Rod Dreher's Blog, page 616

Trump Plucked The Populist Apple

Take a look at the 2005 Political Typology report by the Pew Center. Note well that this came out over a decade ago. That is, before the economic crash of 2007-08, and before disillusionment with the Iraq War and the Bush administration had taken hold.

Here are the relevant takeaways:

A total of 46 percent of registered voters — Republicans and Republican-leaning independent — had in 2005 a political profile that fits with the Trump brand.

Those Pew defined as “Social Conservatives” were 13 percent of all voters in 2005. Pew defined them as: “While supportive of an assertive foreign policy, this group is somewhat more religious than are Enterprisers. In policy terms, they break from the Enterprisers in their cynical views of business, modest support for environmental and other regulation, and strong anti-immigrant sentiment.”
Only 10 percent of registered right-of-center voters — Enterprisers, the most conservative Republicans — had a 2005 profile that would reject Trump utterly.
Those Pew defined as “Conservative Democrats” — that is, social and religious conservatives who are the New Deal types, and who almost entirely lean Democratic — comprised in 2005 fifteen percent of the electorate. Pew described them this way: “Older women and blacks make up a sizeable proportion of this group (27% and 30%, respectively). Somewhat less educated and poorer than the nation overall. Allegiance to the Democratic party is quite strong (51% describe themselves as “strong” Democrats) but fully 85% describe themselves as either conservative or moderate ideologically.”
The “Partisan Poor” are the most financially disadvantaged of all the typologies, and vote heavily Democratic. A third of them are black, and they favor government services but are skeptical of government, and hostile to business interests. They were at the time 10 percent of registered voters.

So, consider this: A Republican candidate back then that could have pulled just half of the “Conservative Democrats” and half of the “Partisan Poor” would have had a working voting coalition of nearly 60 percent. He could have afforded to have lost some of the Independent and Social Conservatives to a Democrat, and still been in a strong position.

Consider this too: in both the GOP and Democratic cases, the party elites were more aligned with the most extreme on their own sides. Among the Republicans, the strongly pro-business conservatives were only 11 percent of registered voters, and a distinct minority among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters.

But they called the shots.

And they still called the shots after the 2007-08 crash.

Point is, 11 years ago, the basis for a Trump-like candidacy was there. A candidate that was broadly socially conservative, favored government programs but was broadly skeptical of government, and broadly wary of big business: that was where the great center of American politics was.

Nobody could really take advantage of it. The parties were too ideologically rigid, and redistricting favored the most ideologically rigid candidates.

In 2011, Pew had rejiggered its typological categories, and found that surprising numbers of conservatives — even in the hardest core — were a lot more skeptical of Wall Street and its relationship to the economy. 

Then, in 2014, Pew released its first overall typology survey since 2005. Pew found that politics on the Right had come down to a struggle between “Steadfast Conservatives” and “Business Conservatives.” Here’s how the two conflict:

First, Steadfast Conservatives take very conservative views on key social issues like homosexuality and immigration, while Business Conservatives are less conservative – if not actually progressive – on these issues. Nearly three-quarters of Steadfast Conservatives (74%) believe that homosexuality should be discouraged by society. Among Business Conservatives, just 31% think homosexuality should be discouraged; 58% believe it should be accepted.

Business Conservatives have generally positive attitudes toward immigrants and 72% favor a “path to citizenship” for those in the U.S. illegally, if they meet certain conditions. Steadfast Conservatives are more critical of immigrants; 50% support a path to citizenship, the lowest share of any typology group.

Second, just as Steadfast Conservatives are opposed to big government, they also are skeptical of big business. They believe that large corporations have too much power, and nearly half (48%) say the economic system unfairly favors powerful interests. By contrast, as their name suggests, Business Conservatives are far more positive about the free market, and overwhelmingly regard business – and Wall Street – positively.

Finally, these two conservative groups differ over foreign policy. Steadfast Conservatives have doubts about U.S. international engagement – and view free trade agreements as a bad thing for the U.S. – while Business Conservatives are more supportive of the U.S. taking an active role in world affairs and free trade.

The Steadfast Conservatives (15% of the overall electorate) are much more likely than the Business Conservatives (12% overall) to back Trump, it would appear. But if you look further into the typology, you’ll find the single largest group, at 16%, is the Faith and Family Left — basically, pro-government, skeptical of business, but also religiously conservative. (Though I am a social and religious conservative and registered Independent who usually votes GOP, I took the Pew typology quiz, and was assigned to the Faith and Family Left.) It’s easy to see how a Trump figure could peel away some of the Faith and Family Left, as well as two of the middle groups, Young Outsiders and (especially) Hard-Pressed Skeptics.

If you look at the passage above comparing Business Conservatives to Steadfast Conservatives, which of the two sounds more like it’s represented by the Republican Party establishment?

Are you beginning to see where Trump came from?

And are you beginning to see why the gatekeepers on the GOP side — the party insiders, the think tanks, the conservative media — were able to keep any candidate who might have appealed to the middle, against the interests of Business Conservatives, from getting through?

Until along came someone so rich he didn’t have to depend on party donors and insiders to promote his political career. Those voters were there, but there was no way for Republican politicians within the system to speak to them, and for them. (And by the way, the Democrats, by having demonized so many religious and social conservatives, have the same problem.)

Here’s a link to a very important three-part series on Real Clear Politics, written by Sean Trende, on the Trump phenomenon. Excerpts from Part I, on how Trump is a very different kind of Republican, one whose appeal upsets the apple cart:

In fact, Trump’s support has largely been spread across the party, with substantial strength among moderate and liberal Republicans. … So the attempts to attack him for his lack of conservative bona fides have been ineffective because they were largely directed at voters who were not likely to vote for Trump in the first place.

But Part II of Trende’s analysis notes that Trump is also doing well with “downscale, blue-collar whites” who usually vote Democratic. The most interesting part of his essay is Part III, in which he talked about the meaning of the divide between “Cultural Cosmopolitans” and “Traditionalists”. Trende writes:

I think the outcome of this is that neither side is capable of seeing America as it actually is, and both sides believe they are far stronger than they actually are. Cultural traditionalists don’t know many gay marriage supporters (much less anyone who refers to “Caitlin Jenner”), are flummoxed as to how it could have become the law of the land, and are convinced that it must be the result of some giant lawless action. Theirs is a world turned upside down.

Cultural cosmopolitans, on the other hand, forget everything they learned in college about social desirability bias when they view polls rapidly swinging their way (with some notable exceptions), mistakenly see their victories as largely total (people online are always surprised when I point out that a near majority of Americans consider themselves Young Earth Creationists), assume that their discussions about diversity at the Oscars or transgender rights resonate with almost all Americans, and have recently moved to purge an increasing number of opposing views from the bounds of acceptable discourse, again, without a full understanding of just how many people they are silencing.

In fact, I think many cultural cosmopolitans, and again, I largely place myself in these ranks, don’t recognize these beliefs for the purely ideological statements that they are (evolution aside). The cultural cosmopolitans have an advantage in that they occupy the commanding heights of American culture, but the democratization of cyberspace and the freedom that comes with 2,000 channels on television have weakened their influence and have probably only further inflamed tensions between the groups.

Here’s the money graf:

Where this becomes relevant – indeed, I think this is crucial – is that the leadership of the Republican Party and the old conservative movement is, itself, culturally cosmopolitan. I doubt if many top Republican consultants interact with many Young Earth Creationists on a regular basis. Many quietly cheered the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decisions. Most of them live in blue megapolises, most come from middle-class families and attended elite institutions, and a great many of them roll their eyes at the various cultural excesses of “the base.” There is, in other words, a court/country divide among Republicans.

And look:

We’re left with an odd situation in which neither party’s leadership is particularly well attuned to the most important divide in American life. Democrats are openly suspicious, if not hostile, to these voters, while Republicans at best hold their noses on cultural issues if it advantages them (but they will go to the mattresses for unpopular tax cuts for wealthy Americans).

So the Republicans offer up candidates who are from cosmopolitan America, who have their speeches written by speechwriters from cosmopolitan American, who have their images created by consultants from cosmopolitan America, and who develop their issue positions in office buildings located in cosmopolitan America. Then they wonder why the base isn’t excited. Say what you will about George W. Bush, but a large part of why he was successful was that he didn’t talk like your average D.C. denizen. He was routinely mocked by the press and his own party derided his malapropisms, but he connected with a class of voters that Republicans sure could use these days, in a way that Willard Mitt Romney never could hope to (and without resorting to the demagoguery of Trump).

I read this and thought about last night’s GOP debate, and how programmed all those candidates sounded. Nobody sounds like Trump — and Trende says that this is one particular thing that the entire establishment class has missed: the way Trump talks, and why that resonates with people. Look:

Cosmopolitan America sees a strong, moral – frankly ideological – interest in accepting refugees from Syria. Traditionalist America thinks that after Paris, this is insane. Which candidate is unafraid to say this unambiguously, without feeling the need to offer caveats? Traditionalist America thinks that the nation that put a man on the moon can “control its borders”; cosmopolitan America at best offers lip service to the need for doing so. Again, how many of the surviving Republican candidates fully side with the traditionalists? Traditionalist America wants to “kick the tires and light the fires” against ISIS/Daesh, and Trump goes on Blutarsky-ish rants against them. Trump doesn’t do nuance on these issues, but the cosmopolitan Republican candidates feel the need to. (Suggest raising taxes on the wealthy, however, and all nuance goes out the window with the rest of them).

All of this is a lengthy way of saying that Trump is a creation of the Republican establishment, which is frankly uncomfortable with many of its own voters, and which mostly seeks to “manage” them. This is a group that looked at the Tea Party revolts of the past decade, looked at the broad field of Republican candidates (many of whom at least had ties to successful Tea Party revolts), and decided that none of these candidates were good enough.

Read the entire essay. It’s very insightful, and if you click that link, you’ll find embedded links to Parts I and II, though Part III is the best.

Trende calls this a “dangerous” situation, and says the Democrats have similar problems of their own. It’s dangerous because it’s destabilizing, and can easily empower a demagogue like Trump.

What Trump has shown, and is showing every day, is how out of touch Conservatism, Inc., is with the people for whom it purports to speak. They haven’t had a chance to vote for someone like him in a long, long time because, as I’ve said, the GOP and Conservatism, Inc., gatekeepers kept them down. The conservative Christians who have gone to Washington and gotten invited to be in the inner Republican power circles? You think those professional Christians really speak for the people back home anymore?

Me, I’m in a weird and extremely unrepresentative place, politically and ideologically. I am mostly a cosmopolitan in my tastes, but I live by choice in deep Red America, and am a traditionalist by conviction. What Sean Trende says about the Republican and conservative elites living inside a cosmopolitan bubble is true — and the people who give money to the GOP and to the think-tank archipelago are Business Conservatives who, as we now know post-Indiana RFRA, regard we traditionalists are the problem.

It is very useful to get this learned. For that, we can thank Donald Trump.

Look, I believe that Donald Trump is basically a pagan. I believe that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who are his chief rivals now, are sincere, prayerful Christians. But I also am entirely convicted that a President Cruz or a President Rubio would, in the end, do exactly what Big Business wanted, and screw the Christians — not because they have anything against Christians, but because they know who calls the shots in the GOP. Remember what the late David Kuo told us?

This is a culture war, all right, but the battle lines have shifted dramatically. I’ll give the last word to Trende, a co-author of the 2014 Almanac of American Politics. Trump may not be the Republican nominee, and he may not be elected president. But business-as-usual with our parties is going to result in an American Caesar. Says Trende:

[I]f the parties don’t remember whom it is they serve, sooner or later that is the direction we will head.

 

Rome, Reformation, & Right Now

I thought the Republican debate last night went better than expected, absent Donald Trump sucking all the air out of the room. It didn’t make me like any of the candidates any better, but it felt more like a real debate than these events have been. I did come away with these thoughts:

What a shame that Rand Paul hasn’t done better in this campaign.
Alan Keyes + Jeff Spicoli + 2 Demerols + 1 Jack & Coke = Dr. Ben Carson
Chris Christie will make an excellent Attorney General in the next GOP administration
Ted Cruz is cold, dark, calculating, intelligent, ideological to the fingertips — and therefore very troubling. I cannot shake the image of him trolling suffering Middle Eastern Christians for the sake of boosting his appeal to Evangelicals. I see him and an insult Churchill directed to a rival comes to mind: “He would make a drum out of the skin of his mother to sing his own praises.”
Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have learned nothing from Iraq. Nothing. All this talk about how under the leadership, the US is going to go in and bite the heads off of ISIS and suck their brains out, etc. — all of that requires going back to war in the Middle East. Is that really what they are proposing? If so, let’s hear the rationale. And Cruz’s line about how he’s going to carpet bomb the Mideast to rid it of ISIS — really? You’re going to wipe out tens of thousands of innocent people for this cause? Cruz’s lines attempting to link ISIS’s success to the material decline of the US military was outrageous — as if ISIS succeeded because the US wasn’t spending enough money on defense. But it tells us that a Cruz administration will mean a windfall for defense contractors.
Cruz saying that he was going to be the Second Coming of Reagan, and was going to cut taxes and get the economy moving again, so all boats can rise. It is eternally 1980 with these ideologues. They have no answer at all for our economy.
I believe Rubio said that in his overarching plan, we would work with Sunnis in the region to construct some sort of stable, post-ISIS political entity, and we would train anti-ISIS Syrians to fight the radicals. What world has Marco Rubio been living in? Did he not see that the US spent $500 million trying to train those anti-ISIS Syrians, and we only found four of them? Has Rubio not seen how well our attempts at state-building have gone in Iraq?

Maybe Donald Trump hurt himself after all by not showing up. I guess the caucuses will tell us. What last night’s event told me, though, is that with Cruz and Rubio, we pretty much get the same old GOP stuff, just a different election cycle.

Let’s turn to David Brooks’s column today, which focuses on a speech that the Tory Prime Minister David Cameron recently gave, about the future of Britain. In it, Cameron said (or Brooks implies that he said) that the usual Left-Right solution to this kind of thing — wealth redistribution downwards, or cutting taxes to free up the market so all boats can rise — no longer work. From his column:

Cameron called for a more social approach. He believes government can play a role in rebuilding social capital and in healing some of the traumas fueled by scarcity and family breakdown.

He laid out a broad agenda: Strengthen family bonds with shared parental leave and a tax code that rewards marriage. Widen opportunities for free marital counseling. Speed up the adoption process. Create a voucher program for parenting classes. Expand the Troubled Families program by 400,000 slots. This program spends 4,000 pounds (about $5,700) per family over three years and uses family coaches to help heal the most disrupted households.

Cameron would also create “character modules” for schools, so that there are intentional programs that teach resilience, curiosity, honesty and service. He would expand the National Citizen Service so that by 2021 60 percent of the nation’s 16-year-olds are performing national service, and meeting others from across society. He wants to create a program to recruit 25,000 mentors to work with young teenagers.

To address concentrated poverty, he would replace or revamp 100 public housing projects across the country. He would invest big sums in mental health programs and create a social impact fund to unlock millions for new drug and alcohol treatment.

It’s an agenda that covers the entire life cycle, aiming to give people the strength and social resources to stand on their own. In the U.S. we could use exactly this sort of agenda. There is an epidemic of isolation, addiction and trauma.

Read the whole thing. Brooks goes on to say that the GOP desperately needs to take this “Burkean” approach to repairing the social fabric. I think he’s right, but I also think that is not remotely adequate to the problem we face. The State can help economically, but it simply cannot do the work of culture.

The State cannot make people stop having babies out of wedlock. The State cannot make people stay married. The State cannot reweave family bonds. The State cannot make people believe in God, and order their lives accordingly. And so forth. This is not to say that there is no role for the State, of course, only that its ability to help is largely at the margins. That’s not nothing — but it’s not nearly enough.

I’ve been reading this week historian Brad Gregory’s study The Unintended Reformation: How A Religious Revolution Secularized Society. I had imagined it to be a somewhat polemical book that blamed the Reformation for all our modern woes. That was dumb of me. It’s a genealogy of ideas and events that led to our current condition.

It didn’t start with the Reformation. The ideas that laid the intellectual groundwork for the Reformation sprung out of Catholic theological debate two centuries earlier. The corruption of the Catholic Church, and the arrogant refusal of its leaders to heed calls to reform before it was too late, were very real and present. Luther had reason. He had the intellectual framework in place, and he had emotional cause: the utter rot within the Roman Catholic establishment.

That doesn’t make the Reformation right, of course, but one does see how it was all but inevitable. Once the break happened, it proved impossible to contain the forces unleashed. “Sola scriptura” proved an impossible standard for building a new church, because various Reformation leaders had their own ideas about what the Bible “clearly” said. The fracturing of the Reformation, and the arguments among various theological factions, were there from the beginning.

And the savagery with which Catholics and Protestants went at each other was horrifying. The Wars of Religion were catastrophic, and in Gregory’s telling, compelled exhausted Europeans to try to figure out a way to keep the peace. This required a strong state that kept religious passions in check. At the same time, the rise of science, and the blind obstinacy of the Roman church in unnecessarily holding on to Aristotelian categories for understanding the natural world, created the false belief that religion is opposed to science. And on and on, through the Enlightenment, down to the present day.

There’s a lot more to it than I’ve said here. It’s a very complex story, and certainly not one with a straight-line cause, e.g., “If not for nominalism and univocity, none of this would have happened;” “If not for the Reformation, none of this would have happened.” The point I wish to make here is that Gregory does a great job in showing how the interaction of ideas, events, and plain human folly, served to drive God out of the public square. He also makes it clear that the secular liberal narrative of uncomplicated Progress because of this is hopelessly naive. The Enlightenment tried to build a binding public ethic around Reason, but ran into the same problem that the Reformation did: who decides what counts as “reasonable”? As Gregory writes:

‘Sola ratio’ has not overcome the problem that stemmed from ‘sola scriptura,’ but rather replicated it in a secular, rationalist register. Attempts to salvage modern philosophy by claiming that it is concerned with asking questions rather than either finding or getting closer to finding answers might make sense – if one just happens to like asking questions in the same way that thirsty people just like seeking water rather than locating a drinking fountain, or indeed having any idea whether they are getting closer to one.

The point of this post — and of Gregory’s book — is certainly not to blame the Reformers. What good would that do, anyway? Nor is it to say, “The Renaissance Popes made us do it!” Again, that is pointless now. The thing to learn from this study is how ideas have consequences — and not just ideas, but ideas as they are taken up by real people in particular circumstances.

Gregory’s book makes very clear that the Reformers would have been horrified by what became of their revolution, just as the Franciscan friars Duns Scotus and William of Ockham would likely have been appalled by what their ideas — univocity and nominalism — brought about. They all meant well. One has much less sympathy for the leaders of the Roman church, who sat back enriching themselves while the faith for which they were responsible fell into radical discredit by their own corruption. Had they foreseen where all this would lead, they surely would have repented before it was too late.

Or not. As Kierkegaard says, the trouble with life is it must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.

The unwinding we’re all seeing now is the cumulative effect of forces that have been gathering for a very long time. We are living through the failure of liberalism (in the classical, 19th century sense) because we have become incapable of stable self-government. We are coming apart because there is no center around which we can all rally. John Adams famously wrote

[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

It is wishful thinking to believe that Christianity can, at this point, stop the forces of disintegration and dissolution moving through American society and culture. Christianity can hardly protect itself from the same (Moralistic Therapeutic Deism with a nominally Christian face predominates). We are living through, and will continue to live through, the political consequences of Christianity’s demise as the guiding vision of our society, and its replacement with radical individualism. I point you to this 1989 essay in The Atlantic by political scientist Glenn Tinder, who wrote of the political meaning of Christianity. Excerpts:

It will be my purpose in this essay to try to connect the severed realms of the spiritual and the political. In view of the fervent secularism of many Americans today, some will assume this to be the opening salvo of a fundamentalist attack on “pluralism.” Ironically, as I will argue, many of the undoubted virtues of pluralism—respect for the individual and a belief in the essential equality of all human beings, to cite just two—have strong roots in the union of the spiritual and the political achieved in the vision of Christianity. The question that secularists have to answer is whether these values can survive without these particular roots. In short, can we be good without God? Can we affirm the dignity and equality of individual persons—values we ordinarily regard as secular—without giving them transcendental backing? Today these values are honored more in the breach than in the observance; Manhattan Island alone, with its extremes of sybaritic wealth on the one hand and Calcuttan poverty on the other, is testimony to how little equality really counts for in contemporary America. To renew these indispensable values, I shall argue, we must rediscover their primal spiritual grounds.

 

… The most adamant opposition to my argument is likely to come from protagonists of secular reason—a cause represented preeminently by the Enlightenment. Locke and Jefferson, it will be asserted, not Jesus and Paul, created our moral universe. Here I cannot be as disarming as I hope I was in the paragraph above, for underlying my argument is the conviction that Enlightenment rationalism is not nearly so constructive as is often supposed. Granted, it has sometimes played a constructive role. It has translated certain Christian values into secular terms and, in an age becoming increasingly secular, has given them political force. It is doubtful, however, that it could have created those values or that it can provide them with adequate metaphysical foundations. Hence if Christianity declines and dies in coming decades, our moral universe and also the relatively humane political universe that it supports will be in peril. But I recognize that if secular rationalism is far more dependent on Christianity than its protagonists realize, the converse also is in some sense true. The Enlightenment carried into action political ideals that Christians, in contravention of their own basic faith, often shamefully neglected or denied. Further, when I acknowledged that there are respectable grounds for disagreeing with my argument, I had secular rationalism particularly in mind. The foundations of political decency are an issue I wish to raise, not settle.

More:

If the denial of the God-man has destructive logical implications, it also has dangerous emotional consequences. Dostoevsky wrote that a person “cannot live without worshipping something.” Anyone who denies God must worship an idol—which is not necessarily a wooden or metal figure. In our time we have seen ideologies, groups, and leaders receive divine honors. People proud of their critical and discerning spirit have rejected Christ and bowed down before Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or some other secular savior.

When disrespect for individuals is combined with political idolatry, the results can be atrocious. Both the logical and the emotional foundations of political decency are destroyed. Equality becomes nonsensical and breaks down under attack from one or another human god. Consider Lenin: as a Marxist, and like Marx an exponent of equality, under the pressures of revolution he denied equality in principle—except as an ultimate goal- and so systematically nullified it in practice as to become the founder of modern totalitarianism. When equality falls, universality is likely also to fall. Nationalism or some other form of collective pride becomes virulent, and war unrestrained. Liberty, too, is likely to vanish; it becomes a heavy personal and social burden when no God justifies and sanctifies the individual in spite of all personal deficiencies and failures.

The idealism of the man-god does not, of course, bring as an immediate and obvious consequence a collapse into unrestrained nihilism. We all know many people who do not believe in God and yet are decent and admirable. Western societies, as highly secularized as they are, retain many humane features. Not even tacitly has our sole governing maxim become the one Dostoevsky thought was bound to follow the denial of the God-man: “Everything is permitted.”

This may be, however, because customs and habits formed during Christian ages keep people from professing and acting on such a maxim even though it would be logical for them to do so. If that is the case, our position is precarious, for good customs and habits need spiritual grounds, and if those are lacking, they will gradually, or perhaps suddenly in some crisis, crumble.

And:

To what extent are we now living on moral savings accumulated over many centuries but no longer being replenished? To what extent are those savings already severely depleted? Again and again we are told by advertisers, counselors, and other purveyors of popular wisdom that we have a right to buy the things we want and to live as we please. We should be prudent and farsighted, perhaps (although even those modest virtues are not greatly emphasized), but we are subject ultimately to no standard but self-interest. If nihilism is most obvious in the lives of wanton destroyers like Hitler, it is nevertheless present also in the lives of people who live purely as pleasure and convenience dictate.

And aside from intentions, there is a question concerning consequences. Even idealists whose good intentions for the human race are pure and strong are still vulnerable to fate because of the pride that causes them to act ambitiously and recklessly in history. Initiating chains of unforeseen and destructive consequences, they are often overwhelmed by results drastically at variance with their humane intentions. Modern revolutionaries have willed liberty and equality for everyone, not the terror and despotism they have actually created. Social reformers in the United States were never aiming at the great federal bureaucracy or at the pervasive dedication to entertainment and pleasure that characterizes the welfare state they brought into existence. There must always be a gap between intentions and results, but for those who forget that they are finite and morally flawed the gap may become a chasm. Not only Christians but almost everyone today feels the fear that we live under the sway of forces that we have set in motion—perhaps in the very process of industrialization, perhaps only at certain stages of that process, as in the creation of nuclear power—and that threaten our lives and are beyond our control.

There is much room for argument about these matters. But there is no greater error in the modern mind than the assumption that the God-man can be repudiated with impunity. The man-god may take his place and become the author of deeds wholly unintended and the victim of terrors starkly in contrast with the benign intentions lying at their source. The irony of sin is in this way reproduced in the irony of idealism: exalting human beings in their supposed virtues and powers, idealism undermines them. Exciting fervent expectations, it leads toward despair.

Read the whole thing.

And then read Damon Linker’s essay today about the political meaning of Donald Trump. He begins by discussing how democracies need mediating institutions to work. And those mediating institutions must have the confidence of leaders and the led. The system requires people to trust their institutions. Linker:

As this week’s events have demonstrated, the [political] gatekeeping process only works if the candidates accept Fox’s legitimacy to serve in that role [as a media gatekeeper for what is legitimate to say on the Right]. With his prodigious use of Twitter, remarkable capacity to generate publicity for himself in more traditional media outlets, and willingness to make strident demands and stick to them, Donald Trump is testing the power of this institution like no one before him. When the Republican candidate leading in every national and most state polls not only refuses to participate in a debate hosted by the most powerful media outlet on the right but actually organizes a competing event designed to undermine the legitimacy of the official debate, that’s an act of outright insubordination against the prevailing political norms and institutions of civil society.

It’s also an act that exposes how little formal power such norms and institutions ever really possess. They gain their force solely from our collective willingness to abide by them. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out in a surprisingly insightful rant on his radio show earlier this week, the system only works because when Fox says, “come take part in this debate,” the candidates respond, “Yes, please!” All it takes for the system to break down is for the frontrunner to walk away, ignore (or attack) the gatekeeper, and use other media outlets to go over its head to speak directly to the voters, circumventing (and badly undercutting) the institution in the process.

This, Linker goes on to say, is why the rise of Trump means the decay of democracy into “darker forms of government.”

He’s right about that, but with Brad Gregory’s book in mind, if Trump is a Luther figure, it’s important to keep in mind how the institutions of American life have failed, giving rise to him. Michael Brendan Dougherty says, of Trump voters:

Working-class whites are increasingly atomized and disconnected from their communities, larger networks of family, the political process, and the nation. They identify as religious, even if they are backslidden. They support the traditional family, even if they come from and create broken homes. In other words, they are people who aspire to be more like social conservatives, though they lack the material and spiritual resources to become like them.

Donald Trump’s campaign has re-exposed them, their unique problems, and their perspective to the political class. It’s been a rude experience for many in the political class. The Trump campaign has also proven, so far at least, that this class of voter will turn out for a rally for someone who truly solicits their attention. When his carnival show leaves town, there’s still plenty of work to do to rebuild this class and their communities.

This is true, but how did these people get into that miserable state? A lot of it, of course, has to do with foolish personal choices. Neither the government, nor the church, nor the school can compel a man or a woman to restrain their passions and live virtuously. But that does not get the institutions of American life off the hook.

The political class in America — notably the Republican Party, along with the Clinton Democrats — presided over the de-industrialization of America, and the financialization of the economy. The Republican Party, once the party of national security, led the nation into a ruinous Middle Eastern war, and to this day cannot admit what it did and why it was wrong. The Democratic Party and its supporters in media and academia have been on a decades-long quest to promote corrosive identity politics and to deconstruct and demonize the traditional family, as well as  the core liberal idea that, as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, what really matters is not the color of your skin but the content of your character.

The mass media — news and entertainment — relentlessly promote hedonism,  radical individualism, and the dissolution of any bonds not self-chosen as liberation. Where in the schools, or in colleges, or in families, or in churches, is any of this opposed? Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen wrote on Facebook last night:

My students are generally very nice, fetching, polite, good-hearted know-nothings. They are not the know-nothings of old, those ferocious if vicious defenders of a passing old order (some of whom were beat up by the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame). They simply know almost nothing, a consequence of the abysmal failure of their elders to teach them anything beyond the art of being nice, taking tests and getting ahead. To the simplest questions that I pose asking about history, myth, song, authors, great and classic books, they can offer only vacant and slightly panicked stares. They are the vanguard of the end of the Republic that we are witnessing before our eyes. They are the fruits of the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the history of the world.

We have created a Res Idiotica – a nation devoted wholly to private things, the enforced solipsism of lives shaped without pasts and in which the future is regarded as a foreign country. If we look for whom to blame for the wreckage accumulating in our midst, we have only to look in the mirror.

Yes, that’s true. The crisis of authority and decay is by no means a top-down phenomenon. The institutions of American life — government, law, academia, religion, business, the market, the family and so forth — are in a crisis more severe than many of us have understood till now. Can they reform themselves, and regain the trust of the people? Can the people ever bring themselves to trust institutions? Well, could the Renaissance Catholic Church reform itself? Or did so many people have so much invested — literally and figuratively — in the rotting old order that they couldn’t imagine changing.

Last night, watching those Fox moderators (who mostly asked good questions) of the Republican presidential candidates, I couldn’t help thinking that the way those journalists framed the intellectual contest, and the way the politicians answered them, seemed very disconnected from what’s actually happening in America. The entire program was evidence of out-of-touch, decaying institutions. And so too was the Trump rally.

History tells us that we had better be careful with revolution, because the consequences are unpredictable. Jeffrey A. Tucker says that as disgusted as Americans are with institutions, we need to be very, very careful about the form our protest takes. Excerpt:

Some of these ideas are so extreme that, it’s true, the establishment doesn’t like them. That’s a good thing. Establishments are as Machiavelli described: stable machines that keep competitors at bay but otherwise seek to make the system work for themselves. They resist rampant populism that would lead to a pillaging of the nation that is serving them so well.

To understand Machiavelli, realize that his black beast was the cleric Savonarola, Florence’s quasi-dictator who led a mass movement of crazed pietists who pillaged and burned material possessions as a pathway to heaven. The Bonfire of the Vanities of 1487 was one result. This is exactly the kind of mania that establishments exist to keep at bay.

It is the height of political naïveté and historical ignorance to believe that anti-establishment populism and the cause of human liberty are united in the same struggle. They are not.

Savonarola, you should keep in mind, was a 15th century Dominican monk who rose to power protesting against the Church’s corruption. I visited his monastic cell in Florence, and later stood on the very site on the Piazza Signoria where he was burned at the stake. Having read his history, I understand why he was so furious. I also understand why the Florentines, having had enough of his radicalism, killed him.

We are at a particularly dangerous moment, I think. The institutions of the Establishment are in serious trouble. The family is going to pieces, the churches, generally, aren’t effective in turning this around, and the ghost of Christianity is dissipating. We don’t know our past, we aren’t thinking of our future, we don’t know where we’re going, and we don’t even know who we are. One thinks of the famous lines of Livy, writing about the dissolution of the Roman Republic and the coming of Caesarism, owing to the corruption of its people and institutions:

I invite the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men and what the means, both in politics and war, by which Rome’s power was first acquired and subsequently expanded, I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch first the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.

What chiefly makes the study of history wholesome and profitable is this, that in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings.

This is why Alasdair MacIntyre’s words, referring not to the collapse of the Roman Republic, but of Imperial Rome, guide me:

A crucial turning point in that earlier [5C] history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.

This has been a discouraging post. More on the good I see emerging out of the ruins in the next post. We are not without hope!

John Lukacs vs. Populism

In 2005, the great Hungary-born conservative (he prefers the term “reactionary”) historian John Lukacs published an unfortunately not-very-good book called Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred. It wasn’t very good simply because it reads like his notebook, not like an actual book. It’s not well organized, I mean. But there are gems scattered throughout, and they glitter with particular brightness in this political moment. Keep in mind that Lukacs, who was born in Hungary, suffered forced labor under the Nazis, and fled Soviet-imposed communism — is a traditional conservative, and has the traditional conservative’s fear of populism. Excerpts from the book:

It is because of its nationalism that the Republican Party has become populist, at least during the past forty or so years. We have seen that by the 1930s American progressives and populists diverged: most of the remaining progressives became internationalists, while most of the populists were nationalists. Indeed, it may be argued (and the United States is but one example of this widespread phenomenon) that, more than often, populism is nationalist socialism. And while populists remain opposed to international capitalism, they have become less and less inimical to nationalist capitalists or to nationalist billionaires. [!!!! — RD]

And:

Meanwhile, we ought to consider the tendency of journalists and of political commentators throughout the Western world: their extreme sensitivity to every manifestation suggesting the appearance of so-called right-wing political phenomena anywhere. That sensitivity is not comparable to anxieties about a resurgence of the extreme Left. It is not attributable to “political correctness” (a stupid phrase) either. It reflects, instead, anxiety and fear about the potential mass appeal of populist nationalism in the age of popular sovereignty.

More:

[I]n the age of democracy what is superficial often matters, because of the very nature of society, of the structure of events, of the widespread extent and propagation of such slogans at the expense of private thinking and of self-knowledge.

More:

In our times … toward the end of the Modern Age, the difference — indeed, the increased discrepancy — between fame and honor has become so large that in the characters of presidents and in those of most public figures in all kinds of occupation, the passion for fame has just about obliterated the now remote and ancient sense of honor.

And:

One of the fundamental differences between extremes of Right and Left is this: in most instances hatred moves the former; fear the latter. … [W]hile hatred amounts to a moral weakness, it can be, alas, often, and at least in the short run, a source of strength. Whence the advantage of the Right over the Left — especially in the age of democratic populism.

More:

It is insufficient and shortsighted to attribute such inclinations [fear and hatred] only to extremists. This is especially so during the devolution of liberal democracy into populism, popular nationalism being an inevitable ingredient of the latter, the wet cement that binds otherwise classless societies together. This, for instance, has now become the principal creed, as well as the principal asset, of “conservatives” and of the Republican Party in the United States, confident as they are in reapoing large and political electoral benefits from the “unpatriotic” and “liberal” characteristics of their potential opponents.

Another:

It is hate that unites people, whereas love is always individual, rather than collective. To this we may add what immediately negates whatever moral essence the purposes of class struggles or of racism or of modern nationalism may have: and this is that love is never the love of oneself, it is the love of another. That is the saving grace of mankind.

Another:

Fear and hatred are human characteristics, and we shall never be able to eliminate them entirely. We must recognize not only their existence but their latent — and often more than latent — presence among those who wish to wield power. Whether some of them will be actually able to achieve power depends on many matters, most of them unpredictable, and seldom visible among the ever more complicated and manipulated appearances of politics and powers in this age of mass democracy. It depends whether and how the devolution of democracy into populism proceeds in the twenty-first century.

One more. This is good:

The “Left” has been losing its appeal, almost everywhere. It may be that in the future the true divisions will be not between Right and Left but between two kinds of Right: between people on the Right whose binding belief is their contempt for Leftists, who hate liberals more than they love liberty, and others who love liberty more than they fear liberals; between nationalists and patriots; between those who believe that America’s destiny is to rule the world and others who do not believe that; between those who trust technology and machines and others who trust tradition and old human decencies; between those who support “development” and others who wish to protect the conservation of land — in sum, between those who do not question Progress and others who do.

If you want to read the whole thing, buy the book.

When the book was released 11 years ago, Jeet Heer profiled Lukacs, “the anti-populist,” in the Boston Globe. Excerpt:

In conversation, he’s willing to grant praise to a certain form of populism, citing the mass movements that have brought democracy to Central and Eastern Europe. ”The people are often right,” he notes. ”Just think of my country. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a real popular uprising. Although it was defeated it had very salutary consequences in the long run. It was the Stalingrad of international communism. The repression in Hungary afterward was much less. They did not quite restore 100 percent terror. That is why in 1989 the change of the regime came along without bloodshed.”

But even when pressed, Lukacs has difficulty finding any good words for populism, American-style. To him, the rise of right-wing populism here is troubling because it means that the conservatives no longer serve as a shield against the dangers of mass politics. Instead, ”conservative” has come to mean simply ”antiliberal.”

”Nationalism is a very low and cheap common denominator that unites people,” he says. ”It is hatred that unites people. People take satisfaction from the idea that we are good because our enemies are evil. This is a very American syndrome but it is also universally true of mankind.”

”In this country the Republicans are the nationalist party,” he continues. ”That’s why they won the election-on the basis of symbols. I think the importance of economics in people’s political choice of vote is vastly exaggerated. We live in such an age of intellectual stupidity that people use the wrong terms. People think this is a ‘cultural issue’ or a ‘moral issue.’ These are half-truths.”

Although Lukacs has won his share of esteem in a career that spans more than five decades, he now finds himself oddly isolated as someone who criticizes the Republican party from a traditionalist vantage point.

”What is there traditional in George Bush?” he asks with exasperation. ”Nothing. Nothing.”

Trump: ‘Shocking, Vulgar — and Right’

Tucker Carlson, in Politico, calls Trump “shocking, vulgar, and right.” Carson says he gets why people can’t stand Trump, but Republicans have a lot to learn from him.

Among them: that Trump exists because the Conservative-Industrial Complex has failed. All those billions sent to the think tanks, politicians, and activists groups over the years. What truly conservative results do they have to show for it? Carson suggests very damn little. Excerpt:

Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents “an existential threat to conservatism.”

Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal.

Ouch. And Carson speaks here to the pleasure of watching Trump mouth off:

When was the last time you stopped yourself from saying something you believed to be true for fear of being punished or criticized for saying it? If you live in America, it probably hasn’t been long. That’s not just a talking point about political correctness. It’s the central problem with our national conversation, the main reason our debates are so stilted and useless. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t have the words to describe it. You can’t even think about it clearly.

This depressing fact made Trump’s political career. In a country where almost everyone in public life lies reflexively, it’s thrilling to hear someone say what he really thinks, even if you believe he’s wrong. It’s especially exciting when you suspect he’s right.

The *#@^& Republicans on Capitol Hill won’t speak up about how they might protect religious liberty in the face of advancing gay rights because they don’t understand the issue, because they’re terrified of being called bigots, and because they’re gutless in the face of Big Business. I don’t know if Trump cares about the issue, but I know that if he could be persuaded that it was important, he wouldn’t give a rat’s rear end what The New York Times or the Business Roundtable had to say, he would do it. He would come into office owing the GOP nothing. This is bad how?

Read the whole thing. I’m begging you to — especially, if you are a conservative Christian, to read the last paragraph on the first page. It’s perfect.

A conservative friend said to me today, “I’m really torn. I can’t stand Trump, but I love what he’s doing.” I bet a lot of people feel that way.

Trump As Republican Apocalypse

I am fond of the word “apocalypse,” which in common usage means “the end of the world,” but etymologically means “an unmasking.” For the Republican Party, Donald Trump is an apocalypse in both senses of the term.

It is plain that he is destroying the party establishment, and now he’s beating the hell out of the conservative media establishment. As Damon Linker writes, leading conservative figures have a peculiar habit of seeing themselves as outside the establishment, even though they have built a massive political, media, think-tank, and activist establishment of their own, and conservative Republicans have been at or near the helm of the federal government for many of the last 35 years. Here’s Linker:

By thinking of themselves as perennially outside the Republican power-structure, members of the counter-establishment conveniently exempt themselves from the need to admit and learn from their own mistakes. It’s always someone else’s fault. The Iraq War and its outcome may be the most egregious and disgraceful example of such shirking, but it’s not the only one.

Taking a stand against Trump is all well and good. But I’d have been more impressed by an honest effort to come clean: Yes, we’re the establishment; yes, we’ve made some massive mistakes and need to change course; but Trump is not the answer.

Instead, we’re left with the same old denial of responsibility.

Until that changes, the Republican establishment will remain vulnerable to the anti-establishment furies it unleashed so many years ago and has never ceased to encourage.

Read the whole thing. It’s very good, and tells the truth. It really is hard to overstate the degree to which people on the Right’s leadership class think of themselves as outsiders. The narrative is key to their sense of themselves and their mission. They really aren’t cynical about it (well, most of them aren’t). And they’re not entirely wrong when it comes to some establishments, like the academy. The point is that Republicans today thinking of themselves as counter-establishment, as if they were the first Reaganauts crossing the Beltway like the Sultan’s forces breaching the walls of Constantinople, has about it the moldy whiff of decrepitude and self-deceit, like Fidel Castro playing the eternal revolutionary.

Conor Friedersdorf has a great survey quoting Rush Limbaugh’s ridiculous pantomime, pretending to be an outsider to the GOP establishment, but effectively conceding that he’s at the very center of the thing. From Conor’s piece:

There is no one who rails against “the Republican establishment” more frequently than Rush Limbaugh. Every week he speaks about it on the radio with disdain. And he always does so while holding himself apart, as if he’s describing a rival tribe. “Now, as you will hear, I’m being blamed for Trump.  Oh, yes.  Does that surprise you?  I am being blamed for Trump now,” he said earlier this week. “You know, the bottom line is, you know why there’s a Donald Trump?  It’s very, very simple. It has nothing to do with me. The Republican Party, whatever you want to call it, Republican establishment, the ruling class, I don’t care what you want to call it, they are responsible for Donald Trump. They are responsible.”

Conor goes on to quote Limbaugh at length from his radio broadcast yesterday, bragging about how close he is and long has been to specific figures in the establishment — presidents, politicians, media moguls, businessmen — and how they have sought his counsel over the years. It’s incredible to read, the lack of self-awareness. Conor sums it up like this:

When Republicans control the White House, Rush Limbaugh gets invited to stay over and socialize with the president. He dined in the office of perhaps the most consequential Republican speaker of the House. One of his best friends runs the most powerful media organization on the right. Its highest-rated anchor attended his wedding. He knows multiple U.S. senators and most of the GOP presidential candidates every cycle.

But he thinks of himself as totally apart from “the establishment,” the “ruling class,” those other people who are responsible for the state of the Republican Party.

Yep. Here’s Limbaugh as late as last year, instructing Republican presidential candidates to reject the idea that the Iraq War was a failure. But of course, he bears no responsibility for any mistakes the GOP and its leadership made.

To paraphrase Orwell in Animal Farm:

“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the Conservative Outsiders. The creatures outside looked from Outsider to Establishmentarian, and from Establishmentarian to Outsider, and from Outsider to Establishmentarian again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Verily, one would have to have a heart of stone not to take pleasure in this apocalypse. The problem is that, as every philosophical conservative knows, you have to be very suspicious of tearing a thing down, because you don’t know what’s going to take its place.

The Return of Eugenics

Economist Tyler Cowen, on progressives and eugenics:

The subtitle of Thomas Leonard’s new and excellent book is the apt Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era.

I take it you all know by now this is quite an ugly story, namely that both early progressives and late 19th century American economists were often quite appalling racists and eugenicists, and that such racism was built into the professional structure of economics in a fairly fundamental way, including but not restricted to the American Economics Association.

The link is to a review of the book in The New Republic. Here’s how Malcolm Harris’s review begins:

The 1926 case Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes is a favorite liberal American story. On one side, a substitute accused of teaching evolution, the famed progressive attorney Clarence Darrow, and science itself. On the other, the state of Tennessee, creationism, and the populist demagogue William Jennings Bryan, who by the end of the trial was only days from death. Scopes lost the battle, but reason and progress won the war and the film adaptation. The Scopes Monkey Trial, as it was called, is a progressive touchstone, and in the minds of many it continues to describe the difference between the two mainstream American political ideologies.

When one revisits the primary material, however, the mainstream liberal narrative is far too simple. Jennings Bryan railed against evolution, true, but not just evolution as we understand the theory today. His never-delivered closing statement indicted the “dogma of darkness and death” as a danger to the country’s moral fabric. It sounds far out, but at the time evolution came with a social agenda that its proponents taught as fact. Jennings Bryan didn’t use its name; today, we call it eugenics.

Scopes was charged for teaching from a textbook called A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems, published in 1914. The book taught Darwin’s doctrine as fact, but it didn’t leave his conclusions there[Emphasis mine — RD]. The author, George William Hunter, not only asserted the biological difference of races, he insisted on the vital importance of what he called “the science of being well born”—eugenics. Like most progressives of the time, Hunter believed in “the improvement of man” via scientific methods. That meant promoting personal hygiene, proper diet, and reproductive control. A Civic Biology also has suggestions for what to do with “bad-gened” people, in a section called “The Remedy.” “If such people were lower animals,” the books says, “we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity would not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe.”

The textbook was wrong, both about degenerate genes and humanity’s near-term tolerance for genocide. Read between the twin specters of human engineering, The Holocaust and the American slave-breeding industry—the abolition of which was younger than Jennings Bryan—the warning in his closing argument seems not only warranted, but prophetic:



Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed, but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the slip of its compass and thus endanger its cargo.

“Some of its unproven hypotheses rob the slip of its compass and thus endanger its cargo” is a near-perfect criticism of evolutionary theory and the era’s progressive thought as a whole. And if today’s liberals were to revisit their ideological foundations with some attention, they might not like what they see.

Read the whole review.  Harris concludes, weirdly, by saying it’s hard for him to see what any of this history has to do with our current era. Really, he can’t? The Browser‘s encapsulation points the way:

We can relativise such behaviour as a product of its time and alien to us now. But advances in genetics are forcing societies to confront basic questions of eugenics once again, and with better science. What are our moral arguments this time?

Cowen argues for a Millian conception of individual liberty as a prophylactic against neo-eugenics. I don’t see how that is strong enough to counter the will to power in contemporary liberalism, in both its progressive and conservative iterations, but especially in its progressive form.

Broadly speaking, the absolute telos of contemporary progressives is the Self, liberated from all bonds — especially sexual — that inhibit free choice. In its extreme popular form, we have the absurdity of people actually believing that a human being who is biologically male is rightly called female if he wishes to be. The transhumanists know what they’re doing. Our culture is sleepwalking into a world in which there is no such thing as human nature, and no such thing as humanity. Seriously, if we cannot agree on what it means to be human, aside from conscious desire, how can we agree to put limits on the individual will?

We can’t. To answer the Browser, there are no arguments strong enough to overcome the nominalism of our time, because reason is weak. Reason has to start from assumed premises, but it appears that there are no widely uncontested premises. In the Progressive Era, the liberal Protestants promulgated eugenics. Only the fundamentalists and the Catholics spoke against it. American Christianity today is far too weak to meaningfully oppose eugenics, when the argument for eugenics is stated as the liberation of personal choice. This is not because progressivism is evil, necessarily, but because of what most in our society believe about the status of individuals and the meaning (or non-meaning) of nature. Under liberalism, in both its conservative and progressive forms, the individual and his desires have come to be near-sacrosanct, and of course in the modern era, Nature is seen as inert matter, devoid of inherent meaning.

What’s to stop it? Where are the arguments that people will listen to, and be convinced by? You tell me. How do you argue with “I feel…”?

Trump’s Machiavellian Move

Cards on the table: all day long, I’ve thought that Donald Trump looks weak and petty walking away from the Fox debate over Megyn Kelly. But tonight, I’m thinking this guy is a strategic genius. Here’s why.

He’s neck and neck with Ted Cruz in Iowa, but has the momentum. This debate is Cruz’s last, best chance to stop him before the caucuses on Saturday. Cruz is a much better debater than Trump, and Trump knows that. He has everything to lose by going on that Fox stage tomorrow night, because Cruz would throw everything he had at him. He needed an excuse to dodge it. Megyn Kelly? She would do.

But then Fox gave him all he needed with this press release:

We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president,” Fox said. “A nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.

Et voilà:

It was the childishly written & taunting PR statement by Fox that made me not do the debate, more so than lightweight reporter, @megynkelly.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 27, 2016

And here’s where it gets really good. Trump turned up tonight on Bill O’Reilly’s show, in a move that was a real blow to Fox head Roger Ailes, believed to have been the author of that neener-neener press release. Says New York magazine:

New signs emerged today at just how frantic Ailes has become to get Trump back to the table. The two men have not spoken since yesterday, sources told me. This morning, Joe Scarborough reported that Ailes called Trump’s daughter Ivanka and wife, Melania, to get through to the GOP front-runner. But Trump is saying he’ll only talk to Rupert Murdoch directly. In a further challenge to Ailes’s power, Bill O’Reilly is scheduled to host Trump. Last night, Ailes directed Sean Hannity to cancel Trump’s interview. O’Reilly’s refusal to abide by a ban adds a new dynamic to the clash of egos. For O’Reilly, this is an opportunity to take back star power from Kelly. Sources say O’Reilly feels he made Kelly’s career by promoting her on his show, and he’s been furious that Kelly surpassed him in the ratings.

Meanwhile, Fox producers are scrambling with the practical matter of how to program the debate without Trump.

Oh, the egos! And now, Trump delivers the masterstroke: he’s saying he will hold a counterprogramming event in Iowa at the same time as the GOP debate. Of course the competing cable networks will be there, covering it live. And which one do you think viewers at home will prefer to watch? It gets better: Team Trump has reached out to undercard debate candidates and invited them to join him at his event after their kiddie-table debate ends. The NYT points out that two of those candidates, 2008 Iowa winner Mike Huckabee and 2012 Iowa winner Rick Santorum, have been focusing their attacks on Ted Cruz.

A friend e-mailed this afternoon to say she believed Trump had finally done the thing that punctured his balloon, this ducking the Fox debate. I think we’ve all learned by now not to say that. I doubt she thinks that tonight. Donald Trump is a genius. Yes, he might be an evil genius, but he’s a genius. He’s demolishing the GOP apparatus and Roger Ailes both. The audacity of that guy is something to behold. He’s rewriting all the rules, in real time. Does he ever lose?

What Is The West, Anyway?

Der Spiegel is disturbed because the right-of-center Polish government is making the country “anti-Western.” Excerpts:

In total, about 20,000 people simultaneously protested in Warsaw, Lodz, Berlin, London and Prague that Saturday, marking the third major protest campaign since the national conservatives came into power. The protesters included gay and lesbian activists, environmentalists and veterans of the anti-communist movement that existed before the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as Catholic conservatives and ordinary citizens. They are united by the same fear: that the national conservatives will transform the country to suit their agenda and will curtail freedom in the process.

Immediately after its election victory in late October, the government began its “national revolution,” using Hungary as a role model. Its goal is to orient the government, the media, the judiciary, education, government-owned businesses and even theaters and museums toward a single center of power. And this power center is essentially one person: PiS leader and founder Jaroslaw Kaczynski, officially represented by President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Beata Szydlo.

But Poland is not Hungary, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski now faces opposition from a protest movement which seems to be gathering more and more supporters by the week. Unlike the Hungarians, Poles are accustomed to success. Their economy has been growing steadily for the last 25 years, creating a self-confident, affluent, pro-European middle class which is now taking to the streets to defend its freedom against Kaczynski.

More:

But unlike KOR, KOD is mainly a movement of older people. At 31, Joanna Erbel is one of the group’s youngest activists. She lives in Mokotów, a former working class neighborhood that is attracting many young Poles, partly as a result of Erbel’s efforts. She has been involved in the local self-administration for years and campaigns on behalf of streetcars and bike lanes. She fights to preserve old buildings and traditional milk bars, which serve inexpensive borscht and pierogi.

She has just baked a spice cake, or an anti-PiS cake, as she calls it — vegan and dairy-free. The cake is a direct response to a recent comment by the foreign minister, who said that vegetarians and bicyclists are not real Poles. The national conservatives also believe that promiscuity and the “mixing of cultures and races” are ruining Poland.

“A decent Pole eats cutlets and pickled pork, drives a car and marries young. That’s what the PiS wants the whole country to be like,” says Erbel. “The health-conscious, globalized middle class on bikes — that’s the bogeyman.” In other words, people like Erbel, who emcees a male strip cabaret in her free time and is engaged to a Protestant pastor, who also has a male partner and helps organize annual gay pride parades.

The conservatives reject anything that smells like the West, says Erbel. “In doing so, they are capitalizing on the dissatisfaction of all those who feel that they have not benefited sufficiently from the post-Communist era.” Those include not just blue-collar workers and the elderly, but young people too. In fact, the PiS owes its election victory to younger voters. The party’s social promises hit home both in eastern Poland and among many Poles born after 1989.

Gosh, I can’t imagine why Poles are reluctant to let their country be run by a class represented by male strip club emcees engaged to bisexual liberal Protestant pastors.

Steve Sailer recently wrote about how the clash in Poland is resonant of the civil war within the GOP. Excerpts:

In the U.S. before the rise of Trump, the emerging schisms on the right—globalism versus nationalism, elitism versus populism, diversity versus solidarity—were mostly papered over by Republicans for the sake of putting up a united front against Democrats. But Poland’s recent history is revealing because the left is so discredited there (in last October’s parliamentary elections, the top five parties, which won 83 percent of the vote, were all more or less on the right) that the tensions among 21st-century conservatives already dominate national debate. This was exemplified by the Polish rightist parties’ clashing over how to respond to German chancellor Angela Merkel’s diktat to invite a million-Muslim mob into Europe, which wound up with a single party winning an absolute majority in parliament for the first time in the history of modern free Poland.

Polish politics tend to baffle Anglophones because the spelling of the leaders’ names is so eye glazing. Moreover, to a slightly lesser extent than Hungarian, Polish is a language little known by outsiders, so it’s hard for Anglophones to get an unbiased sense of what’s going on politically in Poland or Hungary. Most of the opinions we hear out of Poland and Hungary come from English-speaking cosmopolites who find the populist policies backed by the majorities deplorable.

Or, in Spiegel‘s case, German-speaking cosmopolites. Sailer adds, “Poland is everything you are not supposed to be in the 21st century: a conservative, religious, and homogeneous nation-state.”

Read the whole thing.

 

In truth, I don’t know enough about the situation in Poland to take sides, but this controversy raises a good question, or rather, two closely related questions:

What is Europe? What is the West?

Are Europe and the West to be defined primarily by Age of Faith, or by the Enlightenment? In truth, Europe and the West are both things, but the Enlightenment Europe cannot tolerate its predecessor. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, once had this to say about the European Union:

If Christianity, on one hand, has found its most effective form in Europe, it is necessary, on the other hand, to say that in Europe a culture has developed that constitutes the absolutely most radical contradiction not only of Christianity, but of the religious and moral traditions of humanity.

From this, one understands that Europe is experiencing a true and proper “test of tension”; from this, one also understands the radicalism of the tensions that our continent must face. However from this emerges also, and above all, the responsibility that we Europeans must assume at this historical moment in the debate on the definition of Europe, on its new political shape. It is not a question of a nostalgic rearguard battle of history being played out, but rather a great responsibility for today’s humanity.

Let us take a closer look at this opposition between the two cultures that have characterized Europe. In the debate on the Preamble of the European Constitution, this opposition was seen in two controversial points: the question of the reference to God in the Constitution and the mention of the Christian roots of Europe. Given that in article 52 of the Constitution the institutional rights of Churches are guaranteed, we can be at peace, it is said.

But this means that in the life of Europe, the Churches find a place in the realm of the political commitment, while, in the realm of the foundations of Europe, the imprint of their content has no place. The reasons that are given in the public debate for this clear “no” are superficial, and it is obvious that more than indicating the real motivation, they conceal it. The affirmation that the mention of the Christian roots of Europe injures the sentiments of many non-Christians who are in Europe, is not very convincing, given that it relates, first of all, to an historical fact that no one can seriously deny.

Naturally, this historical mention has a reference to the present. To mention the roots implies indicating as well the residual sources of moral orientation, which is a factor of Europe’s identity. Who would be offended? Whose identity is threatened?

The Muslims, who in this respect are often and willingly brought in, do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations, but by the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundations. Neither are our Jewish fellow citizens offended by the reference to the Christian roots of Europe, in as much as these roots go back to Mount Sinai: They bear the sign of the voice that made itself heard on the mountain of God and unite with us in the great fundamental orientations that the Decalogue has given humanity. The same is true for the reference to God: It is not the mention of God that offends those who belong to other religions, but rather the attempt to build the human community absolutely without God.

The motivations of this twofold “no” are more profound than one would think from the reasons offered. They presuppose the idea that only the radical Enlightenment culture, which has reached its full development in our time, could be constitutive for European identity. Next to this culture, then, different religious cultures can coexist with their respective rights, on the condition and to the degree in which they respect the criteria of the Enlightenment culture, and are subordinated to it.

One more excerpt:

At the time of the Enlightenment there was an attempt to understand and define the essential moral norms, saying that they would be valid “etsi Deus non daretur,” even in the case that God did not exist. In the opposition of the confessions and in the pending crisis of the image of God, an attempt was made to keep the essential values of morality outside the contradictions and to seek for them an evidence that would render them independent of the many divisions and uncertainties of the different philosophies and confessions. In this way, they wanted to ensure the basis of coexistence and, in general, the foundations of humanity. At that time, it was thought to be possible, as the great deep convictions created by Christianity to a large extent remained. But this is no longer the case.

The search for such a reassuring certainty, which could remain uncontested beyond all differences, failed. Not even the truly grandiose effort of Kant was able to create the necessary shared certainty. Kant had denied that God could be known in the realm of pure reason, but at the same time he had represented God, freedom and immortality as postulates of practical reason, without which, coherently, for him no moral behavior was possible.

Does not today’s situation of the world make us think perhaps that he might have been right? I would like to express it in a different way: The attempt, carried to the extreme, to manage human affairs disdaining God completely leads us increasingly to the edge of the abyss, to man’s ever greater isolation from reality. We must reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment and say: Even one who does not succeed in finding the way of accepting God, should, nevertheless, seek to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God existed. This is the advice Pascal gave to his friends who did not believe. In this way, no one is limited in his freedom, but all our affairs find the support and criterion of which they are in urgent need.

The text of the entire lecture is here. 

Poland is now deciding what it means for Poles to be European, and to be Western. From what I have read, I would not wholly sympathize with the Law and Justice Party’s acts and policies. But the protesters who want Poland to march off the post-Christian cliff with the rest of western Europe represent no future at all.

A Glimpse Of What We Have Lost

Yesterday a reader recommended that I take a look at the 2013 BBC2 documentary/reality series Tudor Monastery Farm, episodes of which are available on YouTube. Last night I watched the first episode, embedded below, and it was really something else.

The show is part of an ongoing BBC series showing what farm life would have been like in various historical periods (Victorian, Edwardian, Wartime). In the Tudor version, a historian and two archeologists recreate what it was like to be a farmer under Henry VII, just before the English Reformation. Ruth Goodman, the historian, talks about what she learned from the experience:

‘I had such a happy summer I feel somehow lighter,’ says the 50-year-old historian, her eyes widening. ‘The lack of machines had an impact, as did the religious texts I was reading. We had to make a lot, too – even rush mats to sleep on – and I think there’s something about making things that’s good for the soul. I also got very good at spinning; I’ve done it before but now I’m practically an expert at turning sheep’s wool into yarn.

‘When we did the Wartime farm last year I didn’t really enjoy it, I felt ground down. But with this one I’ve felt such a connection with the countryside. It was like I really felt and smelled and tasted and touched what it was like to be on a Tudor farm. It’s been a bit of an epiphany. It helped that the main drink of the period was ale,’ she adds with another giggle.

Tudor Farm goes further back in time than the series has before. It’s the year 1500 and the reign of the first Tudor King, Henry VII. The Church was absolute and like many farms of the time – up to a third – Ruth’s is on land owned by a monastery.

‘What’s so interesting is that Protestantism hadn’t really made much of an impact in Britain and there was little science, so the Catholic Church was the only way of understanding the world,’ she says. ‘It felt unchallenged. I don’t think there’s a place anywhere in the modern world where religion is the only way of understanding things.’

Goodman is, and remains, an atheist. Funny thing is, watching that first episode made me, a Christian, feel an intense longing for the sacramentalism of the life those people had. Watch the episode linked above and see if you don’t agree with me. What I mean is the sense they had that God was everywhere, and that their lives had real substance because they were anchored in and ordered by the divine. I’ve been reading intensely for the past two weeks about the ideas involved in the medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation religious consciousness, but this is the first time in recent memory that I’ve seen a sense of what that must have looked like. (The recent novel Laurus, set in roughly the same time period, but in Russia, powerfully evokes the same sensibility.)

Yes, undoubtedly, we have gained a very great deal since those times. But we’ve also lost something precious.

Here’s a BBC guide to the six Tudor Farm episodes, which conclude with Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and the end of that way of life. I remember visiting the Salisbury Cathedral a few years back, and being stunned by the aesthetic violence the English Reformation did to the 13th century church. Tudor Farm brings to mind what it must have done to everyday life for ordinary Englishmen of the day.

UPDATE: Look, if you’re planning to make a remark about how the Tudors didn’t live this way because the show doesn’t re-enact disease and misery, spare yourself the trouble. I won’t approve it. I think we are all grown-ups here, and I think we all know that life in rural England in 1500 wasn’t a hobby farm. That has nothing to do with my point in this post. Furthermore, if you are planning to make a remark about how modern dentistry, air conditioning, and nookie-without-issue, etc., proves that we have nothing whatsoever to learn from our ancestors, don’t bore me with that Whiggish nitwittery. Stick to the subject of this post if you want to see your comment. It is possible to find truth and beauty in the lives of people in the distant past without affirming that they lived in Eden.

SJWs Vs. MLK

A liberal reader sends this story from the University of Oregon student newspaper as an example of what boobs her side can be:

Since 1986, the University of Oregon has housed a quote by Martin Luther King Jr. in the lobby of the Erb Memorial Union. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream…”

However, this hasn’t always been the quote that filled the entrance of the EMU and there was talk of the quote changing again. The quote is not going to change, but that decision was not made without some hard thought by the Student Union Board.

Laurie Woodward, the Director of the Student Union said that when she approached the union with the question of if they wanted to keep the current MLK quote or supplement a new one, one of the students asked, “Does the MLK quote represent us today?”

“Diversity is so much more than race. Obviously race still plays a big role. But there are people who identify differently in gender and all sorts of things like that,” sophomore architecture major, Mia Ashley said.

So, they made the right decision, but the fact that this was even an issue to which anyone devoted “hard thought” because hey, King was insufficiently appreciative of transgenders, is a sign of insanity.

This is not one of this “ha ha, look at the crazy liberals” things, or at least not simply that. What does it say about a country in which educated people actually stop to wonder if one of the most famous moral expressions of the American creed ever uttered ought to be removed from a university’s public space because LGBT.

I cannot wait for the backlash. Honestly, I cannot. As Reason‘s Nick Gillespie, a gay rights supporter, says, 

The revolution eats its own, doesn’t it? And then, like a bulimic, it vomits it all up and gives it another go.