Rod Dreher's Blog, page 90

Postcards From The Decline And Fall

From today’s mailbag:

Your blog posts are the only thing keeping me sane right now. Even after everything that’s happened, I don’t think people truly grasp the danger zone the country’s entered. There’s no “going back to normal.” We may not see another raid on the Capitol, but we’re definitely going to see an intensification of political violence in this country.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on the Spanish Civil War, as you have, and I came across this passage in the Wikipedia article for the topic:

Laia Balcells observes that polarisation in Spain just before the coup was so intense that physical confrontations between leftists and rightists were a routine occurrence in most localities; six days before the coup occurred, there was a riot between the two in the province of Teruel. Balcells notes that Spanish society was so divided along Left-Right lines that the monk Hilari Raguer stated that in his parish, instead of playing “cops and robbers”, children would sometimes play “leftists and rightists.” Within the first month of the Popular Front’s government, nearly a quarter of the provincial governors had been removed due to their failure to prevent or control strikes, illegal land occupation, political violence and arson. The Popular Front government was more likely to persecute rightists for violence than leftists who committed similar acts. Azaña was hesitant to use the army to shoot or stop rioters or protestors as many of them supported his coalition.

Obviously, Wikipedia doesn’t constitute an academic source, but what’s been written here has been sourced and is consistent with what I’ve seen elsewhere, including that excellent 1980s British documentary you keep referencing. The parallels between what’s happened in Spain in the ’30s and what’s happening today is alarming. The idea that children would play “leftists and rightists” is especially disturbing, in light of the anti-racism and Critical Race Theory (CRT) curriculum that’s seemingly becoming mandatory at all levels of U.S. public education. This is indoctrination and assuring that incoming leftist totalitarianism will have plenty of foot-soldiers to sustain it indefinitely.

The way our institutions and the media endorsed the George Floyd protests, or at least distinguished between peaceful protestors and rioters, but didn’t extend that courtesy to the MAGA protesters yesterday, is another sign that the authorities, including the Biden administration, will persecute rightists more than leftists the same as they did in Spain. This will only reinforce the impression that MAGA already has that they’re under siege cause them to continuously lash out and escalate violence.

I want to caution you against saying a civil war can’t happen here. It probably won’t. But, as I’ve said a time or two, the economy’s the only thing holding this country together right now. Our communities, our institutions, they’ve all been compromised. Nothing but fear and force is keeping them together right now. But if the economy collapses, then there’s no way to keep any of it together.

A lot’s been made of how other countries look at what happened yesterday. Normally, I wouldn’t care, but there’s this one thing – the dollar. The entire world trades in the dollar because it’s a powerful and stable currency. However, if what happened yesterday becomes more normal, other countries might start thinking the currency isn’t stable because America’s overall unstable. If they decide to start investing in other currencies, we’ve got a problem and that’s going to be a bleed that becomes difficult to start.

The potency of our currency is everything. We’re a long way off from an economic collapse, but if yesterday proved anything, it’s that we covered a lot of territory in a very short period of time. And the fact neither side’s backing down, both sides are pointing fingers at one another, and everyone else will just go along with what the Biden administration does and says, ensures this one-way express elevator to hell will only fall faster.

A different reader writes:

Your piece on the Judean Hills was spot on.  What I see this is a result of is the Darwinian Capitalism that has taken over the country the last 40 years.  I believe it started with Jack Welch of GE.  Companies had always had layoffs during recessionary times.  (My dad was EVP of a bank in LA that almost went under in a 70’s recession.  The only time I saw him cry was the night he came home after ordering 15% of the employees be laid off).  Jack Welch changed that.  He made it socially acceptable to lay off people to boost profits, even in the good times.  His nickname was “Neutron Jack” because he left the buildings standing even though all the employees were gone.  The reason I am not a Mitt Romney fan is that he made millions while his company (Bain) utilized this slash a burn management style.

I have family in the Rust Belt.  In the 1970’s I left California and moved to Detroit to work at Ford.  I remember my wonder as I drove around Southeast Michigan and saw the huge factories, River Rouge, Ypsilanti Ford, Hamtramck.  Factories that had been around for decades and were the “Arsenal of Democracy”.  These factories gave the opportunity for a working class blue collar guy the chance to buy a home (maybe even a boat), put his kids through college and have a nice pension when he was through.  Then the deindustrialization of the Heartland started.  Cheap foreign labor and automation turned these once proud factories into skeletons.  People left, homes were foreclosed and worst of all a drug epidemic fueled by hopelessness ravaged the area.  I saw it first hand as my son-in-law went from being a highly paid machinist to an itinerate house painter sometimes driving five hours to get to a job that barely paid of minimum wage.  It took a toll.  Alcohol, and drugs followed.  At 41 he died of a brain tumor and left behind my daughter (also an addict) and 2 young sons.

That plague still affects Caucasians in the heartland.  On top of it we have the occurrences of the past 7-8 years.  Many tried to raise their voices and were told to sit, down shut up and to check your “white privilege”.  Do you know the rage that must have been felt by these folks as they heard people like Barack Obama, Lebron James and the society tell them how privileged they were?  They pulled back into their tribes, followed sports. During all this and despite the fact their country betrayed them they became more and more patriotic (nationalistic)(Raider Nation).  Then Colin Kaepernick came along.  That movement attacked the sanctuary many had.  The reasons for Mr. Kaepernick’s protests, while legitimate, were of little concern to a group of people who had been kicked around as this group had.  The “take a knee” movement was looked at as a group of rich athletes and team owners extending their middle finger to this group of Americans.

Then came protests of the summer where the very foundation of America is questioned . Washington, Jefferson even Lincoln are denounced as racists.  Their monuments are desecrated, and barely a peep from the liberal elite of politicians, media and celebrities

Then Trump comes along.  I will not discuss Mr. Trump’s insanity, but for many he was the voice for a great many people who had been told to sit down and shut up by the elites and mostly only given lip service by the political class.  Trump became their guy.  He appeared to be standing on their side on immigration, abortion, the LGBTQ  insanity and other radical liberal priorities.  They turned out to vote in record numbers, but Trump lost.  So Trump gets into the whole election conspiracy thing.  It is very seductive and then he calls them to the Capitol so that they can be heard.  Look at the perps yesterday.  Most were white, working class in their 30s, 40s.  They tried the ballot box but they lost.  Sadly, many tried the other way.

Did you notice the difference in this time in how the media portrayed them?  During the summer while we sat and watched the rioting and looting we were told you have to understand its because they have been oppressed (Nothing like walking off with five pairs of Nikes to cure being oppressed).  Now will there be any questioning about the causes behind what happened yesterday?  No they are just terrorists and anyone who questioned the election are guilty of sedition.

Unfortunately, they hear nothing from Biden.  When he talks about his vision they see more of the same that they have had shoved down their throats before Trump.  The elites are starting the drum beat to get rid of Republican politicians who questioned the election.  Just throw them out and of course replace with “enlightened” Democrats.  There needs to be a voice of national reconciliation to bring this country back together addressing the problems of all Americans, not just minorities.  Otherwise I am afraid this was just a prelude.

Michael Lind has a thoughtful essay about the roots of yesterday’s assault. He says it’s really about five crises. Here’s how it starts:

In the past eight months, two Capitol Hills have fallen. Two shocking events symbolize the abdication of authority by America’s ruling class, an abdication that has led to what can be described, not without exaggeration, as the slow-motion disintegration of the United States of America in its present form.

The first occurred on June 8, 2020, when the Seattle police evacuated their East Precinct building in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Left-wing rioters stormed the police headquarters and looted it. For 24 days, Seattle’s government allowed would-be revolutionaries to create an anarchist commune, acting out the fantasy of “abolishing the police” embraced by much of the American left as well as liberals who should have known better. This anarchist commune, created in the midst of nationwide protests against the death on May 25 of a Black Minnesotan, George Floyd, in police custody, was the scene of the fatal shootings of two Black men before the police finally shut it down on July 1.

On Jan. 6, 2021, America’s elite abandoned another Capitol Hill to rioters. After President Donald Trump stirred them up in an incendiary address in which he claimed that Joe Biden had stolen the presidency from him, a mob of right-wing radicals broke into the United States Capitol, where the certification of the results of last November’s election results was taking place. Like the leaders of Seattle in June, America’s congressional leaders abandoned their posts and fled. In the ensuing chaos, the Trumpist rioters, mostly men wearing MAGA hats or more exotic outfits, posed for selfies in the well of the House chamber or in the legislative offices they broke into. A police officer killed a female rioter. Three others died as a result of “medical emergencies.” As in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, so in America’s: The forces of legitimate authority and coercive order for a period were nowhere to be seen.

What is the meaning of these dystopian scenes? Many Democrats claim that Republicans are destroying the republic. Many Republicans claim the reverse. They are both correct.

More:

People who are rooted in real communities—extended families, neighborhoods, occupational associations, religious congregations—do not make good foot soldiers in partisan armies deployed by remote elites who are battling for control of government offices. They have jobs they can’t miss and children they have to pick up from school and errands to run.

Isolated individuals are the natural sources for political armies. Though their ideologies vary, and different political warlords recruit them, the young people who vandalize stores and offices in the name of Black Lives Matter often share a common lack of social rootedness with their militant MAGA counterparts, a common Durkheimian anomie. Twenty-somethings who are married with children and have stable jobs and mortgage payments are unlikely to storm either Seattle’s or Washington’s Capitol Hill.

Combine the rise of social anomie with social (actually antisocial) media, and our warring political factions can summon mobs of alienated, mostly young militants anywhere in the country on short notice, overtly like Trump or discreetly from behind the scenes, like Democratic donors and politicians through the local NGOs they fund. The flash mob, originally used for fun, has now been weaponized for street warfare by Democratic and Republican party leaders from the luxury of their mansions or apartment suites or offices. The Democratic street armies, with their national networks of bail funds that enable the coastal rich to spring left-wing rioters and looters from jail in staged protests across the country, is far more sophisticated and enjoys far more corporate and financial sector support than the less-developed, but increasingly militant, right-wing alternatives.

And:

The strategy of American business, encouraged by neoliberal Democrats and libertarian conservative Republicans alike since the 1970s, has been to lower labor costs in the United States, not by substituting labor-saving technology for workers, but by schemes of labor arbitrage: offshoring jobs when possible to poorly paid workers in other countries and substituting unskilled immigrants willing to work for low wages in some sectors, like meatpacking and construction and farm labor. American business has also driven down wages by smashing unions in the private sector, which now have fewer members—a little more than 6% of the private sector workforce—than they did under Herbert Hoover. Another wage-suppressing tactic of American business is replacing full-time employees with benefits with part-time contractors or gig workers with lower wages and no benefits. The MAGA assault on Capitol Hill came shortly after it was announced that Albertsons, the grocery company that owns Vons, Pavilion, and other chains in California, is firing full-time delivery drivers and replacing them with gig workers.

Read it all. There’s a lot in there, critical of both Left and Right. Can we pull back from the brink? Where are the counter-distintegrating forces? I don’t see them.

One more excerpt, this one from a long piece by Glenn Greenwald, from his Substack newsletter:

It is stunning to watch now as every War on Terror rhetorical tactic to justify civil liberties erosions is now being invoked in the name of combatting Trumpism, including the aggressive exploitation of the emotions triggered by yesterday’s events at the Capitol to accelerate their implementation and demonize dissent over the quickly formed consensus. The same framework used to assault civil liberties in the name of foreign terrorism is now being seamlessly applied — often by those who spent the last two decades objecting to it — to the threat posed by “domestic white supremacist terrorists,” the term preferred by liberal elites, especially after yesterday, for Trump supporters generally. In so many ways, yesterday was the liberals’ 9/11, as even the most sensible commentators among them are resorting to the most unhinged rhetoric available.

Within hours of the Capitol being cleared, we heard truly radical proposals from numerous members of Congress. Senators and House members who objected to Electoral College certification, or questioned its legitimacy, should be formally accused of sedition and removed from expelled from the House if not prosecuted, argued Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), with other House members expressing support. Even those unarmed protesters who peacefully entered the Capitol should, many argued, be hunted by the FBI as domestic terrorists.

Calls proliferated for the banning of the social media accounts of instigators and protest participants. Journalists and politicians cheered the decision by Facebook and Twitter to temporarily bar the President from using their service, and then cheered again when Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that the ban on Trump extended through Biden’s inauguration. Some journalists, such as CNN’s Oliver Darcy, complained that Facebook had not gone far enough, that more mass censorship was needed of right-wing voices. The once-radical 2006 Gingrich argument — that some opinions are too dangerous to allow to be expressed because they are pro-terrorist and insurrectionary — is now thriving, close to a consensus.

These calls for censorship, online and official, are grounded in the long-discredited, oft-rejected and dangerous view that a person should be held legally accountable not only for their own illegal actions but also for the consequences of their protected speech: meaning the actions others take when they hear inflammatory rhetoric. That was the distorted mentality used by the State of Mississippi in the 1970s to try to hold NAACP leaders liable for the violent acts of their followers against boycott violators after hearing rousing pro-boycott speeches from NAACP leaders, only for the Supreme Court in 1982 to unanimously reject such efforts on the ground that “while the State legitimately may impose damages for the consequences of violent conduct, it may not award compensation for the consequences of nonviolent, protected activity,” adding that even “advocacy of the use of force or violence does not remove speech from the protection of the first amendment.”

The complete reversal in mentality from just a few months ago is dizzying. Those who spent the summer demanding the police be defunded are furious that the police response at the Capitol was insufficiently robust, violent and aggressive. Those who urged the abolition of prisons are demanding Trump supporters be imprisoned for years. Those who, under the banner of “anti-fascism,” demanded the firing of a top New York Times editor for publishing an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) advocating the deployment of the U.S. military to quell riots — a view deemed not just wrong but unspeakable in decent society — are today furious that the National Guard was not deployed at the Capitol to quash pro-Trump supporters. Antifa advocates are working to expose the names of Capitol protesters to empower the FBI to arrest them on terrorism charges. And while Rep. Cori Bush’s proposal to unseat members of Congress for their subversive views went mega-viral, many forget that in 1966, the Georgia State Legislature refused to seat Julian Bond after he refused to repudiate his anti-war work with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, then considered a domestic terrorist group.

Read it all. 

 

The post Postcards From The Decline And Fall appeared first on The American Conservative.

Rival Orthodox Christian Visions

There’s still time to register for the online lecture I’ll be giving on January 30. It’s the Schmemann Lecture, sponsored by St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary:

You can register for it here. Note well that the registration fee goes up after January 15. I will base my lecture on my book Live Not By Lies, with a particular emphasis on the challenges that priests and Christian lay leaders will face now and into the future. I will be addressing an Orthodox audience, and will get into Orthodox particulars, but my lecture is by no means only something that Orthodox Christians will be interested in. I will speak with all small-o orthodox Christians in mind. In my book, I interview Christians from Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant traditions who were persecuted by the Communists. They were not persecuted because of their particular confession; they were persecuted because they professed Christ, and were understood to oppose the unjust regime. I really think that all Christians (and even traditional believers from other religions, who are trying to figure out how to live and to raise faithful children in the shadow of this civilizational crisis) will find what I have to say provocative and helpful.

It turns out that my talk has caused a tempest in the teapot that is American Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Left — primarily academics — have been trying to get my talk cancelled. I oppose their efforts to turn Orthodoxy into Byzantine Episcopalianism, and though I would not be so rude as to name names in this lecture, they quite correctly understand that I am going to call their project what it is: a dead end that stands to do to the Orthodox Church what progressivism has done to Mainline Protestantism, and is doing to Catholicism.

Having failed to get me cancelled, they’re now counterprogramming:

Prof. Demacopoulos is a Fordham professor, a leader in the Mainline-Protestant wing of American Orthodoxy, and one of the people trying to get me disinvited by the seminary on grounds that I am neither academic nor cleric, and that I am somehow demeaning the lecture by being political (my lecture will not be political). No time has yet been announced for Demacopoulos’s just-announced lecture, but — surprise! — I imagine it will coincide with mine. Seems to me like a cheap stunt by people who are outraged that they can’t control the Orthodox narrative, but given that I didn’t expect that the Orthodox Left would fork over the money to listen to my talk, I suppose it’s good that they will have something to do with their time on that day. Interested observers of American religious culture will see rival visions of Christian engagement on display that day, from two Orthodox commenters. I’m biased, of course, but if you listen to my lecture, you will hear something about a vital future for Orthodoxy in America; the other guy will be talking about a way for the Orthodox Church to manage a decline into senescent respectability.

Please sign up for my talk, and encourage your friends to do so. You may not like everything I have to say, but you will be challenged by it, and certainly not bored.

The post Rival Orthodox Christian Visions appeared first on The American Conservative.

To The Judean Hills

Here’s how the MAGA thuggery began yesterday:

The moment it all began. pic.twitter.com/gdyx9Udgc6

— Philip Crowther (@PhilipinDC) January 7, 2021

A reader e-mailed last night:

Watching the events in Washington today, I kept coming back to one basic reaction: This is the moment that the American national security state will truly turn its gaze inward. Of course, Edward Snowden and others have showed us that that has already happened, and even a basic glance at the history of J. Edgar Hoover, RFK, etc., proves that this is nothing new. And as a Catholic, an American, a conservative, a Republican, and a lawyer, I had lots of other reactions to what happened today, but this preoccupation with the inevitable backlash was the one that kept coming back. It is already well known that the FBI and other agencies regard far-right domestic terrorism as a major threat, and Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and other prominent people on the left have made it clear that they want to use the counterterrorism apparatus that this country built after 9/11 to go after MAGA world. There is no telling where that ends.

To be clear, there is a very real white nationalist threat in America today, and we saw it this afternoon, but I think this can very easily form the beginning of a crackdown that will have much greater reach than anyone would currently think or intend. Mind you, I’m not saying that I think the FBI is about to start kicking down doors in every conservative community, but I do think that conservatives in America might soon have a greater appreciation of what Muslims have been living with for the last twenty years. As Matt Taibbi put it on Twitter today, these idiots guaranteed that every third attendee of MAGA events will be an FBI agent from now on. My hope is that a Justice Department led by Merrick Garland will be responsible and measured in addressing these problems, but I have no faith in the long-term ability or willingness of Democratic politicians to restrain themselves from using the vast power and might of the surveillance state as a cudgel with which to attack the opposition. In America, once something becomes a matter of National Security, all bets are off.

The frustration for conservatives, and social conservatives in particular, is that voting Trump was largely meant to be a hedge against this threat, and against the broader threat of soft totalitarianism that you have so eloquently written about. But now, it seems that Trump has made it worse. And we have no remaining institutions that can serve as honest brokers.

An enduring alliance between the military-industrial complex and woke capital became more likely today.

This is true. All of the things I write about in Live Not By Lies are now on an accelerated path. If you are not preparing yourself and your family, you are not reading the signs of the times. Yesterday I quoted Jesus’s prophecy of the coming destruction of Jerusalem — the time Jesus, quoting the Prophet Daniel, said that when you see the “abomination of desolation standing in the holy place” (the Temple), then it is time to head for the Judean hills. Jesus was making a particular prophecy; I certainly am not. What I’m saying is that the symbolic desecration of the Capitol yesterday by a political mob was a massive sign of underlying instability (as was Trump’s election in 2016; as Tucker Carlson has written, a happy nation does not elect a man like Donald Trump). And now I’m hearing reports from conservative friends all over saying that their MAGA family members are doubling down on the belief that the insurrection was caused by Antifa disguised as Trump supporters who were allowed into the Capitol to discredit opposition to the socialist New World Order agenda.

The prophet of the Catholic Far Right certainly seems to think  something along those lines, tweeting the following out yesterday, heedless of the shocking events at the Capitol. Naturally he was retweeted by the Evangelical radio personality who has spent weeks calling people to prepare to die to protect Trump’s presidency, and who is still pushing the Stop The Steal line:

 

So this is not going away. This is the point at which I say, in my helpful way, that Hannah Arendt’s list of signs of a pre-totalitarian society includes that people are unwilling to believe anything that doesn’t cohere with their inner narrative. The MAGA Right does this, as does the Woke Left. I’m especially sorry to see wide sections of the Right fall victim to this Trump madness, because these people, this mob, subverts the cause of legitimate resistance to the Left’s broader project.

Consider that for much of the past year, we have all watched as left-wing mobs torched parts of cities, ransacked businesses, physically harassed and intimidated innocent civilians, all in the name of racial justice. We have watched these same mobs tear down statues of American historical figures with impunity. People like me objected, but not many in our media and liberal establishment. It was all necessary, we were told, to achieve Social Justice. True, some on the Left may have objected to violence in principle, but we were all instructed that we had to understand the pain of the protesters. Yes, it might have been mob rule, but it was a righteous mob, we were led to believe. We have seen our universities, and our leading media institutions, throwing out their professional and academic standards in an effort to appease the leftist mob and its ideological madness. So please do not come pee up my leg and tell me that the MAGA insurrection was a shocking attack on American democracy and the liberal order, one that is completely disconnected from the Left’s sustained assault on the same.

One of the most astute black commenters on public affairs tweeted this yesterday:

He’s right, of course. And it’s not at all whataboutism! You cannot understand the insanity that took place on Capitol Hill yesterday — something that I have condemned and do condemn without equivocation — without understanding it in context of what the Left has been doing. The MAGA mob and its supporters acted yesterday to dismantle the American system of government, as a manifestation of classical liberalism. The radical Left has been doing this for some time now, more broadly. The MAGA mob has the Crackpot-in-Chief behind them; the Left has Establishment leaders in the media, academia, progressive state governments, and in corporate America.

Remember NPR’s puff interview last summer of the leftist author of a book titled, “In Defense Of Looting”? The liberal media elites have been embracing this stuff for a long time. They would never in a million years allow some MAGA nut to elaborate on why sacking the Capitol was morally just action. They have standards, after all. It’s just that those standards only apply sometimes. This is exactly why so many Americans despise and mistrust the media.

Here’s another example. I was texting with a Democratic friend earlier this week. We were talking about the massive demographic changes America is now undergoing, and how conservative whites really are losing power relative to other demographic groups. The UK political scientist Eric Kaufmann talks about this in his book Whiteshift. He did an interview last year with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker about his thesis. Excerpts:

You write, “If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed. I realize this is very controversial for left-modernists. Yet not only is white group self-interest legitimate, but I maintain that in an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet.” Can you say a little bit more about what specifically you’re arguing for?

Yes. Part of this comes from a view that what’s ultimately behind the rise of right-wing populism are these ethnic-majority grievances, particularly around their decline, and that ultimately this is about nostalgia and attachment to a way of life or to a particular traditional ethnic composition of a nation. Wanting for that not to erode too quickly is the motivation. I think the survey data show that it’s much more about that than about material things, for example, or even fears. It’s about attachment to one’s own group rather than hatred of other groups. This is an important distinction. The survey data from the American National Elections Study show that whites who feel very warmly toward whites are not any more cold toward, say, African-Americans, than whites who aren’t very warm toward whites.



When you say that “white interests” will need to be discussed in politics, I presume you acknowledge that the interests of white people are generally taken into account as much as any group, if not more than other groups. Do you mean explicitly discussed?

There should be an equal treatment of groups in the cultural sphere. There’s no question whites are advantaged economically, politically. I’m not going to dispute that. But in the cultural sphere, on immigration, the group whose numbers have declined, or who experienced a more rapid sense of change and loss due to migration, are the white majority. If, for example, they’re saying, “We would like to have a slower rate of change to enable assimilation to take place,” I think that’s actually a legitimate cultural interest. It doesn’t mean that it should drive policy. I think a moderate group self-interest is fine.

This is seen as toxic, as expressed by a majority group, but when minorities express these interests, that’s seen as quite normal. I think that when it comes to white liberals, there tends to be a double standard, as there is with white conservatives, by the way, when it comes to groups expressing their self-interest.



Are you saying that it is in the “self-interest” of white people to have lower immigration rates, or are you saying that if white people perceive that it’s in their interest, they should be able to express that without being shamed for being racist? Or both?

I’m saying that for the conservative members of the white majority who are attached to their group and its historic presence, I think that sense of loss and wanting to slow down that sense of loss is an understandable motivation. The problem is when you bar that from the discussion. It then gets sublimated and expressed in what I think actually are more negative ways, when it comes to racism. I think it’s not very different from African-Americans in Harlem not wanting Harlem to lose its African-American character. It’s a similar cultural loss-protection argument, which is actually not that different from wanting to preserve historic buildings or ways of life. The problem is that then they go toward fear of criminals and terrorism, and immigrants putting pressure on services, and all the things which there’s very little evidence for, and I think are more negative because they actually stigmatize an out-group, which is closer to the definition of racism than simply being attached to one’s own group. Not that that doesn’t carry some risks as well, but I think that it’s more problematic to suppress it for the majority and not for minorities. I think that’s creating a quite negative situation.

I told my Democratic friend that future historians will look back at this era of American politics and find it absolutely deranged that the political left, and mainstream institutions, embraced antiwhite identity politics at the same time that the United States desperately needed to strengthen its traditions of classically liberal civic nationalism, which offers the best hope for a racially pluralistic democracy to hold together. But that’s not what’s happening.

Bizarrely, as blacks and other minorities are growing in power, wealth, and influence, the Left acts as if America is little better than apartheid South Africa, and in need of radical antiwhite policies to bring about justice. Just yesterday I was speaking to a fellow white Southerner, a guy of my generation, and we were talking about how much things have changed for the better in terms of black-white relations, over the course of our lifetimes. We were talking about how things were when our parents were kids, and how things were when our grandparents were kids. The progress has been vast, and measurable. He said that one of his family members is married to a black person, and is accepted by everybody in the family. That simply would not have happened in the past, he said — and of course he’s right. It’s so bizarre how on race, our progressives don’t believe in progress. We are not living in a racial utopia, and never will, but things are so much better than they were. I mean, look, a black preacher who holds the Rev. Martin Luther King’s old pulpit was just elected US Senator from the state of Georgia! That doesn’t make Georgia the Garden of Eden, but you’d have to be blinded by ideology to fail to see that America is a much less racist place than it was within living memory.

Let me put it to you like this: Raphael Warnock was born in 1969. Who was the governor of Georgia at the time? Arch-segregationist Lester Maddox. Now Lester Maddox is dead, and Raphael Warnock is headed to the US Senate to represent Georgia. If you don’t see that as progress, you are choosing to be blind.

What is going to shock historians in the future about this era is how left-wing race radicalism emerged and became the dominant ideology within institutions at the same time that white hegemony was in decline. The race radicals have marched through institutions, and are transforming them into factories that manufacture race hatred. This cannot possibly end well.

The independent journalist Christopher Rufo does great work documenting what’s happening in the most radicalized places. Someone at the San Diego public schools leaked to Rufo a document about the “antiracist” training being done there now. He writes:

In recent months, the district has announced mandatory diversity training for teachers, added a new “ethnic studies” curriculum focused on racial grievance, and even abolished the requirement to turn in homework on time—all in the name of becoming, in the words of school board member Richard Barrera, “an anti-racist school district.”

Last month, I reported on one of these training sessions, focused on “white privilege,” in which white teachers were accused of being colonizers on stolen Native American land and told “you are racist” and “you are upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies.” The trainers demanded that the teachers “confront and examine [their] white privilege,” “acknowledge when [they] feel white fragility,” and “teach others to see their privilege.” After the story caused an uproar, school officials defended the training as a form of “racial healing.”

According to new whistleblower documents, San Diego Unified held an even more radical training program featuring a speaker who believes American schools are guilty of the “spirit murdering of Black children.” The school district hired Bettina Love, a critical race theorist who believes that children learn better from teachers of the same race, for the keynote address at the August Principal Institute and for an additional district-wide training on how to “challenge the oppressive practices that live within the systems and structures of school organizations.”

Though the school district explicitly forbade attendees from recording the session, one whistleblower took detailed notes of the speech and captured screenshots of the presentation. According to these notes, Love began her presentation by claiming that “racism runs deep” in the United States and that blacks alone “know who America really is.” She argued that public schools in particular “don’t see [blacks] as human,” are guilty of systemic “anti-Blackness,” and “spirit murder babies” in the education system.

 Spirit murder. This is insane propaganda. It can only lead to violence, even bloodshed. What would you do if you became convinced that people of another race were murdering the spirits of your children? Suffer not a witch to live!

It is clear that if you are a white teacher or student in the San Diego public schools, you had better get out of there while the getting is good. This madness is not about improving education; it’s about teaching race hatred, and institutionalizing race hatred. What happens when, having driven “whiteness” out of the education system, minority students still lag behind in educational achievement? Obviously, it means that whites are so clever that they managed to spirit-murder black and brown kids despite the best efforts of antiracist educators. What will be done with the white devils then? Do you really want to stick around to see?

You can escape this for now by leaving California. But don’t think there is any safe place to hide. Bettina Love, is a professor of educational theory and practice at University of Georgia. She is poisoning the minds of education students there. Graduates of her teaching will march through the institutions of Georgia and other states as militant antiwhites.

This is an example of what I mean by “soft totalitarianism.” The toxic idea that racism is concentrated in a single race, that guilt is collective, and that the line between good and evil passes between whites and other races — all of this is straight out of Marxist theory. In Live Not By Lies, I write:

One imagines an entry-level worker at a Fortune 500 firm, or an untenured university lecturer, suffering through the hundredth workshop on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and doing their very best not to be suspected of dissent. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it at all. As a journalist who writes about these issues, I often hear stories from people—always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers—who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives. They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake.

For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship.

The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool, and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

A softer, bloodless form of the same logic is at work in American institutions. Social justice progressives advance their malignant concept of justice in part by terrorizing dissenters as thoroughly as any inquisitor on the hunt for enemies of religious orthodoxy.

There are no gulags, and no firing squads, as there were in the Bolsheviks’ Red Terror. But the logic is the same. White people are guilty of murdering the spirits of black and brown people, according to Bettina Love and the San Diego Unified School District. If others come to believe this, do you think that they will just sit with that knowledge? Come on. 

And in turn, do you really think too that white people are going to sit back and do nothing? Those within the institutions — corporations, universities, media — they will submit to the soft totalitarianism. But for every action, there is an equal and positive reaction. We are going to see some bad, crazy stuff happening. Yesterday’s assault on the Capitol was just the beginning. It is fair to say, of the MAGA mob, that because the normal, respectable leaders did not speak out against this, and act against it when they had the opportunity to, the fire in their brains led them to insurrection. It is also fair to say, of the leftist revolutionaries marching through the institutions and remaking them along identity-politics lines, that because normal, respectable  liberal leaders did not stand up for old-fashioned liberalism when the had the opportunity to — and in fact helped tinder the fire of radicalism on the Left — then, when extremists who are the mirror image of these racist power-holders emerge, the Left will bear its share of blame.

Seriously, think about it: the public school district in a major American city is teaching its teachers that white people wish to murder the souls of black and brown people — and nobody in the media objects, or even notices. What the hell do they think is going to happen?

The Democratic Party is now going to control Congress and the executive branch. But note well that this has all happened under a Republican president, and with Republicans controlling Congress for half of his administration. Note what the conservative commentator Michael Brendan Dougherty said yesterday about Trump booster Sen. Josh Hawley:

This fake politics is designed to raise hopes among the disaffected and untrusting Trump voters and keep them engaged in the process. But there is a price for this fraud; namely, it erodes the adherence of the American people to their constitutional system of self-government. It atrophies their political muscle by feeding it with empty calories and giving them fake exercises of their political faculties.

Senator Josh Hawley claims to be speaking for 70 million Americans in asking questions about election integrity and saying he objects to the process — in some underspecified way. He is a legislator. He could try to advance legislation. If he doesn’t like the influence of tech, he could support laws limiting what tech could say. He could promote periods of media and social-media silence as some countries do. Maybe he doesn’t want this; Republicans typically have preferred the management of elections to remain with the states. So grant that. He could — as a man with real knowledge of the law and influence with the Republican Party — lend his bully pulpit to efforts in the states to better govern mail-in voting, ban any practices such as “vote harvesting” where it exists, and tighten up election-security measures. He’s not doing so. Instead, we have this gesture politics.

This is becoming something of a pattern. Last year, Hawley gave a memorable and biting speech on the floor of the Senate after the Supreme Court handed down the Bostock decision, which extended the 1964 Civil Rights Act to be inclusive of novel gender identities and transgendered persons. He demeaned the decision as “legislation” written by a court. “Courts are supposed to leave legislating to legislators,” he thundered. He was utterly correct that the Court usurped the role of Congress and had done something Congress had “pointedly declined to do for years now.” All of this was 100 percent bang-on. The problem was that Hawley did not finish the speech by introducing superseding legislation himself. He had just outlined the duties of his job but then failed to do them, letting the Court prevail by default.

It’s despicable, the games these Republican leaders play, and it’s despicable how eagerly Republican followers are to fall for them. We on the Right can’t just keep pointing to the Left and say, “But they’re worse!” Yes, in some ways, they are. But look at what our side’s lunatic fringe did yesterday: carried out an act of insurrection against the US Capitol, instigated by the President of the United States.

The stupid, shocking, deplorable MAGA insurrection in Washington yesterday will only accelerate the leftist internal revolution. Now the commissars will do what they want to do anyway, but in the name of suppressing the kind of people who violated the temple of democracy. The MAGA idiots gave the Left its Reichstag fire. We saw that ridiculous QAnon shaman, that selfie-ready barbarian, standing in the well of the Senate yesterday. But that cartoon man, potent symbol though he was, is impotent. The real barbarians are the ones in suits and lab coats, the ones who are dismantling our civilization. Time to revisit this final passage from MacIntyre’s After Virtue:

The imperium is dissolving before our eyes. You might think that this is a time for responsible leaders — and responsible followers! — of the Left and the Right to come together to recognize what we are fast losing, and to turn back from the brink. But it is probably too late. Stacey Abrams, the architect of the Democrats’ stunning sweep of the Georgia Senate races, has said that she 100 percent believes in identity politics. The Left is not turning back from them. If you think that the Right is going to fight this with one hand tied behind its back, you’re deluding yourself.

Is it possible for any kind of coalition of the center to emerge to counter the extremes of the Left and the Right? I would hope so, but honestly, I fear the time for that has passed. If this were 1930s Spain, I would say we were at about 1934 (the civil war broke out in 1936). But we aren’t Spain, and a country as middle class and as comfortable as ours is not going to have a civil war (though it probably will have widespread acts of violence by Left and Right wing extremists). The Establishment is going to pacify the country with a Chinese-style social credit system. If you are now or ever have been associated with MAGA, or any other Deplorable movement, organization, or entity, you will find yourself popping up on a lot of people’s computer screens, and denied economic and other opportunities. Corporate America will be eager to help the state. Things will move fast.

Remember the so-called Patriot Act? What’s coming is going to make that look like small beer. And the Judean hills — I speak metaphorically — suddenly look a lot more reasonable.

The post To The Judean Hills appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trampling Our Country

My friend Michael Warren Davis, a Catholic journalist, wrote this to me just now. I publish it here with his permission. I think it is profound:

 

In his essay Clio, Charles Peguy celebrates the idea of a “cult of the founder.”  He writes:


How right the ancients were, dear friends, to have celebrated, feasted, and commemorated the foundation of a city; to have realized that the city was a being, a living being, and that its foundation was no ordinary action, but a religious action; something out of the ordinary and solemn, worthy of solemnization…


This has always been the best Christian argument for patriotism.  Patriotism follows naturally from the Fifth Commandment: to honor one’s father and mother, the fathers and mothers of our nation.  It’s an act of gratitude—a simple recognition that, were it not for them, we wouldn’t be here.


It’s also an act of humility.  We forgive our fathers their imperfections, hoping that our sons will forgive ours.  We love our nation, not despite its imperfections, but because of those imperfections.  Because we, too, are imperfect, and if anyone is ever going to love us, they too must be prepared to love the imperfect.  True patriots are always humble; true patriotism isn’t possible without humility.


Call it whatever you like.  What transpired in Washington today, it was not patriotic.  The men who attacked the Capitol were not patriots.


The Capitol Building is the house that our Founding Fathers built.  It’s the cradle of our Republic—our beautiful, beleaguered, imperfect Republic.  The British sacked it in 1812 because they hated the Republic.  How can the MAGA mob do the same, and claim to be acting out of love for the Republic?  How can anyone now ransack our Fathers’ house and claim to be acting in our Fathers’ name?


You know as well as I do, Rod, that this has always been the real problem with the Left’s iconoclasm.  It wasn’t about the slabs of marble and stone, however artfully crafted.  By disowning the fathers of our nation (Columbus, Serra, Washington, Jefferson, et al.)the iconoclasts were attacking our common parentage.  They attacked the spirit of gratitude, of humility, that makes it possible for Americans to exist as a national family.

By disowning our fathers, they were giving themselves an excuse to disown our brothers.  They demanded we accept certain political doctrines before they would accept us as their own.  They put a litmus test on their loyalty, on their love—not only for their countrymen, but for their country.  They were granting themselves permission to hate.


Russell Kirk once said, “The conservatives declare that society is a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn; and that it coheres through what Aristotle called friendship and Christians call love of neighbor.”  The MAGA mob, no less than Antifa, makes it impossible for us to imagine loving our neighbor—our countrymen—if they disagree with us politically.  Both sects have made clear that, if we dissent from their ideology, they’re ready to do violence against us.


Both the Left and the Right dabble in political violence because we have no idea what it would actually be like to live in a nation where our countrymen truly hate one another.  The Left felt free to burn down the ghettoes of Minneapolis because we long ago stopped caring about those poor folk; we assumed they would be miserable their whole lives anyway.  They felt free to loot Fifth Avenue in New York because those rich folks could take the hit.


That’s wrong, but that’s the way it is.


The Right just made political violence imminent for all Americans.  We may not feel any fellow-feeling for the Minneapolis poor or the New York rich, but when we see Trumpists brawling with Capital Police in the Senate Chamber, that touches every single American.  That’s your Senate—no matter where you live, or what color your skin is, or how many zeroes you tack on the end of your net worth.


As of today, every American in the country has legitimate reason to expect that he’ll be touched by political violence.  Not only the very rich, or the very poor, but every single one of us.  We can well imagine that our neighbor hates us, and that he’s willing to harm us for the sake of his political agenda.


The Right has to own that.  We can’t get around that.  It’s on us.


This may all be a huge gas for the time being.  Only one woman died in the Battle of Capitol Hill (2020), God rest her soul.  But, again, we haven’t even tasted life in a nation where our countrymen truly hate one another.  We’re going to find out.

When we do, lots of Americans are going to realize why Christians believe that loving one’s enemy is, not only a virtue, but a duty.  We’re going to wish we felt that reverence for our national symbols—be they statues of Washington or the Capitol Building—to remind us of our common parentage, and to engender something like fraternal love.

That was the only real duty of conservatives at this historic juncture, and we have manifestly failed.  God help us.

All too true. Our poor country.

Now seems the right time for me to repost this story, which I have told in this space several times over the past few years:

On the morning of September 11, 2002, I walked over to Ground Zero for the solemn observation of the anniversary. I stood on the north side of the hole, at the perimeter, waiting for the service to start. The crowd was behind a fence; none of us had access to the site itself, which was reserved for families and dignitaries. It was important, though, to be there.

Suddenly, at the time when the first plane hit the World Trade Center, a powerful wind descended from the same direction of that plane. It was from Hurricane Gustav, which had come ashore in the Carolinas, and was rolling up the East Coast. Still, I was there, and the timing was very, very weird. It blew a fairly steady 60 mph all morning. A friend who had been watching the services live on TV said that one of the commenters called the wind “Biblical.” If you were down there in that wind, as I was, it seemed apt.

The wind was still blowing later that morning when I went into Trinity Church Wall Street for a memorial service celebrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury. At some point during the church service, we could hear a signal from adjacent Ground Zero, indicating that all the names of the dead had been read, and that the ceremony there was ending. Shortly after, the church liturgy ended, and I emerged outside to calm. The winds had stopped. I don’t know when the ceased to blow, but I can tell you it was in the relatively short time between the start and end of the church service.

If I had to bet money, I’d say that the winds stopped blowing when the last names were read at Ground Zero. It was that kind of morning.

Later in the day, I received a call from a friend I had run into at Ground Zero that morning. She was fairly freaked out, and asked me to come over at once. I made my way to her apartment. She led me into her tiny home office, and showed me a small American flag, so old and threadbare that you could see through it, framed and under glass, hanging on her wall. A tear ran through it, almost from top to bottom.

It wasn’t obvious to me what the issue was. Then she told me: she’s had that flag on the wall for years, and it was fine. It was position right across from her desk. She looked at it every day. But that morning — September 11, 2002 — while she was out in the crowd at Ground Zero, something happened to it. It had torn down the middle, even though it was sealed under glass, and nobody had come into her home.

This really did happen. I have lost contact with that friend, but I wonder what she thinks of it today. Both of us are believing Christians, and we could not help seeing it in light of the Biblical account of the tearing of the veil in the Temple when Jesus died on the Cross. That event has multiple meanings in Christian belief, and among them is a prophecy of the ultimate destruction of the Temple itself, which took place at the hands of the Romans in 70 AD. I left my friend’s apartment wondering if the tearing of the flag — assuming that there was symbolic meaning behind it — meant that there was a withdrawal of God’s favor on the US, and that 9/11 was the beginning of our end.

Granted, I have an apocalyptic mindset, and even if I didn’t, it was very easy to think in apocalyptic terms in those days, living so close to Ground Zero. On the other hand, I was also primed to think that 9/11 was going to summon up the strength of our great nation, and goad us to assert ourselves on the world stage. The United States was at that moment the sole hyperpower on the planet. We were at the peak of our strength. We would soon be going to war in the Middle East, that was clear by then. Now, finally, we would set the world to right. I was not eager to believe in portents that cast doubt on that project. I was in those days filled with patriotic righteousness — which is why the tearing of the flag was so eerie, and unwelcome to me.

That’s what I saw on 9/11/2002. Maybe it was just a fluke. Maybe that flag had come apart earlier, and my friend only noticed it on that morning. But: in light of everything that has happened since then — and that continues to happen — that torn flag seems to me like the omen I feared it was at the time.

The post Trampling Our Country appeared first on The American Conservative.

Religious Meaning Of MAGA Riot

Let me say up front: not all conservative Christians supported Donald Trump; not all conservative Christians endorsed the Jericho March, and the rest. If you are using today’s horrifying, disgraceful events in Washington to justify your hatred of all conservative Christians, you are wrong, and should knock it off. I’m not going to post your comments if so.

And: the disgusting actions of the MAGA mob in DC today do not obviate the awfulness of the radical Left — nor do the disgusting actions of the radical Left obviate the awfulness of the radical Right.

But.

Conservatives saw the progressive mobs rampaging last summer. We saw the media and others within the liberal Establishment downplaying the wickedness of that violence. We were meant to understand the pain of the demonstrators. We have seen institutions — corporations, universities, media outlets — change their policies to react favorably to what these mobs have demanded. Conservatives have stood up to these things.

And yet now, we have seen the MAGA mob do one better than the BLM mobs, which never attacked the US Capitol. We never saw them do things like this to the citadel of American democracy:

Rioter uses a metal barricade to try to break open a Capitol building door. pic.twitter.com/54XJR51g0R

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) January 6, 2021

And the BLM/Antifa mobs did not do what they did at the instigation of a leading Democratic politician. Today’s mob did it at the instigation of the President of the United States.

I don’t want to hear “whataboutism” from my side. What happened today in Washington was a defilement of the most potent architectural symbol of American democracy. In the Bible, Jesus said, speaking of an approaching apocalypse:

“So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.” (Matthew 24:15-16)

He’s talking about the Hebrew Temple. The US Capitol is not a religious building. But from a nationalist point of view, the Capitol is our Temple. And this MAGA idiot in the headdress is an abomination of desolation standing in the holy place:

It is hard to overstate how shocking this is. Again, it is a defilement. This is going to be deeply felt by the American people. Symbolism matters.

The fact that this previously unthinkable thing happened is a sign of a far deeper disorder. Let those in Judea understand what they’re seeing. I’m not talking about anything to do with God. I mean this in a completely secular way. I’m talking about symbolic meaning.

Nevertheless, I believe that these MAGA fools have provided those on the Left — in the government and within corporations, universities and other institutions — who wish to suppress conservatives and religious dissidents with a Reichstag-fire excuse to crack down (except in the case of the Reichstag fire, that didn’t happen; this abomination in Washington today really occurred). The soft totalitarianism I’ve been warning about: the MAGA mob today accelerated its arrival. 

To repeat what I said at the beginning: not all conservative Christians supported Donald Trump. But there is no way to excise the role that some very prominent Christians played in creating what happened today. I wrote about them here, here, and here — the Jericho March people, with their insane rhetoric, calling on people to be prepared to die for Donald Trump and his presidency. Here is a clip from my initial Jericho March coverage:

This Flynn speech was important, though. He said, “The Courts don’t decide the election, we the people decide.” But later: “The rule of law is at stake.”

Well, which is it? The rule of law in our Constitutional republic means that the courts operate in the name of We the People. Flynn declares mob rule over our constitutional institutions in the same speech in which he decried the loss of the rule of law. He obviously didn’t get the irony, nor, I’d wager, did a soul in that crowd.

He also told the people to ignore their minds and listen to their hearts, because in your heart is where you determine truth. It’s. All. About. Feeling. Don’t think, feel. This is 100 percent what Metaxas was saying this week on Charlie Kirk’s show: logic & evidence don’t matter if your heart tells you that Trump won.

Every single Christian leader who has encouraged Trump’s post-election behavior has a duty to repent. The passions unleashed by the mob today will destroy this country. Are destroying this country. Today I saw a tweet from a Christian Trump supporter showing a group raising a big cross near the Capitol as part of the protest. That tweet has since been removed. But the point has been made by so many of these MAGA Christians in the past month or so.

The Civil Rights Movement was led by black pastors. Even though they were fighting against American apartheid, they never once did anything remotely like what the MAGA mob did today. They brought honor to the church not only by their cause, but by their peaceful protest, even when they were physically attacked for it. The contrast between the MAGA Christians and them is instructive. Shame! Repent!

For the rest of us small-o orthodox believers, think, metaphorically, of the Judean hills. Things are about to get bad.

UPDATE: From Jeffrey Goldberg’s report, marching with the MAGA mob:

What I do know, after spending hours sponging up Trumpist paranoia, conspiracism, and cultishness, is that this gathering was not merely an attempted coup but also a mass-delusion event, not something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics. Its chaos was rooted in psychological and theological phenomena, intensified by eschatological anxiety. One man I interviewed this morning, a resident of Texas who said his name was Don Johnson (I did not trust this to be his name), told me that the country was coming apart, and that this dissolution presaged the End Times. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible. Get yourself ready.”

The conflation of Trump and Jesus was a common theme at the rally. “Give it up if you believe in Jesus!” a man yelled near me. People cheered. “Give it up if you believe in Donald Trump!” Louder cheers.

The post Religious Meaning Of MAGA Riot appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trump’s Weimar America

My God, this is what Donald Trump has done to this country: he has incited a mob to storm the US Capitol. Just saw a shocked Terry Moran on ABC saying that he has seen mobs take over foreign government buildings, but he has never seen anything like that in America. The MAGA mob attacked Capitol Police officers and stormed their way into the building.

MAGA mobsters have broken in with backpacks. Who knows what’s in them? Guns? They breached the metal detectors, and overwhelmed it all. Nobody has any idea if there are people with guns roaming the halls of Congress. We do not know. This has never happened in America. Trump goosed his own mob of supporters in DC this morning, saying in a speech:

“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical Democrats. We will never give up. We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s death involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”

He said: “We will never take back our country with weakness.”

And then they went in and invaded the Capitol. Elected representatives are barricaded into their offices. The Vice President had to be evacuated from the chamber, at the same time that Trump was tweeting out that Pence was cowardly for not trying to overturn the election.

This is happening in the United States of America. This is on Donald Trump. This is an assault on constitutional democracy. It’s not happening at the hands of Antifa. It’s not happening at the hands of BLM. It’s a MAGA mob, 100 percent. As I write this, the mob is trying to break down the door to the House chamber. Reporters in the press gallery say they’ve heard shots fired inside the Capitol.

What a complete national disgrace. There are no words. Any Republican lawmaker who stands behind Trump after this is not a patriot. Any American who stands behind Trump after this is not a patriot.

You watch: this terrorist action by the MAGA mob is going to be what the Establishment uses to justify implementation of a social credit system and repression. This is the fault of Donald Trump, and his supporters.

As I write this, police in combat gear are rushing into the Capitol. This country will not soon recover from this.

UPDATE: As soon as the Congress can be made safe again, Congress must expedite the impeachment and conviction of Donald Trump. Trump should be escorted from the White House in handcuffs if necessary.

BREAKING: Trump supporters have breached the Capitol building, tearing down 4 layers of security fencing and are attempting to occupy the building — fighting federal police who are overrun

This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Thousands, police can’t stop them pic.twitter.com/VVdTUwV5YN

— ELIJAH SCHAFFER (@ElijahSchaffer) January 6, 2021

Look at this: a MAGA protester breached the Senate chamber, took the president of the Senate’s seat, and shouted, “Trump won the election!”

UPDATE.2: These terrorists deserve to be shot:

Shocking scenes in D.C. show Trump supporters smashing windows and breaking inside the Capitol building, which is on lockdown. The Mayor has announced an emergency curfew. pic.twitter.com/LIc2qMIlqp

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) January 6, 2021

Via Drew Angerer/Getty images: pic.twitter.com/nh21YugPwV

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) January 6, 2021

UPDATE.3: Barbarians overrunning Rome:

UPDATE.4: Trump continues to make America great, oh yes (/sarc):

BREAKING: Woman rushed out of Capitol building on a stretcher, “covered in blood” pic.twitter.com/IKmMmHNyZC

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) January 6, 2021

BREAKING: Woman rushed out of Capitol building on a stretcher, “covered in blood” pic.twitter.com/IKmMmHNyZC

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) January 6, 2021

UPDATE.5:

It took 159 years, but a mob marching behind a confederate flag has stormed the US Capitol. They are doing so on @realDonaldTrump’s express orders. pic.twitter.com/Q9MnbT0emZ

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) January 6, 2021

UPDATE.6: When he’s right, he’s right. I wish I had taken David French more seriously about this:

UPDATE.7: What a foul statement by Trump: “this was a fraudulent election,” they stole it, etc. … but we have to have peace. At least he told them to go home. I don’t think this mob will listen to him:

UPDATE.8: Reader MichaelGC, speaking for me:

It occurs to me upon watching these events unfold that the great idea and tradition of a peaceful transfer of power has been broken with this storming of Congress, halting the formal procedure of recognizing and recording electoral votes prior to the inauguration.

Trump has acted progressively more deranged and stunted since losing the election. Is this debacle what he had in mind all along? He invites his minions to convene at the Capital, tweeting angrily and intermittently. This morning he whips them into a frenzy, then when the all-too-predictable thing happens, he tweets something to the effect of “be nice, now.”

Way too little, way too late. Trump is trying to pull off a coup, disrupting the process for installing the next duly elected president with mob action. As soon as the situation is under control (pray to God it is) Trump needs to be article 25’d out of office ASAP. Have President Pence for 2 weeks, then hand it over to the one who was elected, Biden. Trump has proven himself unfit to occupy the position he is in for one more minute.

UPDATE.9: Last summer, some leftists rolled a guillotine down the streets of Washington, DC. It was horrifying. Now, this is what the MAGA mobs are doing today:

UPDATE.10: John Podhoretz, just now in Commentary:

Fully endorse. Do it now. This has to end. This Trump garbage not only has to end, it has to be utterly and decisively repudiated by Congress. This is for history.

These MAGA idiots just handed the Left a gift that it could not possibly have earned on its own. A political scientist friend says that the Georgia vote gave Democrats control of Washington, and the MAGA riots gave Democrats a mandate.

UPDATE.11: Impeach him. He’s killing this country.

The post Trump’s Weimar America appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trump Costs GOP The Senate

As of this writing (1 a.m. Central time on Wednesday), there has been no official call of the two US Senate races in Georgia, but they are almost certainly going to go to the Democrats. Raphael Warnock is slightly ahead of Republican Sen. David Perdue, and though incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler ever so slightly leads Democrat Jon Ossoff, all the votes left to come in are from overwhelmingly Democratic areas. Unless there’s some miracle for the GOP, the state of Georgia’s Senate delegation has flipped to blue overnight, and Republicans have lost control of the US Senate.

These things happen when a losing Republican president spends two months promoting crackpot conspiracy theories about how his election was stolen, and urging, and allowing his minions to urge, Georgia Republican voters to stay home to teach state GOP officials a lesson about how they ought to have served Trump’s interests rather than the law.

If Warnock and Ossoff win, the Senate will be tied at 50-50. Vice President Kamala Harris will cast the deciding vote in the event of a tie. Democrats will control the Senate. Unless Republicans can hold party discipline and convince West Virginia’s Joe Manchin to break with his party on key votes, President Biden can get whatever he wants.

Think of all the liberal federal judges that we’ll have, including possibly Supreme Court justices. Think of the new states of Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, each coming in with two Senators. Think of the Equality Act, which the Democratic Congress will pass, and President Biden will sign. (N.B., it could be filibustered, but given the cowardice the Congressional GOP has shown on SOGI issues over the past few years, I think it probably wouldn’t be that hard for the Dems to get the 10 Republican senators they would need to break the filibuster). It would write sexual orientation and gender identity into federal civil rights law — with devastating consequences for social and religious conservatives, and anyone who doesn’t believe that a biological male with a penis who says he is a woman should have access to women-only spaces, and compete in women’s athletics.

Look, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler were not good candidates. But that didn’t matter. Holding the Senate was the only way to put some reins on Joe Biden and the woke Democratic Party. Now, thanks to Trump’s insane campaign to suppress the Georgia Republican vote, there is nothing stopping Biden except the occasional objections of Joe Manchin.

To be fair, this might have had something to do with it:

The GOP: how could this happen

Also the GOP: https://t.co/WxqtChgvAB

— Pedro L. Gonzalez (@emeriticus) January 6, 2021

But I don’t know how you overcome the bizarre signaling from Trump and his minions that Georgia GOP voters ought to sit this one out (but maybe not, but okay, maybe so).

After stabbing his party in the back in Georgia, the president tweeted tonight:

 

 

Pence doesn’t have the authority to do this, and if he did, it would be an outrage to decertify state votes. Trump is trying to set Pence up as a scapegoat for his own loss.

What is MAGA Nation going to do now? How is it going to avoid blaming Trump for costing the Republicans the Senate? I don’t know, but I am confident that they’ll find a way, probably involving faulting Mitt Romney and David French. Though the Trump era ends with a Democrat in the White House, and Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, one must never forget that Trump cannot fail; he can only be failed.

UPDATE: Gosh, they seem nice:

And so it begins.

On a plane from TX —> DC flight attendants are struggling to control a plane full of Trump supporters as they display a pro-Trump projection and harass others passengers bound for DC.

[DM to license]#dc #trump #trumprally #protest #thisisamerica #sos pic.twitter.com/BlTCbD8ntl

— Maranie R. Staab (@MaranieRae) January 6, 2021

The words "I stand 100 percent with Mitt Romney" have never been associated with me, but I surely do against these goons. https://t.co/PfNQyh9i3t

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) January 6, 2021

The post Trump Costs GOP The Senate appeared first on The American Conservative.

Letter From A Struggling Young Man

I received this moving letter this afternoon. Its author has given me permission to share it with you:

 

I’ve been following you on twitter and also reading TAC over the last year or so. Finally, over the Christmas break, I decided to read The Benedict Option, as it’s interested me for a while. I don’t know if you check your mail (or even care if fans email you) but I wanted to give you some insight from a 26 year old in a very liberal/progressive part of North America.


I found it to be a fascinating read for so many reasons. Mainly because I fear that Christianity and religion in my age group is rapidly declining. I look around and see a culture that is so radically different from the one that I grew up in. And I’m only 26 years old! It’s very depressing.


Just a little bit of background to give you some context. As I mentioned, I’m 26 years old and living in Canada. I was born and raised here. I was born and raised into a Christian family and attended private Christian schooling. Christianity has been a part of my life since I was a kid.


However, my relationship with the faith has become extremely tenuous. My family BARELY attended church (only on Christmas and Easter). My elementary school years were fairly formative as I had several staunchly Christian teachers who guided us students in the right direction.


Secondary school was drastically different. I went to a “prestigious” Christian school in my city that is known for it’s athletics and academics. What I saw there shattered my belief in Christianity for years and I have only recently recovered in my faith.


A huge portion of my peers in secondary school openly mocked Christian values. Essentially nobody attended church amongst my friends and peer circle. Drugs and substance abuse ran rampant. And some parents openly mocked the faith. Their only rationale for sending their kids to this school was to avoid the riff raff of the public school system. By the end of my senior year, I would say that less than 5 students actually believed in God and attended church. Biblical literacy was non existent as well. All the warning signs that you talked about in the Benedict Option were things that I saw and lived through first hand during my teenage years.


Even now as an adult, I struggle with my Christianity. I’ve been to several different churches, across different denominational lines, and yet I still feel disconnected. The moralistic therapeutic deism that you referenced in the book is pervasive where I live. Church often times, acts as a social group to bring people together instead of bringing people closer to God. And while. I do believe church can play a healthy role in bringing people closer, that shouldn’t be its main purpose. Every time I’ve been excited to check out a new church and denomination, I’ve been bitterly disappointed when the service ends and I leave. The fit just never seems to be there.


Covid has exasperated this issue as well. Not being able to worship in person is extremely tough. We were allowed to have in person religious services in the summer. However, our provincial government recently shut down all church services. The few people I talked to seem to cheer this on. Not of an abundance of caution and safety, but rather to “stick it” to the churches. Anti religious sentiment is real around me. It’s gotten to the point where it’s best to avoid talking about being a person of faith.


I fear that things are just going to get worse. Churches are crumbling; unable to offer a vision and path for those seeking holiness. There are plenty of us, young people, who are disillusioned with the way that society is going. I truly believe it’s why so many people my age are suffering from anxiety, depression and other mental health problems. Drug usage, alcohol abuse and a hookup culture are blankets of comfort for people who have no meaning or purpose in life anymore. While I’ve resisted that, I understand why so many of my peers have not. In a world with the most powerful technological advancements and highest living standards in history, so many people feel a deep emptiness and lack of direction in their life. And churches aren’t there to pick up the slack. It’s deeply distressing.


I don’t know what the path forward is for me spiritually. Christianity in the West has lost its moral foundation. I battle everyday because I strongly believe in God but haven’t been able to find the right fit for me. I would love to check out Orthodox Christianity (you’ve inspired me!) but with covid restrictions, that probably won’t be available for the next little while. The Orthodox congregation near me is very small and not exactly tech savvy. It might be the only denomination left for me to check out. My experiences with Evangelicalism left a bitter taste in my mouth. All flash and no substance (no offense to my evangelical friends).


I remember you commented on an article written in First Things by a man named Jacob Williams. In it, he talked about the anomie and lack of respect for traditions amongst his peer group. He eventually found Islam and has been a practicing Muslim since. I read this a few months ago and found it strange. But upon further reflection am now starting to understand why Williams would make the drastic leap of converting to Islam. I live next to a Muslim family. They are practicing and devout people. And I can tell they take their faith very seriously. From my conversations with them (and there have been many), I get the sense that this family has done a fantastic job passing on their values to their offspring. They are doing all the things that Christians used to do but no longer do because of the decline of faith in our societies. While some may question and even criticize my neighbors for their reluctance to fully integrate into a secular society, I applaud them. Promoting traditional values, the importance of family and submission to a higher being are important if one wishes to have a meaningful, fulfilling life.


Anyways, I’m starting to ramble and better cut this off. It’s extremely difficult being a young person nowadays. People don’t believe it or understand why I say this. They immediately point to the fantastic technological advancements and wealth in our society. While those things have undoubtedly made life better, there is a tremendous lack of meaning and purpose with most young people. I can confidently say that many of us feel hopeless and aimless in life. We are living in a society that promotes people to do whatever makes them happy, even if the consequences are dire. This emphasis on hedonism has hollowed out so many young men in particular, who are now succumbing to the worst of these impulses. Family life is quickly deteriorating around us, while unconventional and even harmful lifestyles are promoted. If you dare oppose these things, you’ll be labelled with all sorts of accusations. The funny thing is, most people recognize that something is seriously wrong with our society, but either don’t have the knowledge or desire to speak up. We’re living in a society that is prioritizing all the wrong things and I fear for the future.


Originally, I went into reading The Benedict Option with skepticism. After finishing the book, I know see it as imperative. I highly recommend it for any religious person, regardless of your faith or denomination. Religion is under siege already. It’s just a matter of if we’ll be able to successfully counter attack, or step away from mainstream society to keep our spiritual life intact.


Sorry for the long email Rod. I’ve been thinking a lot about the BenOp lately. I don’t mean to sound hyperbolic, but it truly is one of the most important books I’ve ever read. It opened my eyes to so many of the problems that churches in our society face. As I said in the previous paragraph, I went into reading this book with a lot of skepticism. I’ve always enjoyed your work so I decided to give the book a chance. By the end, I couldn’t really disagree with anything. The only problem I kept coming back to is how to get started. I’m in my mid 20’s and in grad school. I’m in a serious relationship and planning to get married. But we don’t have the funds to start anew. And the overwhelming majority of churches we’ve been to have practiced the MTD that you touched upon in this book. It’s one thing to be older and established and have the financial resources at your disposal. For somebody like myself and my partner, it’s much harder. Hopefully, in the next few years, we can work something out. Because at this current rate, the irrational drive for power by the illiberal left is going to make life hell for so many people, if it hasn’t already.

Thank you, reader, for this moving letter, and for your kind words. This young man has drawn a vivid sketch of our crisis. What can politics possibly do for him? They can play some role in protecting his liberties, and the liberties of institutions that can give his life meaning and purpose, but what he and his generation are looking for cannot be found in political commitment. Only belief in God can give one meaning, purpose, and the ability to suffer without breaking.

But what can a church committed to Moralistic Therapeutic Deism do for him, or anybody struggling like he is? What can a church committed to the Prosperity Gospel, or the Social Gospel do? Think about that Muslim family next door. Their lives are a lived testimony to the power of the Islamic faith to stand as a sign of contradiction to hedonistic, godless North American society. I do not believe that Islam is true, but I know that those Muslims are closer to the truth than the others among whom this young man lives.

Ever read Houellebecq’s Submission? It’s about a burned-out French hedonist who witnesses Islam coming to power within post-Christian France. It’s not a novel about Islam. It’s a novel about how no culture can survive without religion to bind and guide. Houellebecq, the novelist, is not a religious believer, but he is a believer in sociology.

Jacob Williams, the young British man who became a Muslim, and who wrote about it in First Things, said in that piece:

Anomie was one thing; the ferocious renunciation of tradition I encountered at university was quite another. I had hoped that the spiritual emptiness of wider society was a result of ignorance, and that the ­academy—especially the ancient, venerable, Gothic academy of Oxford—had preserved what I vaguely imagined was my country’s noble heritage. Studying philosophy did provide some engagement with an intellectual inheritance, but for anyone moderately interested in public life, the campus movements for “social justice” were impossible to ignore. All of these—whether their goal was the liberation of women, of LGBT persons, or of ethnic minorities—seemed to have the same vision of man: a deracinated, protean aggregate of desires. These movements gained in strength every year. ­Formerly apolitical spaces were distorted by the need to appease one demand after another. The culture of the university, once imbued with the brash boyishness of the English public schools, now accommodated the sterile, strenuous inclusivity of progressive zealots.

After three years of this, I was frustrated and alienated. I needed a purpose. Philosophy classes had sharpened my inquiries, but they didn’t rectify the meaninglessness all around me. My utopian peers found their purpose in crusades against racism and homophobia, but their contempt for England revolted me. I chose a different course and embarked on a search for God.

Where could a lost soul go? Nowhere in college or country offered an answer. What the campus Conservative Party outlined was absurd: We can pick up the fragments of our culture by putting on three-piece suits, getting riotously drunk, and reviving the divine right of kings. I had plenty of opportunities to engage with orthodox Christians, and I sincerely wanted Christianity to be true. It was clear to me that what the authorities in my world celebrated—the collapse of family life, the slaughter of the unborn, the deterioration of high culture—were, in truth, social evils that followed from the decline of the Church. Christianity seemed the natural alternative to secularity.

But when I entered the chapels and listened to the ministers, the regeneration I sought didn’t happen. Christian voices sounded all too agreeable and compromising. I wanted something stronger, something that didn’t ­bargain with secularism. I found it in Islam.

Of course he did. Allah — the Islamic god, I mean — is a strong god. Again, I do not believe that Islam is the true faith, but I can certainly see why people in the West are drawn to it. I believe that Christianity is the true faith, but unless it recovers a strong conception of God, and lives by it — sacrificially — it will be dissolved within the acid bath of liquid modernity. This is simply true. Christians don’t want to hear it. Listen to the voice of that struggling young Canadian man. He wants to find the true God. Why doesn’t he in our churches, and in our ways of life?

A couple of years ago, I did a short Q&A with Louis Betty, an American scholar of French literature who wrote a book about Houellebecq’s metaphysics. Excerpt:

RD: Though he’s not a religious man, Houellebecq believes as a matter of sociological fact that no society can endure without religion. By “religion,” let’s use a broad definition that means “metaphysical framework” — though as you point out in your book, Houellebecq believes that transcendence itself is not enough; a resilient religion also has to offer some form of immortality. Is his case persuasive to you?

LB: Here it’s important, I think, to distinguish between religion as a human phenomenon and the specific case of Christianity in Europe. I don’t think such a thing as a “society without religion,” in the sense of having a metaphysical framework, really exists; to me, that’s akin to imagining a society without a language, or some notion of kinship, or ways of preparing food. I’m not an anthropologist, but it seems clear that any human society worthy of the adjective “human” is going to articulate some metaphysical system that makes sense of reality and offers consolation and a sense of meaning in the midst of natural vicissitude.

In the case of Christianity in Europe, I think the question to ask is something like this: can a civilization maintain its identity if it sheds its native religion? Houellebecq doesn’t think so, and neither do I. This isn’t a political or polemical point. Imagine taking as an anthropological platitude the claim that human beings will be religious and, moreover, that civilizations are built upon the metaphysical systems they create (or which are revealed to them, to give credit to the metaphysical on its own terms). It’s obvious from such an assumption that the collapse of the metaphysics entails the eventual collapse of everything else. This should be deeply alarming to anyone who cares about the West’s tradition of humanitarianism, which emerges—and it would be wonderful if we could all agree on this—out of the original Judaic notion of imago Dei and later from Christian humanism. Secular humanism has been running for quite some time on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian religious inheritance, but it’s not clear how much longer that can go on.

Honestly, it’s frightening to think what a truly post-Christian West would mean for our basic institutions. I’m not stumping for Christianity here; I just happen to have the intellectual conviction that the analysis of human society begins with religion. If you incline toward Marxian thinking, which looks at things in the diametrically opposed way, you’re going to hate what I’m saying. But that’s how I see it.

As for your question about immortality: it’s clear to me that religious systems holding out a promise of survival are going to do better than those that don’t. There are many reasons Christianity overwhelmed Greco-Roman religion in the early centuries of the first millennium, but part of it has surely to do with the relative weakness of the Stoic understanding of immortality, which involved a figurative incorporation into the cosmos, compared with the personal immortality Christianity promises. In this respect, I think Christianity will always be a powerful metaphysical player, even if the present situation in much of Europe seems to point in the opposite direction.

Mortality is too overwhelming a fear and the difficulties of life too great for whole populations to go on without remedies to them for very long. I read a few months ago that religious practice in Venezuela has increased as the country becomes more and more disordered. Perhaps all it would take in Europe is a little upheaval—not that I wish it—for young people to start, say, making a habit of going to Mass. In any event, this is just my own somewhat-less-than-scholarly speculation. Ultimately, the future is opaque.

Read it all. Either Christianity will recover itself in this crisis, or it will die. To be precise, the forms of Christianity that recover themselves, and posit themselves as clear, distinct, strong alternatives to hedonistic materialism and progressivism, will survive, and eventually thrive. There is no middle ground.

But there is hope! Just in the past week, I have heard from two different readers, both of them British, raised without religion, who have become Christians recently. They thought they had Christianity figured out, and took it to be a dead thing. Then they started investigating, and found that there is something there. One of them will be baptized and chrismated into the Orthodox Church tomorrow, on the Feast of Theophany. He told me a book that was key in his conversion to Orthodoxy was Kyriacos Markides’s The Mountain Of Silence, which helped me along my path to Orthodoxy too. If you think you know all there is to know about Christianity, read Markides’s book, which is about Orthodox spirituality as explained by a contemporary monk of Mount Athos (who, after the book was published, went on to become a bishop). Powerful, powerful stuff.

One book I heartily recommend to all is The Spirit Of Early Christian Thought: Seeking The Face Of God, by the eminent contemporary historian of the early church Robert Louis Wilken. Wilken is a Catholic, but this is a non-sectarian intellectual history of key thinkers of the early church. This is history written for the general reader, by a man who writes like a dream. Again, if you think you know all there is to know about Christianity, open your mind to Prof. Wilken’s work about the foundations of Christian thinking.

The post Letter From A Struggling Young Man appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Tacit Shadow Regime

My old friend Eric Metaxas is taking his Trump devotion to the limits. Here he uses a photo of Egyptian Christians on the verge of beheading by ISIS because they refused to deny Christ, and deploying them in context of people like himself, who are standing by Donald J. Trump, God’s anointed.

This is beyond offensive, but more than that, it’s … profoundly weird. It’s a sign of just how far gone in Trump martyrdom some people are. Eric has said in the past, on the air, that he would be willing to die to protect Trump’s presidency.

One of the things I do not remotely understand about these folks is why they believe that having Trump in the White House is going to stop the bad things from happening. I was on the phone this morning talking to a Christian journalist friend of mine, and he mentioned the Christian thinker Jacques Ellul’s concept of the “political illusion”: the idea that all things in life are essentially political, and therefore require political solutions. This perfectly describes the orientation so many conservatives have towards Donald Trump. It’s as if they have forgotten everything conservatives — especially religious conservatives — are supposed to know about the complexity of society, and the roots of our various crises.

It is an anti-political illusion to think that politics have nothing to do with our overall well being, and can, or should be, ignored entirely. But the political illusion says that politics is the only thing that matters, or the thing that matters most of all. It’s so obviously false that it’s a wonder why anybody who doesn’t make his or her living in politics believes it. But here you have so many conservative Christians who believe that the fate of America stands or falls on the basis of whether or not Donald Trump, largely a failed president on his own terms, retains office. This is not only idolatry, it’s also stupid and self-defeating.

The regime in Washington, whether controlled by Republicans or Democrats, does not on its own determine the future of America. I recall a conversation I had in the mid-1990s with a financial journalist friend, who got her start covering politics, but moved over to finance. She said it was a red-pill event for her. She had been under the illusion that politics drove the world, but studying the currency markets, and seeing how the movements there decided the fates of nations, dispelled that illusion.

In a more down to earth way, consider that for all his bluster, and all the media attention given to him these past four or five years, Donald Trump has done nothing effective to turn back wokeness and its pomps and works. Perhaps he could have done some things better had he been more disciplined, but the truth is, so much of what is ruining America is happening outside the realm of politics.

I had a conversation this morning with a reader of this blog who teaches at a conservative Christian school. The teacher explained that the culture among the students is militantly pro-LGBT, to the point where the students do not tolerate anyone who doesn’t endorse the latest iterations of LGBT ideology. The fascinating thing to this reader is that the students got none of this from their teachers, or from anything in the official culture of the school. It’s all coming to them tacitly — as simply something that’s understood to be part of teenage culture today. The reader explained to me that the thing so many Christians fail to understand is the defining power of this tacit regime: the values and taboos instantiated and advanced through the unofficial culture.

In The Benedict Option, I quoted from the work of Judith Rich Harris, on the power of peer culture:

Peer pressure really begins to happen in middle childhood. Psychology researcher Judith Rich Harris, in her classic book The Nurture Assumption, says that kids at that age model their own behavior around their peer group’s. Writes Harris, “The new behaviors become habitual—internalized, if you will—and eventually become part of the public personality. The public personality is the one that a child adopts when he or she is not at home. It is the one that will develop into the adult personality.”

Harris points to the example of immigrants and their children. Study after study shows that no matter how strong the home culture, first-generation offspring almost always conform to the values of the broader culture. “The old culture is lost in a single generation,” she writes. “Cultures are not passed on from parents to children; the children of immigrant parents adopt the culture of their peers.”

On the other hand, says Harris, is that in most cases, it’s not too late for kids who have been exposed to bad influences. Researchers find that damage to a child’s moral core can be repaired if he is taken away from a bad peer group. What’s more, determined parents who run a disciplined home, and who immerse their children in a good peer group, can lay a good foundation, no matter how lax they have been until now.

The bad news about the fragility of culture is also good news, according to Harris: “Cultures can be changed, or formed from scratch, in a single generation.”

And yet, there are Christians who believe that the person who sits in the White House determines whether or not their kids’ peer culture succumbs to this or that ideology. Look, I’m not saying that it doesn’t matter at all; Obama, recall, ordered that public schools open up their locker rooms to transgenders. I’m saying rather that politics are far less influential than people think.

Here’s an example from Twitter today about how institutional capture by the far left is revolutionizing culture:

The president of @Portland_State wrote this in an email, “My highest priority is sustaining and amplifying our commitment to racial justice.” pic.twitter.com/04HqNkmJ12

— Peter Boghossian (@peterboghossian) January 5, 2021

Boghossian goes on:

Of course the PSU president will get away with this nonsense, and the quality of the university will decline as identity-politics ideology consumes the institution. Students will learn that what really matters in the professional world is what you think about “racial justice.” Real-world problems will not be attended to, because everybody will rearrange reality to suit the ideology. I’ve written in this space about how this kind of thing has a foothold at my own alma mater, Louisiana State, where a group of professors, with administration support, are trying to push to require all undergraduates to take a course in “antiracist” ideology as a condition of graduation. It is an outrageous attempt to propagandize undergraduates at the state’s flagship public university — this, in a ruby-red state. How many of the Republican voters in this state who are fighting mad over the Trump election are willing to lift a finger to fight the ideological left’s bold move at institutional capture right here in their own backyard?

Another example: news today from the world of elite media:

The Cut, the New York Magazine style and culture website with a devoted following, named Lindsay Peoples Wagner as its new editor in chief on Monday.

Ms. Peoples Wagner, 30, will rejoin the publication after a two-year stint as the top editor of Teen Vogue, where she was the youngest editor in chief of a Condé Nast magazine and one of the few Black journalists to have led one of the company’s publications. She was previously a fashion market editor for The Cut, which started out as a fashion blog on the New York Magazine website and became a stand-alone site in 2012.

In the past two years, Teen Vogue has published a guide to anal sex, a guide to the best vibrators, and praise for Karl Marx and Communism. You might think, “Who reads Teen Vogue, anyway?” or “Who reads The Cut, anyway?” The trendsetters do. Cultural change usually happens when radical ideas are taken up by elites and elite networks. You might never know who these people are, but your teenagers’ exposure to these ideas, and their normalization, is changing them, and the culture.

What could Donald Trump, or any president, do to stop that? I would certainly be open to potential political solutions, but nobody is talking about them, because it would be hard to get past the First Amendment. My point is, the sense of alarm that all of us conservatives feel about the direction of our culture is based on something real, but we are lying to ourselves if we believe that electing the right politicians is the answer. It can be part of the answer, but it is simply beyond crazy to think that Donald Trump is the solution to the decay and dissolution of our culture.

I believe many Christians have gone all-in on Trump as a way to avoid responsibility for changing the things they can change.

Though I strongly believe politics can’t solve these problems on their own, I do believe that they have a role to play in creating the environments within which they can be solved. But the ongoing Trump drama is making it harder for politicians who live in the real world (as opposed to this unreal social-media world of Trump) to analyze and come up with potential solutions. It’s one big distraction. Meanwhile, the tacit culture, dominated by identity politics and left-wing cultural ideology, marches on through the institutions and communities unopposed.

Saying you would be willing to die for Donald Trump is nothing but vanity and theater. People say they would die for Trump, but they aren’t willing to commit to living in countercultural ways that might stand a chance of building communities of resistance to the atheistic materialistic ideology that is routing our culture. “But he fights!” they say. OK, but he doesn’t win. Similarly, you might think that you’re fighting by joining yourself to his quixotic battle to hold on to the presidency, but it’s an empty gesture. You don’t stand to win anything. Every day and every dollar we put into defending this guy is time, money, and effort not directed towards building a meaningful opposition. And the tacit regime conquers…

UPDATE: An Irish reader writes:

Your latest blog about the Right ‘s tendency to see politics as the solution to everything that ails the USA reminds me of my own country and its history. I grew up in 1980’s Ireland. Political violence was a daily occurrence in the North. Thankfully most of that is now in the past and although politicians did a lot of work to bring about peace my own feeling is that Ireland had simply moved on culturally. We were no longer as different from the U.K. as we once believed we were. Consumer culture and the media had changed the whole political and cultural landscape. This saddens me in one way. We have achieved peace but at the cost of what made us different and distinctive. Our Catholic faith and culture.

I never really understood why those who claimed to be Irish patriots didn’t put more effort into preserving our culture rather than fighting the British. What good is independence if you have lost what is of most value. Of course most of the Irish revolutionaries of recent times were leftists and Marxists, a fact that a lot of Irish Americans were not aware of. They wanted and still want , a united , socialist Ireland. They have made progress towards this goal purely by accident as their goals align with broader population trends. Ironically it is the dwindling die-hard Protestants in the North who oppose abortion , gay ” marriage” and EU tyranny. Politics follows culture not the other way around.

The post The Tacit Shadow Regime appeared first on The American Conservative.

Live Not By Lies: The Right-Wing Version

I finished the final manuscript of Live Not By Lies in early to mid-March. Covid was just taking off, and the George Floyd killing was yet to come. Though my book did not appear in stores until late September, the deadline for changing the text passed in late March. I have had some readers ask me why I didn’t write more about Covid, or anything about George Floyd, in the book. It’s a reasonable question, given the September 29 publishing date, but the way book production goes, nearly all books are editorially locked months before they are printed.

I don’t know when the paperback version will be out. Live Not By Lies is selling well, still, so I imagine it will be some time yet. But when it does come back, I will add a chapter that addresses what the Covid response has taught us about the themes in the book, and what the George Floyd reaction has done as well. And I will also talk about the way the pre-totalitarian phenomena that Live Not By Lies identify as primarily on the Left  manifested in a major way this year on the Right in 2020 and beyond.

I didn’t meet my first QAnon believer until about a month before the final version of my manuscript was finished. I knew it was a thing, QAnon, but it took having a lengthy conversation with a true believer to wake me up to how serious the phenomenon was. The man I talked to was to all appearances intelligent, wealthy, and worldly — but was a serious believer in QAnon. I thought for a while he was pulling my leg, but it turns out he meant it. Back home, I told my college-age son about the conversation, and he said, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for a while: you’ve got to take this more seriously than you do.”

There’s no need to recount what played out this year with QAnon. What interests me the most is what has happened to the Right since Trump lost the election. As a religious conservative, watching the MAGA Religious Right rally at the Jericho March was a red pill experience for me. (I wrote about it first here, then answered some of the criticism here.) The joining of religious faith to conspiracy theory, and the juicing it with nationalist fervor, and Trumpist cult of personality — it was radioactive. The core, from a Live Not By Lies standpoint, was Gen. Michael Flynn exhorting the crowd not to listen to their minds, but rather believe what their gut tells them is true. That, plus emcee Eric Metaxas and other speakers saying that God told them this and that, and that when God tells you something, you have to do it.

As you know if you read my book, Hannah Arendt said the willingness to believe things that are not true, or that defy rationality, is part of what opens one up to totalitarianism. From Live Not By Lies:

To grasp the threat of totalitarianism, it’s important to understand the difference between it and simple authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is what you have when the state monopolizes political control. That is mere dictatorship—bad, certainly, but totalitarianism is much worse. According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, “[I]t has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

In Live Not By Lies, I give example after example of the Left trying to do this. Since Election Day, though, we have seen many on the Right succumb to this too. Just the other day I spoke to a friend who is a Trump supporter, and who is convinced the election was stolen. Nothing moves my friend’s mind; this conclusion is unfalsifiable. But what about what the courts have said? I went on. Are they all in on the conspiracy?

My friend responded calmly but firmly: “I just have a feeling that Trump really won.” I understood that any evidence that contradicts that feeling, my friend dismisses, and anything that confirms it, my friend accepts without question. Because, like Gen. Flynn said, you need to go with your gut.

Arendt wrote about the pre-totalitarian masses (I quote this in my book):

They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent with itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

I also wrote in Live Not By Lies about how so many on the Left today accept things they surely must know to be falsehoods, but who endorse these principles because they want to be on the side of the Oppressed. From LNBL:

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.” For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

Think of the Republican establishment figures today who know that the President lost the election, and who know perfectly well that he is tearing apart our democracy in his desperate attempt to hold on to power. Some of them are cynics who are trying to jockey for Trump’s voters in the next presidential contest. Others — not just lawmakers, but all kinds of conservatives — may simply hate liberals more than they love truth. More from Live Not By Lies:

Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

As you can see, I used Arendt’s conclusions to pass harsh judgment on liberals and progressives for their embrace of identity politics. But we are seeing some on the Right embrace the same kind of thing, for MAGA’s sake. Here’s a grifty fundraising text that Sen. Ted Cruz sent out today (a friend received it; I have removed his name):

Over the weekend, as you know, the president was recorded threatening the Georgia Secretary of State, like some two-bit gangster, in an effort to get him to falsify the election results. I think Trump might really believe the conspiracy theories. But what excuse do his supporters in Congress and among conservative voters have?

Yuval Levin published a powerful, powerful essay about the “failures of leadership in a populist age” today at National Review. Levin says that conditions have degenerated with Trump to the point where a basic question of reality is front and center. He says that populists won’t get anywhere at changing things that they rightly think should be changed if they continue to allow themselves to be preoccupied with crackpot conspiracy theories. Excerpts:

If the Right is likely to continue to do well in politics, it should get better at governing, and that cannot help but mean getting better at dealing with reality, including those realities that some voters don’t want to face.

The election was not stolen, and the vice president doesn’t get to choose the next president. There isn’t anything Congress can do to change that. But Congress could do some things to protect religious liberty, to lift some of the burdens weighing on Americans struggling to raise children, to push back against the radicalization of higher education, to take the threat of Chinese power more seriously, to help Americans yearning for meaningful economic security or more stable employment, to make more opportunities available to Americans who don’t go to college, to secure our borders and improve the immigration system, and in other ways to help more Americans lead dignified lives in a decent and prosperous free society. Legislative action can’t simply achieve any of these things, but it could meaningfully help, even while a Democrat is president. And politicians who knew how to operate as legislators and (when a Republican is elected president again) executives could also more effectively restrain and reverse some of the worst excesses of the Left. Working toward those ends would make for a stronger electoral argument, too, with the potential to broaden the Republican coalition in the coming decade. But as long as Republican politicians choose to spend their time acting out futile fantasies while letting their capacity for governing atrophy, they are failing the voters they say they want to serve.

And they are failing their voters in a more fundamental way, too. By lying to these voters in order to benefit from their outrage, Republican politicians are living down to the view these voters have of our country’s leaders — precisely the view those politicians claim to channel and share. They are affirming too many voters in their low opinion of American politics, and they are leaving them doubtful that the incoming president is legitimate and that our larger system of government is too.

No amount of macho fighting talk can cover up this simple fact: To play along with the president’s lies about the election is a profound failure of leadership, a dereliction of responsibility, and a disgrace.

Read the whole thing. 

I do not believe the threat to our liberties from the soft-totalitarian Right is remotely as strong as it is from the soft-totalitarian Left, simply because the Left controls institutional power in this country, especially in the media. But “the Left is worse” is not an excuse to indulge in the same kind of insanity. Republican lawmakers and influencers who know better but who are riding the conspiracy into what they hope will be greater power and influence are especially culpable here. No, we are not going to see a right-wing authoritarian state, and certainly not a right-wing totalitarian one. But the Right’s inability to live in reality is going to weaken it in the face of the Left’s increasing radicalization of the institutions, and is going to give left-wing would-be totalitarians the excuses they want to suppress dissent.

The fact that Republicans did surprisingly well in the election despite the president’s loss ought to be a sign of hope. But the GOP cannot and should not prevail as the party of conspiracy theory. In Live Not By Lies, I quote Solzhenitsyn saying that people who think what happened in Russia cannot happen in their country are wrong: it could happen anywhere on earth. Similarly, there is no reason to think that the ideological madness that is overtaking liberal institutions, and the Democratic Party, won’t be repeated in a right-wing version among conservatives. It’s happening right now. I didn’t write a book called Live Not By Left-Wing Lies, you know.

UPDATE: On today’s show, Eric Metaxas says that Trump was elected president, and if you don’t believe there is mountains of evidence proving it, you should jump in a lake. And, you are deceived by the devil.

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