Rod Dreher's Blog, page 612

The Press In Hillary’s Purse

This is pretty amazing stuff from Gawker: a glimpse into how Hillary Clinton gets the press she wants. A FOIA request turned up some e-mail exchanges from 2009 between Philippe Reines, Hillary’s press secretary, and then-Atlantic editor Marc Ambinder. Ambinder had asked Reines for an advance copy of a speech the then-Secretary of State was about to give at the Council on Foreign Relations. Reines responded:

From: [Philippe Reines]

Sent: Wednesday, July 15 2009 10:06 AM

To: Ambinder, Marc

Subject: Re: Do you have a copy of HRC’s speech to share?

3 [conditions] actually

1) You in your own voice describe them as “muscular”

2) You note that a look at the CFR seating plan shows that all the envoys — from Holbrooke to Mitchell to Ross — will be arrayed in front of her, which in your own clever way you can say certainly not a coincidence and meant to convey something

3) You don’t say you were blackmailed!

As Gawker shows, Ambinder did exactly as he was told. More Gawker:

The same [FOIA] request previously revealed that Politico’s chief White House correspondent, Mike Allen, promised to deliver positive coverage of Chelsea Clinton, and, in a separate exchange, permitted Reines to ghost-write an item about the State Department for Politico’s Playbook newsletter. Ambinder’s emails with Reines demonstrate the same kind of transactional reporting, albeit to a much more legible degree: In them, you can see Reines “blackmailing” Ambinder into describing a Clinton speech as “muscular” in exchange for early access to the transcript. In other words, Ambinder outsourced his editorial judgment about the speech to a member of Clinton’s own staff.

Read the whole thing. Ambinder is by no means alone. Sounds like P. Reines is very good at his job. Can’t imagine why people have so little trust in the Washington media…

 

We Live In Interesting Times

Ross Douthat, in a post titled “A Party on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” considers Marco Rubio’s debate collapse, and the prospect of a second-place Kasich finish in New Hampshire:

At which point we would be in truly chaotic territory, in which the Republican Party’s ideological center, such as it is, would have great difficulty holding. A Rubio-Cruz-Trump race, as I’ve pointed out before, would already be the most ideologically consequential primary battle the G.O.P. has featured in decades if not generations. But at least it would be a relatively orderly battle, in which most of the party leadership would end up behind the Florida senator, rather than turning the knives on one another. If Rubio can’t consolidate things, though — if he falls into a tie with Jeb, let’s say, while Kasich is alone in second place — then we’re in a situation where Jeb might stick around till Florida and Kasich till Ohio, both on March 15th, an eternity away. Meanwhile Trump would have an actual win under his belt and Cruz would have running room in the SEC primary, meaning that the delegate leaders a month from would be all-but-guaranteed to be a candidate running on increasingly Bernie Sanders-ish rhetoric and a candidate feared by G.O.P. elites (on reasonable grounds) as the Barry Goldwater of 2016.

The thing is, the Democratic Party is also having a nervous breakdown, though it’s less entertaining to watch than the Republicans’. Tim Stanley, in the Telegraph:

Presuming that the polls are right and Sanders wins good, she is in serious trouble. Again, the press can’t accept the idea of a Sanders nomination – so let’s acknowledge the caveat that she’ll still be the nominee eventually. Nevertheless, her underwhelming performance is a sad indictment of what a poor candidate she is. Consider her advantages: money, endorsements, running against an aging socialist who wasn’t even a Democrat until recently, a career full accomplishment and major brand recognition. The problem with Hillary is that the voters know her too well: a majority of voters don’t trust her. Her narrow win in Iowa showed the depths of resentment towards her coronation, while defeat in New Hampshire – the state that rescued her in 2008 from immediate annihilation by Barack Obama – would make matters so much worse.

It’s worth dwelling on Stanley’s points here. A woman who has been at the top of American political life, and indeed at the pinnacle of Democratic Party politics, for over 20 years, is being walloped by an elderly socialist from Vermont. She has been reduced to stale, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” pants-suit identity politicking. having elderly Democrat Madeleine Albright, who is four years older than Bernie Sanders, chastising women who refused to vote for Hillary out of identity politics as headed for “a special place in Hell.” And Pleistocene-era feminist Gloria Steinem, 81, who was born the year Bonnie & Clyde were shot to death, said that the only reason young women support Sanders is because cute boys like him.

That does not even rise to the level of pathetic.

Hillary will, of course, be the Democratic nominee, but she will be reduced to depending on the GOP to melt down and produce Donald Trump or Ted Cruz as their nominee. A Hillary-era Democratic Party will not be one filled with vigor and vision. It will have the feel of the stale end of something. Bernie probably won’t make it to the nomination, but I suspect he will prove to be Gene McCarthy to Hillary’s Hubert Humphrey. The old Vermont leftie is probably going to lose to Hillary, but his people represent the party’s future. If I were a Democrat, I would anticipate the next four years of a Hillary Clinton administration as like unto going to work the day after Mardi Gras with a terrible hangover, and just having to gut it out.

Of course the GOP’s problems are massive too. There is no way to read this primary season so far as anything other than a resounding rejection of the Republican Establishment. Trump has all the energy. It may be a dark energy, but it is vital. One way or another, what Trump stands for is going to be a powerful force within the GOP after this election. Unlike Perotism, which fizzled, Trump is tapping into something more elemental. Tucker Carlson’s much-discussed piece about Trump (“Donald Trump is shocking, vulgar — and right: And, my fellow Republicans, he’s all your fault”) is still true.

God knows what kind of clown-car government Trump would oversee. It’s hard to see how a Cruz presidency is going to succeed, given how combative and unlikable he is, and how much he is loathed by his own party. And any Establishment Republican will start from a position of knowing that most of the people in his party at the grassroots have little confidence in him.

The next decade of American politics is going to be an interesting time, in the “ancient Chinese curse” sense.

Revenge of the Kennedy School

I received an e-mail from a friend who is a Harvard graduate and an orthodox Catholic. He takes exception to R.R. Reno’s column on meritocracy, which I cited favorably today. I can’t reproduce his letter verbatim here, because he wants to protect his privacy. But I have edited it to his satisfaction, and present this version with his approval:

I wanted to write about your post “Meritocracy & the Middle Class,” which sparked a number of reactions.  I believe Rusty Reno’s article is, to be extremely charitable, vague.  And I tend to agree with you far more than many of your other readers, so I would like to think this is not coming from an automatic negative bias.

Let’s begin with the first problematic passage:

Another important reason is the meritocratic reinvention of elite America, which now includes and socializes non-whites into its once all-white ranks. Talented, ambitious young people tend to move up and out, encouraged by an inclusive elite that is eager to draw into itself those whom, two generations ago, would have been kept out of the establishment. This has decapitated most communities, depriving a great deal of Americans of their natural leaders.

Some thoughts/questions in no particular order:

1)      This has the air of plausibility at the rhetorical level, but I would love to see evidence in support of this.  Has he not seen any issue of any business or economic periodicals in recent years, all of which with some frequency lament the lack of minorities in the ranks of business, politics, academia, etc.?  From my own experience at an elite institution, I assure you that minorities are not exactly swelling the ranks of elite America.  For Reno to suggest as much is absurd to the point of hilarity.  I hate to sound mean, but it really is ridiculous.

2)      Communities are not lacking in young leaders with ability.  There are just so few opportunities, period, unless you are in the East/West coast (and then you can barely pay your bills if you’re just starting).  There are a lot of reasons one could cite for this, but I do not have time to get into that debate here.  Part of it is that there are several Boomers in leadership positions who cannot or will not retire.

To a subsequent passage, which you quote in your post:

What white middle class voters are waking up to is that their natural leaders are being co-opted by the meritocratic system as well [as minorities’ leaders]. Hillary Clinton may have lived in Arkansas for decades, but she’s a creature of elite education and Goldman Sachs. People talk about the Clinton Machine. But it’s not at all like the machines of ward bosses and patronage jobs as sidewalk inspectors. The Clinton Machine is an interlocking network of very rich donors, high-placed journalists, and political elites. It operates at Davos, not in gritty ethnic urban neighborhoods.

Some thoughts and questions arise immediately:

1)      This is a maddeningly overgeneralized characterization.  “Elite education and Goldman Sachs” seems to be just a vague, metonymic substitute for all things bad.  This is bad writing not only because it is vague but because the institutions falling under this umbrella are not as uniform as he (and perhaps his audience) suspect.  After all, no less than Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, former Harvard Law prof, is a perennial thorn in the side of big finance.

2)      He may disavow it if asked explicitly, but Reno is implicitly linking all people with an “elite education” to an “interlocking network of very rich donors, high-placed journalists, and political elites” operating “at Davos, not in gritty ethnic urban neighborhoods.”  However, many Ivy League graduates (all of my evidence is anecdotal here—I don’t have time to get hard numbers) did not seek the world of high business and/or policymaking  and instead went to work in gritty neighborhoods.

3)      This brings me to the more important issue: Reno offers no concrete alternatives.  I have a problem with the Ivy League (plus Stanford/MIT/Cal Tech etc.) apparatus/industrial complex because it can perpetuate the very inequities it purports to oppose, but there will always be elite institutions.  They need not be brick-and-mortar now, but there will always be mechanisms to differentiate high-quality performers from others.  The key is to make these institutions available to all and to define “high-quality” in a way that is actually accurate.  And whatever happened to the conservative praise of elite institutions as a bulwark against ever-fickle public opinion?

Another passage:

Globalization has altered the reward structures and incentives for the top ten percent of Americans, with a trickle-down effect that also influences the next ten percent. Finance is a thoroughly globalized industry. The same goes for hi-tech. The red-hot economy in the Bay Area has become independent of the rest of California. Tech executives push hard for the expansion of the H-1B visa program to bring in more foreign software engineers. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the entertainment industry makes more money through international than domestic sales. Even a middle American company like Caterpillar is thoroughly globalized.

This passage is particularly problematic.  I’ll mention a few points here:

1)      I see no problem in Silicon Valley’s tech scene’s being “independent of the rest of California” (what does that even mean anyway?!), and I find it ironic that a social conservative would find any sort of independence from liberal California anything less than a Godsend.

2)      Tech executives push for H-1B visas, yes, but a) they also push for greater tech education in American schools because American workers cannot do the work (I have experienced this firsthand), and b) they don’t have enough visas to fill talent gaps.  Perhaps this is my inner globalized technocrat talking, but the American economy would be all the better if more of its own companies could produce at full capacity.

3)      The entertainment industry makes more money through international sales.  Um, need he be reminded that America has 5% of the world’s population?  Forget the merits or demerits of globalization: any industry with a product like film should have greater international than domestic sales.  And this is a good thing for the American economy: I suspect most any economist of any political persuasion (even the most mercantilist) will say that increasing exports is good for the American economy.

4)      The same points in 3) could apply to Caterpillar.

So maybe Reno is using all of this evidence to show that the economy is thoroughly globalized (despite the fact that there is a legitimate debate as to what this actually means and entails).  Fine, but even using globalization as an argument for why whites are so restless is itself problematic and reductive to the point of absurdity.  Elites have held all sorts of crazy opinions different from the rest of the populace—why is this time so different for whites?  That he says it is is more assertion than argument.

All of which leads us to the following segue:

This gap isn’t just economic; it’s cultural as well. Our establishment is moving toward a post-national vision of the common good, while middle America seems eager for gestures and rhetoric that promises renewed national solidarity.

To a great extent, multiculturalism and other forms of “global consciousness” serve as companions to economic globalization. They promise to teach us how to navigate cultural differences in ways that defuse conflict, promote cooperation, and thus ease the way toward a global marketplace overseen by well-trained, benevolent technocrats from the Kennedy School of Government.

This approach need not be overtly ideological. It’s enough for us to downplay our local loyalties and to adopt a spirit of detachment from our histories. This can be done with plain vanilla relativism. The point is to strip away potentially divisive commitments, allowing us to focus on universal interests we share in common—the universal human desire to get richer, be healthier, and to satisfy individual preferences. This has led to a leadership class that is technocratic in its outlook but has trouble speaking about patriotic loyalties that unify us all.

This was really bad.  Let’s explore at least some of it:

1)      “Post-national vision of the common good”:  I would be very interested in seeing his evidence of this claim.  The myth of the decline of the state has been around for decades—does anyone who has watched the American government (to say nothing of governments in Europe and Asia–let’s name behaviors in China, Japan, Germany, France, and Britain just to warm up) really believe that nationalism is going away anytime soon, whether among the elite or anywhere else?  Having lower tariffs and more commercial international exchange does not mean the state is going anywhere in practice or in elite opinion.  In my experience, the people who do discuss this sort of thing tend to be people with exposure to philosophy/political theory who have read too much Hegel/Kojeve (if they like post-national talk) or Leo Strauss (if they don’t).  I would not claim that this post-national vision does not exist among “the elite,” but I am far from convinced it is dominant.  If he has evidence to the contrary, I welcome the correction.

2)      No matter how foolishly liberal elite institutions can be, I really see little problem in navigating cultural differences to defuse the problem and promote cooperation.  Would that we had leaders who could actually do that!  All this talk of smoothing differences may sound like so much liberal claptrap to conservatives, and some of that is legitimate; however, knowing how to navigate those differences is actually really hard.  Given that many of our problems require multinational cooperation (terrorism, climate change, etc.), you can be sure I’ll happily give a full-throated defense of institutions’ trying to do this, even if some of its practitioners descend into liberal naivete.  For him to be tongue-in-cheek with it may be funny to some, but he goes too far.

Perhaps I’m simply too biased because I went to an elite institution, but I particularly dislike it  when a fellow Catholic tries to pigeonhole me and my fellow graduates.  It is particularly infuriating because I can probably guess from just how he words (and even how he spells—cf. “hi-tech” ) certain issues how little concrete experience he has with the issues he claims to be describing.  He writes like someone who has studied humanities talking about politics and economics.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but you lose credibility very quickly if you don’t have your facts in order.

I hope you will forgive what may appear immodest, but I have worked in the start-up world.  I have worked in the government world.  I have multiple friends who have done and are doing the same.  I became interested in public service because of the suffering of the poor in my home state, and that is why I came home after finishing my Masters.  I have classmates from all parts of the U.S. and around the world who returned home for similar reasons.  We’re not all a bunch of caviar-chomping Davos dilettantes.  Some of us have operated in gritty, ethnic urban neighborhoods.  One can have an elite education and still do that.

My apologies for the length—if I had had more time, I would have written fewer words and made better arguments (in short, I would say that it boils down to 1) Elite opinion, on globalization or something else, is not a convincing reason whites feel abandoned, and 2) his description of these forces at work is absurdly inaccurate anyway).

I learn so much from my readers. Mulling over this. Thoughts?

Zombie Universities

A reader calling himself PomoProf writes about the interview with Jon Haidt, in which Haidt talks about how the left-wing culture within universities is destroying them:

What Haidt is complaining about appears to be the emerging of a victor in the battle between the two campus subcultures identified by John Searle in his “The mission of the university: Intellectual discovery or social transformation?“. And it’s seems (to the better, I say) to be the so-called “postmodern” faction. To quote Jerry L. Martin’s “The university as an agent of social transformation: The postmodern argument considered” (Journal: Academic Questions · Volume 6, Issue 3, pp 55-72, 1993):

Therefore, the aim of higher education should be not the pursuit of truth, which is both an illusion and an instrument of oppression, but social transformation—changing ideas, symbols, and institutions from tools of racist, sexist, capitalist, imperialist hegemony to instruments of empowerment for women, minorities, the poor, and the Third World. (p. 61)

We are seeing Progress in action as one age (the “modern”) gives way to a newer one (the “postmodern”). Of course, some people are unhappy at being left behind by progress, like so many others in history; and like all those other groups, they will become ever more marginal, and ultimately disappear.

To further quote, this time from Dalhousie University Associate Professor Catrina G. Brown’s “Anti-Oppression Through a Postmodern Lens: Dismantling the Master’s Conceptual Tools in Discursive Social Work Practice“:

Within postmodernist anti-oppressive approaches to the social world, assumptions about neutrality and objectivity have been exposed as a fiction, masking the partial and located nature of all knowledge (Haraway, 1988). Falsely universalized and objectivist claims about social reality which have often upheld limited and privileged world views have been contested by the growing visibility and challenge of competing standpoints. In challenging the hegemonic knowledge base which has upheld the power and privilege of some at the expense of others, this approach deeply challenges the notion of universal truth and objective knowledge.

Thus it is revealed that defenders of the “pursuit of truth” like Haidt are thus, knowingly or unknowingly, defeners of hegemonic oppression, and so rightly opposed by the present Academy.

So, “truth” becomes “whatever serves the revolution.” To the extent that that is true, if they can’t be saved, these universities need to be destroyed, if only by desertion by students and others who actually want a real education, not indoctrination. Postmodernists of the sort mentioned here are like an infection that takes over a body and turns it into a zombie, a monstrous facsimile of a human being.

Fun’s Over With Trump

I watched several times the entire NSFW 1:53 clip of Trump calling Ted Cruz a p**sy for having constitutional qualms about waterboarding. It doesn’t get any better when repeated. The thing that most people are talking about is his use of the vulgarity, which is pretty lowlife stuff coming from a man who wants to sit in the Oval Office. But by far the more disturbing thing was that he was calling Cruz this as a way of asserting his own willingness to torture people, and the Constitution be damned.

And here’s the thing: a mob in the audience started shouting, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” Cheering for torture, and this ridiculous man calling a U.S. Senator a p**sy for not being man enough to say to hell with the Constitution, we’re going to torture.

I’ve enjoyed the Trump show. I’ve enjoyed the way he’s shaken up the Republican Party, frazzled Conservatism, Inc., and put the state of the beleaguered white working class into the political conversation. I liked him when he was a threat to established interests. But now that he’s coming off as a threat to democracy, this isn’t funny anymore.

This guy is a hooligan. A man who talks like a mafioso while bragging about his lack of compunction for Constitutional niceties is not someone a democracy can afford to have head the executive branch of the US Government.  I believe that when it gets right down to it, most Americans will be unwilling to take a risk on a president with that kind of character. There’s something of the back alley to him. If America needs to shred the Constitution and embrace torture with gusto to “be great again,” then she will already be ruined.

 

Happy Birthday Roy Dale

A relative of Roy Dale Craven wrote me to say that today would have been his 51st birthday, and to thank me for the piece I wrote about him back in 2002, in National Review Online. I couldn’t find that piece on the NRO site, but here is an excerpt of Roy Dale’s story, taken from The Little Way of Ruthie Leming:

The ballpark was also the place where dying young touched many of us kids for the first time. In the summer of 1974, on my first team, the John Fudge Auto Parts Angels, a blond tow-headed Starhill kid named Roy Dale Craven was the star pitcher. That might not have meant much in a league where the oldest players were, like Roy Dale, nine years old, but Roy Dale was a real phenom.

He was also a poor country boy with a million-dollar smile. His mother, Evelyn Dedon, and his father had divorced when he was very young. She raised Roy Dale and his brothers in a little brick house on the side of Highway 61, on the outskirts of Starhill. They didn’t have much money. Roy Dale invited his father up from Baton Rouge one afternoon to watch him play his first game. The dad must have seen what a raggedy glove his kid was playing with, and bought the boy a new glove. At the next game, Roy Dale showed up with a brand new glove. A week later, that glove was as floppy and dirty as if Roy Dale had used it all season long. That’s how much the kid practiced with it.

Roy Dale and his glove were inseparable. One day, Paw drove home to Starhill for lunch and saw Roy Dale and his brothers headed across a bottom for Grant’s Bayou, carrying fishing poles. Roy Dale also had his glove. There was no one else to play with, but he couldn’t bear to leave it behind.

Paw, who was one of the team’s coaches, remembers that Roy Dale was so passionate about baseball because he had so little, and grasped at every opportunity offered him. He was a sweet kid. The game was his life.

One night, the coaches pulled Roy Dale from the mound after he completed the second inning, because he vomited up his supper in the dugout. All he’d had to eat before the game was pickles. No one knew if he had eaten so badly because he had chosen to, or because that was all the food his family had in the house that day. No one wanted to ask.

On July 15, late in the afternoon, Roy Dale lit out from his yard to his cousin Allen Ray’s, across Highway 61, hoping to catch a ride to the ballpark. He did not see the northbound car, which struck and killed him. The driver was not charged. I found out about the tragedy sitting in the back of Paw’s pick-up, headed to the game; we were stuck in traffic backed up from the accident scene. Paw said later it was just like Roy Dale to be so excited about playing ball that night that he didn’t pay attention to anything else.

That funeral was the first time most of us kids had seen death up close. At some point before the service started, one of the Angels found the courage to step into the aisle at the funeral home chapel, and go forward to pay respects to our teammate. A gaggle of six to nine-year-old boys walked forward, and saw that beautiful boy, Roy Dale, dead in his coffin. They buried him with his glove on his hand and his uniform on his back. This may have been the nicest set of clothes Roy Dale owned.

That night, I heard Paw and his friend Pat Rettig, the other coach, out on our back porch, talking. I stood by the screen door to listen, and realized these grown men were weeping in the dark. I didn’t know how to take it, and went away. It was 28 years before Paw and I had a conversation about Roy Dale that wasn’t ended by a grown man’s tears.

Free Republic posted the entire text of the NRO essay. It’s pretty much what you see above, except this is how it ends: with a 2002 visit to Roy Dale’s grave, the first time I had been since his 1974 burial:

We didn’t linger long. It was hot, and there wasn’t a lot to say. In truth, I can’t say Roy Dale was a close friend, because he was older than me, and we went to different schools. But I’ve thought about him throughout my life, wondering where he’d be now if he’d lived. Would he have made it out of our town, and his humble circumstances? Would he have made it to the pros? Would he have been an All-Star? Would you know his name?

I think you should know his name. For 28 summers, Roy Dale Craven, a poor little country boy who loved baseball madly, and who didn’t get the chance he deserved in this life, has laid under the rye grass behind a hill you can’t even see from the road. Thousands of people drive past his grave every day, not knowing how close they come to something so tender, so worthy, and so pure.

Donald Trump (R-Howard Stern)

This clip from a Trump campaign rally today — which you shouldn’t play at work or around the kids — tells you a lot about Donald Trump’s sense of dignity and decorum, to say nothing of the quality of his character. In it, he calls Ted Cruz a “pu**y” for having hesitations about waterboarding. Which is torture.

“Donald Trump is a breath of fresh air,” Jerry Falwell Jr. said last month, endorsing the casino mogul. Falwell Jr. said that he sees “a lot of parallels between my father and Donald Trump.”

“Like Mr. Trump, dad would speak his mind, he would make statements that were politically incorrect,” he said.

Like that time he called Jim Bakker a p***y, and Tammy Faye a b***h. That was such a breath of fresh air, as I recall.

Look, I think the country has worse problems than a president who is so lacking in respect and decorum that he talks like this in public. There are far worse obscenities in our political life than what Trump said today at the podium. For example:

“I will always defend Planned Parenthood and I will say consistently and proudly, Planned Parenthood should be funded, supported and protected, not undermined, misrepresented and demonized,” [Hillary] Clinton said. “As your president, I will always have your back.”

Still, it was repulsive. Yeah, politicians talk like that privately, but do people really want their president to carry on like that in public? And more disturbing than Trump’s trash talk is the fact that he used it to disparage someone’s concern about torture and its legality. Is that what you want in a president? (Though I suppose a case could be made that it’s better to have a barbarian unmasked than hiding behind sentimental public Christianity.)

I find it regrettable that the one populist candidate in the race speaks in public like common trash. But this is who Donald Trump is. Classy, to the shortened fingertips

The Rot In The Academy

You’ve got to read this dynamite John Leo interview with Jonathan Haidt, who is emerging as one of the country’s leading public intellectuals, and a traitor to his liberal secular academic class because of his fidelity to the ideals of the university. Excerpts:

JONATHAN HAIDT: But that’s fine. As long as you have an alternate model, then other universities can copy it. But more importantly is this – here’s the one reason for hope – almost all Americans are disgusted by what’s happened to the universities.

JOHN LEO: You mean the micro-aggression, the trigger warnings and the censorship?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. The craziness on campus. Almost everybody says, you know, shut up, grow up, stop complaining. And this is even true for people on the left.  And so, there’s a gigantic market of parents who don’t want to send their kids to Yale and Brown and Amherst, and they want to send them someplace where they won’t be coddled.  And so my hope is that if there are some prestigious alternatives where their kids actually could learn how to survive hearing things they don’t like, and that market forces will lead a stampede to less coddling schools.

JOHN LEO: But what about the craving for elite credentials, no matter how bad the school really is. A lot of parents will send their kids anywhere, to the mouth of hell, if they can get a Yale degree.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. Well, look, Chicago’s pretty darn good. Chicago’s a very prestigious school. I don’t know what Ivy could join them. …

JOHN LEO: Well, Columbia still has the Great Books course.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Columbia is very PC. Columbia’s not, going to be it. So, another reason for hope is that more and more progressive professors and presidents are being attacked. And each time they’re attacked, they usually feel quite bitter. And at some point we’re going to get a college president who has been attacked in this way who sticks his or her neck out and says, enough is enough; I’m standing up to this. I also hope and expect that alumni will begin resisting. That’s something we’re going to do at “Heterodox Academy.” We’re going to try to organize alumni and trustees.

Because the presidents can’t stand up to the protesters unless there is extraordinary pressure on them from the other side.

More:

JOHN LEO: Well, but there’s always a possibility of truth and accuracy. I mean, why is the professoriate so…

JONATHAN HAIDT: Spineless? Nowadays, a mob can coalesce out of nowhere. And so we’re more afraid of our students than we are of our peers. It is still possible for professors to say what they think over lunch; in private conversations they can talk. But the list of things we can say in the classroom is growing shorter and shorter.

JOHN LEO: This sounds like the Good Germans.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. Exactly. It is. It’s really scary that values other than truth have become sacred.  And what I keep trying to say – this comes right out of my book The Righteous Mind – is that you can’t have two sacred values.  Because what do you do when they conflict?  And in the academy now, if truth conflicts with social justice, truth gets thrown under the bus.

Read the whole thing. It has far more great material than I can possibly excerpt here. And while you’re at it, check out and bookmark the website Heterodox Academy, where Haidt and his band of academic rebels — many of them fellow liberals who are disgusted with the lies and bullying on campus — are fighting the good fight, every single day.

Here’s an example of what you can find through Heterodox Academy: this incredible interview with Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech civil engineering professor who broke the Flint polluted water scandal wide open. In the interview, Edwards blames, in part, academic scientists for being so corrupt that they avert their eyes to scientific conclusions that lead them to places that might put their funding into jeopardy. That is, the scientists believed state and federal agencies, when the scientific data ought to have made them skeptical. Excerpt:

Q. Now, of course, when you walk around Flint and ask people about the reassurances they’re hearing now, they don’t believe anybody. When is it appropriate for academics to be skeptical of an official narrative when that narrative is coming from scientific authorities? Surely the answer can’t be “all of the time.”

A. I’m really surprised how emotional this interview is making me, and I’ve given several hundred interviews. What these agencies did in [the Washington, D.C., case] was the most fundamental betrayal of public trust that I’ve ever seen. When I realized what they had done, as a scientist, I was just outraged and appalled.

I grew up worshiping at the altar of science, and in my wildest dreams I never thought scientists would behave this way. The only way I can construct a worldview that accommodates this is to say, These people are unscientific. Science should be about pursuing the truth and helping people. If you’re doing it for any other reason, you really ought to question your motives.

Unfortunately, in general, academic research and scientists in this country are no longer deserving of the public trust. We’re not.

Q. I think of that rock with the spray paint on it that says, “You want our trust??? We want Va Tech!!!” That’s a vote of confidence in you at the expense of confidence in anybody else. Is that a happy piece of graffiti in your eyes?

A. It’s a symbol of the total failure of our government science agencies, and also of our academic institutions. I really derive no personal satisfaction from that. I feel shame. That’s what I feel.

This is a particular instance of a broader point that the Heterodox Academicians hammer home every day: that academic institutions are also corrupted by politically correct fear, and a concomitant desire either to fix the data around the ideologically preferable conclusions, or to ignore research, or areas of research, that undermine those conclusions.

Meritocracy & the Middle Class

Rusty Reno explains why so many middle class whites are having a populist moment:

The relative success of Trump and Sanders shows that they’re rebelling against both left-leaning and right-leaning political establishments. That’s not because of identity politics. It’s because they’re in the best position to see the new character of our leadership class.

More:

What white middle class voters are waking up to is that their natural leaders are being co-opted by the meritocratic system as well [as minorities’ leaders]. Hillary Clinton may have lived in Arkansas for decades, but she’s a creature of elite education and Goldman Sachs. People talk about the Clinton Machine. But it’s not at all like the machines of ward bosses and patronage jobs as sidewalk inspectors. The Clinton Machine is an interlocking network of very rich donors, high-placed journalists, and political elites. It operates at Davos, not in gritty ethnic urban neighborhoods.

For Christians, the starkest evidence of this is how the Republican Party caved on religious liberty in Indiana and Arkansas as soon as Big Business cleared it’s throat. Add to that the lesson from Rep. Scott Garrett’s isolation; despite being a faithful water-carrier for Wall Street, his apostasy on LGBT issues has made him a pariah among GOP megadonors and (therefore) the GOP Congressional leadership. Reno talks about how the Democratic and Republican elites serve the market above all, whether or not it benefits people further down the hierarchy from the Davos class. As far as that crowd is concerned, mankind will not be free until the last Southern Baptist is clubbed into submission with Bruce Jenner’s severed wing-wang. More Reno:

This gap isn’t just economic; it’s cultural as well. Our establishment is moving toward a post-national vision of the common good, while middle America seems eager for gestures and rhetoric that promises renewed national solidarity.

To a great extent, multiculturalism and other forms of “global consciousness” serve as companions to economic globalization. They promise to teach us how to navigate cultural differences in ways that defuse conflict, promote cooperation, and thus ease the way toward a global marketplace overseen by well-trained, benevolent technocrats from the Kennedy School of Government.

This approach need not be overtly ideological. It’s enough for us to downplay our local loyalties and to adopt a spirit of detachment from our histories. This can be done with plain vanilla relativism. The point is to strip away potentially divisive commitments, allowing us to focus on universal interests we share in common—the universal human desire to get richer, be healthier, and to satisfy individual preferences. This has led to a leadership class that is technocratic in its outlook but has trouble speaking about patriotic loyalties that unify us all.

Thus our volatile political moment.

Read the whole thing.

I saw a “Bernie 2016″ bumper sticker on a minivan outside of church yesterday. I’m pretty sure the driver and his wife are quite religiously conservative. There was a time — like, the day before yesterday — when I would not have been able to understand religious conservatives for Bernie Sanders. Nor could I have understood Democrats for Donald Trump. I’m starting to get it now.

From historian Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation:

Indeed, it is crucially important that in the aggregate, people continue to conform to consumerism. No matter what, individuals must be left free to be selfish, because the manufactured goods life is needed to hold Western hyperpluralism together. In a world pullulating with so many incompatible truth claims, values, priorities, and aspirations, what else could do the trick?

What he’s saying is that individualism and consumerism are the only things that keep us from flying apart as a society. Is that going to be enough? What happens when the rising tide fails to float all (or most) boats? That’s what we’re starting to see now.

Serious question: what unites us as Americans? To what are we loyal, beyond our immediate self-interest? It’s not the Christian religion, or any religion. Is it to the principles of the Constitution? That seems quite abstract, in the end. What happens when people come to believe (rightly or wrongly) that the system is set up to prevent people like them from succeeding, or even to punish them?

The “Clinton Machine” is the Democratic version of the Machine. The Republicans are no different. The Democrats pretend that they care about the economic situation of non-elites who vote for them, and Republicans pretend that they care about the social concerns of non-elites who vote for them. What happens when people realize that it’s not true?

There may not be any realistic alternative at the ballot box, at least not now. But at least we shouldn’t deceive ourselves about what’s happening.

Wall Street: GOP Bigots Don’t Need Our Money

This Bloomberg News story is emblematic of our time, and what it says about the relationships among the GOP leadership, religious conservatives, gays and lesbians, and Wall Street. And it is critically important for conservative Christians to read it and understand what it means.

The story is about Rep. Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who chairs a powerful House subcommittee. More:

Garrett’s committee is vital to Wall Street. “The rules of the road for handling money and anything with the SEC go through this committee,” says Marcus Stanley, policy director of the nonprofit Americans for Financial Reform. “There’s a ton of money at stake.” In Washington, the committee is known as the ATM, because banks and hedge funds shower the chairman with contributions. After the Dodd-Frank financial law forced hedge funds to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Garrett, already the recipient of more Wall Street money than almost any other member of the House, got millions more. The banks pay to have a voice, ensure they’re at the table when new rules are discussed, and insinuate themselves into the chairman’s good graces.

Though he’s from New Jersey, Garrett is a staunch religious conservative. And that got him into a behind-the-scenes fight with fellow Congressional Republicans last year:

At a private caucus meeting, he got into a heated dispute with his colleagues by declaring that he’d withhold hundreds of thousands of dollars in National Republican Congressional Committee dues to protest the party’s support for gay candidates. His outburst immediately caused a rift in the caucus. “I was shocked,” says Richard Tisei, a Massachusetts businessman who was one of the candidates Garrett objected to. “The first time I ran, I was nervous my sexuality would be a problem. But everyone was just great. John Boehner, Paul Ryan—they went out of their way to let me know it wasn’t. Eric Cantor pulled me aside and said, ‘You know, I’m the only Jew in the caucus, so I understand better than anyone how important it is to have you down here to broaden and diversify our ranks.’ ”

Garrett’s protests so angered Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Financial Services Committee that he declined to invite Garrrett on a Congressional junket to Switzerland — even though he invited top Democrats on the committee. So Garrett is persona non grata to the House GOP leadership — but as Bloomberg reports, Speaker Paul Ryan doesn’t dare remove him, because that kind of thing is what led to John Boehner’s ousting.

Here’s where it gets real interesting:

The political fallout from Garrett’s remarks pales compared with the anguish it’s created in some corners of Wall Street. The financial industry ranks among the biggest donors to the Republican Party. But it has also been a pioneer in advancing gay rights. Garrett’s reelection race presents banks and investors with a fascinating—and excruciating—moral dilemma: Do they follow their financial interests and continue supporting a chairman whose antiregulatory views largely jibe with their own? Or do they honor their professed commitment to LGBT equality by cutting off that support and potentially angering a powerful industry overseer?

 

The article goes on to explain how Garrett is deeply in Wall Street’s back pocket. On regulatory issues, he gives Wall Street everything it asks for. They could hardly ask for a more compliant member of Congress in that position, sounds like. He gave them everything they asked for, that loyal servant of Mammon. Yet some big finance-industry donors have already said that they’re not going to give money to him anymore, because he has outed himself as someone who opposes LGBTs. More:

If Garrett is subjected to more scrutiny in the upcoming campaign, this issue could pose a serious liability because his objection to gay people isn’t limited to political candidates. Examining his public-disclosure filings, I noticed that he’s a co-founder and former trustee of a private high school, Veritas Christian Academy, in Sussex County, which explicitly forbids “homosexual activity.” The “Code of Conduct” on the Veritas website warns students that any violation will draw an automatic suspension and possible expulsion.

So his affiliation with a private Christian school that adheres to traditional Christian moral teaching about homosexuality is anticipated to be a political liability for Garrett. Note that well.

It is fascinating to observe how the LGBT issue has become such a passion for corporate America, including Wall Street, that finance industry titans are willing to lose one of their best friends in Congress over it — not because Garrett is in a position to harm LGBT interests (it’s clear that the House Republican leadership is far more big-tent on gays than Garrett is), but simply because he is now publicly known as someone who objects to homosexuality. One more quote from the story, a quote from an interview with Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat who is running against Garrett this fall:

“My takeaway from talking to people in the financial community,” Gottheimer says, “is that they don’t think that someone who’s a social extremist can also be a problem solver who can sit at a table and do business with them.” [Emphasis mine — RD] That concern extends beyond Garrett’s district. Last cycle, the Chamber of Commerce, fed up with Tea Party-driven shutdowns and default scares, took the unorthodox step of endorsing six Democrats; five of them won. Gottheimer could be next. “We’re looking for good, probusiness candidates who can win in the fall and focus on governing,” says Scott Reed, the Chamber’s senior political strategist.

A “social extremist.” That’s what they call orthodox Christians in politics now. Mind you, I think it’s quite possible that Garrett’s views on recruiting gay Republicans to run for office are wrong. But that’s not why Wall Street donors are turning on him. They’re turning on him because of the opinions he holds. 

Read the whole thing. 

There are two ways to look at this, both of which recognize that what Wall Street is doing here makes a powerful statement. One is that business and financial leaders are so principled that they would risk their own financial interests to stand up for a cause they believe in. But the other way to look at it is that Wall Street and big business are so given over to the cause that they will stop at nothing to marginalize and eliminate from public life anyone who objects to it.

Christians had better read the handwriting on the wall here. Remember my telling you that I learned on my trip to Capitol Hill last fall that House and Senate Republicans have no intention of taking up legislation to defend religious liberty? Now you know why. It’s too risky to their campaign donations to be seen by Wall Street and Big Business as the party of “social extremists.” If you think the Republican Party is going to protect our right to be wrong on this issue, you are lying to yourself. And if you believe any of these Republican presidential candidates can be relied on, I think you are going to be sorely disappointed. Even if they wanted to get religious liberty legislation passed, they don’t have the Congressional Republicans on board with them. Bottom line: if you think voting Republican is going to protect us, you’re living in a dream world.

What’s more, Christians desperately need to understand the deeper dynamics at work in the culture. We are headed very quickly toward a culture in which affirming publicly traditional Christian beliefs about homosexuality is a disqualifying bar for holding national office. The Garrett race this fall will be an important one to watch, to see the extent to which his relationship with the private Christian school will become a political liability. If you cannot see the day coming, and coming soon, when candidates’ membership in particular churches will be held against them, unless they distance themselves from the church’s “extremist” teaching, you are blind.

And if you think that it will be possible in the future to work in the financial industry (and others) and be anything but deeply closeted as an orthodox Christian, you are fooling yourself. Entire fields are going to be effectively closed to people who will not publicly affirm the new orthodoxy. People in those fields won’t think they can do business with “social extremists.” We — and certainly our children — are, in many cases, going to have to decide between apostasy or our livelihoods. We had better get ready for that.

I’ve been saying this for a while now, and lots of people have been chiding me for being too apocalyptic. For those with eyes to see, the Law of Merited Impossibility (“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”) is vindicated more and more with each passing day.

And by the way, though Marco Rubio says the right things about same-sex marriage and religious liberty — he did so again in the New Hampshire debate over the weekend — note well that Paul Singer, a hedge-fund billionaire and GOP mega-donor who also generously supports gay rights causes (Singer’s son is gay), has become a key figure in raising money for Marco. Who is Paul Singer? The WaPo profiled him in 2013:

A battle within the Republican Party over same-sex marriage is unfolding on two fronts, in public, and behind the scenes. In the latter case, one of the most influential players is a billionaire hedge fund manager largely unknown to those who don’t work in finance or mix with political mega-donors.

That man is Paul E. Singer, who over the years has used his wealth to spur Republicans to support gay marriage laws. Now, Singer is expanding his reach with the creation of an advocacy group which aims to spend millions influencing the legislative debate over same-sex marriage across the country.

You think if it comes down to it, President Rubio is going to cross this guy for the sake of the liberties of church people? You think any Republican would? Or Democrat?

This is the world we live in now.