s no social program that’s going to make my cousins show up for work every day, or take their kids to school on time. Or keep them from brawling–with each other, even, once with a knife. What good is a high-paying job they can’t keep?

Here was the part of Kevin D. Williamson’s latest remarks that got to me:

When I think about my own upbringing, one of the thoughts that comes to me most often is: “Why didn’t someone say something?”

Think about that for a second. We don’t know the details of what KDW grew up with, but think right now about poor, dysfunctional people in your own community. Would you “say something”? What would you say? To whom would you say it?

Presumably you would say something if you had cause to believe a child was being abused — physically, sexually, or emotionally. But if a child was being neglected in ways that didn’t rise to the level of the criminal, but which nevertheless had a huge effect on the child’s well being, and ability to thrive, would you say anything? Be honest.

Again: what would you say, and to whom would you say it? Over the years, and as recently as this past weekend, I talked to teachers who have told me that they have nobody in their students’ homes to work with as partners in education. They reach out to talk to the caregiver — you can’t even say “parents” anymore — and find at best someone who is overwhelmed or otherwise useless, and at worse somebody who gets resentful, hostile, and even violent.

Here’s the thing: it’s not just the poor and the working class anymore. I’m told by teachers and others that it’s the middle class now too. The attitude that if anything is wrong, it’s Somebody Else’s Fault, is becoming general. Nobody wants to hear criticism of any sort. Nobody wants to recognize authority, or to assert authority in a meaningful way.

This is what it means to live in therapeutic culture, in which maintaining a sense of well being is the absolute telos of our common and individual life. This is what it means when the values of the marketplace (e.g., “The customers is always right”) have infected our normative institutions, and inform the way families and individuals see themselves. This is what it means when our churches (insofar as people still attend them) treat their purpose as offering people comfort and uplift, not solid moral norms and preaching repentance when we fall short. This is what it means when we the people expect our institutions — our schools, our churches, and so forth — to cater to our own felt emotional needs.

The middle class can forestall the reckoning because we have money and resources to avoid the consequences; the poor and the working classes do not. But a reckoning is coming. The Gods of the Copybook Headings are irrepressible:

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

… As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

David French chimes in:

The truly insidious thing about the welfare state isn’t that it has robbed people of their agency — it hasn’t — but that its excesses and naïveté have created a glide path of dependency. It’s made vice easier and virtue more challenging. But to state that truth doesn’t mean that vice isn’t still vice. It’s wrong to try to milk the disability system. It’s wrong to drink to excess. It’s wrong to give up on finding a job. It’s wrong to fracture families. If we can’t speak these truths, we’re lost. If we can’t call on our fellow citizens to live with greater determination and purpose, we’re lost. If we can’t live with determination and purpose ourselves, we’re lost. But the spirit of the age — and the temptation of every age — is to play the victim and to use that victim status to justify all manner of wrongful acts.

This is true. It’s a truth that does not obviate the truth that we have a serious structural economic problem in this country, one that our leaders have not addressed, because it’s hard. Nevertheless, it remains true. Nobody wants to be told “no” — and nobody wants to tell themselves no. A school administrator told me the other day that the school wanted to bring in an outside expert to talk to the parents about the problem of online pornography and their children. Parents resisted, insisting that their children didn’t even know what that was. My jaw fell open when the administrator told me that. But then I thought that it’s of a piece with the other things I’m hearing and seeing from all over. People want to live in their fantasyland, where it’s only the Other People doing bad things.

If you aren’t troubled by KDW’s question — “Why didn’t someone say something?” — then you aren’t thinking about it hard enough. If I saw a situation (again, non-criminal) in which children were suffering and the parents, or parent, appeared neglectful, there’s not the slightest chance that I would say a thing to them. For one, I might be afraid of the reaction. People get really aggressive these days. For another, I would lack the confidence to reach out to them. It’s not that I would doubt the correctness of my position, but because I too have been steeped in the culture of non-judgmentalness. Oh, I’ll judge in private, but in public, I’ll keep it to myself, because knowing that our culture no longer shares common standards, I will conclude that it would be a waste of time to take a stand, because we do not live in a culture in which people are willing to hear anything that sounds like criticism, and besides, nobody would have my back (by which I mean that the force of community standards is, by now, negligible).

What does this private judgment mean? Well, in effect, it means withdrawal to behind defensible boundaries, to within communities where there remains robust moral standards held in common. This is what the ongoing fragmentation of American society means. I see no reason to think it will be arrested any time soon. As KDW and David French point out, we can’t even talk about these things openly, with confidence.

Let’s be honest: there are very, very few of us who would “say something” about kids being raised as Kevin D. Williamson was (assuming that he was not being criminally neglected; he hasn’t specified the conditions of his childhood). But of equal significance, very few of us would “say something” to other middle class parents about the way they raise their children, or the way their children’s behavior is making it harder for all of us to raise morally upright kids. Nobody wants to judge (publicly, anyway), and certainly nobody wants to be judged.

So we continue to drift apart, unmoored from authority, and unable to perceive how lost we are. If we do not draw some clear moral lines, in community, and submit to them, and defend them, we are going to lose them entirely. We drift towards moral anarchy in the public square, and we conceal from ourselves what is happening, either not talking about it or euphemizing it as “diversity” or some other Orwellian term meant to conceal truth.

How can we ever hope to defeat the enemy if we cannot even name the enemy, or confront our own collaboration with it? Yes, people who are unemployed or underemployed have big problems, but as my reader wrote, handing them a good job is not going to make them show up to work on time, or marry, or stay married, or raise disciplined children. Plus, there are plenty of people who have good jobs now, and to all appearances solid middle-class lives, but who are quietly, behind the facade of respectability, falling apart. We know people like that. Maybe we ourselves are people like that. We don’t even know who out there is willing to help us because maybe they see what’s happening, maybe they see that we’re drowning, but they’re afraid to say something because our culture of self-centeredness understandably leads them to fear that if they extend a hand, they will draw back a nub.

“You can’t help people who won’t help themselves,” my late father used to say. He meant that if you reach out to help people who have no interest in bettering themselves, you’re wasting your time. Some people live in a pigpen, and call it paradise. And there’s nothing to be done for them. Some people live in what looks like paradise, but it’s really a pigpen. Nothing to be done for them either. When a culture can no longer distinguish between pigpens and paradise, and condemns those who do so “judgmental,” it is well and truly lost.

I hope that this work I’m doing now on defining the Benedict Option offers real help and real hope in the face of fear and dissolution. As Father Cassian said, speaking of the Ben Op community in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, “Christians who don’t do something like that aren’t going to make it through what’s coming.”

We don’t need politicians. We need prophets. We don’t need reform. We need repentance.

UPDATE: Reader Chris Rawlings:

I’m not sure about the economic debate. I grew up white and poor with a single mother. I’m sure that I was witness to a lot of the neurosis that Williamson saw growing up, and I’m also pretty sure that it had a lasting, wounding effect on me, too. At the same time, I also excelled enough academically to attend a great undergraduate school and then go on to law school. I’ve seen both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, and I still can’t tell you which is more or less edifying, because they both are wracked with a profound moral and spiritual sickness that no U-haul will solve.

I am absolutely certain that whatever material prosperity a U-haul gets you, it will be strictly limited to material prosperity. And that’s because the moral neuralgia of the white working class—though undeniable—is hardly more ultimately grotesque than that which afflicts all other sectors of society. One of the great temptations to the conservative mind is to supplant bourgeois values for Christian ones, as though living in posh subdivisions fueled by organic quinoa cereal and arugula are self-evidently more well-ordered and decent than the haphazard communities of the working poor, fueled by pain pills and government assistance.

Let me offer this: the prosperity of my law school colleagues made moral degradation much easier for them. It insulated them to an extent from real consequences (daddy will take care of it), it widened the possibilities for moral failure (the working poor will never have the opportunity to blow thousands on liquor and prostitutes in Thailand), and it allowed them to cover debauchery in a veneer of prestige and accomplishment (“Oh, so you’re an attorney?”). Prosperity is to nihilism what gasoline is to fire, I’ve found. And so I’m not entirely sure why we’re still privileging prosperity as an ontologically “higher” mode of living.

So, yes, college-educated whites do marry more, divorce less, and have fewer children out of wedlock. That’s great. But it is merely an intersection of Christian morality with the values of David Brooks’ Bobos, with contemporary bourgeois cultural practice. The broad societal tendency to make bourgeois values normative—liberals extolling ecological ethics and conservatives emphasizing stability—should at least make every Christian question the root and meaning of the values we broadly accept.

As it happens, I’m personally following Williamson’s path to prosperity, I’m not actually sure it has made me better or happier. And I am very much aware of the fact that without an integral commitment to my Catholic faith, travelling that path probably would have been a moral disaster for me. I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, but the “way out” of the vicissitudes of my childhood was Jesus Christ and not a law degree.

Photo by Rod Dreher

 

KDW & The Geographical Cure

Apologies for the light blogging today. I’ve been literally bedridden all day. This stuff is beginning to look like walking pneumonia, though I don’t think we’re quite there yet. Pray that the magic of antibiotics will kick in soon.

There’s been a lot of commentary here and on Twitter about my post from late last night, “A Hard Case, For Trump,” in which I commented at great length about the extremely polarizing Kevin D. Williamson essay excoriating the white working class. The piece is behind National Review‘s paywall, but I excerpted the key part of it in my earlier post. Basically, he tells dysfunctional white people who are unemployed or underemployed that their problems are their own fault, and to get off their butts and get the hell out of their dead-end towns.

Some people are put out with me for not 100 percent condemning KDW’s essay. Though I am largely unsympathetic to his point, for reasons I explain, he is not entirely wrong. His fundamental mistake, I think, is to mistake a partial truth for a complete one.

I remembered just now, though, a Malcolm Gladwell piece that came out last summer, in which he looked at social science research done on poor New Orleanians that had been sent into diaspora by Hurricane Katrina, and discovered that they were by and large doing much better in exile than they had been back home prior to the storm. Turns out that the most reliable predictor of whether or not someone is likely to make it out of poverty is whether they live around other poor people. (“They mean that the things that enable the poor to enter the middle class are not primarily national considerations—like minimum-wage laws or college-loan programs or economic-growth rates—but factors that arise from the nature of your immediate environment.”

Here’s the post I did on the Gladwell piece when it was published. It’s kind of a summary of the original piece, which is here if you want to see it. And here’s an excerpt from the Gladwell report:

“I think that what’s happening is that a whole new world is opening up to them,” Graif said. “If these people hadn’t moved out of the metro area, they would have done the regular move—cycling from one disadvantaged area to another. The fact that they were all of a sudden thrown out of that whirlpool gives them a chance to rethink what they do. It gives them a new option—a new metro area has more neighborhoods in better shape.”

That is, more neighborhoods in better shape than those of New Orleans, which is a crucial fact. For reasons of geography, politics, and fate, Katrina also happened to hit one of the most dysfunctional urban areas in the country: violent, corrupt, and desperately poor. A few years after the hurricane, researchers at the University of Texas interviewed a group of New Orleans drug addicts who had made the move to Houston, and they found that Katrina did not seem to have left the group with any discernible level of trauma. That’s because, the researchers concluded, “they had seen it all before: the indifferent authorities, loss, violence, and feelings of hopelessness and abandonment that followed in the wake of this disaster,” all of which amounted to “a microcosm of what many had experienced throughout their lives.”

Katrina was a trauma. But so, for some people, was life in New Orleans before Katrina.

Quoting social scientists, Gladwell said that even if their social networks are holding them back, it’s very hard for poor people to extricate themselves from those networks and relocate. Besides, many of them don’t have the money to do so. It’s not as easy as Williamson seems to think. That said, Katrina didn’t leave the poor any choice — and the fallout, a decade later, shows that leaving New Orleans, however unwillingly, was a good thing for most of them, because it enabled them to get out of a deadly rut.

 

A Hard Case, For Trump

The Washington Post‘s great Stephanie McCrummen profiles Ralph Case, a struggling small-town Ohio businessman who has placed all his chips on Trump. Excerpts:

It was in so many ways the moment that 38-year-old Ralph Case had been waiting for, one building since June, when the single father with a one-truck renovation business was watching TV in his living room. A breaking news alert flashed on the screen, followed by the scene in a brassy lobby in New York City. “Rockin’ in the Free World” was blasting. A crowd was facing an escalator. And then, gliding down it, came the man Ralph recognized as the “great builder” and reality-show host Donald J. Trump, who was announcing his bid for president.

“Oh. My. God,” is what Ralph remembers thinking. As Trump spoke of an America that doesn’t “have any victories anymore,” he felt something stirring inside — “like something hit me in my gut.”

“I’m thinking, it’s time,” Ralph recalled. “Like, this is big. This is bigger than big.”

He became a Trump supersupporter. McCrummen details the hardscrabble life Ralph Case has. More:

It seemed to Ralph that the whole political world was mobilizing against Trump, and by extension, people like him — an everyman with an 11th grade education, aching knees and chronic ailments requiring four prescriptions and a monthly IV infusion to keep him going.

All of it only affirmed Ralph’s instinct: that Trump was an outsider telling the truth about America’s decline. “He’s honest,” said Ralph. “And the truth hurts.”

“Hey, Ralph,” said a volunteer named Mike, arriving at the office to pick up signs. “You see what the Republicans are trying to do to us? It’s just sad. They will never get another vote from me.”

“Me either,” said Ralph, who had actually rarely voted before but was now so energized that he had called the John “Couchburner” Denning radio show that morning, waiting on hold for 35 minutes to tell people about the new office on Tuscarawas Street, where a portable sign in the parking lot said “Tru Headquarters” because he’d run out of letters. Now people were streaming in.

Read the whole thing. I’ve read it twice, and man, my heart breaks for this guy. He’s like a walking John Mellencamp song. If Trump doesn’t make it, he’s going to be crushed. And I am completely confident that if Trump does make it to the White House … he’s going to be crushed. Him and his boys. And these people, from the story:

There was the veteran who couldn’t care less that Trump was vulgar: “I feel he’s talking to me when he talks,” said Terry Smerz.

There were Lucia Zappitelli, who worked for 30 years at Diebold until her division was outsourced to India — “He tells it like it is, and we are sinking,” she said — and Pam Henderhan, who was handing out the phone number for the Republican Party so people could complain.

It’s people like Ralph Case, Terry Smerz, and Lucia Zappitelli — 30 years at Diebold, and then her job goes to India — that make me deeply sympathetic to Trump. I don’t think the Republican Party or the Democratic Party really cares about them. The tragedy, though, is that Trump is playing these people. My friend Michael Brendan Dougherty, who has also written sympathetically about Trump’s crusade, details how the candidate is already falling apart. Excerpt:

Indeed, the transformation is already showing. On policy, Trump is caving to normal Republicanism. He’s trying to get elected by pining for someone to finish the dang fence but has amnesty on the mind. He’s promising to protect American workers from unfair competition, but angling to pass a plutocratic tax reform. By the end of his campaign the only thing he’ll have added to the Republican Party is a reputation for crudity and disorderly violence.

His nationalist challenge to the status quo is disintegrating before our eyes. Instead of the inevitable transformation of the American right, Donald Trump is just the most successful huckster, selling gold coins and survival seeds to a scared public.

MBD and National Review‘s Kevin D. Williamson got into a heated argument last month about Trump and the white working class. The WaPo’s Jim Tankersley summarizes their exchange here, and adds a few comments from his interview with MBD, which concludes like this:

(MBD says:) When conservatives think of American trade negotiators and diplomats working to lower the barriers to American capitalists investing in overseas workforces, they see it as a core function of government, not as a kind of favor to wealthy clients of the American state. But if the same negotiators had in mind the interests of American workers instead, they see it as corrupt protectionism, that coddles the undeserving. There is a huge failure of imagination on the right. And a failure of self-awareness.  It may also be that I don’t see conservatism’s primary duty as guarding the purity of certain 19th century liberal principles on economics. I see its task as reconciling and harmonizing the diverse energies and interests of a society for the common good.

That’s how I see things too. Now, KDW has excoriated the Ralph Cases of the world in the pages of National Review, in an essay that has enraged some on the Right. It’s behind a paywall now, but here’s an excerpt:

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Well.

If you haven’t read KDW’s reporting from Appalachia’s white ghettos, you really should. He is not a guy writing from the comfort of a Manhattan office. For one, he lives in Texas (he was born in the Texas Panhandle), and for another, he has been out into the field. KDW’s verdict in his new piece is far too harsh, and somewhat misguided, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. But let me say what I think he gets right.

My late father was born and raised in rural poverty in the Deep South. He spent most of his career working as the chief public health officer in our parish, which is the most rural one in the state of Louisiana. Nobody gets rich working as the state public health officer. He dealt with real poverty every single day, both in the course of doing his own work, and in the parish health unit, where his office was. He was a compassionate man, but also an unsentimental one. For him, poverty and human behavior was not an abstract problem. It was one he lived.

My dad made a fool of me from time to time, and I deserved it. There was a time when I was a snotty college student, and having a good old time with my buddies making fun of a poor, simple man. Daddy let me have it good, shaming me for looking down my nose at that man. That man had lived a hard life, and was not smart. He had made mistakes. But he did not deserve the scorn of smart-ass college boys like me and my friends. Daddy didn’t make that man into a Bruce Springsteen hero. He just saw him as a human being who deserved respect.

During my crusading liberal days in college, I was full of ardor and right-thinking on the subject of race and poverty. I dismissed my dad’s conservative views as typical hard-hearted Reaganism, and fumed over how someone like him, who was raised working-class and was culturally working class, could sympathize with Reagan, that old racist. What it took me years to see was that however shaped my father’s views on race and poverty were by his generation’s attitudes, they were also deeply informed by years of observation of how poor black people, like poor white people, lived. He would try to explain to me how nobody who lived the way so many of the black (and white) poor did in our parish could ever hope to break the cycle of poverty. It took education, and hard work, and self-discipline, especially staying off of drink, drugs, and avoiding having children outside of marriage. You had to be sensible with your money, he would tell me (I didn’t know until many years later how hard he and my mom, a school bus driver, struggled financially during my childhood).

I didn’t want to hear it. I had my theories from my books and my favorite magazines and op-ed writers. What did my dad know, anyway?

I’m not retrospectively canonizing him. Like every one of us, my dad’s take on the world was limited by his circumstances. The point is, my dad’s lack of sentimentality about the lives of the rural poor came from the inside out, and from working with and among them. They were by comparison only an abstraction to me, a kid born in the late 1960s at the end of the long postwar boom that had propelled people like my dad into the middle class.

The thing I remember most about my dad was how much contempt he had for people who would not work. He was an old-timer who really didn’t respect office work as “real work” (you can imagine how much stress this caused in our relationship). He had to work at a desk when he was the public health officer, and hated every minute of it. He preferred to be working with his hands, and literally, until the day he died, would tell anybody who would listen what a damn shame it was that we lived in a society that devalued physical labor, and tried to push everybody into college.

All of this is to say that when I read Kevin D. Williamson’s essay, I hear in it the voice of my father. Daddy would take the side of a hard-working man, white or black, in a heartbeat, but a man he judged as lazy, or wanting a handout — they were nothing but trash to him, whatever their race. And if you didn’t live by a code of honor — hard work, self-discipline, respect for self and others — you were no kind of man in his eyes. I remember once passing the house of a poor white family down one of our country roads, and remarking on the ramshackleness of their house. Daddy did not feel sorry for them. He told me that the mother and father of that family were struggling, but that the father drank all his wages up, and was “no-account.” The mother, she had her own problems. He pointed out how hard they made the lives of their children by their slothful, self-indulgent behavior. Daddy was as hard on them as he was on the rich people in town that he thought didn’t do their duty to their kids and their community.

Worst of all in my father’s eyes were those people who were content to sit on their butts “like a stump full of owls eating dirt daubers,” in his memorable phrase, allowing their kids to suffer and everything to fall apart around them when they could be doing something, anything, to provide. My father would at times point out people in our town to my sister and me as examples to emulate, or to avoid imitating. “That sumbitch wouldn’t hit a lick at a snake,” he would say about a fellow who was lazy (and who might be rich or poor).

Someone who was content to wallow in self-pity instead of getting up and going somewhere to find work to provide for his family — that kind of person would have been contemptible in my dad’s eyes. Life, for him, was about struggle. To win at life was to struggle honorably. That was the main thing. To have to leave your town would be a tragedy, maybe, but better that than to pity yourself and depend on the charity of others. His was a code of honor held by many of the white working class in his day, and he believed in it fiercely. He would have had nothing but scorn for the “vicious, selfish culture” of some poor and working class white people — and black people too. My father would have given KDW a thumbs-up on that.

But here’s the part of my dad that I don’t find in KDW’s essay.

Daddy was one of those people referred to on retirement plaques as a “dedicated public servant.” Thing is, he really was. He never bragged about it; he just did it. He thought the honorable thing for a man to do was to help out his community, to be of service to others. Now that he’s gone, I look back on the things my dad did for this place, and I marvel. In his job as the public health officer, he helped bring running water and sewerage to the houses of poor people who had never had it. He set up and administered programs that did real good for people. When I was a little kid, I would go with him on his rounds of our parish during the week he would provide free rabies vaccinations for the dogs of country people. He didn’t have to do that; he knew that it would help folks out. And on and on. He helped start our neighborhood volunteer fire department, and served as its first chief — this, in a time when he could have relaxed in retirement.

In short, he loved this place and its people, and believed that being a good man meant caring about the common good. Towards the very end of his life, he despaired of this at times, but the sum of his life’s work was to leave his community better than he found it. For my father, this was a real thing. He often became frustrated with what he regarded as the foolishness of people to get caught up in parochial, self-interested concerns, at the expense of the greater good, and at times, towards the end of his life, confessed to despairing of the work he had done over the decades. As readers of my Dante book will know, I think my dad made a false idol of community, family, and place, one that caused him and me a lot of heartache, though we worked it all out before the end. Still, the life he spent in service to his community is a model to me of the public-spirited man.

I know that in his final decade, he was concerned about how hard it was for young people born and raised here to stay in the parish. The kind of jobs that were available to men of his generation had largely disappeared. We had (and still have) a problem with affordable housing here. In his eyes, it was bad enough that my generation would leave here in search of work because we chose to do so. Much worse were his generation’s grandchildren who wanted to stay here, but could not because there was no work for them.

What do the winners in the information economy owe to those who have not done well? A man used to be able to make a good living by the strength of his back and his willingness to work. That’s the world my dad grew up in, and that shaped his outlook on life. Now, many Republicans have lost touch with how hard it is for people who don’t have the education or the natural intelligence to navigate this new world. Back in 2005, when George W. Bush, fresh from his re-election triumph, undertook a crusade to privatize Social Security, I found myself thinking about my dad and the people back home. That scheme was for people like me: successful middle-class professionals who knew how to take advantage of investment opportunities, or (in my case, because I’m an idiot on math) afford the professional advice on how to manage investments. Most of the working people back home would have been set upon by the kind of people who pay big money to political campaigns, and been fleeced. I don’t think that G.W. Bush intended to hurt these people. But I think Republicans, especially policy people in DC, suffer from what MBD calls a failure of imagination. They don’t understand that not everybody is an A student, and not everybody can figure the complexities of modern life out. There is among a lot of Republicans a contempt for the working poor and working class — a contempt of which that the people who hold it are unaware — that says people not smart enough to be self-contained, successful individualist libertarians kind of deserve what they get. Too stupid to figure out how to invest your Social Security allotment? Sucks to be you.

That’s part of what I hear in KDW’s essay, that attitude. Having trouble reaching your bootstraps because you were born with arms too short, or you threw your back out permanently? Sucks to be you.

I wish my dad were still around to talk to about Trump, and the Ralph Cases of the world. I wonder what he would say. Again, he was not a sentimentalist, but rather a practical man. In fact, he was so uninterested in tradition that if it had been up to him, he would have bulldozed antebellum houses to make a shopping center if the land would be more profitable that way. He and I got into a hot argument a couple of decades ago about whether or not Wal-mart ought to come to town. I think he got the best of me, to be honest. He pointed out that it was easy for me to decry the potential aesthetic spoil of our town, because I didn’t live here, and I didn’t have to drive way out of the way to get things because most of the small stores in town had long since closed. And during the last big political controversy in our parish, he was adamantly on the side of the forces of progress, because he believed that the “let’s keep everything the way it is” people, whether they realized it or not, were dooming our parish to obsolescence and permanent decline. I say all this to you to point out that he did not believe in the idea of a permanent arcadia.

That said, he was the kind of man who would almost certainly have taken Michael Brendan Dougherty’s side here:

It may also be that I don’t see conservatism’s primary duty as guarding the purity of certain 19th century liberal principles on economics. I see its task as reconciling and harmonizing the diverse energies and interests of a society for the common good.

He was one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever known, but he hated theory. Hated it. The only Shakespeare he knew or cared anything about was the company that made fishing reels, and he couldn’t have given a fig about Aristotle or even Tocqueville. What he understood in his bones was that the things that make life worth living are goods that come to us in family, and in community. A good life is something that ought to be shared, and shared across generations. He used to talk with bitterness about the merchants who left the parish after the catastrophic 1927 flood, which followed a long period of economic decline. He was born in 1934, and was too young to remember any of it, but he had it fixed in his mind that those people had abandoned us.

Whenever this would come up, I would explain to him that those merchants back then almost certainly had no choice but to leave for the city, because there was no economy around here anymore, not after the flood and the boll weevil, and certainly not during the Great Depression. He was a smart man, and at some level must have understood what I was saying. Still, he was convinced emotionally that they ought to have found some way to have stuck it out. Because you know, they were us. We were one community. That’s how he saw it. Where was their loyalty? To the “almighty dollar,” as he would put it? Or to, you know, all of us?

I don’t know what my dad would have thought of Trump. He died late last summer, as Trump’s campaign was taking off. The last thing we watched on TV together was Trump’s rally in Mobile, but he didn’t comment on it. I think that my dad would have instinctively taken the side of Ralph Case, and Terry Smerz, and Lucia Zappitelli. But he wouldn’t have agreed that they were owed a living in their town. I suspect his view would have been that the best policy is one that makes it easier — not easy, but easier — for people to stay where they were born and raised, and where their family’s roots are. That’s what I think it meant to be conservative, to my dad: to give decent men and women willing to work hard and live honorably — not like common trash, sponging off their neighbors — the opportunity to make a decent life for themselves in their hometowns. He was a George Bailey kind of guy. He unquestionably shared KDW’s low opinion of “no-count” people whose poverty he saw as largely the result of deficient character. But he reflexively sided with the little guy with the hard work ethic, and he would give people a chance if he thought they were salt of the earth folks doing their best.

Here’s who my dad was. He owned a trailer park for a couple of decades (money from those rental spaces helped put my sister and me through college), and kept the monthly rental fee somewhat below market rate. He knew the people who rented spaces from him were hard workers, and that they struggled to pay their bills. He had a soft spot for working men and women — and if they were working at the mill or the plant, they were making more money than he was at the health department. I can remember my mom complaining to him from time to time, quite reasonably, that really, Ray, you can’t let So-and-so keep taking advantage of you like that. They’re way behind on their rent. Don’t you see that they’re cheating you? There were times when my dad had to face that fact and evict people. But he hated to do it, because, I think, he remembered what it was like to have little, and to fight to hang on to that. He was a soft touch as a landlord, not because he was dumb, but because he stood with the little guy, always. He was a Reagan Democrat all the way.

We were watching the news one day during the last year of his life. I don’t know what the particular story was, but I remember watching him sit in his chair, shaking his head. “I’m glad I’m not going to be around to see much more of this,” he said. The world had long since passed him by. He did not believe America was headed towards greatness, that’s for sure.

My heart hurts for Ralph Case. He’s the kind of man my dad would have befriended, helped, and fought for. He’s the kind of many my dad did befriend, help, and fight for. And he’s going to get run over.

The Politics of Peeing

Courtesy of reader

A reader tweeted this out from the annual conference of college administrators who run student life. He said, “Rod Dreher is not making this junk up.” He added that he did not see any single-gender restrooms onsite.

When will people just stop honoring this stuff? Read the language on the poster — it is prim and alien and just weird. And culturally aggressive. Keep pushing this garbage, you SJWs in academic power, and you will reap the whirlwind.

Here’s a common purpose for the sane: unite to fight Social Justice Warriors who insist on turning passing water into political activism.

A MacIntyre Moment

A reader whose name I’m withholding to protect his privacy writes:

I wrote to you about six months to a year ago about deconverting from radical Leftism to some species of conservatism. I had an experience recently which exactly reflected the issue of emotivism and moral incommensurability that you talked about in this post– can we call episodes like this “MacIntyre Moments?”–  and I wanted to share it with you.

I try to avoid Facebook arguments but I let myself indulge in one recently. The topic was the recent desecration of the grave of Junipero Serra . A friend who is still involved in radical activism posted a story about the incident, in which Fr. Serra’s grave and the graves of other people of European descent were desecrated. Due to the racial aspect of the vandalism, the police were investigating it as a hate crime.

My friend thought that this was perfectly reasonable. The desecration, I mean, not the hate crime investigation– that, she thought, was just ridiculous.

One of the things that infuriated me most during my time on the radical left was the complete lack of respect for the dead. I couldn’t have put into words why, then, and I’m not sure I can now. In the part of the– maybe we can call it the Deep Left– I inhabited, it was very common for a dozen or more young activists to live together in a house, which was seen as a kind of collective or commune. We can talk about what this says about young peoples’ need for real community another time. The first such house I lived in was a trailer. The city is an expensive one on the West Coast, so a two-bedroom trailer was a luxury. We had gotten into it because the previous resident had died and his neighbor had helped us rent the trailer from his brother, who was managing the estate.

The previous owner’s name was Chester. He was in his 90s when he died. The trailer was his– you could feel it, and you could tell by the personal things he had left behind what kind of person he was. There were model ships and sailors, a memoir entitled “Double Whammy,” an piano with the sheet music to “Old Cotton Fields Back Home” on the stand. (I still can’t hear that song without crying.) We did our usual Leftist thing with Chester’s home, packing upwards of a dozen young radicals into it and filling it with stolen goods and dumpstered food.

Any time any of our comrades brought up Chester– this obviously very sweet old man, whose death had provided us with a place to live– it was to mock him. “Chester the Molester” was the nickname that one friend gave to him– the very same friend that posted the article on Facebook. At other times they read from his memoir, laughing and sneering.

That was wrong, and it was wrong to desecrate Junipero Serra’s grave. I said as much. I avoided the issue of whether Fr. Serra should have been canonized, because it’s irrelevant. “Regardless of what you think about Junipero Serra, you don’t have the right to desecrate his grave just because you’re angry, and you don’t have the right to single out members of a specific racial group for victimization.”

I said this over and over again. The trouble was, there was no way that I could make my case. To say “you don’t have the right to desecrate someone’s grave because you’re angry” assumes a common frame of reference, one in which all people have the same set of rights and responsibilities, derived from a common source, and are equal in the eyes of the law.

To my young friend and the others that came to her defense in the argument, this simply didn’t make sense. One responded that “we know” that Fr. Serra was “a racist and an as*hole,” and so that made it okay. I reiterated my point that I wasn’t going to address the issue of whether Fr. Serra was a good guy or not, because it wasn’t relevant– you still don’t have the right to desecrate someone’s grave because you’re angry with them, and that the Catholic Church has the right to practice its religion in the way it sees fit, even if it makes you angry.

Their response? “Yes, and we have the right to desecrate someone’s grave, even if it makes you angry.”

After that I stopped talking because I knew there was no way to move forward. We had reached EXACTLY the impasse that Alasdair MacIntyre talks about. We had no common language on which to discuss the issue. For them, being angry and feeling oppressed justifies basically any act. For me, the idea of universal rights and the rule of law, however imperfectly it may work out in the real world, is what saves us from the arbitrary rule of power. But there was no way for me to explain that to them. “We know” that Junipero Serra was “a racist as*hole,” and since “we know” that, there is nothing that can stop us from doing anything we like to express our anger at him.

I see things like this happen– regularly. And I see Trump banging the drums on the other side. The Trumpists and the SJWs have legitimate grievances… but that doesn’t matter. Lacking a common frame of reference, we no longer have any way of hearing one another in this country. Which I’m afraid means that, going forward, the only way we will be able to settle our disputes will be through the exercise of unrestrained will and violence.

The reader subsequently wrote to say that the friend who posted with approval the article about the desecration of Fr. Serra’s grave is, in real life, an “extremely sweet and kind-hearted person,” but one who participates in an evil movement, and “has no sense of or interest in the larger issues involved.”

Think about it. Think about it hard.

Tanya Berry, Hero

Please please please don’t miss Gracy Olmstead’s piece on The Seer, the new documentary about Wendell Berry, co-directed by Laura Dunn and her husband Jef Sewell. I loved this part especially (emphasis mine):

Despite the haunting sense of loss we might experience when seeing the helplessness of aging farmers, the shots of dilapidated barns and deserted farmhouses, there is also beauty reflected throughout the film. Much of this comes from the hope reflected in the face of younger generations, people picking up Berry’s call and embracing it. There are those who stay—and this film is also about those who stay: like Tanya Berry, who chose to follow her husband back to Kentucky, even though it was not her home, at least not at the time.

“I started this film thinking so much about Wendell and what a hero he is,” says Dunn. “But as a stay-at-home mom, as a woman, a homeschooler—the person who really stays with me, who I think about day in and day out, is his wife Tanya. She changed my way of thinking in this film. She elevates the domestic realm.”

Tanya grew up mostly in Northern California in a family of artists, notes Dunn. Her father was the Head of the University of Kentucky’s Art Department, where she also attended college as a music major. But when Wendell Berry decided to travel back home to Kentucky, Tanya followed: “I had no clue what I was getting into, but I’ve been lucky because of him, because he’s the kind of person he was, and he’s been lucky because of me, because I believe in the continuity of the home and the family.” She notes that growing up she’d lived all over the country, “moved and moved and moved,” and she had an intense desire to have a home—a place where her children could belong.

And this is a desire that many of Berry’s readers have: a yearning for a place of their own, for a home and community. His writing often draws people back to the land, to the places they’ve forgotten or neglected. This is one of the reasons why Dunn is planning to show the film at South by Southwest: Austin is her home.

“A lot of the same forces of development, change, and money that are destroying farms in Kentucky are destroying our home here,” she says. “It’s really meaningful to be able to show it at home, since it’s largely about finding your home in a world that feels so despairing a lot of times, where so many of the things you love are being destroyed. This is our home, and we’re going to start here.”

Read the whole thing. I cannot wait for you to see this film. Here is an excerpt from Wendell Berry’s 1971 poem, “The Country of Marriage”:

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange

of my love and work for yours, so much for so much

of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are–

that puts us in the dark. We are more together

than we know, how else could we keep on discovering

we are more together than we thought?

You are the known way leading always to the unknown,

and you are the known place to which the unknown is always

leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,

I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing

not belittled by my saying that I possess it.

Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing

a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only

accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light

enough to live, and then accepts the dark,

passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I

have fallen time and again from the great strength

of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

As I post this, I am listening to my wife in the next room teaching geometry to our children. My own Tanya Berry, cultivating my own domestic garden.

Freedom & Speech

I see that my “SJWs Will Elect Trump” post was a big hit over the weekend (thanks, Real Clear Politics, for the link). I posted it after midnight on Saturday morning — after reading accounts of the cancelled Trump rally in Chicago — and by Sunday afternoon, had changed one thing about the view expressed in that post. I had said that the SJWs shutting down an American presidential candidate’s rally was a sign that Trump had to go on — by which I meant that the SJWs could not be allowed to win yet again.

I do believe that the SJWs cannot be allowed to win. But Trump, on Sunday morning, showed again why he is a dangerous figure. Here he is on Meet The Press yesterday:

CHUCK TODD:

But Mr. Trump, when you say, you know, “If you see somebody getting to ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them. Seriously, just knock the hell out of them. I promise you, I’ll pay for their legal fees.” How is that not condoning what this older gentleman did to this protester?

DONALD TRUMP:

Well, let me explain what happened. We were told just as I was going up on the stage, I was told by the secret service, “Sir, there’s a person or two people in the audience that have tomatoes. They are going to throw them at you, we think. If they do throw them, you have to be prepared.”

Now, if you get hit in the face with a tomato, let me tell you, with somebody with a strong arm, at least, let me tell you, it can be very damaging. Not good. So I was told people were in the audience, two people, with tomatoes, and they’re going to throw them at me. What I did is I said, “By the way, if you see anybody with tomatoes, right at the beginning, you’ve got to stop them. Do whatever you want to do.” I have no objection to what I said. I would say it again. People are there doing harm, you have to go and you have to use equal force.

CHUCK TODD:

Do you plan – I’m just curious–

DONALD TRUMP:

It’s not fair. It’s a one-way street.

CHUCK TODD:

I’m just curious, do you plan on paying for the legal fees of this older gentleman in North Carolina who sucker punched the protester?

DONALD TRUMP:

Well, I’m not aware. I will say this. I do want to see what that young man was doing. Because he was very taunting. He was very loud, very disruptive. And from what I understand, he was sticking a certain finger up in the air. And that is a terrible thing to do in front of somebody that frankly wants to see America made great again. And so we’ll see.

CHUCK TODD:

And that condones —

DONALD TRUMP:

I’m going to take a look at it. But I want to see what that man was doing.

CHUCK TODD:

And that condones a sucker punch though?

DONALD TRUMP:

No, as I told you before, nothing condones. But I want to see. The man got carried away, he was 78 years old, he obviously loves his country, and maybe he doesn’t like seeing what’s happening to the country. I want to see the full tape. But I don’t condone violence.

CHUCK TODD:

So you might pay for his legal fees?

DONALD TRUMP:

Well, I’m going to look at it. I’m going to see, you know, what was behind this because it was a strange event. But from what I heard, there was a lot of taunting and a certain finger was placed in the air. Not nice. Again, I don’t condone the violence. I don’t condone what he did. But you know what, not nice for the other side either.

CHUCK TODD:

It’s possible you could help him with legal fees, if this man needs it?

DONALD TRUMP:

I’ve actually instructed my people to look into it, yes.

He’s talking about the elderly white guy who sucker-punched the black protester in North Carolina the other day. You’ve seen the video, probably; everybody has. The black man was being hauled out of the arena by police, and was no threat at all to the old white man. None. No. Threat. Yet the old white guy reached out and cold-cocked the black protester. Of course Trump condones that, by offering to pay his legal fees. Trump knows what he’s doing.

And this:

Bernie Sanders is lying when he says his disruptors aren’t told to go to my events. Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2016

Has any American running for president ever talked this way? As Marco Rubio pointed out over the weekend, you cannot talk the way Trump does if you want to be a leader. You have to rise above the rabble. Trump stokes what is worst in his followers. Noah Rothman wrote yesterday:

I had initially assumed that Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric was simply a strong-arm political tactic — that Trump campaign operatives threatening chaos, or worse, was a strategy designed to intimidate the Republican Party into giving their candidate the nomination at a potentially contested convention. That might have been the original plan, but it’s not any longer. The violence Trump has stoked has arrived months ahead of schedule. It suggests that this is a phenomenon over which Trump no longer has full control, and the cooler heads that we all expected to prevail are still largely silent about it or positioning themselves to benefit from it.

The country is careening into a familiar dark abyss. Trump supporters now feel confident enough in their surroundings to scream “go back to Africa” at blacks and “go to Auschwitz” at Jews. This anti-social behavior is being abetted from the top, because the top seems to have no interest in stopping it. Indeed, the celebrity candidate appears to think he can ride this ugly wave into power.

John Podhoretz is correct here, talking about the left-wing provocateurs who invaded the Chicago Trump rally, then acted up:

And then they play victim. It’s straight out of the Marxist-Leninist street-game playbook, and only a historical illiterate or a fool or someone who is sympathetic to the tactics would deny it.

The larger question is what responsibility Trump bears for all this. The answer is simple: He bears most of it. He thinks it’s okay to play a wink-wink-nudge-nudge game with the people in his crowds about how in the old days a protestor would have been beaten up, or how he’d pay for legal fees if someone wants to do something to a protestor  —and inside and outside his events things are getting violent. People are getting punched. Photographers are getting hurled to the ground by Secret Service agents. Reporters are getting manhandled by repugnant Trump toadies. The charged atmosphere surrounding Trump is charged because he has charged it.

And if you have the sickening feeling this is only the beginning, you’re not alone. Trump, I’ve often said, is a manifestation of Loki, the god of misrule. Misrule breeds chaos. Chaos breeds violence. A political party that chooses Loki for its leader is a political party with a rank-and-file choosing chaos. And a political party whose populist left is provoking its rival into choosing chaos is morally stained as well.

They are. For months I have been pointing out that here that the aggressive illiberalism of the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as other Social Justice Warrior groups, is calling up a backlash. It is outrageous that they have been able to intimidate college administrators and professors, and bully people who don’t share their views, especially its racial particularism, with no pushback. And it is infuriating that they shut down a political rally held by a candidate for the US presidency. From Politico‘s report going inside the Chicago planning of the disruptors:

By sundown on Friday night, the crowd assembled inside the arena was chanting and ready to cheer on their candidate: Donald Trump. Six thousand strong and still trickling in through the metal detectors at the front gate, they had traveled from across the Midwest, taking vacation days from work, booking bus tickets from afar, and waiting, at times, more than 12 hours outside on the streets of Chicago for a night with the GOP frontrunner.

But not everyone was there to cheer. Just 50 feet in front of the podium where Trump was scheduled to appear at any moment, Nathaniel Lewis, a 25-year-old African-American graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, had established a beachhead of sorts: a pocket of about three dozen college students and activists. They were ready, too.

What Lewis and dozens of his UIC classmates had planned was perhaps bigger—and better organized—than any protest Trump had faced to date. It had been a week in the making, and now everyone was in place: with roughly 2,500 on the street outside and hundreds more inside, including dozens working directly with Lewis.

Provocateurs there to deny Trump the right to speak, and those people who had traveled to hear him the right to hear him. More:

The plan was straightforward. Once Trump began speaking, Lewis would begin sending messages to the groups around the hall—and, so prompted, they would each stand up, chanting, and disrupt the speech. It would then build to a crescendo: right there, in front of Trump’s podium. Lewis and the other protesters in front were going to link up—“arm in arm,” he instructed the students around him—and make their presence known in a silent, but conspicuous, circle. “It will speak louder,” Lewis said, “than anybody who interrupts Trump’s speeches.”

They didn’t get to do it, because Trump cancelled his talk, citing safety concerns. And then:

And that was the exact moment when the violence began, pitting Trump supporters against protesters, whites against blacks. An event—teetering on the edge until that moment, but still calm—devolved quickly into an angry scrum, and Lewis and his fellow students found themselves in the middle of it. They were standing near the podium where the candidate would not be appearing—with an increasingly angry crowd around them that knew exactly who had prevented Donald Trump from showing up.

“Stay together!” Lewis urged his fellow protesters.

The Trump supporters surged toward them, shouting and swearing. The confrontation the student protesters had hoped to avoid was coming, and there was nothing any of them could do to stop it.

Read the whole thing.  It’s worth it to get an idea into the mindset of the protesters. They actually seem to believe that going into the rally and repeatedly disrupting the speaker, so that the speaker cannot communicate his message, is somehow “peaceful.” Steve Sailer expresses the offensiveness of what those SJWs pulled off in Chicago, and ties it to the SJW movement on campus (N.B., the venue they denied to Trump on Friday was on a college campus):

Of course, Safe Spaces has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the territorial imperative. Young people naturally feel the urge to fight turf wars, to stake out territory and drive out enemies. Normally in America we have laws to regulate the competition for property so territorial urges don’t turn into mob rule. But over the last year minority college students have increasingly asserted that they must be above the law because racism. It’s the only way they can be safe. …

 

So the violent protesters shutting down a public political gathering were engaging in self-defense, since everybody knows from watching TV that Trump supporters are Ku Klux Klanners and Nazis, so violence is okay. It’s self defense of Safe Spaces.

Sailer links to this lengthy Reddit account of the event by a Trump supporter who was at the rally, and was frightened by what he saw from the anti-Trump protesters. The Redditor concludes:

Obviously I did not see everything that occurred as I wandered the protest grounds outside the cancelled Chicago rally. What I did see, however, was fear. Fear from the rally attendees for their immediate safety, and fear of Donald Trump from the protesters.

More than that, I feel that I experienced today, for the first time in my life, true totalitarianism and authoritarianism, expressed laterally from citizen to citizen, in order to silence opinions from being shared. This enforcement was shared through sheer numbers and intimidation, and in a few cases, violence.

People brought their children, loved ones, and friends to attend the Trump rally. I saw an older Asian man and his white wife in attendance, and the looks on their faces when the rally was declared cancelled almost broke my heart. I saw scared children clinging to their parents’ sides as they exited the building to the screams of protesters. I saw a quiet, but excited crowd of Donald Trump supporters get thrown out of Chicago.

Worst of all, I saw the first amendment trampled, spit on, and discarded like trash.

This cannot go on. As I finish this, I feel a sense of utter dread and hopelessness for what is becoming of the youth in this country, particularly those of the regressive left. So polarized has political opinion become, that dissenting thoughts on college campuses are now seen as hateful. These people deal in absolutes. They are right, and whatever means they must take to achieve their ends, they will do it. They will not stop themselves from violence or censorship. They will do it, and they will call hell down upon you if anyone dare does upon them the same.

Tonight I went to the Trump Rally to hear the thoughts of not only the man who was supposed to come and speak, but the people who support him. I found respect. I found calmness. I found peace.

The truth is, I am a legal immigrant, not a US citizen. I am not American. I am not white. I cannot vote.

After tonight, I support Donald Trump.

The Redditor’s account says that even when the demonstrators inside the hall were acting in an extremely provocative way, a voice came over the loudspeaker instructing Trump supporters to leave them alone, and not to put a hand on them. For what it’s worth.

The liberal writer Jonathan Chait has a strong piece calling Trump an “unprecedented threat” to American democracy. In it, though, he criticizes the behavior of the Chicago students:

But Rubio is not wrong to draw a connection between political correctness and elements of the left’s response to Trump. Donald Trump may or may not have been forthright about citing safety fears in cancelling his speech Friday night in Chicago, and disrupting the speech may or may not have been the protesters’ goal. But it is clear that protesters views the cancellation of the speech as a victory, breaking out in cheers of “We stopped Trump!”

Preventing speakers one finds offensive from delivering public remarks is commonplace on campuses. Indeed, more than 300 faculty members at the University of Illinois-Chicago signed a letter asking the University administration not to allow Trump to speak. I polled my Twitter followers whether they consider disrupting Trump’s speeches an acceptable response to his racism. Two-thirds replied that it is. Obviously, this is not a scientific poll, but it indicates a far broader acceptance than I expected.

Because Trump is so grotesque, and because he has violated liberal norms himself so repeatedly, the full horror of the goal of stopping Trump from campaigning (as opposed to merely counter-demonstrating against him) has not come across. But the whole premise of democracy is that rules need to be applied in every case without regard to the merit of the underlying cause to which it is attached. If you defend the morality of a tactic against Trump, then you should be prepared to defend its morality against any candidate. Now imagine that right-wing protesters had set out to disrupt Barack Obama’s speeches in 2008. If you’re not okay with that scenario, you should not be okay with protesters doing it to Trump.

The threat to democracy, then, also comes from the mob that shut Trump down. This is the thing that drives me nuts about this debate. So many people on the left think that because Trump is illiberal and nasty, he and his supporters don’t deserve the basic respect that is part of the social contract in a liberal, pluralistic society. They believe that their tribe is right, and that’s all that matters. And why shouldn’t they protest like this? Their illiberal tactics have been working for months on campus.

So, I don’t at all back away from the claim that the militant left is driving a lot of this. How many Trump rallygoers left the other night thinking, “You know, these youths have a point. Trump takes things too far. I’m going to reconsider voting for him”? Not one, I’m sure. Rather, they probably left thinking, “This is why we need Trump. This is the future the left is planning for people like me: to silence us.”

And you know what? I don’t think they are wrong. I don’t expect the mainstream media to see this, because its knee-jerk response is always to Feel The Pain of protesters from favored liberal victim demographics, and either to justify or explain away those protesters’ illiberalism. But it’s plain what’s going on here, and has been going on for some time on the left.

But Trump is not innocent either, for reasons I’ve already talked about. He ought to be working towards calming things down, not doing jackass stunts like threatening to direct his violent supporters to a Bernie Sanders rally, particularly when there is no evidence at all that Sanders told his people to disrupt Trump’s event. If one of his supporters were attacked at a Trump rally, and was arrested fighting back, I would admire Trump offering to pay the man’s legal bills. But that is not what happened with that old man in North Carolina. He was in no danger at all, and his striking the protester from the side was a cowardly act. All in a day’s work for Trump, though.

Saturday, as you know, a white SJW maniac affiliated with Black Lives Matter tried to assault Trump onstage in Ohio. He’s lucky that the Secret Service didn’t shoot him dead. After that incident, Josh Marshall wrote an important essay yesterday, warning that if this kind of thing keeps going, somebody’s going to die. Excerpt:

People act very differently in crowd or mob situations than they do on their own. There are various theories as to just why this is the case – again, there’s a whole social science and group psychology literature about it. But crowd/mob situations are profoundly disinhibiting events. People sometimes do things they themselves not only regret but almost literally can’t believe they did.

None of this is meant to absolve people of responsibility for their actions. Having watched the video I have little doubt Bamberger came into the event with a lot of pretty intense feelings and beliefs that set him up for this confrontation. But would he have acted this way without all the outside stimulus he describes in his letter? Probably not. We all have angers and prejudices and hostilities which our socialization keeps in check, sometimes even hidden from ourselves. Some of us, of course, have much more than others. But in crowd settings, with what can now only be called Trump’s almost nonstop incitement to eject or beat “thug” protestors, jostling and shoving, ramped up emotions, things can escalate very rapidly. And let’s be honest, it can happen on both sides. A hypothetical: a Trump supporter shoves a black protestor, the protestor punches back, others join in. We don’t need to equate the two sides, which I do not, to see that there is a lot of anger and animus on each side. This kind of atmosphere can unleash it.

What we have seen over the last two weeks isn’t just an escalation of chaos and low level violence but a progressive normalization of unacceptable behavior – more racist verbal attacks, more violence. This is in turn clearly attracting more people who want trouble – on both sides. If you’re an angry racist who wants to act out on his anger, can you imagine any better place to go than a Trump rally? If you hate Trump, his supporters and all he stands for and want to get physical about it, where best to go?

Alasdair MacIntyre, in his early 1980s book After Virtue, explained why protest today is so fruitless. Excerpt:

It is easy also to understand why protest becomes a distinctive moral feature of the modern age and why indignation is a predominant modern emotion. ‘To protest’ and its Latin predecessors and French cognates are originally as often or more often positive as negative; to protest was once to bear witness to something and only as a consequence of that allegiance to bear witness against something else.

But protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s rights in the name of someone else’s utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestor can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that the protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this.

In less philosophical language, his point is that protest cannot hope to persuade anyone, because our culture has gone so far down the road of radical individualism that there is no longer a shared rational framework within which one can be persuaded. We are an “emotivist” culture (says MacIntyre) in which whatever people feel is true is taken as truth, rationality be damned. Protest, then, can only be expressive, not persuasive — and indeed, SJWs don’t intend to persuade anyone who disagrees with them, only to intimidate them and to make it impossible for them to speak or to be heard. As Sailer points out, that is the whole point of the “Safe Spaces” racket.

One good thing about Trump is he challenges the racket directly. But that good thing is overwhelmed by the destructive chaos he unleashes by the way he challenges it, and encourages his followers to challenge it.

What is awfully hard to take is folks on the left denouncing Trump’s implicit and explicit violence and illiberalism, when they have been silent when SJWs have done the exact same thing, over and over, on campuses around the nation. Chait is right: either we have a country in which people are reasonably free to speak their minds on political matters, or we don’t. If we cannot or will not recognize and defend that right for everybody, then what kind of country is this? On the other hand, if people exercise that right irresponsibly, by inciting violence, it brings the law and the constitutional framework into which it fits into disrepute.

The bonds of mutual affection that should hold our country together are a lot thinner than people think. Donald Trump isn’t strengthening them. Neither are his enemies. After Trump’s performance on the Sunday talk shows yesterday, I am less sympathetic to him than I was after his rally was shut down by the SJWs. I hate a mob. Hate, hate, hate a mob. The mob won on Friday night. But Trump, in  a sense, is a mobster, in that he’s meeting their mob with his mob.

The GOP convention in Cleveland this summer is going to be bad news. The fact that a candidate for the presidency had to cancel his rally in a major American city because of protests is a terrible sign. It’s a victory for the forces tearing America apart.

 

 

Common Decency

This may be the best photo from Mrs. Reagan's funeral. pic.twitter.com/kX1WZP9mwi

— David Chalian (@DavidChalian) March 14, 2016

You readers know I don’t care much for the politics of either of these people, but God bless them for that moment of normal humanity and common decency. I’m in such despair over the direction of our politics that this image nearly brought me to tears.

Remember: you too shall die.