Rod Dreher's Blog, page 603

A Brutal Takedown of Ryan

Ross Douthat does not mince words in calling out House Speaker Paul Ryan as a coward on the Trump matter. You would expect Douthat to blast Ryan for being uncertain about speaking out against Trump, and he does (boy, does he ever). What I found most interesting about the Douthat column is how he indicts Ryan for intellectual cowardice. Read on:

Personally I would favor both: a Republican Party that adapts to Trumpism by absorbing the legitimate part of its populist critique, while also doing everything in its power to resist Trump himself. But if you watch or read Ryan’s recent CNBC interview with my colleague John Harwood, you’ll see a man who seems unable to go down either path.

Repeatedly Harwood presses him on whether the party needs to change to address the concerns of the blue-collar Republicans who are voting for Trump. And every time, as The Week’s James Pethokoukis pointed out afterward, Ryan simply returns to a 1980s-era message: cut spending, cut taxes, open markets, and all will be well. Asked about the possibility that some voters might see those policies as “taking care of people at the top more than you’re taking care of me,” he responds dismissively: “Bernie Sanders talks about that stuff. That’s not who we are.”

The James Pethokoukis column is tough, , and dead on. Here is Pethokoukis summarizing Ryan’s answer to Harwood’s question:

In other words, Republicans should keep deeply cutting taxes for the richest Americans — as part of across-the-board tax cuts — and not give any special preference to targeted or direct middle-class tax relief.

Not only does Ryan’s position clash with the Trumpist truths of 2016 — his position makes little sense from a policy standpoint. Analyses of the tax plans of the various GOP presidential candidates show their deep individual income tax cuts — such as slashing the top rate from 40 percent to 28 percent — would cost the most revenue while producing the least amount of economic growth.

And Republicans wonder why so many of their erstwhile voters are coming out for Trump.

The thing is, Trump’s tax plan will scarcely help those folks either, but rather give massive tax relief to the rich, and soar the federal deficit. Trump will be no friend to the working man, not judging by his tax policy, anyway. But his views on trade are dramatically different than GOP orthodoxy, which is something. No matter how much credibility Trump lacks, at least he sees — or appears to see — what these blue-collar and middle-class Americans are going through. That’s more than you can say for the standard-issue Republicans like Paul Ryan, so given over to their Reagan-era orthodoxies that they are blind to what’s happening all around them. You can’t beat something with nothing. What do the Washington Republicans have?

15) Instead, the "change-nothing" faction has lost control of their own presidential nomination. We’ll see what more there is left to lose.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 17, 2016

Fanatics For Trump

Well, this will certainly help Trump’s cause:

Trump protesters were blocking vehicles leading into Fountain Hills in advance of Donald Trump’s campaign stop Saturday morning.

Protesters were chanting, “Donald Trump, shut it down, Phoenix is the people’s town.”

Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies were seen directing tow trucks to start hauling the violators away.

Idiots. They are only making Trump stronger.

In other Trump-related news today, read this from super-conservative radio host Erick Erickson, about how he’s had to hire security to protect his family from Trump supporters:

Last night, as my family went to bed, a man in a car parked just down our driveway. He and his coworker roaming the neighborhood are the security now part of my life. It is the age of Trump.

In 2011 and 2012, I actively campaigned against Mitt Romney. In November of 2011, I had written that Romney would lose to Obama and conservatives would get blamed. That happened. He was a terrible candidate. But Romney supporters, despite vigorous disagreement, were not hurling threats my way or toward my family. They were not calling advertisers to my radio station making threats.

In fact, the only time I have ever experienced what is now happening is from far left activists outraged over my position on gay marriage. Those radical gay rights activists have appeared once or twice in my neighborhood. They have hounded advertisers and made threats. I’ve even once been swatted.

But even these radical activists were not as aggrieved or angry as Trump supporters. The new reality in which my family and I live is that of going to bed at night with security parked at the end of the driveway and our movements more regulated for our own protection.

In the Age of Trump, the worst and basest instincts of humanity are on display. Like the Islamic radicals they rail against, Trump supporters have adopted a “convert or die” attitude. They will not persuade you to the merits of Trump. They will not defend Trump. They will harass you, censor you, wish for your death, and threaten to kill you if you do not convert.

Read the whole thing — and listen to the audio clips of fanatics who left voice mail messages hoping that Erickson dies or is murdered.

The only time I had to have off-duty police officers (provided by my newspaper, to which I will be eternally grateful) came when a gay rights fanatic attacked my home. It’s terrifying. This is one reason I hate it when pro-life protesters demonstrate outside of abortion doctors’ houses. If people cannot feel safe in their own home, nobody is safe anywhere. Activists who believe that their cause is more important than observing the basic rules that govern civilized behavior are a cancer. Many gay rights activists think their cause absolves them of any behavior — and that attitude has to some degree been institutionalized by sympathizers. Reading Erickson’s tale about how he and his family are being threatened by Trump fanatics is a warning sign.

Social Justice Warriors are too. Weimar America. Life is a cabaret, old chum.

The Big Short Fingered Vulgarian

In the 1980s, SPY, a New York-based satirical magazine, routinely referred to Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian.” Subject line here is a shout-out to the Eighties.

Anyway, where was I? Yes, so, John Podhoretz has a theory of Trump: that his rise (and Bernie Sanders’s rise on the left) is a delayed reaction to the economic meltdown of 2007-08. Excerpt:

In September 2008, after months of uncertainty following the collapse of Bear Stearns, the financial system went into its terrifying tailspin. A disastrous recession shrank the overall economy by 9 percent, and the unemployment rate rose to 10 percent a year later.

Now imagine that the meltdown had taken place not in September 2008 but rather in September 2006. Imagine that housing prices and stock prices had fallen in the same way—such that the wealth invested in the 63 percent of home-owned American households and in the stocks owned by 62 percent of all Americans had declined by 40 percent.

Further, imagine that serious proposals arose that the 8 percent of homeowners who had defaulted on their home loans be forgiven their debts—the very proposal in 2009 that led investor Rick Santelli to call for a new “tea party” uprising on the part of the 92 percent who paid their bills on time. Only this time Santelli’s comments had been spoken in 2007. Imagine all these things. And then imagine the presidential race that would have followed. Does the rise of Trump and Bernie Sanders suddenly make all the sense in the world? Of course.

Pod starts his piece talking about Steve, a New York businessman friend who is for Trump.

When I asked why, he explained he was tired of political correctness and sick of Wall Street bankers getting away with murder. And then he told me about the stresses of his business—specifically, that he works with people who sign contracts featuring non-compete clauses with major corporations. When their time is up and they’re ready to move on, their employers threaten them with legal action due to the non-compete clauses. These claims are without merit, Steve says, but litigating them would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So his people stay where they are. It’s unfair, he says.

What on earth, I asked, does he think Trump would do to help him and his clients with a non-compete problem? What does this have to do with anything? It’s the big guys, Steve said. The big guys are lording it over the little guys.

Pod says Trump is an emotional outlet for people who are sick and tired of being screwed by the system. It doesn’t matter that Trump’s policies make little or no sense. They want to strike a blow against a system that is rigged against people like them.

Last night, I rented the 2015 film The Big Short from Amazon streaming. It’s a terrific movie. It’s based on the Michael Lewis book that tells the story of several guys, all unknown to each other, who recognized early on that the housing market was a massive bubble, and who ended up making fortunes “shorting” that market — that is, betting that it was going to collapse. The film is about the blindness of optimism (nobody imagined that the housing could collapse), about the blindness of greed (nobody wanted to question what they were doing, because they were making too much money), and how the financial system is based on fraud. The bond agencies were in the tank for the investment banks. Federal regulators had a very cozy relationship with the banks they were to regulate. Banks routinely lied to themselves and to each other about what they were doing, because the fraudulent system was making them all very rich.

When it all came crashing down, the US taxpayer bailed out the banks, Congress refused to break up the big banks or to meaningfully reform them, and nobody went to jail for what they did.

It’s all true. Watching the film (trailer below) brought back all the memories of those days. It brought back the $60,000 we lost selling our house in the wake of the crash, when we moved. (“You’re lucky,” said a friend from DC who had to sell his at the same time. “We lost close to $200,000.”) It is still incredible to me that there was no political reckoning for that. Wall Street never suffered a thing. The politicians who protected them from radical reform, including breaking up the Too Big To Fail banks? They’re still there.

As the credits rolled last night, the idea of voting for Trump or Sanders made a hell of a lot of emotional sense. That’s not the same thing as being actually rational. But I can entirely understand why a voter would say, “To hell with it,” and vote Trump just to stick it to the Man. Here’s a quote from the real Michael Burry, an investor played by Christian Bale portrayed in The Big Short. It comes from a story in Vulture:

“I felt I was watching a plane crash,” Michael Burry tells me. “I actually had that dream again and again. I knew what was happening, but there was nothing I, or anyone else, could do to stop it. The last day of 2007, I couldn’t come home. I was in the office till late at night. I couldn’t calm down. I wrote my wife an email and just said, ‘I can’t come home, it’s just too upsetting what’s happening,’ and I didn’t want to come home to my kids like this … I am shocked that executives at some of the worst lenders were not punished for what they did. But this is the nature of these things. The ones running the machine did not get punished after the dot-com bubble either — all those VCs and dot-com executives still live in their mansions lining the 280 corridor on the San Francisco Peninsula. The little guy will pay for it — the small investor, the borrower. Which is why the little guy needs to be warned to be more diligent and to be more suspicious of society’s sanctioned suits offering free money. It will always be seductive, but that’s the devil that wants your soul.” All of them pointed to the current bitter, mistrustful political atmosphere as a direct result of Americans’ loss of faith in systems.

In the film, Steve Carell’s character, I believe, has a short speech in which he talks about how the crash is really about the collapse of authoritative institutions in American society. You could not trust the banks. You could not trust politicians. And you still can’t, though you have to trust them to some extent, because you cannot live otherwise. Me, I see the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church as Catholicism’s version of Wall Street’s 2007-08 crash (and by the way, I am told that the recent indictments of Franciscan priests in Pennsylvania on charges related to sex abuse are just the beginning there). I find it impossible to trust nearly any religious institution as a matter of course, having seen how flagrantly men of God are willing to violate every sacred thing to protect themselves and the system from which they profit. Senators, investment bankers, government regulators, cardinals, bishops — I find it hard to believe any of them. This may be unfair, but when you see what they’ve all gotten away with … .

In Dante’s Inferno, the lowest level of Hell is reserved for traitors. The reason for this is that in Dante’s day, people within the cities could never rest for fear that during the night, a traitor within would open the city gates and let the enemy in. Trust was at the core of society. Without that basic social trust, everything fell apart. This is why Dante also holds vows to be sacred.

I’m a dark person on this stuff, I concede. I believe people, especially those in authority, will betray others to save their own butt, or to protect their own status and peace of mind, without flinching. But that pessimism comes from somewhere. Watch The Big Short, is all I’m saying. If Trump were turning his big guns away from immigrants and onto Wall Street (and, by extension, on the big business lobby that wants to keep the immigrant flood rolling across the border), he would be a lot better off. People want an accounting. I don’t believe Trump will give it to us, but the inchoate desire is there.

Finally, here’s an interview with Big Short author Michael Lewis, published around the time the movie version of his book came out. Excerpts:

It’s interesting that you say that, because I’ve talked to some of the guys in the book, and their position is that the system is much safer, that Dodd-Frank really worked, and they kind of disagreed with the end of the movie, which implies that this is all going to happen again.

It sort of worked. One thing it has not changed is the sheer size of these institutions, they’ve gotten bigger rather than smaller. And I don’t understand that , I would have thought that from Too Big To Fail we would have found a way to make them small enough so that it was ok for them to fail. And know there’s all this complicated language about how you can resolve them in bankruptcy but I don’t believe it, and the markets don’t believe it. The bigger thing is — I regarded this crisis at bottom as a problem of incentives. People behaved badly because they were incentivized to behave badly, and the incentives haven’t really changed that much. They have changed a little bit on the margins, like paying people a bit more more in stock rather than just cash at the end of the year. But it’s a cultural problem has been created over a long period of time, because people are not locked into their individual firms for very a long time, and they are very short-term oriented, and the firms are short-term oriented, and The people who ultimately own the company, the shareholders, aren’t anywhere near the company when its making big decisions. It’s a recipe for disaster. I don’t think there’s going to be an identical crisis any time soon, but I think that, the big things that might have been done to make the system safe really weren’t done and I can think of a few things that might have been done. I think they should have broken up the banks.



And in your opinion, why didn’t that happen?

It didn’t happen because the Obama administration decided that it was worse than the course of action they took. They considered it, kind of. If you asked Tim Geithner why it didn’t happen, he would say how am I going to do that? I am going to have to nationalize these banks, and then break them up. Well, we’re really not equipped to run the entire financial system out of the Treasury. And the system is in such disarray and chaos that we are more likely to create more crisis, than resolve the crisis if we do that. Which is not a terrible argument. The problem is, that having profit what we what didn’t bank on, is it’s really clear from his memoir was that having rescued these places that they would turn right around and exert maximum political pressure to have any reform of them. He probably thought if they are going to be downsized they’ll be downsized in a time of peace and not in a crisis environment. But then once they were resurrected they were impossible to deal with politically because they ended up sticking their hands into the regulation to change them right away. Another kind of reform, which would eventually cause them to shrink a lot, would be vastly increasing the capital requirements, which has been floated by people, require them to hold not just about 7 percent or 6 percent but 20 percent, and what happens is they’d become a lot less profitable, they can’t take big big bets and no one would want to invest in them or work for them. But that has been roundly defeated at the regulatory level. I think, beneath that, the bigger problem is, virtually everybody at the table, even well-meaning government employees, when they are talking about what to do about these places, have — even if they aren’t thinking about it consciously, cannot help but consider the likelihood that the way they are going to make a living, a very good living, when they get done with government work, is to go work for one of these places. So nobody who is actually in the conversation has anything but a disincentive to keep everyone in power in the financial sector in place and happy. So I just think it’s like regulatory capture on a grand scale. It’s not just the SEC and the CFTC that’s a problem, because those guys who directly regulate the sector know that they are going to get jobs on Wall Street of they don’t alienate too many people.

My sense is that most people don’t really want to deal with any of this, that it’s overwhelming on many levels.

It’s very complicated and it’s the sort of thing other people are supposed to deal with, so it’s nobody’s problem. I’m reading this book right now, and it’s basically the history of Israel, and the author is talking about how all of Israel ignores the building of the nuclear bomb in Israel, and as momentous as this is, and as much as it’s going to call for a reaction from Arab states to have their own nuclear bomb, nobody really wants to know. It’s a very interesting — in some ways, Democratic societies don’t want to be informed about some things, and why would that be? I would say that much of the pain is numbed by monetary policy; that is true of the financial crisis. Had it played itself out in the way it would have, if the Fed didn’t know what it was doing, like in 1929, we would have had so much pain and so much unemployment, that people would have been forced to deal with it. But people don’t want to deal with unpleasantness. Like they don’t want to go to the doctor. They hope it heals itself.

Story of Wall Street. Story of our government. Story of the Church. Story of our lives as Americans in the 21st century. It’s a cultural problem. We are very short-term oriented, as Lewis said. This is why so many of us Christian refuse to recognize the grave crisis in our churches, and to prepare. We think everything is going to come right again if we just sit still and wait.

Resistance Within a Potemkin Village

You might remember this e-mail I published from an anonymous person who had just been hired as a staffer (not faculty) at a small liberal arts Christian college. The person, an orthodox Christian, wrote at the time:

My traditional Biblical stance on sexual morality was publicly known to the college as it was considering my application, and that earned me a lengthy pre-hire conversation with my manager. Making sure I can work well with people who disagree, making me aware of the conversation on campus, that sort of thing. All very positive. I learned in passing that my manager also discussed my views with the president and the provost before offering me the job, although I don’t know what exactly the conversations entailed. Apparently, my traditional views on marriage, gender and sexuality went all the way to the top.

On the upside, they hired me; on the downside, it’s strange that these conversations have to take place even at an institution like this one, with Christianity deep in its bones—and located in a region as conservative and Christian as they come. I’d be blacklisted from other types of employment, I’m sure, but I’m red-flagged even at Christian institutions.

I could be wrong, but my impression is that there isn’t a consensus on what “Christ-centered education” means for this campus. The board and administration seem solidly committed to preserving the historic, orthodox Christian faith, but there seems to be less of that among faculty. Many of the students, of course, couldn’t pick orthodoxy out of a lineup down at the police station.

Read the whole post for more.  I know the person’s name and the name of their institution. It is the sort of college that most people on the outside would think of as thoroughly traditional. It’s not, though. Almost a year later, this person has had their eyes opened; the reader’s hope that this college would itself be a Benedict Option in Christian higher education has been dashed by reality. And so, this e-mail came today; I’ve edited it slightly to protect the correspondent:

The idea that [this college] could be a Benedict Option has always been a long shot — and it looks more and more naive that I once thought it could be possible here. (To be fair, that was before I worked here.)

In any case, my thinking about the Benedict Option has shifted: Instead of asking what it might look like for the college to become a Benedict Option in response to the broader culture, I’m starting to ask what it might look like for a group of faithful Christians to form a Benedict Option at [this college] in response to [this college] itself.

How do those of us who find altogether too much of the world in our Christian institutions — our churches, nonprofits, parachurch ministries, schools, etc. — form intentional, faithful relationships and communities within those institutions? How do we band together to reinforce and encourage each other; to protect and defend our values, traditions and orthodox faith; and from that position to engage and reform our own institutions? Or, do we jump ship and find those institutions that already are, or could genuinely become, a Benedict Option?

I’m intrigued by the question of the Inklings. I in no way mean to imply that Tolkien, Lewis, etc. embodied the Benedict Option (they didn’t). Only to say that in an institution that was largely hostile to their faith, they joined in fellowship with others — and they left their mark on the world (though not on Oxford, it would seem).

Friendship, fellowship, community? Conversation over pints of ale? Are these enough? My hunch is they’re not. There must be an institutional nature to any Benedict Option that hopes to last.

Yesterday I wrote a lengthy response to James K.A. Smith’s charge that the Benedict Option is “alarmist.” I would ask you readers to consider what it means that my correspondent today works in what everyone would consider to be a conservative Christian institution of higher learning, but has to consider forming a core of orthodox believers within that institution to resist that institution’s emerging heterodoxy.

This is not alarmism. This is reality. Philip Rieff, in The Triumph of The Therapeutic, wrote:

The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves. Many spokesmen for our established normative institutions are aware of their failure and yet remain powerless to generate in themselves the necessary unwitting part of their culture that merits the name of faith. “Is not the very fact that so wretchedly little binding address is heard in the church,” asked Karl Barth, rhetorically, in 1939, “accountable for a goodly share of her misery—is it not perhaps the misery?” The misery of this culture is acutely stated by the special misery of its normative institutions.

The “special misery” of this reader’s conservative Christian college is that it no longer communicates the orthodox Christian ideal of marriage and sexuality in a way that remains inwardly compelling to many within the institution itself. Again, if you think this is going by bypass your own Christian school, church, or institution, you are deceiving yourself. More Rieff:

It may be argued against this position that Western culture was never deeply believing—at least not in the Christian manner which, in a number of its most persuasive varieties, encouraged the seeking after individual salvations at the expense of a collective one. Even so, Christian culture survived because it superintended the organization of Western personality in ways that produced the necessary corporate identities, serving a larger communal purpose institutionalized in the churches themselves. Ernst Troeltsch was correct in his institutional title for the moral demand system preceding the one now emerging out of its complete ruin: a “church civilization,” an “authoritarian and coercive culture.” What binding address now describes our successor culture? In what does the self now try to find salvation, if not in the breaking of corporate identities and in an acute suspicion of all normative institutions?

For colleges like the one in which my unfortunate reader works, the gradual, now accelerating, abandonment of Christian sexual and marital norms is the result of the complete ruin of “church civilization”. Even the institutions that pledge fealty to the ideals of church civilization are crumbling in their fidelity.

Better form those cells now, within those increasingly hostile institutions. And better, let us figure out how to strengthen those institutions that still stand, and to start new ones.

‘Reality Is Socially Constructed’

A reader writes:

I don’t tend to agree with you about the threat that SJWs pose to society as a whole, but good Lord this Radiolab episode really got my goat. I believe that you posted about this a while back, but the story concerns a high school debate team from a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri. When they found themselves outmatched in national competitions by teams from more affluent communities, they pulled the race card. This began with a debate that was supposed to concern the importance of national service programs like the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, etc. Instead of taking a position on the issue at hand, one of the debaters from this team launched into a quasi-slam poetry performance that framed the practice of competitive debate as yet another facet of structural racism.

I don’t disagree with many of the points that the debater made – the stereotype of the “angry black man” could in fact unconsciously prejudice debate judges, for instance – but it’s what came after that really infuriated me. The other team’s representative made all the points you would expect, saying that structural racism was not at issue here, but he also objected to the African-American debater’s style, saying that she should “get out” because “Poetry & Prose” (another debate category, apparently) was “down the hall.”  So, of course, the next member of the African-American team gets up and takes umbrage, screams RACIST! at the top of his lungs and somehow they end up winning this “debate”, which, if you recall, was supposed to be about national service programs.

Now, one of the members of the debate team is in the studio with the hosts of Radiolab. He’s narrating the story. When we get to this point, one of the hosts, Robert Krulwich, says he’s going to play devil’s advocate for just a second. Hey, you could kind of see where this other team was coming from though, right? Nope. The member of the debate team literally shuts him down, interrupting him by saying “Stop stop stop”. At this point, I had to turn the damn thing off.

Now I think there’s a lot of merit to the “you don’t know what it’s like” critique, whether it’s on the basis of gender, religion, sexuality, or what have you. We all ought to consider that before we throw in our two cents. However, we absolutely cannot shut down rational debate – public discourse, I mean, not competitive debate – on that basis. We all have to live together in this world and the veto power of victimhood is an insufficient basis for getting socio-political buy-in from society as a whole. You can shut down a debate or get a speech canceled at a university, but you’re not going to change hearts and minds. In fact, you’re just going to piss off people like me, who are otherwise sympathetic to your concerns.

The thing that’s so maddening to me about this particular case is that if the kids on this debate team just did their best, used their participation in debate to sharpen their intellectual abilities, and got a college degree, they’d be doing much more to combat structural racism than they are by hi-jacking debate competitions. Every individual success story strengthens the black middle class and thereby, little by little, weakens the grip of white supremacy. I wouldn’t deny that there are racist cops out there, not in a million years, but if the proportion of violent criminals who are African-Americans goes down significantly, I can almost guarantee you that so will the likelihood of a law-abiding black citizen being pulled over for “driving while black”.

Some people just can’t seem to get over the idea that “respectable” is a synonym for “sell-out” and that playing by the rules makes you a rube. I get that, I really do, but I don’t see what will be gained if folks like this debate team continue to go down the SJW path.

Well, I listened to the entire Radiolab episode, and it’s worse than the reader thinks. The black teams learn that they can win debates by ignoring the topic and forcing the debate to be about how racist debates are. A black woman interviewed on the show — I believe she was the debate adviser for the team — says that any attempt at objectivity (i.e., debating the issue at hand, leaving the subjectivity of the debater out of it) is “anti-black.” In other words, the persuasiveness of your argument is inextricably linked to your race, your gender, and so forth. And any objection to this approach to debate is racist.

Eventually, a two-man team from Emporia, Kansas — both of them black and gay, according to the story — go to the national debate tournament, and get all the way to the finals with this approach. In their matches, they would approach debate as a performance, and would be profane and emotional, emphasizing their blackness and their queerness. Their entire strategy was to make every debate about themselves, about race, and about exclusion.

So they get to the finals, versus Northwestern. The topic was about alternative sources of energy. But of course the real topic is always Racism. Ryan and Elijah, the black team, immediately challenged the structure of the debate, saying it was unfair that to win at debate you have to have a research team, and that privileges rich white schools. One of the Northwestern debaters says if that’s true, then it disrespects the work that teams who follow the rules of debate and put in time researching the topic have done. The Northwestern guy is heard on the tape saying that the way to change the world is to master the rules of debate and take those skills out into the world and apply them in any number of situations.

It comes down to the very end. Ryan gathers himself, and delivers a profane, extremely angry rant. F-bombs all over. He construes what is supposed to be a debate about alternative energy into one that’s about judging his worth as a queer black kid from the inner city, and through him the worth of all the Marginalized. “This is all the f–k I got!” he shouts.

The room erupts in cheers when he finishes. Emporia won the debate on a 3-2 vote. One of the judges, a white guy named Scott Harris, wrote a long, rambling apologia explaining why he voted for Emporia. Excerpts:

This ballot recognizes that reality is socially constructed. The reality of my interpretation of the arguments in the debate can be disputed and disagreed with. When I judge debates on panels I sometimes agree more with the reasoning of the judges who vote against me than the judges who vote with me. Being in a 3-2 decision on this panel does not make me “right” and the judges who voted the other way “wrong.” This ballot could have been written to justify a win by the negative. There are many areas of the flow where the negative is clearly ahead and there are arguments the negative made that are not answered by the affirmative. This ballot is not more correct because it is part of a majority. The last time I judged the final round of the NDT I was part of the minority of a 3-2 decision and in my socially constructed reality the Emory team of Bailey/Ghali won the NDT on topicality. Rod Phares and I saw the debate in exactly the same way. It is why when ranking the greatest teams of all time I rank Bailey/Ghali higher than others do because I define them as an NDT winner. Some may dispute this ballots reading of what is and is not the nature of the arguments in this debate or the relative importance given to those arguments. Northwestern will think they made the arguments this ballot says they needed to have made to win this ballot. Reality is for each of us a product of our social constructions.

Oh lord. More:

To me one of the most important lessons that debate teaches is that there is a difference between our arguments and our personhood. One of the problems in out contemporary society is that people have trouble differentiating between arguments and the identity of the person making the argument. If you hate the argument you must hate the person making the argument because we have trouble differentiating people from their arguments. The reason many arguments end up in violent fights in society is the inability to separate people from their arguments. People outside of debate (or the law) are often confused by how debaters (or lawyers) can argue passionately with one another and then be friends after the argument. It is because we generally separate our disagreements over arguments from our opinions about each other as people. There are two concerns this ballot has about the implications of where this debate has positioned us as a community. First, the explosion of arguments centered in identity makes it difficult to separate arguments from people. If I argue that a vote for me is a vote for my ability to express my Quare identity it by definition constructs a reality that a vote against me is a rejection of my identity. The nature of arguments centered in identity puts the other team in a fairly precarious position in debates and places the judges in uncomfortable positions as well. While discomfort may not necessarily be a bad thing it has significant implications for what debating and deciding debates means or is perceived to mean in socially constructed realities. I hope we can get beyond a point where the only perceived route to victory for some minority debaters is to rail against exclusion in debate.

Well, he voted for a team that built its entire argument around racial identity. What you reward, you will have more of.

The whole episode of Radiolab is depressing, but instructive about our present moment. Social Justice Warriors believe that emotionally asserting identity is the same thing as argument, when in fact it makes genuine argument impossible. It’s not about argument at all, but about a naked, raw assertion of power.

It’s not just them, though. Here’s an essay by a woman named Jen Senko who has made a documentary about how the right-wing outrage machine ruined her father. She said her father was a normal guy until one day he started listening to conservative talk radio, and then went deeply into the world of conservative media obsessions:

Gradually, my Dad had become a completely different person. He was angry all the time, and you couldn’t discuss anything remotely political with him. At the same time, he tried to engage everyone he met to talk about politics, and always tried to find out what “team” they were on. If we didn’t agree with him, he got angry with us. And he wouldn’t stop sending these strange emails. My older brother blocked him first, then I did, and then my younger brother did. My mother was so unhappy with the change in him that she resolved to email him back, hoping beyond hope that he would question some of these newly held beliefs and return to being himself.

It was a nightmare for our family. It was our Invasion of the Body Snatchers. His body was the same, but what happened to the Dad we knew and loved?

Once I started chronicling this character change in my film The Brainwashing of My Dad, I discovered I was not alone. This was a phenomenon. People from all over wrote me asking for advice about what to do to restore their relationship with their sister, or their brother, or their mother. Their concerns were many, from “We can’t even talk about the weather because then global warming comes up” to “My Dad keeps buying guns and ammunition waiting for the new Civil War.”

She’s right. Over a decade ago, my conservative friends and I started talking about how impossible it was to discuss politics or current events with our folks because our folks had become dedicated Fox News watchers, and had become highly ideologized. The thing is, there are people who have broken relationships with family members and former friends who have embraced various Social Justice Warrior causes.

What has happened in America — and you see this in the Radiolab episode, as well as in the phenomenon Jen Senko describes — is the exaltation of emotivism, and the weaponization of grievance. How can we hope to have a peaceful, orderly society if the concept of truth is up for grabs? If an educated man says that “reality is socially constructed,” and acts accordingly, and teaches others to do the same. If even facts are taken to be opinions.

True story: I got into an argument some years back with a Fox News devotee at a social event. She refused to accept facts that contradicted the opinion she preferred. “Look, I’m a conservative too,” I said. “But this is not a matter of opinion. It’s about facts.”

“Well,” she said frostily, “you have your opinions and I have mine.”

“It’s not a matter of opinion!” I said. “We are talking about facts, not the interpretation of facts.”

“You have your opinions, and I have mine.”

There is no difference between that white conservative woman and the black liberal debaters in the Radiolab story. We literally could not have a discussion about the issue, that woman and I, because the very structure of normal debate (not forensics, but just ordinary give-and-take) she took to be entirely subjective. In the end, she took my disagreement with her as a rejection of her identity.

This is where we are in this country. It’s not a left or a right thing exclusively. If we get to the point where most people believe that reality is socially constructed, then the only reality that will make sense to anybody is the reality of force.

Transgenderism Hurts Children

This is something: the American College of Pediatrics has come out strongly against physicians imposing gender ideology on children. Look:

The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts – not ideology – determine reality.

1. Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and “XX” are genetic markers of health – not genetic markers of a disorder. The norm for human design is to be conceived either male or female. Human sexuality is binary by design with the obvious purpose being the reproduction and flourishing of our species. This principle is self-evident. The exceedingly rare disorders of sexual differentiation (DSDs), including but not limited to testicular feminization and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, are all medically identifiable deviations from the sexual binary norm, and are rightly recognized as disorders of human design. Individuals with DSDs do not constitute a third sex.

2. No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one. No one is born with an awareness of themselves as male or female; this awareness develops over time and, like all developmental processes, may be derailed by a child’s subjective perceptions, relationships, and adverse experiences from infancy forward. People who identify as “feeling like the opposite sex” or “somewhere in between” do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.

3. A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V). The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved.

4. Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous. Reversible or not, puberty- blocking hormones induce a state of disease – the absence of puberty – and inhibit growth and fertility in a previously biologically healthy child.

5. According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.

6. Children who use puberty blockers to impersonate the opposite sex will require cross-sex hormones in late adolescence. Cross-sex hormones are associated with dangerous health risks including but not limited to high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.

7. Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBQT – affirming countries. What compassionate and reasonable person would condemn young children to this fate knowing that after puberty as many as 88% of girls and 98% of boys will eventually accept reality and achieve a state of mental and physical health?

8. Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse. Endorsing gender discordance as normal via public education and legal policies will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to “gender clinics” where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs. This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will “choose” a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults.

Finally, common sense. Now parents have some solid ammunition to fight against local far-left educational policies that present mental illness as normal, and lead pre-pubescent children into a lifetime of brokenness and misery.

UPDATE: Well, here’s something I didn’t know. A reader writes:

The American College of Pediatricians is a conservative splinter faction of a couple hundred doctors opposed to premarital sex, legal weed, gay adoption, and any other parody right-wing bugaboo you can think of.

The actual pediatricians’ group, the American Academy of Pediatrics, doesn’t have a position on pre-puberty transgender treatment as far as I know.

I don’t think that the ACP is far wrong on this issue – telling a five-year-old boy who tries on a dress that he’s actually a girl and shunting him onto a hormone treatment is totally insane and unjustifiable – but the fact that the ACP said it isn’t really a big deal at all. They’re a fringy group whose purpose, more or less, seems to be to put out curmudgeonly policy statements.

Well, that’s disappointing. I thought this was the professional association of pediatricians. I still think they’re right, of course, but it definitely takes away the impact of the statement.

The Coming GOP Realignment?

Steve Sailer quotes from a very interesting David Frum tweetstorm analyzing the GOP’s dilemma — this, in reaction to an interview House Speaker Paul Ryan gave to the WSJ. Frum discusses the inability of the Republican Party’s elites to understand what nemesis is upon it. The tweetstorm ends like this:

12) Yet even as the R elite sees what’s probably coming, it won’t believe it. What worked in 1980 must work again. It just *must*.

13) I’ve spent a lot of time being dismissed as a RINO squish, or worse, because I think to save most of conservatism, we must change some.

14) The dominant faction on my side of the argument, however, has insisted that it can win all, by changing none.

15) Instead, the “change-nothing” faction has lost control of their own presidential nomination. We’ll see what more there is left to lose.

I heard a couple of weeks ago from a fairly well known conservative who confided that he is voting for Trump because he is sick and tired of going from election cycle to election cycle with the party elites refusing to learn anything (in particular, about the effect of globalism on local communities). He’s not so much for Trump as he is for something that will break the hold of Reagan-era dogmas on the GOP.

Sailer adds:

Individualistic Reagan-Kemp conservatism had a good run in its day, but then it hit diminishing marginal returns. So, it’s time for solidaristic conservatism for awhile. Do the low-hanging fruit that have been neglected, like build a border fence, implement E-verify, fire the SJWs from Executive branch sinecures, eliminate the most plutocratic tax loopholes like carried interest for hedge fund guys, encourage the most desirable global manufacturers to set up factories in America (as Reagan reluctantly did with Japanese car companies), etc.

Then when solidaristic conservatism starts to run out of ideas and gas, individualistic conservatism can have another shot, after they’ve been away in the wilderness for awhile and have had time and incentive to come up with some better ideas. First, though, let the solidaristic conservatives have a time to fix the biggest weaknesses in the individualistic model, such as not defending the nation’s borders in an age of ever increasing smartphone-enabled Third World migrations.

Pat Buchanan sees the potential for renewing the GOP after the anti-Trump establishment walks away:

A Trump campaign across the industrial Midwest, Pennsylvania and New Jersey featuring attacks on Hillary Clinton’s support for NAFTA, the WTO, MFN for China – and her backing of amnesty and citizenship for illegal immigrants, and for the Iraq and Libyan debacles – is a winning hand.

Lately, 116 architects and subcontractors of the Bush I and II foreign policy took their own version of the Oxford Oath. They will not vote for, nor serve in a Trump administration.

Talking heads are bobbing up on cable TV to declare that if Trump is nominee, they will not vote for him and may vote for Clinton.

This is not unwelcome news. Let them go.

I think a “solidaristic” conservatism is a good idea, but I have no confidence at all that Donald Trump is capable of delivering it — or if getting it would be worth having someone as unstable as he as Commander in Chief. And where is the money behind this model of conservatism? It doesn’t serve the interests of Wall Street or corporate donors. Hey, I think that’s a feature, not a bug. But the money to build the infrastructure has to come from somewhere. And DC is filled with think tanks and activist groups that are thoroughly bought in to Conservatism, Inc., and they aren’t going away.

Still, it’s hard to imagine the Republican Party going back to business as usual after Trump, especially if he’s the nominee. Questions to the room, assuming that Trump is the nominee, but does not win the presidency: What do you want the post-Trump GOP to look like, and what do you think it will actually look like?

That is, what will change — and what won’t?

As you ponder the questions, keep in mind Pete Spiliakos’s piece in First Things yesterday, in which he reads a Sid Blumenthal autopsy of the dead Democratic Party after its 1984 wipeout, and applies its insights to the GOP of today. Excerpt:

The Republicans are reliving the Democratic Party’s nightmares. The cancelled Donald Trump event of Friday March 11 seemed to presage 1968-style disruptions at political events, but 1968 might not be the right analogy. As the party of tired myth and exhausted agenda, the Republicans of 2016 most closely resemble the Democrats of 1984.

It took eight years for the Democrats to win the presidency again. The Republicans ought to thank their lucky stars that charmless Hillary Clinton is not a Ronald Reagan figure of the left.

Leftist Provocateurs For Trump

Amici, forgive the light posting. I’m still really sick. Have been sleeping all day, and am about to have to go back to bed. Useless! Can’t remember the last time I was so sick for so long. But the world keeps turning, somehow, and that means Donald Trump keeps on doing that hoo doo that he do so well.

Comes the news that Black Lives Matter and other progressive activist groups are meeting to figure out how to demonstrate effectively against Trump, and are frustrated that invading his events and being socked by his supporters isn’t effective in turning people against him. Excerpt:

One of the key issues discussed was the effectiveness of direct action protests at Trump events. Although the actions draw media coverage, two sources on the call said organizers worry that because Trump seems to be immune to shame, these protests simply put black activists in harm’s way but have little effect on Trump.

“It was tough to think about this idea that a black person goes to do an action at a Trump rally and gets beat up, and then it wasn’t exactly forcing a shift in the discussion about Trump we desired,” said one organizer, who asked BuzzFeed News to withhold their name from this story because they were still reaching out to groups. “It was almost annoying to watch.”

Ben Wickler, the Washington director of MoveOn.org, which circulated an onlinepetition before the fracas at a Trump rally in Chicago, said Trump is a “five-alarm fire for Democracy,” which is why his group has committed to coordinating marches, calling on people to denounce him and mobilizing voters to cast votes against him. Wickler said a key part of the organizing is coalition building: MoveOn.org will engage immigrants, Muslims, undocumented people, and blacks. “Really, anyone in Trump’s crosshairs,” he said.

“It’s an early moment in the national progressive movement, but I think there’s a sense in the progressive world that has been watching in horror but hasn’t yet jumped in the fray that it’s time now to jump in with both feet.”

Oh, that’ll be great. Why don’t y’all reach out to the Board of Education nitwits in New Jersey who punished a little kid for criticizing vegetarianism to a vegetarian classmate, because expressing disapproval of vegetarianism constitutes bullying. Microaggressions! And why don’t you pull in the aggrieved snowflakes of UC Davis who had to check themselves in to the psych ward after seeing two sumo wrestler balloons on campus:

Students accused the Associated Students of the University of California-Davis (ASUCD) of fat shaming, and culturally appropriating the traditions of the Japanese people.

“My overall impression is that this conversation is in itself an expression of white-supremacist anti-Asian structural racism,” student Scott Tsuchitani told The California Aggie. “Asian Americans are treated as mute, hapless victims, devoid of agency, a.k.a. the ‘model minority’ stereotype. That is what is being re-inscribed by this conversation.”

Another student, Phil Jones, was shocked at ASUCD’s insensitivity towards overweight students on campus, even demanding financial reimbursement for the emotional distress.

“To be honest, I was shocked. February 19th was Remembrance Day for Japanese internment during WWII, and some of my Japanese friends were heavily traumatized by seeing their culture mocked in such a clearly racist fashion,” Jones wrote in a Facebook post on the event’s page. “Not to mention, as a heavy-American, I don’t appreciate the blatant Fat-Shaming involved with caricaturing one of the few sports traditionally enjoyed by Heavy individuals.”

Jones went on to demand “reparations payments” for “affected individuals” and asked for the resignation of all senators responsible for hosting the event.

The joy of Trump is that he doesn’t care what trolls like that think. And he doesn’t give a rip about BLM and other protesters who come to try to derail his rallies, and get roughed up. To be clear, I think Trump is wrong to encourage violence against protesters — and he does do that. If he were president, we would be looking back with fond nostalgia on the days of Nixon’s Enemies List. Let’s be clear about that. Trump calls out what is worst in us.

Still, it is hard to get all that worked up about it when somebody finally stands up to bullies like these demonstrators and says no, you’re not going to get your way. When somebody actually refuses to be intimidated by the illiberal tactics of BLM and other SJWs, because he doesn’t see them as holy warriors, it’s a good thing — precisely because those SJWs also bring out what is worst in us.

Ross Douthat suggests that indeed, as I predicted it would the night it happened, the Chicago agents provocateurs may have helped Trump break through what Ross and others had previously considered his ceiling. Excerpt:

The way events in Chicago fell out is a case study in the way that a figure like Trump is dangerous to the body politic, not just to one party or faction: He’s a walking, talking radicalizer, whose demagoguery doesn’t just encourage the extremists who love him but also feeds the no-platforming instincts of an increasingly illiberal left. But it’s also a case study in why demagoguery can be so effective: It encourages precisely the kind of reaction from its enemies that it claims as justification for its own excesses, creating a feedback loop of anger, fear and hatred that tugs moderates toward the extreme. And since Trump didn’t need to persuade that many Republicans — just an extra five or ten percent — that they’re either with him or with the left-wing protesters, what he got out of Chicago was probably exactly what he wanted: A sense of chaos, of things slipping out of control, that sharpens the authoritarian temptation.

He can still be stopped. He may will still be stopped. But the remarkable good fortune that he’s depended on so far came through for him last week, and I fear that he’ll need less of it hereafter.

I have been saying in this space for some time that the illiberalism of the Social Justice Warrior left is going to call forth and legitimize a backlash. Trump is that backlash. Douthat is right that Trump’s authoritarianism is a temptation, but I think it’s important to recognize, as Douthat does, that the militant left plays a key role in giving Trump fuel for his fire. And not just the militant left that turns up to no-platform conservative speakers. I’m talking the militant left that makes normal, everyday life impossible because it is forever finding a new reason to be offended and demand satisfaction.

A fat college kid demands reparations because he saw a sumo wrestler balloon on his campus. What he deserves is for Camille Paglia to show up at his dorm room, slap him hard across the cheek, and tell him to quit being such a baby. When many viewers see left-wing protesters trying to shut Trump’s speech down, they don’t think of those protesters sympathetically. They think of them as privileged brats who are stomping and screaming and demanding their way. They become extremely unsympathetic except to those who already agree with them. MacIntyre said that this is the problem with protest today: they only ever communicate persuasively to those who don’t need persuading because they are already on the protesters’ side.

If the anti-Trump leftists want to stage effective protests against him, they should make them peaceful, not militant and confrontational. Confrontational protest doesn’t weaken Trump; it only makes him stronger.

‘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.