Rod Dreher's Blog, page 66

There Is No Good Wokeness

My pal David Brooks is a sunny, cheerful guy, but I think his natural optimism, and his personal politics, blind him to the seriousness of the crisis we face. His column today responds to an earlier response of mine to something he previously wrote, in which I said that he (David) was too optimistic. Specifically, David had written that he doesn’t get why conservatives are so pessimistic. I answered by explaining why, from my point of view.

Now he has responded back. I’m going to respond again — and by the way, I hate that we live in a culture where I have to say this, but David and I are friends, and we’re doing what friends do sometimes: disagreeing. This is normal. He felt the need to signal at the top of his column today that we’re friends. I appreciate that, but I regret that we live in a culture where people like him and me understand that that’s necessary. This is a conversation between friends.

Anyway, from David’s piece today:

I’m less alarmed by all of this because I have more confidence than Dreher and many other conservatives in the American establishment’s ability to co-opt and water down every radical progressive ideology. In the 1960s, left-wing radicals wanted to overthrow capitalism. We ended up with Whole Foods. The co-optation of wokeness seems to be happening right now.

The thing we call wokeness contains many elements. At its core is an honest and good-faith effort to grapple with the legacies of racism. In 2021, this element of wokeness has produced more understanding, inclusion and racial progress than we’ve seen in over 50 years. This part of wokeness is great.

But wokeness gets weirder when it’s entangled in the perversities of our meritocracy, when it involves demonstrating one’s enlightenment by using language — “problematize,” “heteronormativity,” “cisgender,” “intersectionality” — inculcated in elite schools or with difficult texts.

David, who is an acute observer of the rites and norms of the social elite, points out that there is a reason the fiercest controversies over wokeness are happening within elite institutions, like fancy coastal prep schools: because this is a battle among elites for status and power. He points out that the ridiculous CIA recruiting ad featuring the self-described cisgender intersectional Latina was really a way to signal to the best and brightest that they are still desired employees at CIA. David believes that the machinery of American success will co-opt and water down wokeness. More:

Corporations and other establishment organizations co-opt almost unconsciously. They send ambitious young people powerful signals about what level of dissent will be tolerated while embracing dissident values as a form of marketing. By taking what was dangerous and aestheticizing it, they turn it into a product or a brand. Pretty soon key concepts like “privilege” are reduced to empty catchphrases floating everywhere.

The economist and cultural observer Tyler Cowen expects wokeness in this sense won’t disappear. Writing for Bloomberg last week, he predicted it would become something more like the Unitarian Church — “broadly admired but commanding only a modicum of passion and commitment.”

This would be fine with me. As I say, there are (at least) two elements to wokeness. One focuses on concrete benefits for the disadvantaged — reparations, more diverse hiring, more equitable housing and economic policies. The other instigates savage word wars among the highly advantaged. If we can have more of the former and less of the latter, we’ll all be better off.

Read the whole Brooks column. 

As I see it, the core of our disagreement is over the effects of having a leadership class radicalized by wokeness. David thinks it’s not all bad, but it will fade in time. I think it is entirely bad, and that even if it fades — I’ve got my doubts — the damage it does in the process is going to be immense. Let me explain.

Yesterday I was interviewed by a white, Ivy-educated American journalist working on a story about the postliberal Right. She was trying to understand where people like me come from. As we talked about wokeness, she agreed (for the sake of argument, at least; I don’t know if this is what she really believes, or if she was just trying to draw me out) that there are excesses, but that these excesses come from an attempt to address real problems (e.g., racial inequality), and are more or less excusable on those grounds.

I pushed back strongly on this. I argued that this amounts to excusing and even legitimizing real injustice through moral abstraction. It is not wrong to look at the disparities in achievement among racial groups, and to want to do something to improve matters for black people. But it is wrong to treat others unjustly for the sake of meeting an abstract ideal of racial justice. Ibram Kendi, the neoracist guru who has elites worshiping at his feet, has the crackpot Marxist idea that justice (“equity”) requires a proportional outcome. In order to achieve this, the theory goes, people who are not part of a favored minority group must be discriminated against, on the grounds that their better qualifications are somehow tainted by privilege.

This is not an abstract issue to me. In 1997, I applied for a film critic’s job at the newspaper in Austin, Texas. I was engaged to marry a woman who lived in Austin, and wanted to move there to start our married life. The section editor to whom I had been talking raved about my writing, and indicated that my hiring was a mere formality. Until he stopped communicating with me. I persisted in trying to figure out what I had done wrong. I discovered that the publisher of the newspaper had sent down an edict that the paper needed to bypass me, a white male, and search instead for a woman or a person of color.

None of my writing mattered to this white man, the publisher. I was nothing more than a bearer of skin color and the male sex. I phoned him personally, and offered to pay my own way to Austin, and asked for five minutes with him. He said that he might be willing to have coffee, but that I shouldn’t think that this was in any way a job interview. I didn’t go.

Months went by. One day, I received a phone call from the section editor. He was cheerful. He said that the national search for a woman or person of color had turned up no one whose work was as good as mine, so the paper would like to bring me in for an interview. In one of those turns that felt like a movie, I received that call while standing outside the New York Post building in midtown Manhattan. The Post had just offered me a job as their chief film critic, and I had accepted. I wanted to tell the section editor to kiss my you know what, but he was a good guy who had always wanted to hire me, but had been overruled by the enlightened liberal above him. I can’t say for sure, but I doubt the white Baby Boomer male liberal who discriminated against me in hiring resigned from his job so a woman or person of color could have it. But that’s how it goes with our progressive elites: they administer a system that makes less privileged people pay for their own sense of moral righteousness.

Things worked out well for me professionally, but what if they hadn’t? What if the Post had not offered me that job? I’m grateful for the way things went, ultimately, but I still feel the humiliation of being told that no matter how hard I had worked to improve my writing, and no matter how hard my parents, who were both born into rural poverty, worked to make sure I studied hard, and valued hard work and achievement, none of it mattered because of my race and my sex. It was wicked to do that to racial minorities and to women in the past, and it’s wrong to do it now to whites and males.

There is no way to reach perfect justice in this world. Even in the purest meritocracy, there will always be some power-holder somewhere who gives a leg up to his college roommate’s dopey son. But we are better off striving toward a world that sees people as individuals, not abstractions, and judges them on the quality of their work and the content of their character. It is not a social injustice that the NBA is disproportionately dominated by black men. If the telos of a basketball team is to win games, then hiring players solely on the basis of their capacity for excellence is the highest form of justice. But then, nobody who cares about NBA teams tolerates losing games. The idea of “equity” applied to the NBA would be a pathetic joke. As a society, we are more serious about sports than anything else — even winning wars, as the US military is now being co-opted by the language and the concepts of wokeness. You now hear senior military officials (like the head of the Joint Chiefs recently) claiming that diversity is key to having the strongest military. If you’ve worked in corporate America, you have heard this before. I have seen it myself, in newsroom settings, invoked as an incantation to cover the fact that we were hiring people who are not capable of performing up to standards, unless we declared (this is an actual quote I heard back in the day) that “diversity is a component of quality.” These are not harmless lies. I saw with my own eyes how this principle in action hurt the quality of the product, and caused bitterness among other employees, who could see the double standard at work.

Anyway, I don’t believe in the slightest that the core of racial wokeness is “an honest and good-faith effort to grapple with the legacies of racism.” I believe it is a naked attempt to exercise tribal politics, and to do so by (brilliantly) deploying moral language and victim status to disguise what is being done. It is a war on Deplorables justified by the same kind of linguistic chicanery that allowed, say, the Soviets to declare their subjection of Eastern Europe to be those countries’ “liberation.”

I truly don’t understand how my friend David can blithely hand-wave the effects of this poisonous ideology’s spread away, trusting that it will be co-opted by capitalism in the end. Has he not read Christopher Rufo’s stunning reporting documenting the imposition of this ideology on institutions, and the devastating effects of same? Does David not understand that teaching an entire generation of white kids to despise themselves because of the color of their skin is likely to spark a bitter racial backlash? The only people who believe that any of this is in “good faith” are those who already believe it.

What about teaching gender ideology to little children, as this program in Ontario does? Excerpt from their teacher guide:

The examples of this sort of thing are legion. These people — these gender ideologues — are malicious and insane, and they are destroying both young minds and the possibility of a stable society. There is nothing innocent, honest, or good faith about any of this. “We meant well” is the excuse that the Social Justice Warriors of the 1960s and 1970s made when their revolutionary plans produced destruction. Let’s say wokeness will run its course, and be co-opted by the establishment, and defanged. How long will that take? What will be its effects on the lives of real people?

I do call this “soft totalitarianism,” because this ideology’s proponents have to resort to totalitarian methods to impose it. David should ask himself how far someone would get in a university or corporation by challenging any of this, no matter how politely? For that matter, he should ask himself how far anyone would get in The New York Times newsroom expressing opposition to Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or any of it. I told the journalist who interviewed me yesterday that I’ve been working for 32 years as a professional journalist, including in five newsrooms, and have written three New York Times bestsellers, but that I could not hope to be hired by a newspaper today. My opinions about race, gender, and sexuality — which are well within the American mainstream — have made me radioactive in media institutions. I can live with that, because I’m already established as a journalist, and have built an audience. But young conservatives — or not just conservatives, but anybody who rejects wokeness — should think hard before entering the journalism field. Contra David, you can’t separate the “good” wokeness from the “bad” wokeness. It’s all bad, and it is destroying liberal institutions.

David seems to believe that this is chiefly a problem that effects elites. But he’s too smart an observer of society to believe that its effects will be contained to elites. Let me quote a passage from Live Not By Lies:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”

This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.

The social justice cultists of our day are pale imitations of Lenin and his fiery disciples. Aside from the ruthless antifa faction, they restrict their violence to words and bullying within bourgeois institutional contexts. They prefer to push around college administrators, professors, and white-collar professionals. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were hardened revolutionaries, SJWs get their way not by shedding blood but by shedding tears.

Yet there are clear parallels—parallels that those who once lived under communism identify.

Like the early Bolsheviks, they are radically alienated from society. They too believe that justice depends on group identity, and that achieving justice means taking power away from the exploiters and handing it to the exploited.

Social justice cultists, like the first Bolsheviks, are intellectuals whose gospel is spread by intellectual agitation. It is a gospel that depends on awakening and inspiring hatred in the hearts of those it wishes to induce into revolutionary consciousness. This is why it matters immensely that they have established their base within universities, where they can indoctrinate in spiteful ideology those who will be going out to work in society’s institutions.

As Russia’s Marxist revolutionaries did, our own SJWs believe that science is on their side, even when their claims are unscientific. For example, transgender activists insist that their radical beliefs are scientifically sound; scientists and physicians who disagree are driven out of their institutions or intimidated into silence.

Social justice cultists are utopians who believe that the ideal of Progress requires smashing all the old forms for the sake of liberating humanity. Unlike their Bolshevik predecessors, they don’t want to seize the means of economic production but rather the means of cultural production. They believe that after humanity is freed from the chains that bind us—whiteness, patriarchy, marriage, the gender binary, and so on—we will experience a radically new and improved form of life.

Finally, unlike the Bolsheviks, who wanted to destroy and replace the institutions of Russian society, our social justice warriors adopt a later Marxist strategy for bringing about social change: marching through the institutions of bourgeois society, conquering them, and using them to transform the world. For example, when the LGBT cause was adopted by corporate America as part of its branding strategy, its ultimate victory was assured.

It took 70 years for Communism in Russia and her colonies to collapse. Here in Hungary, where I’m spending the late spring and summer, you see signs everywhere of its lingering effects, even thirty years after its collapse. A Hungarian friend, a Millennial, told me that Communism destroyed civil society here, and that Hungary still hasn’t recovered from that, because people still don’t trust each other. Communism taught them that to trust was dangerous. Similarly, I know people who are now afraid to socialize with people of other races, or with anybody not within a tight circle of trust, because they are afraid to inadvertently say something that triggers the liberal (white, black, or otherwise), who will spread it on social media, and get that person cancelled. This is not an abstract threat! The soft totalitarianism of wokeness is not going away anytime soon. Indeed, technology, especially surveillance technology that we in America have mindlessly adapted as part of our consumerist mentality, is going to make it easier for these totalitarians to tighten their grip. What kind of society does my friend David think the woke elites are going to create? Whatever it is, it will not be stable or harmonious.

I found out last night that my friend Antonio Garcia Martinez has been fired by Apple, which just hired him, after over 2,000 employees within the company went berserk over passages from his gonzo Silicon Valley memoir Chaos Monkeys. The Verge has the story. Here is a passage from his memoir that first triggered them:

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

The context is describing a tough, strong woman with whom he was falling in love. But even that’s not good enough for these pissy totalitarians at Apple. The Verge reports:

“It’s so exhausting being a woman in tech; sitting opposite men who think because of my gender, I am soft and weak and generally full of shit,” wrote an Apple employee on Twitter, drawing attention to the quote. “It’s not even worth it to say I have worked relentlessly for every accomplishment I have.” The tweet also contained a screenshot of the passage in question.

How dare this dude say that women like me in Silicon Valley are soft and weak! His words wound me, and he should be fired!

Chaos Monkeys is not going to appeal to everybody, but the idea that this memoir poses any kind of threat to anybody at Apple is beyond absurd. Garcia Martinez, though, is impure. He has Thought Wrong Thoughts, he has Written Wrong Words. He has been cancelled. The richest company on the planet cannot tolerate his presence among its not-at-all-soft-and-weak staffers.

It’s infuriating. But look, these people have now made an implacable enemy in Antonio Garcia Martinez. He’s smarter than they are, and they’re going to be very sorry for it, in time. I haven’t talked to him about this, but my guess is that he will be one more person who has been burned by this madness, and will devote the rest of his life to bringing down this system.

Note well that this wicked social order is coming into being within the structures of liberalism. Amazon, for example, is free within our liberal democratic capitalist order to sell, or not sell, whatever it wants. But as I have written here, the company’s decision to stop selling books that criticize transgender ideology, while perfectly legal, is going to have the knock-on effect (given Amazon’s massive size and influence) of keeping future books criticizing transgenderism from being published. No publisher can risk coming out with a book that Amazon won’t sell. The media and the universities are becoming militantly monocultural and intolerant, and so are corporations — especially those like Apple, which attract educated elites.

People who would have been liberal ten or twenty years ago are now illiberal leftists. They hold almost all the power in American life today, and they are not afraid to use it to suppress dissent and solidify their control over American life. After talking for an hour with that reporter yesterday, she said, “But you’re liberal” — meaning, someone devoted to classical liberal principles. Yes, I told her, in principle, I am. But to be a classical liberal today, in the face of this powerful woke assault on liberal principles of tolerance, free speech, freedom of religion, fair play, and the like, is to be a sucker. Which is why the journalist was in my flat in Budapest interviewing me for a story about the postliberal Right. For all my criticism of classical liberalism, I cannot think of a better way to administer a pluralistic society. But I am being dragged kicking and screaming to the view that there is no longer any possibility for liberalism as we have known it — that the only real-world possibilities are on the illiberal Left (which holds hegemonic power within what used to be liberal institutions) and the illiberal Right. More on this in a future post.

None of this wokeness is innocent, or without meaningful effect. None of it. It could not possibly be, not when an ideology so illiberal and vindictive has seized the means of cultural production. In the 1930s, Communist propaganda painted Communists as “liberals in a hurry” — this, to try to make people less afraid of them. David doesn’t mean in it this way — he’s quite sincere — but I believe his column has that same effect: to make people less afraid of the serpents of wokeness. I predict that something terrible will happen to David — he is an unfailingly kind, generous, and good-hearted man, but he will get crossways the woke in some way he could not have anticipated — and they will set out to destroy him personally and professionally. The Jacobin mob within the Times newsroom will turn on him, and his weak, fake-liberal bosses will not have the courage to defend him. Then the scales will fall from his eyes, and he will join the rest of us in the Resistance.

(Look, I know a lot of you hate David Brooks. You’re wrong to do that, but I can’t stop you. What I can tell you, though, is that he is my friend, and if you criticize him in nasty personal terms in your comment, I won’t publish it. That’s a fact. Say whatever you like about his ideas, but leave the ad hominem out of it.)

The post There Is No Good Wokeness appeared first on The American Conservative.

Uncle Sam + Lesbian Moms

Here’s a new US Army recruitment ad:

Incredible, isn’t it? That’s one of a new series of recruitment ads on the US Army’s YouTube channel. That one features a girl raised by lesbian moms who goes on to join the Army so she can “shatter stereotypes.” The ad likens her joining the Army to her experience in Pride demonstrations; in both cases, she is “fighting for freedom,” she says.

The other ads feature non-white soldiers, each telling a story about how joining the Army let them find self-fulfillment. They are thematically reminiscent of the CIA recruitment ads, all of which feature CIA workers describing their employment at CIA as an exercise in self-fulfillment and self-realization. Remember this quote from the CIA ad featuring the self-described cisgender intersectional Latina? “I am unapologetically me. I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are.” You watch the ad, and it jumps out at you how self-focused the appeal is. It’s all me-myself-and-I.

These ads surely weren’t launched out of the goodness of the military and the intelligence agency’s hearts. I would love to know the social psychological research behind these campaigns. My guess is that the Army and the CIA have their reasons for thinking that this is the way to get new recruits among young Americans. I concede that

both institutions have to recruit from the population as it is, not as some conservative nostalgist like me wishes it were.

Compare them, though, to this 2018 Chinese army recruitment ad. It too ties the soldier’s personal identity to his service, but does so in a very different way: by highlighting the physical challenges, the emotional stoicism, and the honor of sacrifice:

Serious question: judging these US and Chinese ads together, what do you think they say about the people of their respective countries? I mean, what do these ads say about the kind of people each military expects to recruit?

UPDATE: One of my readers who is very well informed about military matters writes:

Regarding the recruiting ad, this is because the marketing types are telling them that the only way to reach Millennials and Zoomers is to go woke, it is the same thing that keeps churning out woke reboot trash out of Hollywood. This illustrates the serious perception problem of regarding Twitter as representative of the youth population and particularly your recruiting demographics as a whole.

The argument for 20 years was that DADT [Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell] kept college students out of the military. Well now it has been repealed and there has been no mass influx. Nor is there going to be, because the same liquid modernity, individualist, emotionalist, and atomizing factors are the same that lead most middle and upper class types to avoid DOD like the plague. There is a lot of commentary about how much more diverse DOD has become, but a disproportionate amount of your combat units in particular are still made up of Jacksonian Southerners.

One of the reasons why Christians need to understand the tradeoff on unconditionally shoring up the imperium is that without all the people who still believe in family, God, and country, your manpower pool massively contracts.
The argument that you can just replace these demographics with others is itself a Lockean view of the world that assumes cultures are interchangeable and irrelevant — something the US might have learned is definitely not the case from Iraq and Afghanistan. The whole British ideal of the martial races for the Indian Subcontinent was racist as heck, but it did take into account the importance of culture in your military. Making sure your military culture mirrors our current campus culture is the fastest way to defeat.

This illustrates the contradictions of trying to maintain an imperium while subscribing to every woke shibboleth with a cynical view towards maintaining power. Why should anyone die for a historic source of oppression and white supremacy? Why should anyone sacrifice their economic and personal opportunities when you have no broader culture or society? Why should anyone fight for a country they regard as evil?

The people at the top likely don’t believe it, but the go-with-the-flow attitude towards this ideology has allowed it to colonize institution after institution, and creates the same dynamic for us that the equally cynical Saudi embrace of Wahhabism did for them, because you now have a vanguard that sees you as evil and wants to replace you.

They likely think that this will lead to an imaginary surge of woke youth rushing in, which is the same argument for churches to liberalize. We’ve seen how that script plays out. This is even more true because your woke youth are self-absorbed, thin-skinned, emotionally stunted, and believe that they are the center of the universe — all qualities that cut against the ideas of hierarchy, sacrifice, rigor, and duty that are central to military life. This is also where the Sacred Band of Thebes or the Pashtun pedophiles of Afghanistan have a leg up. They understood culture, duty, and hierarchy, and were quite willing to kill and die to defend it. Our current atomized youth are definitely not going to sacrifice any opportunity or take on risk, hence why they prefer social media activism where you have none of the actual risks of real activism. Completely atomized cultures, especially those that hate their past and don’t appreciate how unique in human history the current atomized and individualistic society is, or why it should be defended, are not people you rely on in a firefight.

Traditional Jacksonian rugged individualists could cut it and hold together on the basis of common identity and culture. The baizuo left is unlikely to achieve the same. I would also note that jihadists have figured this out and repeatedly demonstrated that the baizuo types are quite willing to compromise and compromise hard once coercive violence is brought into play.

Failure to have any common cause, culture, history, ethos, or society leads to disintegration and that is why the West in general and US in particular is in decline and widely seen as such.

Man, I guess this reader doesn’t believe that soldiers will be willing to kill or be killed to defend a culture that believes Gegi the Pervy Genderfluid Unicorn’s presence in elementary schools is a good thing.

 

UPDATE.2: Another reader writes:

In your latest blog posting, you asked, “What do you think they say about the people of their respective countries? I mean, what do these ads say about the kind of people each military expects to recruit?”

Well, here’s an apparatchik’s would-be response to that question:

It’s worth parsing this remark. The implication is that the military has been less than a meritocracy and that diversity is merely a way to ensure the best people make their way up the ladder. Fair enough. The military does have a meritocracy problem and it isn’t new. It goes back decades, even when the military was overwhelmingly White and male.

Which makes you wonder – what is with the overriding focus on women, LGBTQ, and people of color, then? Why does the military think these groups hold the key to ensuring the military becomes even more of a meritocracy? Does Jim Golby and others who bear the standard for our left-wing elites (take a look at his Twitter page) think that diversity really holds the answer to solving the military’s problems, when, as I just mentioned, our problems started back when the military wasn’t as diverse as it is today and has seemingly gotten worse despite the military’s increasing leftward shift? If even among White males, the wrong people kept climbing the ranks, what difference does greater diversity make?

More telling is the fact that only gender, racial, and sexual diversity galvanizes the apparatchiks. What about professional diversity? How many military intelligence officers have served as Chief of Staff of the Army? Better yet, why not a logistics officer? An army travels on its stomach, right? Why aren’t our logistics officers managing our services from the top? To cap it all off, an Army officer, the other day, became only the third active-duty Army soldier to earn an astronaut. Nobody’s outraged about that, are they?

My point is simple – actively pursuing diversity serves either a cultural, political, or social purpose. End of story. It simply serves no other end. A pure meritocracy, like the NBA, does not lose sleep over the lack of racial diversity within the league. The Left has so doggedly pursued “awakening” the military precisely because it is still the preeminent national institution. If the military can achieve the ideal make-up and social arrangement, surely, the rest of the country would follow, right? The irony of all this is that people like Golby have spent years warning the rest of us that the military cannot solve society’s problems for us, but that is exactly what they are trying to achieve here.

The real story, in my view, however, is that the military itself seems oblivious or unwilling to admit how politicized it has become. A view common among contemporary civil-military scholars (nearly all of whom lean left or are establishment-friendly, so much for diversity) is that politics is impossible to isolate from the military, since war is ultimately a political act. The key, instead, is to place barriers to limit both the military’s political power and establish appropriate “rules of the road” governing how the military ought to conduct itself in a political environment. What you’re seeing today is not just Wokeness in the ranks, but also a perversion of the mentality described above.

The other day, the establishment freaked out over a letter written by 120 retired U.S. military officers who criticized both the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, specifically. The letter (which you can read here) was a shameful display of rank political partisanship, but the Left’s reaction is bizarre, given that just months ago, a concurrent series of attacks against Tucker Carlson was initiated over his valid criticisms of the military. Furthermore, did these people forget how retired officers came out and openly criticized President Donald Trump for threatening to deploy troops to quell the violent riots of last summer, a decision, if made, would have been hardly without precedent?

Of course not. In the minds of the apparatchiks, last year’s admonition was troubling, but the officers spoke out because, well, “Orange Man Bad” (and he is, but that is not the point). So, the national security pros out there can play semantics and word games all they want, but the military has become highly politicized in partisan fashion. It does not matter if they do not specifically single out conservatives or Republicans. Much of it is implied and made blatantly obvious through other ways, such as the military’s adoption of Critical Race Theory. Would an aspiring flag officer make rank if s/he spoke out against CRT?

When the military’s institutional ethos and values has come to resemble the Democratic Party platform, it is politicized in partisan fashion. To say otherwise is a blatant falsehood.

One more thing – some of your commenters claim that future wars will not be fought on a physical battlefield. Instead, it will be fought from within air conditioned rooms and require more brains than brawn. Nothing could be more false. In fact, this is a mentality resulting from 30 years of endless war, where we fight from a distance not because it is a more effective way to wage war, but because it allows us to “do something” while minimizing the mount of skin in the game. As Israel is discovering right now, you can “mow the grass” all you want, but this just means the war will never end. To get results, you have to close with the enemy on the ground. When faced off against an adversary more brutal and fierce than the average U.S. soldier, he will, at best, not care that his enemy is a woman raised by two lesbian moms. At worst, that would become just another reason to hate an American. I do not believe for a moment any of our enemies are in any way intimidated by what they see out of the military these days, a college campus where everyone wears a uniform.

 

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The ‘Terrorist’ Chaplain

The Rev. Dr. Bernard Randall is a Church of England priest who worked as a chaplain at a private British school, one founded on the Evangelical tradition, where an LGBT activist gave a rousing talk on the importance of “smashing heteronormativity” and suchlike. In a subsequent sermon, he told students that there was nothing wrong with them if they disagree with LGBT ideology. The school reported him to the government’s anti-terrorism agency. The program to which he was reported is one in which people are encouraged to report those believed to be at risk of radicalism and terrorism. The agency ruled that the vicar was not a terrorism risk. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Excerpt:

Dr Randall, a former Cambridge University chaplain and Oxford graduate, claims that the school later told him that any future sermons would be censored in advance.

He also claims that he was warned his chapel services would be monitored ‘to ensure that… requirements are met’. Dr Randall was later dismissed. He is suing for discrimination, harassment, victimisation and unfair dismissal and his case is due to be heard next month. ‘My career and life are in tatters,’ he said.

Campaigners said the case was one of the most extraordinary of its kind and raised disturbing questions about freedom of speech. Former Education Minister Sir John Hayes said, if the claims are proved, the school had ‘behaved appallingly’.

Here, from The Critic, is an essay by the Rev. Randall, talking about what happened to him. Excerpts:

Or maybe when it came to inviting Educate and Celebrate to Trent College, it wasn’t thought to have anything to do with religion. It’s just about be friendly to LGBT+ people. Who can object to that? And the answer of course, is no one. Certainly not me.

But the Christian tradition has plenty of resources to help navigate such conundra as making sure that there is no tolerance for bullying — we’ve all heard of “Love your neighbour as yourself.” How about supporting teenagers as they work out what their identity is, and how they fit into the world. “Made in the image of God,” anyone?

And if something needs adding to this, then, yes, let’s have that discussion. But if you want to import a different belief system into the school, don’t expect the chaplain to sit idly by. And make no mistake, this is a different belief system. The sign was writ large on that day of staff training. You couldn’t miss it. It said that the Equality Act protected characteristics include “gender,” and “gender identity.” No. They don’t. “Sex,” (you know, that biological thing) is there, and “gender reassignment, (a process of change)” too. If this is just a benign programme, why start with a whopping great lie?

The answer is that this is not simply about supporting LGBT pupils — even supposing we think that LGB and T belong together (the LGB Alliance and many others don’t). It is about an ideology which wishes to break down society, and remould it into … well, I know not what. It’s about Queer Theory, and disrupting all categories. That’s why the mantra “smash heteronormativity” describes Educate and Celebrate’s work so very well. But as human beings we navigate the world by categories — it means we don’t have to process every piece of sensory input or information separately and afresh. The destruction of categories means mental overload, loss of the ability to make timely decisions, paralysis, and chaos. I’m pretty sure no Christian would support chaos. Nor would any reasonable person. Yes, categories, stereotypes, sometime mislead us, but the way to deal with that is to be alert to them, not to dispense with them altogether.

What’s more, Queer Theory has roots in Marxism and Postmodernism, and is thus a manifestly atheist system. Again, why would a Christian chaplain just let that pass?

Read it all.

Where is the Archbishop of Canterbury on this? Where are other Christian leaders in Britain? This is an utter outrage. The vicious leaders of that school turned the vicar in to the anti-terrorism agency of the government for giving a sermon saying that it was okay to disagree with an LGBT activist! They’ve wrecked his life. This is soft totalitarianism, straight up. Watch this short clip from Christian Concern, in which the priest reads from the sermon that got him accused of terrorism. Criticize LGBT ideology in even the mildest, most respectful terms, and these radicals will try to destroy your life.

Who will stand up for the Rev. Randall? Who will finally get sick of these leftist bullies, and push back hard in the name of liberty and common decency?

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Paul Kingsnorth Comes Home

Drop everything you’re doing right now and read Paul Kingsnorth’s First Things account of his conversion to Christianity. He writes of growing up atheistic in modern Britain, and how his questing took him through Buddhism and Wicca (“I discovered that magic is real. It works. Who it works for is another question.”), before Christ found him. That’s how it happened, in his telling. He didn’t go looking for Jesus of Nazareth; Jesus came for him. Here’s an excerpt:

How can I feel I have arrived home in something that is in many ways so ­foreign to me? And yet beneath the surface it is not foreign at all, but a reversion to the sacred order of things. I sit in a monastery chapel before dawn. There is snow on the ground outside. The priest murmurs the liturgy by the light of the lampadas, the dark silhouettes of two nuns chant the antiphon. There is incense in the air. The icons glow in the half light. This could be a thousand years in the past or the future, for in here, there is no time. Home is beyond time, I think now. I can’t explain any of it, and it is best that I do not try.

I grew up believing what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint. Orthodoxy taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s. To deny yourself. To let it come. I am terrible at this, but at least now I understand the path.

In the Kingdom of Man, the seas are ribboned with plastic, the forests are burning, the cities bulge with billionaires and tented camps, and still we kneel before the idol of the great god Economy as it grows and grows like a cancer cell. And what if this ancient faith is not an obstacle after all, but a way through? As we see the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, of choosing power over ­humility, separation over communion, the stakes become clearer each day. Surrender or rebellion; sacrifice or conquest; death of the self or triumph of the will; the Cross or the machine. We have always been ­offered the same choice. The gate is strait and the way is narrow and maybe we will always fail to walk it. But is there any other road that leads home?

Read the whole thing. 

On the last issue of my Substack newsletter, I quoted from a wonderful novel of Hungary I’m reading, Under The Frog, by Tibor Fischer. In one chapter, the character Gyuri reflects on his friendship with Ladányi, a childhood friend who had been brilliant, then converted from Judaism to Christianity, and become a Jesuit. Fischer writes:

Gyuri hadn’t been to church since he was fourteen when his mother dragged him to Easter Mass. Naturally he had attempted to get in touch with God on several subsequent occasions when he had thought he was going to die but always on the spot, away from church precincts. This was surely the real boon of a religious upbringing: it gave you a number to ring in emergencies, which was some consolation, even if no one answered. Gyuri had met with the various arguments for God’s existence from his partisans, proof through design (“that’s what I call a well-made universe”), the craftsmanship of the universe (It did seem to be an awful lot of trouble for a practical joke) or Pascals’ way of looking at it, a hundred francs on God each way. But, all in all, the best argument he had come across for taking Jesus’s shilling was that the sharpest razor, Ladányi believed it.

If you know anything about Paul Kingsnorth’s work, you will know that the fact that someone like him has discovered Christianity — and Orthodox Christianity at that — will open the hearts and minds of others to the faith.

Kingsnorth has a Substack too, by the way, and has written today about how all cultures must rest on sacred order. We in the modern West deny this, and are therefore disintegrating. Excerpt:

In some ways, I am a roundhead at heart. Maybe we all are. The Enlightenment may have failed, but it taught modern Western people something useful: how to interrogate power, and identify illegitimate authority. But while I learned this early, it was much later that I learned something else, dimly and slowly, through my study of history, mythology and, well, people: that every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. It does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.

The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions – ‘the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress.’ I’m all for liberty, and for democracy too (the real thing, not the corporate simulacra that currently squats in its place), but the dethroning of the sovereign – Christ – who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led – via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler – to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

This has been the terrible irony of the age of reason, and of the liberal and leftist theories and revolutions which resulted from it. From 1789 to 1968, every one of them ultimately failed, but in destroying the old world and its sacred order they cleared a space for capitalism to move in and commodify the ruins. Spengler, who I wrote about last time, saw this clearly. ‘The Jacobins’, he wrote of the French revolutionaries, ‘had destroyed the old obligations of blood and so had emancipated money; now it stepped forward as lord of the land.’ Revolution, he claimed, will always play the role of handmaiden to the Machine:

There is no proletarian, not even a Communist, movement that has not operated in the interest of money, in the directions indicated by money and for the time permitted by money – and without the idealist amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.

The vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism. It has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives in the way that the Christian story once did, so much so that we barely even notice as it colonises everything from the way we eat to the values we teach our children. Cut loose in a post-modern present, with no centre, no truth and no direction, we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers before the monstrous idol of the Machine.

Read it all — this is the last free entry in Kingsnorth’s Substack, so you’ll want to subscribe.

Today in Budapest, I was talking to two Hungarian journalists about the disintegration of America and its historic ideals. Both of them see it coming for them here too. They hope their country can avoid the worst of it, but they are small, and the forces arrayed against them are mighty. How strange, even unnerving, it is to learn how to see my own immensely powerful country through the eyes of people who live in a small country, and to come to understand the power that America exercises over them, without necessarily meaning to. Another Hungarian today brought up in conversation the recent construction of a Black Lives Matter/LGBT Statue of Liberty here in Budapest (it was torn down overnight by far-right activists). He can’t wrap his mind around why the local Hungarian Left has adopted American cultural conflicts as a way to lash out against their conservative opponents. He said, graspingly, “It’s … it’s a religion.”

Yes, it is. It’s a global religion. It’s the Grand March. Milan Kundera wrote:

The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies.  The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March. …

What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.

All true, but listen, Kingsnorth is correct: it’s not so much a Left vs. Right thing as it is a Cross-versus-the-Machine thing. We will scarcely be better off if we reject a left-wing version of modernity, but adopt a right-wing version. Christ did not live, die, and rise again to Make Rome Great Again, or to own the libs. To my eyes, from this perspective, the decadence that is consuming the United States is driven by the Left, but is not effectively resisted by the Right because the Right is trying to fight the Machine with the Machine. The Right does not have a concept of sacred order to defend. Choosing to vote for conservative politicians because they might slow down the decline and fall is defensible, but it’s not the way out, or the way home.

Take a look at this five-minute clip from a recent interview Jonathan Pageau did with Kingsnorth. Here, they talk about the power of ritual:

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Fudan U. Coming To Hungary. Should We Worry?

Readers, here in Budapest, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban recently struck a deal with the Chinese to build a campus of Fudan University here in Budapest. The Shanghai university is one of the top-ranked in the world. But some people — including me — are deeply concerned that the Hungarians are providing an espionage platform for Beijing. I was talking about this with a friend who works for Mandiner, the top Hungarian conservative magazine. He asked his colleague Mátyás Kohán, who writes about foreign policy for the magazine, to brief me on the situation. Kohán sent me a briefing in Q&A form, but when I offered to publish it on my blog, he reformatted it as an op-ed.

I still cannot get comfortable with Beijing’s extraordinary push into Europe via this university. I understand why Hungary doesn’t want the wokeness of corrupt Western universities, but this seems to me to be a deal with the devil. Still, I present to you Mátyás Kohán’s viewpoint to help American readers understand the thinking of conservative Hungarians who support this move. — RD
==

ON THE MYTH OF A CHINESE UNIVERSITY
By Mátyás Kohán

Hungary is poised to welcome China’s Fudan University to Budapest in 2024. The $1.5 billion project brings the world’s 34th best university to Central Europe – but its geopolitical implications provide fodder for merciless liberal opposition. What is a conservative to think of America’s great adversary coming to its mistreated ally?

We need to face the ungainly reality: Hungary’s universities rank very poorly in any kind of global comparison. If Quacquarelli Symonds’ established ranking system, which does not seem to have a significant geographical bias, is anything to go by, we do not have one single university in the global top 500. Central European countries that are similar in size (take Austria, for example – the University of Vienna, is #150) or geopolitical position (Prague’s Charles University is #260, Poland’s University of Warsaw is #323, the Jagiellonian University in Kraków is #326) have at least one or two institutions that drive progress and scholarly innovation so that the rest of the higher education sector can follow suit. In Hungary, differences between the quality of university education are only significant within the country – on a global scale, Hungarian universities are bad to almost the same extent. If ambitious Hungarian youngsters wants to get an education outside the fields of law or medicine, the country offers no reasonable alternative to Austrian, German, British, Swiss or American universities. In absence of significant competition within the country, even top Hungarian universities have settled for mediocrity – and this is especially true for economics, business, management, STEM or international relations (the latter is a well-established laughing stock in Hungary), the fields Fudan plans to cover in its Budapest project.

We do not specifically need the university that shakes up the still waters to be Chinese – the significant factor is that Shanghai’s Fudan ranks #34 in the QS survey. However, it most certainly does not hurt that Fudan is Chinese. We are in the decade when China is set to overtake the U.S. in terms of nominal GDP, and with a skyrocketing business potential comes massive influence in several regions of the world – there are some areas of Chinese expansion the West pay attention to, like Southeast Asia, and some in which it is taken by surprise, like Africa. The necessity of good ties to China and thorough understanding of who they are, in both linguistic and cultural terms, will soon cease to be a matter of personal predilection. It is unlikely that China would earn a special place in the heart of Hungarian youth anytime soon, but if it establishes a firm cultural and linguistic presence in their heads through thousands and thousands of them receiving an education that is either in Chinese or based on a Chinese mindset, we are set to gain a significant competitive edge.

As to why the Chinese might want to build a university in Budapest – well, there are obvious reasons of vanity, reasons of soft power strategy, and socioeconomic reasons. For Beijing, a giant Chinese university in the heart of the European Union is undoubtedly a pleasant sight and a powerful statement to the rest of the world. In terms of soft power diplomacy, Fudan Hungary would also be a very effective addition to the network of Confucius Institutes – China already dotted much of Europe with those. It is not an irrelevant consideration that Fudan’s research in economics, business studies and IR, which is obviously a showpiece of the Chinese mindset, would geographically make its way into the European scientific world through Budapest. Operating on two campuses and catering to a global student body would further enhance Fudan’s prestige, both in China, where competition between universities is nothing short of cutthroat, and abroad. Also, the concrete that will be home to Fudan Hungary is a $1.5 billion Hungarian investment into the Chinese construction sector, which comes in very handy as China is going out of its way to secure projects abroad to deploy as much of its population as possible into markets that are less saturated than its own.

$1.5 billion dollars, which is the current ballpark figure for what the Hungarian government wants to spend on building Fudan Hungary University, is very serious money. Fudan Hungary shapes up to be the third most expensive university construction project in China’s current construction schedule, with the first two being Hong Kong Technical’s new Foshan campus and Sun Yat Sen University’s Zhongshan project. The Hungarian government will have to do significant work explaining what exactly this money is used for, what opportunities Hungarian students get in return, and how it’s going to keep costs down to their planned level.

There is a popular – and partly warranted – talking point that is used by the Hungarian opposition, which questions the choice of the university involved – if the government is spending the equivalent of $1.5 billion on a university, it could at least have been Western, or so their reasoning goes. In terms of why this money is not used for a Budapest campus of the University of California, McGill, Harvard, Oxford or some other prestigious Western university, the answer is simple – they did not express any strategic interest in Hungary. Usually, it’s the university that reaches out to the government or a partner institution in the target country. If Western universities are not interested in coming to Hungary, a financial incentive alone is unlikely to make them interested.

Another topic that crops up frequently in critical opinions about the Fudan project regards George Soros’ Central European University – as part of an ongoing campaign to move Hungary out of the democratic Euro-Atlantic space into the authoritarian East, the opposition says, Hungary’s leaders expelled CEU, the West’s great contribution to Hungarian higher education, and invited in the Chinese Communist Party’s university instead. CEU has indeed been at odds with the Hungarian government since 2017 because of their disagreement on the legality of handing out American diplomas without the backing of an American university that actually does research or teaching work in the United States. CEU’s programs that offer an American degree have moved to Vienna since, other courses remain in Budapest. Ever since, the government sticks to legalese on the matter, and the Hungarian opposition parrots a witch hunt narrative, according to which CEU was partly eased out of the country because of its investment in postmodern grievance studies: gender studies, postcolonialism, and postmodern critical nonsense.

It was, in fact, possible to receive a master’s degree at CEU with theses like Becoming and being: the experiences of young feminist men in Iceland, Dispossession and futurelessness: at the confluence of Marxism and queer theory, or “Qu(e)’erying the Qur’an: How non-heterosexual Muslims in London articulate sexual citizenship narratives,” which might in fact have aroused second thoughts in Hungary’s government or any fair-minded person – but the issue is significantly more complex, and the Hungarian right, including myself, is torn about it. The core flaw of this argumentation with respect to Fudan is that comparisons of CEU to Fudan are egregious examples of a false equivalency. CEU was a very good university by Hungarian standards, but Fudan plays in a completely different league. It is a global top university, the merits (and rankings) of which are unrivaled in the entire European Union – the European universities that can compete are located in Switzerland and the UK. CEU is by no means anywhere close to being global top university.

CEU’s curricular policy brings us to the issue of Communism, and whether Fudan University is in fact run by the Chinese Communist Party. The short answer is that everything in China is run by the Chinese Communist Party – to some extent. But at the same time, China is not the Soviet Union. They have been thoroughly schooled on how micromanagement by the party leads to mismanagement, culminating in a significant competitive disadvantages. The only way to explain the success of China’s top universities (Tsinghua, Beijing, Fudan and the like) is that they are being run as competitive universities, not as party schools. Hungarian Fudan alumni confirmed to me that the party was not at all making its influence felt in Fudan’s education – it is just, plainly and simply, a high quality university.

As regards Marxism, erudite American conservatives have firsthand experience with the way grievance studies, based on postmodern-infused Marxism with a deconstructionist undertone, destroy the best university programs in the world – because it’s happening in your own country. The sad reality is that the Chinese could not outperform American universities in terms mind-blowingly stupid Marxist educational precepts, even if they wanted to. We have no reports from alumni on Fudan’s academic content being Marxist in any way, especially as they do not focus on the humanities back home and they do not plan to do so in Budapest, either. Contrary to popular belief in America’s academia, there isn’t really a Marxist – or, really, political – way to teach STEM, International Relations or business administration if you also want to be a top university at the same time. In all earnesty: there would be significantly more reason for concern about Marxism if an American university offered to teach social sciences in Budapest.

Another interesting question that pops up across the board is – will the Chinese spy on us using Fudan University? Yes, they will, as they already do. There is no way to exclude the possibility of Fudan expanding China’s already vast intelligence capabilities, but there is also no way to exclude the possibility of such expansion without Fudan’s construction – and this paradox makes this concern all but irrelevant. At the same time, the widespread Hungarian preconception of every graduate of Moscow’s MGIMO diplomacy academy being a KGB asset is malarkey, and the same goes for China – using a university for the recruitment of intelligence officers, as opposed to teaching, would, again, interfere with peer-reviewed, quality education.

For the United States, then, there remains the problem of whether or not Hungary receiving a Chinese university is a threat to the interests of the United States. Fudan, like China in general, is a threat to U.S. interests. Fudan’s presence in Budapest is also a clear message to the United States that the self-inflicted, Marxism-induced deterioration of its scientific, geopolitical and economic capabilities will carry a hefty price tag all around the globe. If the Trans-Atlantic partnership were, indeed, a partnership in which the parties dealt with each other in a respectful manner without meddling with each other’s internal affairs, which the United States has done several times in Hungary in a staggeringly shameless manner, there would be no need for Hungary to compound its unipolar, NATO-based military policy with a diplomacy of great power balancing, known in Hungary as the „egg dance,” which relies on simultaneous economic and cultural cooperation with the U.S., the EU, Russia, China, and the global South. It is safe to say that Fudan Hungary University does not in any way serve the United States’ interests in Hungary, but the fault for this consideration being completely irrelevant now lies with several consecutive American administrations that have shown massive disrespect for Hungarian political sovereignty, leading to a decrease in mutual trust and goodwill.

The last consideration is whether or not Fudan Hungary University is a textbook example of Chinese colonialism. And the answer to that is – yes and no. The two major arenas of Chinese colonialism are the former Soviet Central Asia and Africa – both of them are regions rich in a variety of natural resources but woefully weak on infrastructure, as regards both the economic and the human kind.

In these regions, Chinese colonialism always follows roughly the same template. China hands out gargantuan loans for infrastructure to countries that are clearly incapable of serving such debts. These loans are to be spent on construction work by Chinese construction companies, while the governments’ inability to serve their debts leads to a chance for China to strong-arm said governments into disadvantageous decisions about their natural resources. Other strategies, mainly used in Africa, include providing kleptocratic governments with shiny new projects (theaters, stadiums, hospitals, roads, bridges) in and around election years to help with their reelection – and then gaining control over forestry, mining and farming opportunities by buying off said kleptocratic elites with sizable bribes. In both cases, these countries (or their financially incentivized leaders) trade off their future for Chinese projects in the present.

One core element, the large Chinese loan that is to be spent on the work of Chinese construction companies, is present in the case of Fudan – the other ones, however, are not. Our government is neither a cohort of kleptocratic, myopic chieftains, nor does the Fudan Hungary University help their reelection chances in any way – if anything, it hurts them. Hungary is also known as a very reliable debtor, which decreases the chances of a debt trap strategy being applied successfully.

Hungary is very conscious of the strategic interest China has in building a university in Budapest. We are also aware of the fact that spending $1.5 billion on construction work done by Chinese companies is a great favor to them – which, in return, gives the Hungarian party ample room in negotiating the terms of the actual education at Fudan. This is the main reason to be optimistic about the project: with the ownership of the project being Hungarian, we can extract great advantages for Hungarian students that need scholarships to the best schools in the world as they don’t have any other way of paying for them. There are also possible advantages for Hungarian universities that are in dire need of cooperation, and Hungarian researchers that want funding as well as good academic infrastructure for their research projects. Fudan Hungary University is not China investing billions of forints into Hungarian higher education – it’s us buying a university from China, a deal that we can tailor to our own needs in order to best suit the interests of our own higher education, which is very much in need of a significant quality boost.

Our watchful eyes will, thus, not need to be fixed on the Chinese. What is more interesting is the challenge to the Hungarian negotiators to make this as good a deal for Hungary’s higher education as it can possibly only be.

The post Fudan U. Coming To Hungary. Should We Worry? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Zombie Catholics Of Germany

You cannot make this up:

Priests and pastoral workers in Germany defied the Vatican Monday by conducting blessing ceremonies attended by same-sex couples.

Organizers held a day of protest on May 10 in response to the Vatican’s recent declaration that the Church does not have the power to bless same-sex unions.

The ceremonies, known as “Segnungsgottesdienste für Liebende,” or “blessing services for lovers,” were promoted using the hashtag “#liebegewinnt” (“love wins”). Organizers said that the services were open to all couples, including — and in particular — those of the same sex.

CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner, reported that ceremonies took place in around 80 cities in Germany as well in Zürich, Switzerland’s largest city.

More:

In the Augustinian Church in Würzburg too all couples — expressly including same-sex couples — were invited to “come and get” the individual blessing in a backroom, after the service.

Ahem! More:

The order of service varied from place to place. A participant who attended the blessing ceremony in Cologne told CNA Deutsch that the ceremony was like a “political event.” The event was led by a female pastoral counselor in liturgical robes, who explained that she had already quit her church service.

After some political statements, the Gospel was read aloud, followed by a speech. Finally, the song “Imagine” by John Lennon was played.

Perfect, just perfect: the anthem of Boomer atheism, performed by rebel clerics and laity of a dying church, to celebrate the blessing of gay partnerships. And you watch: nothing will be done to the priests and lay leaders who participated in this.

These are the last rites of a dying liberal national church. Once again, I recall the conversation I had in Rome three years ago with a German Catholic, an orthodox believer who told me that he and his community are preparing themselves to continue their sacramental lives as Catholics when the institutional Catholic Church no longer exists in their country.

 

 

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Capitalism And Culture War

If you missed Ross Douthat’s column about capitalism and conservatism this past weekend, you really should read it. In it, he considers the role that capitalism plays in undermining social cohesion, and social conservatism. He points out what has long been known: that the dynamism of capitalism makes it harder for society to be stable. But he also says that this cannot possibly be the whole story:

It’s only after the 1960s that this conservative reinvention seems to fail, with churches dividing, families failing, associational life dissolving. And capitalist values, the economic and sexual individualism of the neoliberal age, clearly play some role in this change.

But strikingly, after the 1960s economic dynamism also diminishes, as productivity growth drops and economic growth decelerates. So it can’t just be capitalist churn undoing conservatism, exactly, if economic stagnation and social decay go hand in hand.

One small example: Rates of geographic mobility in the United States, which you could interpret as a measure of how capitalism uproots people from their communities, have declined over the last few decades. But this hasn’t somehow preserved rural traditionalism. Quite the opposite: Instead of a rooted and religious heartland, you have more addiction, suicide and anomie.

Or a larger example: Western European nations do more to tame capitalism’s Darwinian side than America, with more regulation and family supports and welfare-state protections. Are their societies more fecund or religious? No, their economic stagnation and demographic decline have often been deeper than our own.

So it’s not that capitalist dynamism inevitably dissolves conservative habits. It’s more that the wealth this dynamism piles up, the liberty it enables and the technological distractions it invents, let people live more individualistically — at first happily, with time perhaps less so — in ways that eventually undermine conservatism and dynamism together. At which point the peril isn’t markets red in tooth and claw, but a capitalist endgame that resembles Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” with a rich and technologically proficient world turning sterile and dystopian.

More:

Which actually makes the challenge for conservatives much tougher. If the decay of faith or family were really a simple matter of “too much capitalism” you could imagine a right that eventually got over its rugged individualism and chose redistribution and sustainability instead. But one can favor moves in that direction — social conservatives should spend more on families — and still see that they aren’t sufficient, that conservatives actually need to somehow jump-start a lot of forms of dynamism all together, in a way that’s hard for an old, rich and decadent society to do.

But let’s not let liberals off the hook. If capitalist churn isn’t what it used to be, if taming its excesses in the style of France or Sweden isn’t enough to restore family and community, if the combination of welfare-state liberalism and personal emancipation trends toward a Huxleyan dystopia, do liberals have any resources besides complaints about capitalism that might help pull us off that course?

Because if conservatism’s responses are incoherent and insufficient, I fear that liberalism has no response at all.

Read it all. 

I was arguing not long ago with an American liberal friend who believes that solving the problem is simply a matter of wealth redistribution and structural reform of the economy. This is the crude materialism that Douthat debunks by pointing to European societies that are far more egalitarian in terms of wealth distribution than we are in America, but who are not thriving either. Culture matters immensely, though my liberal interlocutor wishes to believe that “culture wars” are a mere distraction from the real problem, which is structural inequality. He’s wrong about this, but he’s no more or less wrong than people on the Right who prefer to believe that there is nothing problematic about the capitalist system, vis-à-vis social decline.

The truth — and it’s an unpleasant one to face — is that nobody has a satisfying answer. But people prefer to have a clear answer, even if it’s an incorrect one. Take a look at the whole race problem in America. The stupidity of Kendi-style race theory — that disproportionate material outcomes can only be explained by racism — satisfies those who are looking for a clear, emotionally satisfying answer. But it has nothing to do with the real world. Take away all the non-black people, and all the rich people, and nothing changes — what then? If capitalism, structural economic injustice, and the bourgeoisie were the cause of poverty, then the Marxist countries of the 20th century would have been wealthy and successful. They were, in fact, hellholes.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe that we really do have to have more pro-family reform of our economic system, and an abandonment of globalism, to return social stability. Though I do believe that capitalism is, broadly speaking, the best system, because it does the best at adapting itself to human nature, I am not a pure free marketer at all. The market was made for man, not man for the market.

But I also don’t believe for one second that politics and economics are sufficient to solve a crisis that is at root moral and spiritual. There will never be enough money to satisfy the longing in the human heart for God, for love, for family, for a sense of belonging, and of meaning. You cannot have a society in which people feel free to live however they like, and expect that society to thrive. Nobody wants to hear that, though, much less live by it. This is one reason why I expect our decline and disintegration to continue — and when things keep falling apart, the search for scapegoats to ramp up in earnest.

I get why the Benedict Option is an unsatisfying solution. It’s not an ultimate solution at all; it’s just a strategy for holding us all together through the long night upon us. But what else is there? I’m serious: what else is there? Politics of either Left or Right can only ever be a partial solution to our problems. As Viktor Orban said once (I paraphrase), “As a politician, I can give you things, but I can’t give you meaning.”

 

The post Capitalism And Culture War appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Little Way Of Tom Sullivan

A tribute from a friend:

 

I knew Tom too, and have been praying for him daily since I heard he was severely ill (he died of cancer this morning in Houston, in hospice care). Everything Carlo says here is true. I wrote this about Tom last week, on my Substack:

I mentioned to you in a post the other day that my old friend Tom is dying in Houston, where he has lived for the last few years, working as an academic librarian. He has esophageal cancer, and has been moved to hospice to await the end. Tom and I met in the early 1990s, when we both worked at The Washington Times. We stayed in touch over the years. Though we weren’t really close, we were fond of each other. I always admired Tom’s sweet spirit. He was, and is, a generous friend.

When we first met, I was on my way into the Catholic Church. Tom was an enthusiastic member of Communion and Liberation, the international Catholic movement founded by Monsignor Luigi Giussani, a priest of Milan, in the 1950s. He invited me to come be part of the local community in Washington. I went to a couple of events, liked everybody I met, but didn’t feel that its spirituality was quite right for me. I’m not much of a joiner, anyway. It’s strange, because I can see theoretically the need for community, but I have such a difficult time being part of one. This is a character flaw of mine, I concede. Anyway, Tom and I remained friends, and I admired, even envied, the sense of joy and solidarity he had within CL, even though I, for reasons of my own, couldn’t be part of it.

A couple of years after I left Washington for Florida, Tom moved from DC to New York City, and joined up with the CL community there. We renewed our friendship when I moved to New York in 1998. More recently, Tom took a job in Houston, where there is a strong CL community. They received him, and he built a good life with them.

When a mutual CL friend of mine and Tom’s told me some days ago that Tom was dying, he generously put me on an e-mail list of Tom’s friends, so I could receive updates. What a gift that was. I’m half a world away, unable to do anything for Tom but pray, but I am seeing in the almost daily e-mail updates what love is, and what love in community is. Tom turned sixty this week; his parents are dead, and his brothers are on the East Coast. His CL family is, practically speaking, his family. The members of the community who are keeping us updated tell us about how the CL folks are taking turns sitting with him, praying with him, telling him how much they love him, things like that. People from CL back East who know and love Tom have been flying in to say their goodbyes. The Houston CL family has been coordinating it all, so Tom won’t be worn out, and so the travelers will have a place to stay. Tom, we are told, is losing his ability to communicate, but he had joy on his birthday because of all his friends.

When Our Lord calls Tom home — it won’t be long now — he will be surrounded by love, as he has been in this passage. It’s an incredible thing to have seen, even from the outside, from a distance. That man is so cherished by his CL community. He never married, but he did not live alone, and he is not dying alone. What a testimony to the power of Christ’s love, and the charism of Monsignor Giussani’s work. If the only thing you ever know about CL is that through the bonds of community it forged, it gave meaning, love, and life to Tom, and those bonds of love tightened and brightened as Tom’s natural life came to a close. Don’t we all want that? Don’t we all want to be free like that? Tom never made much money, but he dies a rich man indeed.

 

Tom, who is loved

On the e-mail list of Tom’s friends and family, this appeared today or yesterday, can’t remember which:

I met Tom so many, many years ago when he was in Washington DC and got involved with the CL community there. Back then, we would have retreats and vacations with everyone on the East Coast (and beyond) showing up. Right away we clicked as book lovers and lovers of “talking other peoples’ ears off”! We were the kind of CL friends that see each other at all the events, say hello, chat and move on… I am guessing, but I can’t remember anymore, exactly, that it must have been the mid to late 1980’s.

Then, at some point, in the 90’s, he moved to New York and joined our CL community there. In 1998, I started working as the CL National Secretary and Tom was working with Sandro Chierici from Ultreya. Ultreya and McGill University Press were overseeing the translation of Don Giussani’s “Religious Sense” (and ultimately so many more of his books). Tom was working on the promotion of this book here in the U.S. So, our paths began to cross quite a bit. We travelled all over the country promoting the books, going to the American Booksellers Association Trade Fairs, Catholic Press Association Conventions, etc. I remember going to New Orleans with Tom for the Catholic Press Association Convention. It’s the only time I have been to New Orleans and we had a great time. I was still drinking at that time and Tom, who enjoyed a beer or two, but could never keep up with my kind of drinking, dutifully followed me to all the bars in the French Quarter and was an admirable, if not expert, drinking buddy!!
At the same time, Tom was living in our tight-knit CL enclave in Brooklyn. We did A LOT together: Mass on Sunday, followed by breakfast at Joe’s (I think that’s the name of that old, long-gone diner on Court Street). Parties at 505 Court Street, School of Community, the first Way of the Cross over the Brooklyn Bridge (well only halfway, the first couple of times…) Tom and his clunky old Honda, or was it a Toyota (?), drove us (me mostly) all over the place. We went for a diaconia in Washington, DC and Tom did NOT take me to the Smithsonian or the Washington Monument. He did take me to wander around his favorite used book warehouse, somewhere down there. We “perused” for hours and left with WAY too many books in his trunk!

Books! Books! Books! Tom’s passion. I remember when he moved to one of his apartments in Brooklyn (the one in “tony” Brooklyn Heights). He did not have tons of furniture or artwork (mostly CL Christmas and Easter posters, lol!), none of the usual trappings of a bachelor, like a huge TV or stereo, but BOXES and boxes and boxes of books! I remember joking, as he did not have a couch for us to sit on, that we should make one (Lego-style) out of all his books, throw a blanket over it and, voila! A sofa! He was against that idea, as it would make it difficult for him to find “that book” when he needed it!

Tom was there for it all. If you were at any CL event and didn’t see Tom, you were not at a CL event! He was like Woody Allen’s “Zelig”. Not necessarily at the center of the action (unless he was performing his obligatory yells and yippees at a vacation rendition of “Ghost Riders in the Sky”!), but always in the “picture” of the whole group taken at the end of every get together. He came to every “public event”, beginning day, vacation, retreat, diaconia – EVERY one. He came to your wedding and your kid’s wedding. He came to your kid’s Baptism, First Communion, Confirmation, Graduation. He came, if he could, when your parents passed. He wasn’t the center of attention, he wasn’t the “responsible” or whatever. Nonetheless, he was there and he did whatever he could to help share our CL experience with all he met and to celebrate our beautiful “Communion and Liberation”.

Like me, he never married, had children, or joined “Memores Domini” (that I know of, lol!) He lived his solitude with dignity and faith and relished in and cherished the family that CL created for him.

I had always hoped we would all end up together at the “CL Old Folks Home” (by the way, I hope someone is working on this…? I am sure our Italian friends are on it, so we should follow suit!). Tom and I would argue over the answers to the New York Times Crossword puzzle and talk over each other as we overshared about our new favorite book.

Alas, that is not to be. I loved Tom and I will miss him. Our paths diverged when I came home to Upstate New York and he moved to Texas, but as is the case with a true friendship, I always felt his presence in my life. He was one of those people that I knew, knew absolutely, positively, if I needed him, he would be there for me in whatever way he could.

Oh Tom. You dear man. How loved you were. What a great intercessor all of us have gained this day. May your memory be eternal. It’s important to talk about people like Tom. We think of saints as heroic figures, dramatic figures. If a saint Tom was, it was because he was always present, always interested in everyone around him. As far as I know, he never fell in love, romantically, but love was ever-present in his life. What a man.

The post The Little Way Of Tom Sullivan appeared first on The American Conservative.

America: Once The Promised Land, But Now?

[Readers, what follows is a modified version of a post I sent out in my Substack newsletter last week. I have added some thoughts to it, prompted by reflection on what the bishop said to me. — RD]

Yesterday I traveled to the Buda side of the Danube to meet Bishop Istvan Szabo of the Reformed Church of Hungary. If you’re a film person, you’re thinking, “Wow, the director of the Oscar-winning Mephisto is now a Calvinist divine?!” Nope. As my new Hungarian friend who introduced us, said, “‘Istvan Szabo’ is the Hungarian equivalent of ‘Steve Taylor’ — a very common name here.”

(And by the way, did you know that Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a Calvinist? This is a predominantly Catholic country, but Calvinism is a significant minority here as well. Here’s a short English-language history of the Reformation in Hungary. It turns out that Calvinism was big here until the Counter-Reformation, when the Habsburgs cracked down hard on Protestantism. It survived mostly in Transylvania, in the far east of what was then Hungary.)

Well, anyway, Bishop Istvan is now retired from bishoping, but he’s pastoring a church in Buda, and generously invited us into a room downstairs for coffee and conversation. I asked him if I could write about our conversation. “Yes,” he said, “I am an open book.”

He was born in December 1956, right after the Soviets invaded to reconquer Hungary for Communism. There was martial law and nighttime curfews, so the Bishop’s mom had to ask Russian troops to take her to the hospital to have the baby. The Szabo family joke was that little Istvan has to be grateful to the Russians for his appearance in this world.

Istvan’s father was a Reformed pastor in their village. He, along with every other Christian cleric in town, received a visit from a Soviet commissar of some sort, trying to convert them to atheism. They didn’t succeed. Istvan recalls a “very fine childhood,” despite the overwhelming Soviet attempt to Russify Hungarian culture. Like all other Hungarian students of his generation, he was required to study eight years of the Russian language, but today can’t remember any of it. Resisting all things Russian was their way of resisting the occupation of their country. He said that celebrating all the Communist holidays was compulsory, as was studying great Russian art and literature.

Listening to this, I thought about what a terrible shame it is that Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and all the other Russian greats will forever be associated in the minds of a generation of Hungarians with occupation and oppression. Istvan told me that bizarrely, the Russians established in the center of the village a graveyard of Red Army soldiers who perished in World War II.

“Can you believe it?” he said. “In a traditional Hungarian village, the graves are outside of the village, or surrounding the church. But these Russians buried 300 of their comrades right in the center of town.”

Think of it: the occupiers forced everyone in the village to make the Soviet sacrifice the center of the village’s life. They could scarcely have done more to engender hatred, could they?

Istvan told me that the villagers were rather Stoic about the occupation. “They said, ‘Listen, Istvan, we have the Russians; we had the Germans, we had the Habsburgs, we had the Turks, and we had the Mongols. They all left. The Russians will leave too.”

The Soviet occupiers subdued religious hierarchies, he said, making sure that the senior leaders — bishops and such — were collaborators. Bishop Istvan remarked that what he sees happening in liberalizing Protestant churches in the West reminds him of this process. The idea, he explained, is that they have been colonized by utopian idealists who believe they have found the truth. Said the bishop, “The Bolsheviks imposed this in a harsh, brutal way, but in the Western countries today, it is happening in a soft way.”

“Yes,” I said. “I call it ‘soft totalitarianism.’ I have written a book about it.”

Why didn’t the Soviets do what Pol Pot did? asked the bishop. They could have simply massacred all their opponents — and in fact did just this in the early years of the Bolshevik regime. But they figured out, he said, that even utopia needs people who are capable of administering it. However soft the woke (my term) may seem, he continued, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that they have what they consider to be “absolute knowledge of human history,” and that they will force people to pay a heavy price in order to see their idea of social justice realized.

I told the bishop about the origin of Live Not By Lies: from conversations I had with a number of Eastern bloc emigres to the US, who are seeing in wokeness the emergence of a system like the one they once fled. The bishop went on to say that every society needs an enemy in mind. After the end of the Cold War, the West lacked for an obvious enemy. Now, he said, the elites have decided that the enemy is traditional Christians.

“It’s not a Cold War, but a Cold Civil War, happening in the US, in Germany, everywhere,” he said.

One of the two men who had joined us for the conversation shared an anecdote from a family member in America. The family member’s little girl came home from school after receiving the standard antiracist indoctrination in whiteness and white supremacy. The child said, “I don’t understand this. Don’t all lives matter?” The child’s mom told her not to ever say those words — “all lives matter” — outside the home, because she could get in trouble.

Bishop Istvan nodded. Those who grew up under Communism know exactly what’s going on here. His interlocutor continued, saying that he is hearing that the phrase “white silence is violence” is a thing in America. He’s right:

The idea is that your silence — that is, your failure to affirm the ideology — is evidence of your guilt. One thinks of the story Solzhenitsyn tells in The Gulag Archipelago:

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). … For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.

However, who would dare to be the first to stop? … After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly – but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?

The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter…

Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!

The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”

You begin to see why the Soviet-bloc emigres are so panicked about what’s happening in America today, don’t you?

“We are not good survivors of Communism,” said Bishop Istvan, of his generation. “If you read the Book of Exodus, you will see that it took forty years of wandering in the desert for the Israelites to prepare to enter the Promised Land. Many of them wanted to go back to Egypt, where they were slaves, but at least they could have a few material things guaranteed for them. I feel like my generation has been told by God that we can’t enter the Promised Land.

“But I ask myself,” he continued, “which Promised Land should I want to enter? Should it be the West? The problem is, there is no fruit there. There is no milk, there is no honey.”

That resonated deeply with me, this point of Bishop Istvan’s. Something similar has been front to mind for me since I first arrived here three weeks ago. There is something about putting distance between oneself and America, and looking at America from a non-woke country, that highlights the true insanity of what’s happening in our nation. When you’re drinking coffee with a Hungarian man who, as a child, was forced, along with every other child in this country, to turn up on the street and pretend to be happy that Communism was running their lives — well, it really does put in perspective the rising cultural hegemony of Critical Social Justice.

And by the way, Bishop Istvan said earlier in our talk that the Communists understood well that capturing the teachers was a good way to mainline Communist ideals into the heads of students. Teachers were almost always true believers in the party. Listening to him say that made me think about how the capture of schools of education and educational circles by the woke is how the woke ideology is moving so quickly through America. I don’t think it was the bishop, but rather some other Hungarian that I told about how school systems across America have committed themselves to supporting trans students by undermining parents. For example, here is a passage from the government document setting out trans student policies in the state of New Jersey:

A school district shall accept a student’s asserted gender identity; parental consent is not required. Further, a student need not meet any threshold diagnosis or treatment requirements to have his or her gender identity recognized and respected by the district, school or school personnel. Nor is a legal or court-ordered name change required. There is no affirmative duty for any school district personnel to notify a student’s parent or guardian of the student’s gender identity or expression.

Over and over I have heard from Hungarians and others who lived under Communism that one of the basic strategies of totalitarians is to separate children from parents, if only in the minds of the children. It’s happening in America, in the name of gender ideology! It boggles the mind. It makes me want to scream, Wake up! Wake up and save yourselves, while there is time!

We have a problem with happiness, said the bishop. By trying so hard to make ourselves happy, we are making ourselves miserable. There can be no true happiness without struggle. “If you want to be happy in this life,” he said, “you will be very boring.” His point is not that happiness is wrong, but that true happiness is a by-product of the search for meaning, and the quest for virtue.

Bishop Istvan said that he has hope in the young, that they will throw off the shackles of social media, and realize that there is no substitute for real life, for the touch of a real person, for the sight of a human face, and the sound of a human voice, unmediated by electricity.

“Here in the 1980s, young people formed loose groups, just spending time together,” he said. “They had no idea that they were coming together for any particular purpose. They just came together to practice a sort of letting go.”

Letting go of what? I didn’t ask, but I understood him to mean that only in personal communion with each other could the young people living under late Communism find some sense of freedom. It reminded me of these words from the Solidarity trade union activist Zofia Romaszewska, from our interview in her Warsaw apartment, and recalled in Live Not By Lies:

Zofia Romaszewska is one of the true heroes of modern Poland. She and her late husband Zbigniew were academics and activists in the Solidarity trade-union movement. The couple joined the fight for liberty and human rights in the 1960s, when they hosted dissident meetings at their apartment. When the communist regime declared martial law in 1980 in an attempt to smash Solidarity, Romaszewska and her husband went into hiding, and founded the underground Solidarity radio station. She was eventually arrested, but amnestied after several months.

Today, at eighty, Romaszewska, now a grande dame of the anti-communist resistance, still retains the spark and tenacity of a street fighter. After five minutes of speaking with her in her Warsaw flat, it’s clear that any commissar faced with a firebrand like this woman would have no chance of prevailing.

Romaszewska is fierce on the subject of, well, solidarity. She sees the danger of soft totalitarianism coming fast, and urges young people to get off the internet and get together face-to-face to build resistance.

“As I see it, this is the core, this is the essence of everything right now: Forming these communities and networks of communities,” she says. “Whatever kinds of communities you can imagine. The point is that the members of that community must be very supportive of one another, no matter what comes. You don’t have to be prepared to give your life of the other person, but you do have to have something in common, and to do things together.”

I left Bishop Istvan Szabo and stepped out into a cool, drizzly afternoon in Buda. We had spoken of heavy things, but his spirit is so light that I didn’t realize quite how heavy they were until this morning, when I was going over my notes. Re-reading them this morning, and thinking about what I learned from this man of God, reinforced my belief that if we are going to have a future, we are going to have to turn to men and women like the bishop, and listen closely to what they have to say. They see the soft totalitarian fraud being foisted upon us in the West — and they know that a similar fate is being prepared for their countries. The good news is that it hasn’t happened here yet. They still have time to prepare.

One more thing about the meeting with the bishop. He and another Hungarian man present talked about how the Treaty of Trianon, which dismembered the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, affected their families. Families who had previously simply lived in Hungary now found themselves divided by new borders. Slovakia used to be part of the Kingdom of Hungary, as did Transylvania, which is now under Romanian rule. Bishop Istvan’s father’s family are Hungarians who live in what was given to Serbia by Trianon. Listening to these two Hungarians talk about this to each other — it wasn’t part of the interview — impressed upon me why so many Hungarians even today still talk about Trianon as a grievous national wound. I had thought that it was mostly a matter of resentment over the treaty having reduced the size of the country by two-thirds. I mean, which country wouldn’t resent that? But after yesterday, I realize that there is a deeply personal aspect to this. Families were separated by borders. Generations of Hungarians who had understood themselves as living within a single kingdom now found themselves citizens of non-Hungarian countries.

I’m neither defending nor criticizing the Treaty of Trianon. I imagine that Romanians and Slovaks — and I have good friends among them too — have a very different view of the treaty, which gave them nationhood. But if you want to understand why sovereignty matters so much to Hungarians, and why Viktor Orban and the Fidesz Party give voice to anger over what they believe are foreigners (foreign countries, international corporations and financiers, NGOs, George Soros, et alia) trying to take away or dilute Hungary’s right to self-determination, you have to understand the Trianon effect on the social psychology of Hungarians. I always thought it was a reaction to Soviet occupation, and the imposition of Communism on Hungary. That’s definitely part of it, but from what I can tell, Trianon is the major thing.

I’m finishing up this piece and am about to head across the Danube again to meet an American friend for a late lunch. I will ask her what she thinks about the Promised Land. Where is the milk and honey of the West? For Hungarians, there is no milk and honey in Russia, or in China, or in the deracinated, globalist European Union. They are going to have to figure it out for themselves.

But what a resource this country has in that damaged generation! Bishop Istvan knows that the tragedy of his generation is that they can never fully recover from the wound of Communism. Still, they carry the memory of slavery in that Bolshevik Egypt, and they can at least transmit this knowledge to the young. You would be surprised by the postcommunist young Hungarians I’ve met here who really don’t know much about the Communist years — this, by their own admission. I wonder why not. This is something I need to find out.

[Readers, this was the end of my Substack post. What follows is extra — things I’ve been thinking about over the weekend, following up on the conversation with Bishop Szabo. — RD]

It’s really hard to emphasize strongly enough how deranged American life is when seen from the perspective of this non-woke country. For Hungarians — not all of them; some want what the West has — when they see what’s happening to America, they panic, and don’t want that here. Can you blame them? What I have tried to explain to the Hungarians I’ve met is that this insanity has rolled over America so quickly because the radicals captured the institutions. If you’ve lived through what these people have lived through, you would not dare to let school authorities interpose themselves between you and your child, especially not when it comes to them wanting the child to be free to decide his or her sex, in a time of mass propaganda for gender fluidity. But we do it all the time in America. Most people in the US don’t seem to be all that concerned about it.

What just happened in my home state of Louisiana is a terrific example of institutional capture. Louisiana is a conservative state. Louisiana State University, my alma mater, finds itself in a world of trouble with the NCAA because of the way it mishandled sexual abuse allegations in the athletic department a few years back, especially with former head football coach Les Miles. It was outrageous what the university did back then, and its leadership should pay a price.

Well, LSU has just hired a new president: William F. Tate, who will be the university’s first black president. I’m glad the school will have a black president — but not Tate, who is a Critical Race Theory scholar. He’s a fairly big deal in the field. I found this in the British Journal of Sociology, from a 2013 paper:

Here is an excerpt from that “milestone” 1995 paper Tate co-authored (read the whole thing here):

He co-wrote that 25 years ago. The kind of radicalism that was confined to certain areas of academia then is now completely mainstream. A scholar who endorsed such illiberal race-centered theorizing a quarter-century ago is now going to take the presidency of Louisiana State University.

(If you don’t know what Critical Race Theory is, here is a good primer from a neutral source. CRT is destroying every institution it infects. It is going to tear apart LSU.)

As an alumnus of LSU, and as the father of a current LSU student, I am shocked, disgusted, and appalled that the LSU Board of Supervisors — who were asleep at the switch when Les Miles and student athletes were allegedly sexually assaulting and harassing others — are now apparently trying to cover their asses by bringing in a woke new president. If you have been following the work of the independent journalist Christopher Rufo, you know what CRT does to institutions. 

How will the white people of Louisiana feel about the state’s flagship university woking up to teach their children that they are oppressors who need to renounce their “white privilege,” and despise their own “whiteness”? How will alumni donors feel about that? How will state legislators? I have two more kids left to educate in college, and if the new president so much as lifts a finger to implement CRT at LSU, my kids will be going somewhere else to school, and I will make sure that my state legislator knows that I oppose any and all funding increases for my alma mater. I will not be party to paying for the destruction of LSU, and to the colonizing of the minds of a generation of Louisianians by this soft totalitarianism. Believe me, I expect to write more on this later.

I want you to focus, though, not on Dr. Tate, but on the (mostly) white elites who have hired him. What made them think that a Critical Race Theorist would be the best fit to run LSU? What kind of LSU do they want to see as the result of making him the university’s top leader? Did the people of Louisiana know that LSU was considering hiring a Critical Race Theorist? Probably not; I could not find anything about this in the state’s biggest paper, which serves Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

The radicals planted their flags at the top of another institution, this one the flagship university of a conservative state. They have done this with the collaboration of the elite gatekeepers whose job it is to look after the health of that institution, and the lack of interest — either passive or active — on the part of the media. 

This is how cultural and institutional radicalization is happening all over America, right under the noses of the American people. I tell the Hungarians I meet here: Don’t be like us! You have to fight these people as hard as you can!

Don’t give critical race theorists or gender ideologues any place in your universities. What they preach is toxic, and it will tear your country apart. They will teach your children to hate their country and their civilization, and turn people against each other. You have got to keep this stuff

I spoke to a Hungarian man about that recently, and he said, “This is why I stand by Orban, even though I don’t like some things he’s doing. We can see that our Left is trying to bring the same things here. Did you know that there was a Black Lives Matter statue here in Budapest? The far right tore it down, but it was there for a day, and had Lady Liberty in a rainbow flag. What is that doing in Budapest? We don’t have any black people here, but the Left is trying to import American issues.”

Of course. It’s a globalist left-wing ideology: gender fluidity, racial consciousness, soft totalitarianism. And it’s all being pushed by elites in the media and in institutions. Here is a report on the BLM/LGBT statue in Budapest. Excerpt:

The statue caused an uproar after it won a recent tender for public art in the ninth district of the Hungarian capital.

“Black Lives Matter is basically a racist movement. The racist is not the person who opposes a BLM statue, but the person who erects one,” said Gergely Gulyás, Orbán’s chief of staff.

But the mayor of the district, Krisztina Baranyi, defended the move, saying: “The BLM goals of opposing racism and police brutality are just as relevant in Hungary as anywhere else.”

From a YouTube video of far right activists removing it:

Unlike our friends on the activist left, I don’t agree with taking statues down (and mind you, these were activists, not people from the government). But you can see how this social radicalism is an international movement. Do you think you could expect a Republican office holder to call BLM a racist movement? The Louisiana legislature tried to ban the teaching of CRT, but the bill’s sponsor withdrew it after a ridiculous controversy over a misstatement he made, and instantly apologized for. In truth, it may not be legal for the Legislature to ban such a thing at an American college. But couldn’t we at least see some spine in Republican lawmakers, speaking out against CRT, and the LSU Board of Supervisors having hired a top CRT scholar as president of the university?!

To take this back to Bishop Szabo: no, Bishop, America is not the Promised Land, in the sense of offering a viable, healthy model of development. It really is dismantling itself through this insane leftist ideology. We are no longer a liberal democracy, but are transforming ourselves into an illiberal left-wing democracy. I’m very sorry for that. You Hungarians are going to have to work out your destiny on your own. Do not do what we have done.

As for me, here’s the conclusion that I am being dragged to by events: that the only choices we have are illiberal left-wing democracy (like Biden’s America), and illiberal right-wing democracy (like Orban’s Hungary). It’s not about voting. It’s about the institutions and the culture. My son Matt arrived here the other day, and I told him that Hungary is like a flashback to my youth in the 1980s, when I was his age. First, a lot of people smoke, but more importantly, you can have an actual conversation with someone you disagree with, without having to worry about being canceled. People can still do this here, or so it seems to me. Orban has said he wants to build an “illiberal democracy” here, and I take him at his word, but how very strange it is to be able to have more honest conversations about politics and controversial matters here than you can back in America.

Over the weekend, a liberal (but non-woke) American academic who is thinking about taking a fellowship at a Hungarian university contacted me to ask me what I thought about the place. I told him that he will feel far, far more free here, in terms of the kinds of debates he can have, than he does in the US. “And,” I said, “it will take you about two weeks on the ground here to learn that most of what you read in the American press about Hungary is bullsh*t.”

 

 

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View From Your Table

Matt and I went for dinner tonight to my friend Anna’s house. Her husband Ormos made a dish with catfish, paprika, and sour cream over noodles. It was crazy delicious. Who would have ever thought of mixing catfish, paprika, and sour cream? Hungarians, that’s who. Man!

Here is a shot of the sour cream section in the cooler at my local supermarket. From the big red, white and green canisters on the right, all the way to the left: it’s all sour cream. Is this a great country, or what?

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