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December 19, 2022: What is the Academic Left’s Battle Plan Against Science and the West?

In previous posts we encountered the radical academic left’s war on the West. A war that targets science, reason, knowledge, objectivity, and concepts of reality as pillars of the West since the Enlightenment. As we’ll see, this return to superstition is not merely a rhetorical goal, but an actionable one based on a dogma of self-contradictory irrationality; one explicitly stated and long underway in our university humanities. To this fraction of the left, progress in freedom, equality, civil rights, or technology that can save lives or the planet are aspects of Eurocentric, white male patriarchal colonization. Exposing their overt bigotry, the likes of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein — notably their way of thinking — are to be deconstructed, which means dismantled, while non-Eurocentric, non-white “ways of knowing” are to be valorized. This validation is accorded to “victims of Western thought” by academics who maintain there is no such thing as values, truth or judgment — except their own. With a flair for condescension, those “other ways of knowing” by other peoples are branded as myth, magic, and faith — categorized as such by Western scholars, a no-no among Western scholars. To heap further contempt on those defined as casualties, the wounded are considered intellectually incapable of grasping concepts like science or human rights because they are — as all of us universally are — “culture bound,” cerebrally subjugated by their own inviolable beliefs. So defined by those who deny the existence of universals. Notice that Galileo, Newton, and Einstein were also culture bound, but somehow imagined the unimaginable, violating their boundedness. The three-century-long project of liberalism — that is, classical Enlightenment liberalism — which seeks to expand, balance, and tame freedom, equality, and the rest is considered naïve and far too moderate by this faction of the anti-West left now so prominent in the humanities.

As declared by University of Arizona and University of Alabama editors of Decolonizing Research in Cross-Cultural Contexts, essays therein “stand at the center of the ‘beginning of the presencing’ of a disharmonious, restive, unharnessable (hence unessentializable) knowledge that is produced at the ex-centric site of neo/post/colonial resistance, ‘which can never allow the national (read: colonial/western) history to look itself narcissistically in the eye.’”

First, don’t be afraid. Translating postmodern performance is an art. Recall Ferry and Renaut’s remark, “that incomprehensibility is a sign of greatness…not proof of weakness but the indication of endurance in the presence of the Unsayable.” Decoded, Decolonizing Research announced, “We are the beginning of a culture war.”

As UCLA feminist theorist Sandra Harding wrote, criticism has “evolved from a reformist to a revolutionary position…[with] calls for a transformation in the very foundations both of science and the cultures [i.e., the West] that accord it value.” This holy cause seeks to convert all of Western society with splendid exactness to Fredrich Hayek’s steps to tyranny in his Road To Serfdom: rally the troops emotionally; provide stirring but vague slogans allowing for a wide latitude of solutions; create an enemy upon which to focus the rebellion; recast old paradigms in a new light “we always sensed but could never articulate.” Someday, someone must carry out by force the Final Solution for this movement, however ugly, if it is to succeed. As Harding writes, the movement raises the possibility of “a painful world-shattering confrontation with moral and political values.”

Since the colonization of university humanities in the 1960s by French postmodernist philosophers Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) and a host of others, the twisted thinking continued to coil as mutations in the movement metastasized. These early postmodernists set out the crumbs from which more recent scholars were able to create slices, then whole loaves, of bread as communion for the Ivory Tower faithful, feed for the ignorant, or, hollow as they are beneath a thin crust of dogma, packed with explosives to lob on the West from the safety of the Academy. And conferred academic freedom by the very civilization they target. Postmodern crumbs of the 1960s and 70s were word games and obfuscations. Like the tobacco and fossil fuel industries lying about the lethal consequences of their commodities, their most profitable product was doubt. Likewise, postmodernists seek to deconstruct certainty in knowledge of any kind, so long as it was valued by the West. But skepticism wasn’t new to postmoderns. The Scientific Revolution was built on a healthy skepticism to preserve open-minded examination in the interest of truth, as was the Enlightenment. What the postmoderns did was to radicalize skepticism to proportions beyond ridiculous, but early on, no one was listening.

Despite the excess, despite all the awards that like-minded academics showered on each other for “breakthroughs in victimology,” “shredding the dominance of biology” or “genderfucking gender,” postmodernists found early on that all that lobbing, all those published papers, all the fury really didn’t do much. The post-Vietnam shift to prioritizing emotion over analysis once common to the humanities didn’t help. The conviction for postmodern myths — what Pluckrose and Lindsay termed a “religious adherence” — didn’t convert many outside the Tower. Still, those in the hard sciences sauntered by the social “sciences” on campus with so little regard they didn’t even sneer. And of all the insults, even within their own walls, the likes of historical scholarship, political philosophy, and law still chugged along in their quest for evidence-based understanding. Worst of all, the public wasn’t buying it. In part because the public face of postmodernism wasn’t new. “Postmodernism did not invent ethical opposition to oppressive power systems and hierarchies — in fact, much of the most significant social and ethical progress occurred during the preceding periods that it rejects.”

The problem with early postmodernism was that it incriminated itself. If the truth is that there is no truth and that’s the truth, then all that French deconstruction of the West was just as flimsy as any Western truth claim. Recognizing this, the professorate changed from commitment to tactics beginning in the 1990s. Deconstruction became “a call to reconstruction.” As Jean François Lyotard wrote in 1991, postmodern thinking “should not be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but [have] strategic value,” that is, like Trump’s 2020 election gospel, it needn’t be true, only useful as subterfuge. By the blurring of accepted boundaries between everything; by promoting language as a dangerous tool only of the powerful, targeting all that is written or spoken for deconstruction to reveal “hidden instruments of control”; by the doctrine of cultural relativism and the relativism of everything else; and by the dismissal of the individual and the concept of universals in favor of group identities, the new applied postmodernists could deny any categories their “objective validity and disrupt the systems of power…” In other words, the academic left could dismantle what they most loathed as power politics with power politics by redefining boundaries as they wished with “dangerous” language of their choosing, armed with cultural “certainty” from the university pulpit. Their tactics coalesced but they still had no actions to execute. All they could do was prattle.

By the latter 1990s the academic left claimed they had moved on from postmodernism. Many sought to insulate themselves from the rationalist drubbing postmodernism took by critics. But this was belied by their every utterance laced with quotes from the French white male patriarchs, genuflecting to the canon, like exclaiming “Stop the Seal!” — as tribal I.D. Their new title: Social Justice scholars within the “theoretical humanities.” But changing their title was like calling creationism “Intelligent Design,” expecting the detachment of creationism’s failure. An especially weak ploy for both camps when constantly referring to the founding. But just as creationists try to “sound scientific” in their effort to destroy science, radical academic liberals could sound academic — sort of. More than that, they could sound like they shared Enlightenment’s quest for freedom and equality. It was an important fulcrum. Instead of attacking “the West” — nation-states, political systems, capitalism as Marx had and failed — they were supporting the oppressed. The theme of oppression had been there from the beginning starting with Foucault, but even Foucault dealt with real victims, those defined as mentally insane, for example. (Whether inmates at the asylum suffered punishment or compassion is another matter.) It dawned on postmoderns that victims could be invented. In time, victims dropped from the dark thunderheads of power-hierarchies like rain. By pretending to be champions for the oppressed, not their university salaries, postmodernists might insert a self-destructive dogma that would invite the West to destroy itself. Like Facebook and Twitter before there was Facebook and Twitter. Of course, this would also dissolve those cushy university chairs, but if it’s not already apparent, postmodernism is anything but consistent. Like herding cats, none of this plan was coordinated, but rather a wildly synthetic kludging together of buzzwords, social justice papers, lectures, and like the professorial gathering for Decolonizing Research above, a quest for the most subversive deconstruction that could reach beyond the Ivory Tower.

The goal was to evolve a social virus that would “spread, leaping the ‘species’ gap from academics to activists to everyday people, as it became increasingly graspable and actionable and therefore more contagious,” writes Pluckrose and Lindsay.

And finally, postmoderns did it. They had the pseudo-intellectual sound, they held the emotional high ground, they had the faith, their moral pose was for the little gals and the little guys — so long as the little guys weren’t “hetero-normative” — and victims were suddenly everywhere.

So, what did this virus look like how did they inject it?

Next time.


References:

Paragraph 2: “stand at…” In Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, Cynical Theories, Pitchstone Publishing, 2020, p. 83, italics in original.

Paragraph 3: “that incomprehensibility…” Ferry and Renaut, p. 14

Paragraph 4: “evolved from…” Harding, p. 9. “a painful…” Ibid., p. 39

Paragraph 6: “religious…”, Pluckrose, Lindsay, p. 18. “Postmodernism…”, Ibid., p. 38

Paragraph 7: “a call…”, Ibid., p. 72. “should…”, Ibid., p.39. “objective…”, Ibid., p. 39

Paragraph 8: “theoretical…” Ibid., pp. 50.51

Paragraph 9: “spread…”, Ibid., p.46

December 12, 2022: How Did the Academic Left Become Anti-Science?

In 1986, University of Delaware (now UCLA) philosopher Sandra Harding wrote The Science Question in Feminism, a pioneering work of feminist theory still taught today in Women’s Studies courses across America. There, Harding asks what value science has to women when it “serves primarily regressive social tendencies [that are] not only sexist but also racist, classist, and culturally coercive…” For scientists, says Harding, “the best scientific activity and philosophic thinking about science are to be modeled on men’s most misogynistic relationships to women — rape, torture, [and] ‘choosing ‘mistresses…’” According to Harding, Newton’s Principia is “a rape manual.” She wants to replace it with a “unified field theory…that can account for both gender differences and dichotomized Africanist/Eurocentrist world views…able to chart ‘laws of tendency of patriarchy,’ [and] ‘laws of tendency of racism.’” For Harding, science is social work. It should have nothing to do with the study of nature, what it does or how it does it. Notice the strong resemblance of feminist theory on the left to creationism on the right, where for creationists, Darwin is responsible for every “ism”: Socialism, Communism, Stalinism. Harding is just one soldier in an army of anti-science, anti-humanist, and anti-Western civilization academics that now crowd American universities.

Not long ago, on this blog, we asked if the academic left were anti-science, anti-reason, anti-rational. A position now held by the radical right, it was surprising to find University of Virginia biologist Paul R. Gross and Rutgers University mathematician Norman Levitt’s book show us that the answer is an emphatic yes, for a sizable fraction of that demographic. Their early work stimulated a chain of other examinations and publications about the Academy — within and without — that continues to this day. All the while, the anti-science left expands its reach and power from academia to the wider public and government policy. We found a powerful element of resentment among the academic left (which fuels the New Left), the consequence of a felt devaluation in the humanities compared to the towering achievements of science, not unlike the way religion felt threatened since the time of Galileo.

For the academic left, the goal is to “demystify” science as just another opinion. Since the humanities are based on opinions — some remarkably well founded on historical, archeological, and written evidence — they are nonetheless opinions forever to be debated. Only the hard sciences provide irrefutable truth claims that can be proven, remembering that the social ‘sciences’ within the humanities are not science; they are ‘studies.’ By demoting science to an opinion, the humanities — based on opinions — can narrow the gap from high to low. But this anti-science posture is new to the humanities. The humanities of old generated philosophers and historians of world renown: from the ancients of Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus to the more modern Rousseau, Voltaire, and Peter Gay. Though the ancients made no distinction between the humanities and science, all was philosophy, and there was no modern science of experimentation until Galileo in the 1600s.

So, what happened to the humanities that made a dominant fraction of them irrational? Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories and Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut’s French Philosophy of the Sixties, teamed with Gross and Levitt’s historical account, help trace the evolution. Gross and Levitt see this faction as having links to the emergence of explicit socialist activities of the 1880s and 1890s and, ironically, with labor struggles of the populist movement championed by William Jennings Bryan of later Scopes “Monkey Trial” fame. Unlike today’s fascist populism in the U.S. and Europe, late 19th-century populism was an agrarian and labor populism responding to abuse of the banks and industrial Robber Barons. Demands for radical social change competed with historic shocks supported by some and rejected by others in the splintering movement. Shocks like WWI, expectations for the Bolshevik Revolution, disillusionment by the Hitler-Stalin Pack, and Stalin’s purge all discouraged the program’s advance. Remaining radical hopes were then dashed by FDR’s welfare initiatives of Social Security and the 40-hour work week followed by a postwar expansion of the middle-class thanks in part to the GI Bill. Despite these setbacks, there was a lingering sense among some that Western thought was responsible for or could not stop the barbarisms of the 20th century. A replacement was needed.

Along came Vietnam. “It was the Vietnam War…that truly revivified the American left and gave it the sense that a mass constituency receptive to its views was about to coalesce,” says Gross and Levitt. A sense most pronounced on college campuses, “particularly elite schools where a tradition of intellectual independence had always been encouraged.” In a few short years, weak sectlets rallied a new generation of recruits, like SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, who went from cautious reformers to “full-blown Maoism.” Vietnam, civil rights, the riots, Kent State shootings, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinations, and the counter-culture movements of drugs, the sexual revolution, and rock and roll as expressions against authority coupled outrage to promises of “liberation from the machine.” Elements within the academic left felt history was on their side; radical social change was in the offing.

With corruption, lies, and monumental mismanagement of the Vietnam War ending in 1975, the left’s assumptions of moral high ground in Third World revolutions from China to Cuba, Cambodia, and North Vietnam itself revealed themselves for what they were: monstrous atrocities. With that, “American radicalism became an ideological orphan… the surviving squad of theatricians of a nonexistent mass movement.” But not without having achieved some gains in civil rights, feminism, and labor. “Nonetheless, the radical style of the sixties left traces that persist,” write Gross and Levitt. “The campus constitutes the only environment in which recent radicalism became naturalized. Even as leftist rhetoric denounced higher education as the breeding ground for unquestioning servants of the bourgeoisie… The scholarly community was the inevitable refuge to which activism retreated as its concrete political possibilities melted away.”

Then a shift in focus occurred on the left. Without substantial and readily apparent causes to rally around, causes made apparent by actions like war and lynchings, beliefs were elevated, a new orthodoxy was born. A “sort of firm conviction associated with religious adherence,” writes Pluckrose and Lindsay. Like any religion, claims can be made for the cause of events or conditions with passion and commitment. Such claims are, however, vacant in their need for measurable, quantifiable proof upon which all practitioners of reason are compelled to agree by their observation of reality. While the old humanities required a semi-scientific method of investigation, evidence, and tacit conclusions based on that evidence, the New Left discarded this paradigm. Powered by their insecurities, disgust with consumerist society, and witness to what they saw as products of Enlightenment thought — WWI, the Great Depression, WWII — extremist liberals in the humanities prioritized feelings over analysis. They launched impassioned political polemics clothed in obscuration from the university pulpit. With the carnage of Marxism ever more apparent and its eventual collapse in the USSR, they needed a philosophic ally. But radical liberal academics rejected everything Western, including Western thinking. They didn’t want a philosophic retread. As nutty as it sounds, they wanted a kind of thinking in opposition to rational thought. Hence, the birth of postmodernism, which fit this need nicely. Infecting American universities from France in the 1960s, postmodernist aficionados accustomed “their readers and listeners to the belief that incomprehensibility is a sign of greatness and that the thinker’s silence before the incongruous demand for meaning was not proof of weakness but the indication of endurance in the presence of the Unsayable,” write Ferry and Renaut. Postmodernist pioneer Jacques Derrida called it a philosophical practice “which means nothing,” while Louis Althusser said it was “a non-philosophical theory of philosophy.”

Huh?

You can already see a problem here. Postmodernism was going to be a new way of thinking that violated the most fundamental aspect of human cognition: reason. This capacity, combined with speculation leading to innovations, all based on accurate assessments of reality outside our skull, is why such a weak-bodied, slow species with lousy eyesight, hearing, and sense of smell survived among superior predators. In the hominid line, reasoning first showed itself by the creation of Oldowan tools 2.6 million years ago in Ethiopia, perhaps as early as 3.4 mya by Australopithecus afarensis, the so-called Lucy. Postmodernism had a strong current to swim against. But it did, thanks to scientific illiteracy outside the sciences but still within the Academy, some linguistic jujitsu, and a public embrace of one of its creations as a moral pose: what became authoritarian political correctness.

Postmodernism’s hostility to Western Enlightenment modernity is wholesale, targeting not science and reason alone but all knowledge, objectivity, language, and reality itself as a mere construct of culture and power hierarchies that set the rules for what’s true. Of course, postmodernism’s project is executed via “reasoned” arguments communicated via language as “objectively” true and seen as the basis of “knowledge” in their respective “cultures” from within the university. In order to defeat reason with “reason,” postmodernism had to establish itself as self-contradictory by nature. Hence the need for obfuscation and the Unsayable. One suspects such a project would be harmless but for the sandbox of obscure departments on campus. This turned out not to be true. This makes postmodernism an urgent matter because “it radically rejects the foundations upon which today’s advanced civilizations are built and consequently has the potential to undermine them.”

So, has the postmodern academic left been able to do this, and if so, how?

Next time.


References:

Paragraph 1: “serves primarily…” Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, Cornell University Press, 1986, p. 9. “the best…” Ibid. p. 112. “a rape manual.” Ibid. p. 113. “unified field…” Ibid. p. 186

Paragraph 5: “It was…” Gross & Levitt, p. 30. “full-blown…” Ibid. p. 31

Paragraph 6: “American…” Ibid. p. 32. “Nonetheless…” Ibid. pp. 32,33

Paragraph 7: “sort…” Pluckrose, Lindsay, p. 18. “their readers…” Ferry and Renaut, p. 14. “which means…” Pluckrose, Lindsay, pp. 5, 4

Paragraph 10: “it radically…” Pluckrose, Lindsay, p. 23

December 6, 2022: Is the Academic Left at War with Science and Reason?

Why do so many university sociologists of the New Left claim science is in fact “bourgeois science”? Is there a communist science, a socialist science? Is science a social product, “a mere set of conventions generated by social practice” and prevailing social prejudice as postmodernist academics assert? How do all those equations describing the laws of nature and the devices built from them work if that were true? What do the postmodernists know that scientists and engineers don’t? Are the Cultural Studies professors correct in declaring that science is racist because imprinted on its demography is society’s failure to educate inner-city minorities? It is true that few inner-city minorities are found in the sciences. Why do feminist theorists see science — and, yes, even those mathematical equations — as corrupted with masculinity, gender, and sexuality bias? Do those mathematical descriptions of nature and the laws of physics not function in the Women’s Studies classroom? Is there a feminist science, a queer science? Is science bigoted because of its Eurocentric, white male origins, incapable of perceiving a full range of cultural perspectives as though there might be an Asian science, an African science? Perhaps there’s a science for every ethnicity and gender — a White science, a Black science, an L-science, G-science, B-science, T-science. For full equity, inclusion, and due diversity, should everyone have a science of their own? Free Choice Science, perhaps.

To those in the sciences and engineering these sound like products of the conspiracy theory industrial complex. “There is something medieval about it,” writes professors Gross and Levitt, “in spite of the hypermodern language in which it is nowadays couched… irrationality is courted and proclaimed with pride. All the more shocking is the fact that this challenge comes from a quarter that views itself as fearlessly progressive.”

But really? Are there members of the academic left who are anti-rational? Anti-science?

University of Virginia biologist Paul R. Gross and Rutgers University mathematician and self-described liberal Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition delineates how the New Left — led by the academic left — is no less hostile to science than the New Right. While the New Left chooses different aspects of science to oppose, it has nonetheless created a church dogma, engaging in propaganda to attack science that threatens the New Creed. While the New Right has FOX, talk radio, and QAnon on the Internet, the New Left has the university humanities departments which publish to spread the virus of postmodernism, get interviewed and quoted by media, and still garner respect by their proximity to the hard sciences, engineering, and medical departments on campus.

While reason was intentionally untethered from creed during the Enlightenment in its search for truth and as a response to dogmatism of the scholastics who forced a narrow conformity to the Bible and Aristotle, creed has returned to half of the Academy. It took a century for the development of Enlightenment reason and its attempt to apply the scientific method to human affairs before scholasticism was dethroned. Not by force or politics, but by the success of Enlightenment’s great ideas. Ideas in the arena of human freedom of conscience, freedom from institutionalized abuse, with ideas in trade and commerce that enriched growing numbers of people. Now, politics is being used to attack Enlightenment and it’s not coming only from the right.

Like the New Right, the New Left desires to unify all in like-minded accordance with their tribe under politically correct authoritarianism, but the target of their retribution is different. For the New Right, science is an accomplice to truth and thus a threat to dogma and conspiracy theories that garner power over the credulous. For the New Left, science is an accomplice of Western civilization. They have a gullible audience too: teenagers away from home, fresh in the college classroom, and a national populous, including many with non-technical college degrees who know as much about science as its New Left assailants. The New Left reviles science “as an ideological prop of the present order, which many of them despise and hope to abolish,” writes Gross and Levitt. The time is past “to get even with the West” for the ills it committed through its march to capitalistic, militaristic (the two are a matched set), and cultural imperialism that other cultures want to emulate simply by the glitz of its success. It’s little wonder that so much of the academic left’s attack uses Marxist tropes. The New Left’s hope is “to demystify science, to undermine its epistemic authority, and to valorize ‘ways of knowing’ incompatible with it.” The way Berkely professor Paul Feyerabend elevated voodoo, witchcraft, and astrology as equal or superior to science. Anyone who attacks science with a “view to vindicating the oppressed, no matter how quixotic the method, is seen to be fighting the good fight.”

Reporting from within the Ivory Tower, Gross and Levitt show that never in all the assault journals, books, and university courses in postmodernist humanities do we find critiques with a working knowledge of science. The academic left feels justified in bypassing the grimy prerequisites of discovering how science seeks what it seeks, knows what it knows, and validates itself through the success of its predictions and technologies built by it. It is the academic left’s self-pronounced moral authority that makes their critiques valid — to them. “Thus we encounter books that pontificate about the intellectual crisis of contemporary physics, whose authors have never troubled themselves with a simple problem in statistics; essays that make knowing reference to chaos theory, from writers who could not recognize, much less solve, a first-order linear differential equation; tirades about the semiotic tyranny of DNA and molecular biology, from scholars who have never been inside a real laboratory, or asked how the drug they take lowers their blood pressure.” All manifestations, Gross and Levitt note, of an intellectual debility afflicting the modern university. One that attempts to conceal not only ignorance of science through diversion but an abject weakness of fact and logic. Surrender of the intellectual high ground for nurtured ignorance is not only a professional pursuit of Trump’s inner circle of favored constitutional lawyers and advisors, proven liars by the House January 6 Committee. Science has no such defender on campus where postmodernist professors assert any wild notion, teach any conspiracy, support any bigotry or bias under protection of absolutist academic freedom, much as the New Right wants absolutist free speech to spread lies unhindered.

Beside the polemics are scores to be settled by a longstanding incentive as potent as the demotion of religion since Newton: jealousy. The colossal success of science has made those in the postmodernist humanities seethe in their irrelevance, as bitter as any young earth creationist. The “hard sciences produce reliable knowledge, assembled into coherent theories,” writes Gross and Levitt. “The more theoretical the social ‘sciences’ are, the less respect they get…subjective beyond hope of redemption, thus outside of the running for the epistemological sweepstakes.” Sad. While the hard sciences, engineering, and medicine chug along with headline grabbing discoveries, seizing annual grants in the collective billions of dollars. Such advances in knowledge spill over into lifesaving cures for COVID-19 or Webb’s imagery plucked from the edge of our universe, while New Left academics huddle in their towers depleted of ivory with catchpenny titles declaring their status.

Which is not to say postmodernist academics have no impact. While the expansion of knowledge is no longer their thing, politics is. The academic left at university are headquarters for influence and correct thinking every bit as much as Breitbart is for the New Right. “In terms of their relations with this country’s formal institutions of higher education…left-wing thinkers have never enjoyed anything remotely close to the current hospitality,” say Gross and Levitt. “Prestige-laden departments in the humanities and the social ‘sciences’ are thickly populated — in some well-known cases, we might say ‘dominated’ — by radical thinkers. Despite all protestations to the contrary, entire programs — women’s studies, African studies, cultural studies — demand, de facto, at least a rough allegiance to a leftist perspective as a qualification for membership in the faculty.” But for those remaining holdouts of the old school, the humanities are no longer inhabited by humanists. As Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut make clear in their French Philosophy of the Sixties, the university humanities are now home to extremists and their “antihumanist position.” But it’s not only the departments that have been debased. “Administrators who are also prominent left-wing figures are no longer anomalous,” write Gross and Levitt. “Often, when administrators take official positions on social issues — particularly those involving race, ethnicity, and gender questions — the tone, and the jargon as well, is indistinguishable from the militant left.” Naturally, valid academic disciplines are now being pressured to conform to the diversity of surface features, not substance, in hiring and student admissions. While the postmodernist humanities dismiss the pursuit of knowable things in other valid departments (after all, “all knowledge is relative,” including that produced by those who make this claim?), the administrators, however, are less vociferous in this regard because they know where the money comes from, and they very much adore those million-dollar chairs.

Gross and Levitt won’t make any friends in the humanities because they are humanists. They wish for the elevation of all by what all have the power to participate in: reason. Their inclusion does not exclude everyone but select victims. They oppose militant segregation of feminist theorists, identity politics, the polite sounding bigotry of multiculturalism in their application to the debasing of science. In short, they are for truth, not tribe, which of course makes them a threat to both left and right.


References:

Paragraph 1: “a mere set…” Paul R. Gros, Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, John Hopkins University Press, 1998, p. 11

Paragraph 2: “There is something…” Ibid. p. 3

Paragraph 6: “as an ideological…” Ibid. p. 3. “to demystify…” Ibid. p. 11, italics in the original. “view to…” Ibid. p. 11

Paragraph 7: “Thus we…” Ibid. p. 6

Paragraph 9: “In terms…” Ibid. p. 34, inner quotes added. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, p. xxiii. “Often, when…” Gross and Levitt, p. 34

November 29, 2022: Descent of the West? Part 3, Michael J. Sandel: How Concepts of Freedom Came Poised to End Freedom

In Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel’s book, Democracy’s Discontent, he declares two anxieties at the heart of democracy’s restless present: “we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives [and that] from family to neighborhood to nation, the moral fabric of community is unraveling around us.” Sounding like Patrick J. Deneen’s assessment 22 years later, Sandel claims what we now perceive as liberty “cannot secure the liberty it promises.”

America lives a theory, says Sandel. “Our practices and institutions are embodiments of theory of rights and obligations, citizenship and freedom, democracy and law. Political institutions are not simply instruments that implement ideas independently conceived; they are themselves embodiments of ideas.” This theory manifests itself by what Sandel calls public philosophy: “the political theory implicit in our practice, the assumptions about citizenship and freedom that inform our public life.” But that practice and those assumptions — until about 70 years ago — had a very different cast of mind.

Sandel decerns seeds of our demise in contradictions of the West’s foundational fabric, specifically its concepts of classical liberal freedom vs. republican (not Republican) freedom. For classical liberalism, which mutated into modern liberalism, “government should be neutral toward the moral and religious views its citizens espouse,” writes Sandel. “[Government] should provide a framework of rights that respects persons as free and independent selves, capable of choosing their own values and ends. Since this liberalism asserts the priority of fair procedures over particular ends, the public life it informs might be called the procedural republic.” This version of liberalism sees people as free and independent islands, “unencumbered by moral or civic ties they have not chosen.” Not only does this put the social contract in question but also the idea of a nation-state, where members belong to an extended abstraction of community. If each person is genuinely independent of a larger body, there is no state as conceived, only a common space occupied by sovereigns. As Sandel has it, this view of liberalism withdraws the civic resources necessary to sustain self-governance. (See Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. )

Government moral neutrality is agnostic on the question of the good life, an inversion of the ancients who thought the purpose of politics and the state was to foster virtuous members of society. Otherwise, by Aristotle’s assessment, we sink into a mere alliance, different from others only in their physical separation from each other. “Law becomes a mere covenant…‘a guarantor of men’s rights against one another,’” says Aristotle. “The end and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end…our highest ends.” Like Puritans, who saw their work in this world as unified with salvation in the next, Aristotle appears to seek unification of purpose and meaning. The purpose of cultivating virtuous individuals for society is in service to the meaning society provides for individuals. But James Madison and the Greeks agreed: governments can’t make everybody virtuous. For Madison, why bother? Accept their lower nature; use other means to tame them — moral neutrality in practice.

Yet leaning toward the ancient perspective, the republican view was not neutral toward values and ends. “The republican concept of freedom, unlike the liberal conception, requires a formative politics, a politics that cultivates in citizens the qualities self-government requires.” Contrary to classical liberal notions, “republican theory is the idea that liberty depends on sharing in self-government,” claims Sandel. “It means deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community. But to deliberate well about the common good requires more than the capacity to choose one’s ends and respect other’s rights to do the same. It requires a knowledge of public affairs and a sense of belonging, a concern for the whole, a moral bond with the community whose fate is at stake.”

Beyond the clickbait of conspiracy theories, talk radio outrage, and government representatives who lie as they breathe, what do most Americans know of public affairs? Politics is now entertainment — reality TV: people in compromising situations or compromising themselves as we watch the wild peculiarities of primate behavior under stress. And thanks to identity politics compounded by the segregation of multiculturalism under the guise of respecting one’s separate heritage, the melting pot is dead. Beyond today’s mass murder “community,” what belonging do Americans feel?

Unlike republican theory, “liberal political theory does not see political life as concerned with the highest ends or with the moral excellence of its citizens,” Sandel writes. “Liberal political theory insists on toleration, fair procedures, and respect for individual rights — values that respect people’s freedom to choose their own values. [However,] if liberal ideals cannot be defended in the name of the highest human good, then in what does their moral basis consist?” Instead, the capacity for morality is questioned by moral neutrality and defended with moral relativism. “Relativism usually appears less as a claim than a question,” writes Sandel, “Who is to judge?” But “toleration and freedom and fairness are values too, and they can hardly be defended by the claim that no values can be defended… How is it possible to affirm certain liberties and rights as fundamental without embracing some vision of the good life, without endorsing some ends over others?”

The answer comes in what good the ancients and moderns endorsed. Moderns reallocated the subject of the good to the individual. The community was demoted to inferior status or seen as hostile to the person. The good of the community no longer trickles down because there is no community. Morality becomes a matter of choice. When states don’t define the good life, each to his own, the death of community is sealed, but the peaceful coexistence of differing values, customs, and religions is facilitated. Social islands are spun off at a distance from one another in order to attenuate waves between them — waves that can become earthquakes on land. Outside family ties antecedent to choice, fleeting associations are as meaningful as our connections can get, eschewing coercion endemic to communities in favor of unencumbered selves.

Modern liberalism acknowledges that there are moral and religious matters that demand our obligation, but they should be set aside as relative matters in the public arena, fenced off for political peace. A “distinction between our personal and political identities…public selves, independent of any particular loyalties or conceptions of the good.” But Sandel asks, “Why should our political identities not express [those] moral and religious convictions?” And how are we able to do this, if not by another form of obligation when obligations are seen as a violation of the sanctity of free choice? Can morality and politics really be separated? And wasn’t politics about the philosophy of moral matters — freedom, justice, equality under law — practically applied?

Sandel provides two examples of moral bracketing: the Lincoln-Douglas Debates and abortion. “Since people were bound to disagree about the morality of slavery, [Stephen Douglas argued] national policy should be neutral on the question,” left to the territories to decide. Since people disagree about when the viability of human life begins, moral bracketing of abortion makes it permissible. The state should be neutral. Women should decide as a matter of individual rights, exempting the fetus as an individual. The central problem expressed is that it’s impossible for a procedural republic to exclude moral questions generated by the radical social dynamics of democracies — impossible by the psychology of human brains. The acrobatics of logic and reason become exhausted; the gap between theory and reality grows until the issue is swallowed in strife. Democracies either exclude morality or include it. Either way, democracy can be risked as a result. As Marcel Gauchet says of states,
so too democracies: they hurl themselves apart as they struggle to hold themselves together.

Barring moral judgment from moral questions as though they could be ignored on the basis of neutrality and the expediency of political peace creates its own detachment, says Sandel. A detachment of the people from their creation of a society no longer their own. People won’t forget that slavery is a moral question any more than they will forget abortion is merely because current fashion says otherwise. This process “creates a moral void that opens the way for narrow, intolerant moralisms.” Like retribution for an election that wasn’t stolen; campus micro-aggressions invented for the purposes of supremacy over others; untrammeled free speech for the benefit of broadcasting disinformation; campus speech codes to muzzle “hate speech” so defined by self-defined victims of it.

Liberal freedom serves well a purpose-centered universe. Republican freedom joins others on a terrain of belonging and belonging means meaning. Both have benefits and penalties. The individual is paramount in a liberal world, while the individual is important but secondary to community in the republican, which happens to be where self-governance resides. Representing interconnected but opposing forces, this yin and yang of political philosophy is based on the same fundamental conundrum we’re faced with by the biological facts of life. We possess independent bodies. Bodies that were dependent on and built by somebody else, assembled cell-by-cell by our mother. But unlike cyanobacterial colonies or Star Trek’s Borg, as maturing beings, we are not a physically interconnected collective. As prewired social animals, heightened by the connections our mother enhanced, our attachments become not physical but psychological. Psychological connection and belonging are fundamental to the human definition. The liberal idea of individualism runs counter to that but satisfies the physical reality we experience every day: that we are alone in our own bodies, while simultaneously demoting the connections we feel but can’t see, especially when we lose them as modernity requires.


References:

Paragraph 1: “we are losing…” Sandel, p. 3. “cannot secure…” Ibid., p. 6

Paragraph 2: “Our practices…” Ibid., p. ix

Paragraph 3: “government should…” Ibid., p. 4, italics added. “unencumbered by… Ibid., p. 6

Paragraph 4: “Law becomes…” Ibid., pg.7. “The end…” Ibid., p. 7

Paragraph 5: “The republican…” Ibid., p. 6. “It means…” Ibid., p. 5

Paragraph 7: “liberal political…” Ibid., pp. 7,8. “Relativism usually…” Ibid., p. 8. ““toleration and freedom…” Ibid., pp. 8,10

Paragraph 9: “distinction between…” Ibid., p. 18. “Why should…” Ibid., p. 18

Paragraph 10: “Since people…” Ibid., p. 21. “creates a…” Ibid., p. 24

November 22, 2022: “People of color and the poor.” “Stop the Steal!” What do these really mean?

How many times per day in America do we hear this or that “disproportionately affects people of color and the poor”? Air and water pollution, Covid-19, manmade global warming all disproportionately affect people of color and the poor. How can a worldwide calamity that’s wrecking planetwide ecosystems affect this demographic more than others? Obviously, some “people of color and the poor” are disproportionately affected by any calamity. But if this phrase is condensed into what it really means, this has been the case since the beginning of time, which is not to discount its importance. So, what’s it really mean? And is there a connection between “people of color and the poor” and “Stop the Steal!”? Implications of the former seem minor compared to those of the latter, but maybe not.

Does pollution or Covid or global warming affect Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan or the Obamas disproportionately? These people of color are doing well. Could that be because they’re rich? Aren’t rich people of color less affected by disaster than poor people of color? Maybe “people of color” really means “poor people of color.”

What about “the poor”? If “people of color” really means “poor people of color,” does “the poor” mean “poor people not of color”? More directly, “poor white people”? Surely poor white people are harmed by calamity more than rich white people.

It looks like “people of color and the poor” really means “poor people of color and poor white people.” So, why do we never hear this?

Perhaps there are a number of reasons. Why enunciate “poor white people” as victims when political correctness prefers the emphasis of “people of color”? After all, much of the victimization of people of color comes from white people, so to include white people as victims dilutes the norms of political correctness. Who wants to share sympathy with perpetrators? As mathematician Bertrand Russel noted of “the superior virtue of the oppressed,” there are special considerations that come with being a victim, real or imagined. Real victims get the attention they deserve, so correctives can be implemented. For imaginary victims, there’s a gravy train to run.

Or maybe it’s just a little clumsy to say those extra words — three of them — in a sound-bite society that cannot tolerate being forced to process extra syllables.

Then why not truncate “people of color and the poor” to what it really means: “poor people.”

From six words to two. Why don’t PBS, NPR, MSNBC, and liberals everywhere say this? Could the reason be more nefarious? Could it be that liberals are as racist as conservatives but in reverse?

Broad-brush questions like this beg for broad-brush answers that don’t apply to every member of either tribe, but they apply to some. Compare the attitudes of two groups that couldn’t appear more different: white supremacists and university administrators. In California, Proposition 209 banned race quotas in 1996, yet California university admissions continue to violate the law despite repeated proof that admittance of underqualified students makes those students less likely to succeed, failing board certifications, failing the bar, unqualified for their careers once administrators satisfied their self-serving bigotry to appear inclusive. A solution Allan Bloom termed in his Closing of the American Mind, “the corner that white impresarios painted themselves into.” Within their respective tribes, are white supremacists and university administrators of admission racist? In spades. Bigots? For sure.

But the left engages in a softer form of racism and bigotry than what we see on the New Right — for now, and this is substantiated by the Department of Justice. It’s been a while since the leftist Symbionese Liberation Army murdered civilians and police in 1970s America. Although student assaults against professors are rising, as exemplified by Middlebury College students who provided one a concussion for allowing a conservative speaker on college grounds in 2017. Meanwhile, on the New Right, we watched hundreds of white boys march with torches shouting, “Jews will not replace us!” We saw white men chase down a black man to shoot him with a shotgun for jogging.” We witnessed the casual suffocation of a black man using no more than the very blasé placement of a white man’s knee. Liberal bigotry isn’t so lethal. It, too, is systemic, but it’s institutionalized in the open. As with quotas like university admissions and Affirmative Action that seek correctives after real racism has already done its work, say, at inner-city schools. Instead of fixing inner-city schools — a massive undertaking — Affirmative Action seeks to make corrections after the damage is done. As the law says, to “remedy the results of prior discrimination.” Racism on the left is more like racism as racism’s cure.

These blatant self-contradictions force societies to live a lie. I witnessed this confluence at a “Diversity Training” session in the corporation I worked for. The diversity instructor projected two documents on the wall, Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employment (EOE). The correctness of each was lauded. Then I said the unsayable. “On one side, you show EOE, stating that in the workplace, no one can be discriminated against for any reason whatsoever. Not race, gender, sexuality, religion, national origin — nothing. On the other side, you show Affirmative Action, which in practice favors three races over all others: Black, Hispanic, and that portion of my heritage, Native American. How are we to square this contradictory practice?” I’d just put the trainer in that corner Bloom noted. All fifty heads turned, laser-focused on the instructor: black, white, Hispanic, East Asian, Indian, and a Pakistani; all engineers, scientists, mathematicians — people not to be bullshitted. The verbal acrobatics to follow fascinated the audience. We all knew what we were supposed to say.

Likewise, to say “the poor” instead of “people of color and the poor” would damage the sanctity of our new segregation, once reviled, now embraced. The American melting pot is dead. Identity politics is the rule under multiculturalism’s guise of respecting heritage, so long as that heritage is not that of the majority. Under minority preference, majorities are oppressive.

What about “Stop the Steal!” — a claim still made by Republicans who gained seats in the House. Do the authoritarian anti-Constitutionalists of the New Right really believe that the 2020 election in which Biden defeated Trump by 7-million votes was stolen by Venezuela, China, Democrats, liberals, or space aliens gun-slinging QAnon’s “Jewish space laser” in the sky? Is there really that much abject stupidity in these unUnited States?

Well…

Apparently so.

Deniers of the election, manmade global warming, and the Covid vaccine won Republican primaries across our fruity plains. Mark Finchem won Arizona’s Republican Secretary of State primary by claiming the Devil stole the 2020 election from Trump. Venezuela, China, Democrats, liberals, and space aliens could breathe a sigh of relief to hear they were off the hook. Many of these cranks lost in 2022, and many won. Many of Trump’s January 6 jihadists — with reinforcement from FOX — still claim it was Antifa who tried to stop the vote for Biden that day — the man Antifa supported.

Hmm…

But aside from the gullible, what about those other tens of millions of New Right conservatives? Do they believe this stuff? After 63 court rulings against and zero for Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell (sued billions for their lies), including two 9 to 0 rulings against Trump by his Supreme Court; after Dominion and Smartmatic voting systems showed their paper ballot copies of each vote cast matched exactly the software count; after the Cyber Ninjas (yes, Cyber Ninjas — at least our nutters have a sense of humor) bumbled their way through an Arizona recount only to find Biden won by 360 more votes than the original tally; after the January 6 Committee showed Trump and his “Team Clown” conspired to overthrow the Constitution they all so love, and still tens of millions of Republicans believe the election was stolen?

Surely…

OK, hopefully, there aren’t that many dolts on the planet. So why keep repeating this election fraud line? What does “Stop the Steal!” really mean? First, it’s not that Republicans believe it — as the media repeats — it’s that they say it. Salted with adolescent defiance, it means, “This is our tribal identifier. This is how we talk. Say this; you’re in the club. We belong. Belonging equals meaning. Fuck everybody else. They’re Libs. We’re Cons.”

Not a great sound-bite, but the New Right has become remarkably verbose.

Aside from tribal I.D., “Stop the Steal!” provides practical utility. Trump taught the once-Christian Right just how easy lying really is. If you lie and stick to it, never admit truth, break every social norm, every moral ethic, not only does God not strike you down, but you can take massive advantage of those who adhere to truth, social norms, and moral ethics. And as we saw here in Seven Truths Trump Taught the World, the Collapse of American Christianity, and the Collapse of Christianity Worldwide, political power is much more important than Christ. Hiding behind lies like “Stop the Steal!” the New Right changed voting laws across the U.S. and attempted to install cranks like Mark Finchem as Secretary of State to “Take back America!” by pseudo-legal means as though they were patriots, not traitors to the Founders they pretend to admire.

Like the left that can’t say “the poor,” the right can’t say the election was fair; Trump lost. What links “people of color and the poor” on the left to “Stop the Steal!” on the right is also what motivates both. To strike these formulaic poses are part of church doctrine, not only as unifier of the tribe but “in your face” to the other. A provocation and a litmus test that True Believers dare not challenge lest they be labeled members of the other cult.

But tests and provocations aren’t always obvious. Given all the talk of diversity and inclusivity among our liberal faithful, mantras about people of color drip with exclusion of whites, just as Affirmative Action and university admissions do. And for all their ignorance, Trump’s party of largely white real victims of social “scientists” called economists — who embraced China’s export of unemployment to America — can see this much. Trumpers can practice liberal inclusivity as well as any campus snowflake. Better: they have guns. And they’re not so smart they won’t use them, while the rest have learned the firepower of lies, long after the left taught them how. Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” and Rudy Giuliani’s “truth isn’t true” are restatements of the left’s postmodern relativism first infecting our universities in the 1960s. As Kurt Anderson clarifies in his Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, social radicalism on the left stimulated political radicalism on the right.


References:

Paragraph 9: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Simon and Schuster, 1987, pg. 95.

November 11, 2022: Confronting the Constitution, Part 8: America’s Not Completely Forgotten Stalker: Karl Marx

Marx believed that the U.S. — what he termed “the bourgeois republic” — was the final form of state, one to so eviscerate the human soul that its citizens would rebound off the bottom of existence like a collapsing supernova off its iron core. A luminous new beginning would commence with a revolution that would be the simultaneous birth of a utopian social life. In W. R. Newell’s spellbinding contribution to Confronting the Constitution we witness the broad scope of Marxist thought with its predictions of capitalism’s outcome and the state its married to. From the pen of Marx (1818–1883) we find him simultaneously dazzling, inane, alluring, and self-contradictory. His motive force was a passionate fear of the disenchantment of Man, from which, ironically, he created a social-political theory to ensure it.

“The core of Marxism’s appeal is the yearning for wholeness,” writes Newell, “for an existence that unites the personal and collective satisfaction. The breakdowns [of capitalism] are inevitable [to Marx] because capitalism must function by robbing man of a wholeness whose lack is, in the long run, unbearable to our species.” The New Deal, social welfare programs, and Keynesian economics are not patches to capitalism that would have swayed Marx, according to Newell. Such ameliorations would not conceal even bigger problems in America: “[It’s] not so much capitalism’s success as American’s apparent unawareness of this unbearable schism in their lives… They seem content with fragmentation, with parceling themselves out among their private, economic, and public pursuits… in family or love life, in religion, or even hobbies and leisure, [viewing] the political system as a means to these private satisfactions.” Born and raised in that system, this doesn’t sound so bad to me, but to Marx, we are reduced “to the service of biological existence alone.” And yet, I pursue the 3-Rs and painting between hikes with my dogs in the wilderness, free from the grind. Though it wasn’t always this way. I traded my youth for it. To Marx, this is tyranny on a small scale, where “America frustrates tyranny of the large-scale terrible kind by routinizing it into a universal, endless series of minor victories over others in commerce.” Precisely what America’s Framers considered a great achievement because it channels the most quarrelsome aspects of bipeds into relatively benign commercial interests.

In agreement with Rousseau, Marx found liberal individualism, for which capitalism is the servant, “to have truncated the human spirit,” with a “longing for a restored polis the Framers wished to dampen.” And that’s really the point. Marx, like Rousseau, had serious concerns about the evolution of individualism. In Germanic fashion, Marx wants the passion of the Volk, the clan, the tribe, on nation-state scales of mass populations that defy the very possibility of tribe, other than the disconnected, faceless, political tribes we have today. These are not the thick communities Marx ached for.

Of course, all of us under capitalism have been able to relate to Marx at one time or another. When each day’s commute to a place we don’t want to be, doing something we don’t want to do, with people we don’t want to be with feels like another lesson in submission. Nine years without a weekend off, and on rare occasions up to 98-hours per week could make me yearn for a little “wholeness.” But this was my own doing. As part of the so called “creative tech class,” my work provided high interest, often riveting. Marx didn’t see much of that in the 1800’s. What he saw is what I did before university, on road crews and in factories (when America had factories). Plenty still live that way — most of earth’s 8-billion humans — and from that perspective, Marx might look like he’s on to something.

But ideologies have an overriding tendency to see one side of an argument. This is borne out by Marx’s perspective on rights and power. “Whereas feudalism conflated personal wealth with political authority,” says Newell, for Marx “the modern state claims to represent impersonally a community of free and equal individuals. But the formal equality of rights guaranteed by the impersonality of the liberal state masks the lived reality of liberal society, a ‘war of all against all,’ [said Marx, quoting Hobbes] where the inequality of result expands without limit. The possession of rights — the occasion of so much reverence for the American Revolution — Marx believed to be nothing grandeur than the pursuit of wealth, in which the greediest and boldest triumph.” Marx makes a good point about feudalism’s conflation of property with power, and one that irritates any modern. He also sounds the alarm we’ve seen on this blog before from political philosopher Patrick J. Deneen on the impersonality of modern community, which isn’t community. To Marx, “Liberty as a right of man is not founded on the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man… The liberty of man is regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.” On that, we need only look around at disconnected America. According to the World Economic Forum, one of the loneliest places on earth. As Louis Dumont put it in his Essays on Individualism , things became more important than people. But Marx was wrong about the pretensions of the modern state (he meant the U.S.), it never sought equal individuals, but rather political equality for individuals. As Hamilton said, inequality will inevitably result from the very liberty that individuals have, free to pursue their talents, some better than others, not equalized by the state. Yes, material inequality can expand “without limit,” practically speaking, for corporations and scarce individuals like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett, but it’s the abuse of that wealth that matters. Abuse is why laws and regulations are in place as counterbalance, though not a threat to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation so long as it’s not exploited. And as the middle class demonstrated, at least until recently, so much for a war of all against all. As Montesquieu held, “If more people were devoting their energies to commerce, fewer people were absorbed in religious hatreds or the feudal pursuit of martial honor.” Marx’s absolutist assertion and his “nothing but” claims prefigure modern day talk radio, authoritarians, and fanatics on the Right and Left: good ratings, short on truth — which is not to say they can’t breed revolutions anyway.

But Marx wasn’t for killing off what capitalism built. “After the socialist revolution,” writes Newell, “the productive apparatus of the capitalist epoch would be retained to provide for everyone’s material needs. To dismantle this technological apparatus would only rekindle the centuries-long competition for economic survival and domination in the natural environment of scarcity that had culminated in the miseries of capitalism.” It’s after this stage in the march for socialism that Marx turns dogmatic. “Whereas that other great exploration of communism in the history of political philosophy, Plato’s Republic, concluded that self-interest and bodily desire made communism virtually impossible,” says Newell, “Marx believed that communism will be brought about precisely by the fullest development of self-interest and bodily desire. Socialism, the least competitive epoch, is brought about by capitalism, the most competitive.” The whole subject of “politics will disappear.” Yes, humans will suddenly transcend politics, greed, hormones, and live happy ever after under socialism. Trying to force mass overpopulations of individualist humans back into a grotesque approximation of our original mold is begging for slaughter, as seen with the Rousseau-inspired French Revolution, or Marx-inspired Stalin and Mao’s murder of millions. Either Marx was magnificently naïve, more likely he simply denied reality, or he ignored human nature to protect his ideology. As Newell points out, “naturally, one wonders why avarice, vanity, and competitiveness will not start all over again under socialism. For Marx… it is axiomatic that, once history has liberated people from the system that functions on alienation and exploitation, people will shed every motive for aggressive behavior.”

Pulease…

Karl.

Really?

Was Marxism not so historically consequential, it’d be laughable. Imagine, we socialists, filled to the brim with altruism, never again to harbor — by any member or by any generation to come — our habits of ravenousness, rapacious, voracity. “This shows the very limited sense in which Marx’s is an empirical theory,” writes Newell. Like Cultural Studies and its related social studies compatriots at university, there’s a long history of failing to check one’s social theory with the real world.

While Marx couldn’t know what we know about primate hierarchy, plenty of other philosophers, including America’s Founders weren’t so sanguine about human nature. Hence, their system — which Marx knew well — which was, in effect, to pit primate trait against primate trait, all to stymie our primate traits. The result would still be an oscillation because humans are inherently unstable, but dampened, less likely to swing wildly out of control.

It’s not that Marx was so wrong about the potential ills of individualism and its handmaiden, capitalism (with not a great deal to say about their positives), it’s that his cure was so lethal. Enlightenment and the Founder’s use of that philosophy were closer to right under our current circumstances of overpopulated, post-Ag-Revolution, nation states. In short, the latter group more closely approximated the human definition under its current circumstance. Marx was so far off target; his first great experiment lasted a pathetic seven decades as that tiny historical fart called the USSR. Capitalism, democracy, freedom, and equality are a mess because humans are a mess. Socialism, communism, and authoritarian tyrannies are a mess too, but in ways opposed to the messy nature of humans as we now exist.

How so many could champion a notion so contrary to human nature, from Lenin to postmodernist academics still pining for Marx after its predestined failure speaks volumes on the human capacity for analysis and honesty. Like the lunacy we saw last time with the libertarian oracle, Murry Rothbard, it’s a wonder people can manage an ice cream social, never mind a civilization. And what a surprise (not) that every one of them fails.


References:

Paragraph 2: “The core of Marxism’s appeal…” W.R. Newell, “Reflections on Marxism and America,” in Allan Bloom Ed., Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990., pg. 335. “[It’s] not so much…”, Ibid. pg. 335. “to the service of biological…”, Ibid. pg. 337. “America frustrates tyranny…”, Ibid. pg. 346.

Paragraph 3: “to have truncated…”, Ibid. pg. 347.

Paragraph 5: “Whereas feudalism conflated…”, Ibid. pg. 341. “Liberty as a right…”, Ibid. pg. 341. “If more people were…”, Ibid. pg. 343.

Paragraph 6: “After the socialist…”, Ibid. pg. 337. “Whereas that other…”, Ibid. pg. 338–339. “politics will disappear,” Ibid. pg. 338. “naturally, one wonders…”, Ibid. pg. 339.

October 17, 2022: Why Populism Wins and What Trump’s Second Term Will Look Like

Democratic forms of governance continue their global backslide in a retreat not seen since the ancient Greeks lost it to commence 2000 years of self-governing blackout. While modern populism’s heartthrob, Vladimir Putin — a “Genius,” “Some peacekeeper,” says Trump, has proven himself a fellow bumbler and war criminal to boot, populism’s march has faltered but stumbles on all the same. For 16 years, democracy has been in global decline. Today, in Italy, as head of the Brothers of Italy party, Giorgia Meloni is poised to become Prime Minister after praising Mussolini and winning the September 2022 election. In India, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, authoritarian governments solidify control while Mexico and Brazil embraced it, but now, like America, they grapple with whether to keep it or not. In the U.S., New Right state legislatures rig elections with pseudo-laws, gerrymandering, and installation of loyalists as they continue their worship of the new Savior, Donald J. Christ.

In Moisés Naím’s scorching account of populism in his Foreign Affairs condensation of The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century, we see how populism wins. Through this chaos-creating political art form, we also see what the second term of Trump in the White House will look like. “Unlike their totalitarian counterparts,” writes Naím, “these populists entered office through elections, but they show decidedly undemocratic proclivities.” Media no longer need be commandeered by dictators as asocial media like Facebook and Twitter offer immediate outlets for lies, disinformation, and propaganda. Others are willing accomplices, like talk radio and so-called FOX RT — there is a market for and money in dismantling democracies. Combining this with post-Cold War incompetence in government, “Declining trust in the traditional institutions that once served as gatekeepers to the public sphere has vastly lowered the reputational cost of bald-faced lying.” The gates to the city are wide open. There are no norms that cannot be violated and flaunted as a proud tribal identifier.

The new autocrats portray themselves as messianic fighters for the people against a corrupt elite. All controversies get recast as “us against them,” the “noble masses” versus the “venal select.” This is the heart of populism’s lure: emotional manipulation — and it’s not hard. All one needs to promote it is an inner vacuum of ethics and morality. An absence, not the acquisition of a long-studied skill for statesmanship or the development of knowledge, understanding, and talent. Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro were tailor-made for this. Couple populism’s lure with its reception by hairless primates on which our higher brain functions rest on a lizard lump of neurons capping our spine — a lump tuned for the emotional immediacy of fight-or-flight; sexual urgency; gag; vomit; defecation — and this combination of reptilian immediacy with human immorality is a home run. Who needs deliberation, reason, and the testing of solutions when populist leaders “tell it like it is,” “get ‘er done,” and “take no prisoners”? Through the miracle of populist mentality, common at every tavern on earth, the weakest of men — men of monumental ignorance, physically flaccid, hyper-charged with insecurities — are converted to “strong men” in the imagination seated on every barstool. “It is a common mistake to treat populism as an ideology,” writes Naím. “It is better understood as a technique for seeking power that is compatible with a nearly limitless range of specific ideologies.” And it works anywhere because “in the hands of the power-hungry, resentment against the elite can be mobilized everywhere.”

Per Naím, “Polarization follows naturally from populism. Once the basic opposition between the noble people and the corrupt elite has been put at the center of political life, the priority becomes to sharpen the opposition between them. Marxists call this ‘heightening the contradictions.’ Polarization strategies aim to sweep away the possibility of a middle ground between political rivals, depicting compromise as betrayal, seeking to amplify and exploit any opening for discord. Polarization warps the relationship between followers and their leaders.”

Those whose careers require the practice of reason, those educated broadly enough in history and philosophy, those who can think on their feet enough to challenge dogma have been flabbergasted by how easily demagogues have duped the faithful. But this is common for any kind of mass movement. “Mass movements,” wrote Eric Hoffer, “interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and realities of the world… [The true believer] cannot be frightened by danger nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence.” And Naím agrees: “The truth of an utterance is therefore independent from its correspondence with reality and derives instead from the identity of the person saying it… Such absurdities become accepted by autocrats’ followers because their psychological relationship to the leader is distorted by the prism of identity.” Identity politics isn’t just for the left. This melding of identities is an emotional attachment at the center of what disciples see themselves to be. “The melding of an individual’s identity with the identity of the leader explains why it is often hopeless to try to reason with the followers… When one’s identity is built on identification with a leader, any criticism of that leader feels like a personal attack on oneself.”

“We are wired…so that our reasoning [supports] in-group solidarity,” writes Brookings Institution senior fellow in Governance Studies, Jonathan Rauch. “Presenting people with facts that challenge group-defining opinions does not work. Instead of changing their minds, they [reject] facts to double down on false beliefs…regardless of educational and cognitive firepower.” In other words, the educated can be duped, too, as Hitler proved with his minions of scientists, engineers, and economists. Polarization is not a byproduct, says Rauch, “polarization is the product [as] cravings for shared outrage against a common adversary.” Extreme partisanship may even be addictive, says social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Justifying lies gives partisans a hit of dopamine. “Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things.”

But for all the trouble, energy, and hassle, can it be only devotion that needy attention addicts like Trump seek?

“The ultimate goal is to turn the state into a profit center for a new criminalized coterie,” writes Naím. “Criminalized states put the usual repertoire of a mob boss, such as demands for protection money, overt intimidation, and back-street beatings, to political ends: silencing opponents, cowing critics, enforcing complicity, enriching allies, and buying political support internally and externally. A criminalized state combines traditional statecraft with the strategies and methods of transnational criminal cartels…” Like Putin’s Russian mafia state, Maduro’s illegal gold mining in cahoots with Columbian guerrillas and Turkey to launder it, or Trump’s claiming Qatar a terrorist state until fleecing them of $1.4B to pay off son-in-law Jared Kushner’s bankrupt 666 Tower. “This is organized crime, yes, but it is much more than that; it is organized crime as statecraft, coordinated by the governments of…nation-states.”

And that is Trump’s second term. A continuation, expansion, and refinement of what he finally got started in the last two years of his first term. Once responsible adults were expunged, once Vladimir had time in their secret meetings to school Trump on how both could profit, Trump was able to leverage his decades of money laundering for Russia (fined by the U.S. Treasury from 1992 to 2015) into a wildly profitable swindling of America. Military personnel were transported out of their way to fill his resorts. Autocratic diplomats filled his hotels for influence. Government events filled his properties. Trump’s second term will be a massive windfall for the Trump Corporation and brownnosed cronies who laud him with sufficient bootlicking if he and they aren’t yet in prison. The New Right will fleece the country as the center of gravity for Banana Republics moves north. The U.S. as just another money machine for the Cosa Nostra, conning the little guys at the tavern as the little guys sing the praises of being conned.


References:

Paragraph 2: “these populists…” Moisés Naím, The Dictator’s New Playbook: Why Democracy Is Losing the Fight, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2022, p. 144. “Declining trust…”, Ibid., p. 145

Paragraph 3: “It is better…”, Ibid., p. 145. “in the hands…”, Ibid., p. 146

Paragraph 4: “Polarization follows…”, Ibid., p. 146

Paragraph 5: “Mass movements…” Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Perennial, 1989. “The truth of…”, Naím p. 146–147. “The melding…”, Ibid, p. 147

Paragraph 6: Jonathan Rauch, Rethinking Polarization, National Affairs, Fall 2019. “Like rats…” Ibid.

Paragraph 8: “This is organized…”, Naím p. 151

October 10, 2022: You’re a Liar. I’m a Liar. We’re All Liars! Why? It’s Evolution, Man

Deceit is “not, as popular opinion would have it, reducible to mental illness or moral failure. Human society is a network of lies and deceptions that would collapse under too much honesty.” On the other hand, “self-deception is the handmaiden of deceit; in hiding the truth from ourselves, we are able to hide it more fully from others. Therefore, like deceit, self-deception lies at the core of our humanity. Far from being a sign of emotional disturbance…it is probably vital for psychological equilibrium.” So says director of the Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of New England, David Livingstone Smith, in his Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind. According to Smith and contrary to Freud, self-deception did not arise to inwardly protect ourselves from stressful experiences or thoughts but for the outward application of social manipulation. While lying all the time would get us labeled as liars, “Self-deception helps us ensnare others more effectively. It enables us to lie sincerely, to lie without knowing we are lying…cleverly weaving useful illusions out of biased perceptions, tendentious memories, and fallacious logic.”

It’s a bipolar arrangement in our head. Deception runs in two different directions. “A savvy social operator,” says Smith, “needs to have an excellent grasp of human self-interests because it’s impossible to beguile others unless you understand what makes them tick. However, self-deception, which is also essential for competent social manipulation, pulls us in the opposite direction, leading us to disavow knowledge about human self-interest, encouraging a rather naïve conception of human nature.” Excluding professional liars, most of the time, we don’t actually know we’re doing this. To block our manipulations from ourselves is the task of the unconscious, completely at home with the idea that we are the only thing that matters. Something David Hume tried to capture when he said, “Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” Unlike professional liars — those people for whom their very livelihoods depend on lies — for the rest of us, this equilibrium by self-deception implies a major evolutionary development of the human brain: “In order to hide the truth about ourselves from ourselves, we needed to evolve an unconscious mind… There is a side of ourselves that we were evolved not to know.”

“Our minds, no less than our bodies,” writes Smith, “are products of the forces of nature operating on time frames of millions of years.” But when that mind evolved, humans lived in a very different world. With our present brain size fixed by about 150,000 years ago, we emerged from that environment “equipped with an array of passions, skills, and mental abilities specifically adapted to life in that primeval habitat.” That hasn’t changed in fifteen hundred centuries. “The mind you and I possess is, in its essentials, a Stone Age mind.” No wonder humans are such a mess; stuck in traffic, gagging on smog, crammed into crowded cities built for cars and buildings that just happen to be occupied by humans, and all with a Stone Age noodle.

But lies go further back than this. Smith provides an astounding case for the notion that lies underpin all life on the planet. From deceiving host immune systems by a virus — something we can’t even say for sure is alive or not — to mirror orchids that “produce insect pornography” with their flowers that look like fertile female wasps, to the Portia spider that knows the species-specific vibration codes of other prey spiders on their particular webs. Given the portia has excellent eyesight, while other spiders are almost blind, the portia taps out the proper code on the silk of target spiders and they come running, thinking it’s a meal. But the portia is small, its prey often large. If the portia sees it picked the wrong dude, it taps out the message for “leaf in the wind — never mind.” At the top of this animal deception pyramid are humans. We are more like Homo fallax (deceptive man) than Home sapiens (wise man), says Smith. “The biosphere teams with mendacity… With this lineage behind us, it is hardly surprising that human society is in large measure a densely woven fabric of trickery and dissimulation.”

This may make human knowledge a special case of the larger category of biological knowledge. For social animals, from ants and bees to primates and people, be they predator or prey, the outcome of decisions followed by actions depend on the internal motivations and pending behavior of other animals. “In other words,” says Smith, “animals must be able to predict the behavior of others.” This kind of “mind reading” facilitates deception, exploitation, manipulation. And the more individuals there are to deal with, the more complex this mind reading and manipulation gets. There’s a direct correlation between primate brain size and their particular group size, implying that intellectual horsepower evolved from demands of social life.

Usually, lying is spontaneous and unconscious. Aside from blatant self-serving lies like “Stop the Steal!” concocted by our right-wing lie factories or “micro-aggressions” fabricated by our college campus victim industry, the lion’s share of lying for amateurs is dominated by unconscious alliance forming, attitude testing, simple manipulations to get our way or “be right” about something. These all link back to the animal world and what we came from. Lying is a survival strategy that advances our opportunities for survival and reproduction. And while, as Smith notes, “There seems to be something inherently paradoxical about a person simultaneously deceiving himself and being a victim of his or her deception,” it turns out that we do it all the time.

That we fundamentally know this about ourselves can be seen in the stories that dominate scripture, literature, and today’s news. “The serpent deceived me, and I ate,” Eve tells God. King Lear, Little Red Riding Hood, Trump’s secret meetings with Putin, our obsession with lies and liars is everywhere. “Deception is a crucial dimension of all human associations,” Smith writes, “lurking in the background of relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, employers and employees, professionals and their patients, governments and their citizens… We are natural born liars.” And although we tout truth as a great value, we also know that too much honesty is antisocial behavior.

All lies, no matter the type, share commonalities. These deceptions must be “concealed behind a shroud of secrecy in order to work… Lying is obliged by its very nature to cover its traces, for in order to lie effectively, we must lie about lying.” Pause for a moment to consider all the cerebral complexities, the back-and-forth gamesmanship, and behavioral predictions going on in Trump’s head as he tries to divert, dismiss, and re-spin his theft of Top Secret intel. Intel which I know from personal experience is allowed only in its designated vault. Not even gum wrappers come out of those places without security inspection. As Trump tests one lie after another, he’s able to call Rupert Murdoch to heal as FOX is back in line defending Trump to his disciples who tune in, lifting ratings, raising ad revenues. At the same time, Murdoch’s new culture war darling , Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, swings in the wind, forced to defend Trump to his base as Trump seals his 2024 bid and DeSantis is forgotten. And as all this unfolded, Trump sat for a deposition in New York concerning his bank/insurance/wire fraud, claiming 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination 450 times, 75-times an hour for 6 hours — something he once said is for liars and cowards (he was right). All as his “back to blue” “law and order” party demands defunding of the FBI.

It’s no wonder humans are the most dangerous creatures on earth. So far as we know, the most dangerous creatures in the universe.

As Smith claims, more than chess, this is poker, where conscious and unconscious feints and tells dominate the game more than rules of how to play it. “At that fateful moment when our species became its own main predator, these well-practiced cognitive routines swung into action in the social arena.”

The saddest part of this evolutionary stratagem is that it looks like the most honest people are the most miserable. Honest people who truthfully assess the world around them, especially themselves, are more often depressives, says Smith. For decades, health professionals assumed that such people were self-deceived and irrationally out of touch with reality. “Scientific research leads to the opposite conclusion that depressives seem to have a better grasp of reality than the ‘normal’ psychiatrists treating them….” Why? Because depressives “suffer a deficit in self-deception.”

But it gets worse. “Self-deception,” Smith writes, “was a splendid adaptation in a world populated by nomadic bands armed with sticks and stones. It’s no longer such a good option in a world stocked with nuclear and biological weapons. The problem is, we’re stuck with it… The most dangerous forms of self-deception are the collective ones. Patriotism, moral crusades, and religious fervor sweep across nations like plagues….”

So we’ve seen.


References:

Paragraph 1: David Livingstone Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004, pg. 2. “self-deception is…” Ibid. pg. 3. “Self-deception…” Ibid. pg. 76–77.

Paragraph 2: “A savvy…” Ibid. pg. 106. “this equilibrium…” Ibid. pg. 3–4.

Paragraph 3: “Our minds…” Ibid. pg. 11. “equipped with…” Ibid. pg. 11. “The mind…” Ibid. pg. 11.

Paragraph 4: “produce insect…” Ibid. pg. 33. “The biosphere…” pg. 29.

Paragraph 6: “There seems…” Ibid. pg. 22.

Paragraph 7: “Deception is…” Ibid. pg. 12–13.

Paragraph 8: “concealed behind…” Ibid. pg. 6,12.

Paragraph 10: “At that…” Ibid. pg. 105.

Paragraph 11: “Scientific research…” Ibid. pg. 27,28.

Paragraph 12: “Self-deception…” Ibid. pg. 196, 197.

September 5, 2022: If You Think “The People” Want Freedom and Democracy, Think Again

That demagogic cranks emerge, even in healthy societies, is no secret. America’s had scores of them, from Henry Ford and Father Coughlin to Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. But in How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write, “An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place… political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers.” In some democracies, “political leaders heed the warning signs and ensure that authoritarians remain on the fringes, far from centers of power.” Today in Austria and France, this means teaming with the opposing party, just as Reagan-conservatives George Will and Max Boot urge Republicans to vote straight Democrat in coming elections. It’s the party elites, not the people, that save democracies because too many people are easily conned.

And it’s not difficult. Demagogues are evidence that the political tricks and tools we learn by age seven are the tricks and tools we’re stuck with for life. Recall how Trump responded to Hillary’s prediction-come-true that Trump would be Putin’s “puppet.” With all the creative originality of a seven-year-old, Trump responded, “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet. No, you’re the puppet.” As political scientist Jonathan Rauch notes, “regardless of educational and cognitive firepower,” such lures and our response to them remain just as effective as when we were children. I practice this when I replace Trump with sTupid or recast the GOP as the GOPP (Grand Old Putin Party). Accurate as both are, it infuriates my opposition just as I intended and reveals the reality that both participants know is true, delighting one, infuriating the other. Per Rauch, polarization is not a byproduct of demagoguery, “polarization is the product,” serving “cravings for shared outrage against a common adversary,” or simply to get under that adversary’s skin. And it might even be addictive, says social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as partisanship gives partisans a chemical hit of dopamine. “Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button,” he says, “partisans may be simply unable to stop believing [and doing] weird things.” Thanks to that lizard lump that caps our spine, we can’t help but be made petty by the petty. As the old saying goes, “When you wrestle with pigs, you’re gonna get muddy.” When it comes to mud wrestling, humans just aren’t that complicated.

This is the sole territory of Right-wing talk radio, TV, and internet. These lie factories are leaders in democracy’s worldwide decline—never solutions, only mud wrestling. Real problem solving requires analysis (yawn), negotiation (what?), compromise (treason!), and constant vigilance required to fix things (zzz… snore)—that’s hard. Poking the brainstem—that’s easy. As George Will said, once a people get in this state, “it’s very hard to un-ring that bell.”

But such is the state we’re in. And from Levitsky and Ziblatt, we see how all those things we thought would keep us safe, won’t. The Constitution won’t save us, nor its institutions; it’s most definitely not the people. Latin American countries and the Philippines made replicas of the U.S. Constitution and structured their governments accordingly, and yet, like 2016 America, they still became authoritarian sanctuaries for half-wits. Laws can be abused in any number of ways, from excessive “letter of the law” to radical “spirit” of the law, either of which can be made to mean anything. There are also many issues that constitutions, including the U.S. Constitution, do not address, in part because it assumed norms of common decency, tolerance, and forbearance. Turns out, that was the secret sauce nobody suspected.

Really?

Norms?

As the authors elaborate, “Institutions alone are not enough to rein in autocrats. Constitutions must be defended… by democratic norms.” It was Thomas Aquinas who argued that norms—matters of social habit—are the most powerful laws we have, superior to written law. “Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not… [Without norms, the] tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, even legally—to kill it.”

With Trump and his GOPP as serial norm-killers, with their Christian ethics replaced by the normalization of immorality, norms and morality are dead on the Trumpian Right. Now that they’re gone, it’s very hard to un-ring that bell. As it took time for the Right to catch up to the relativity of truth promoted by our postmodern Left, it shouldn’t take long for the Left to catch up to the evisceration of norms and the last moral holdout. In part because commencing with our norm-breaking 1960s, the Left was never much for norms to begin with—though some norms, like those opposing civil rights deserved to be broken. Norms—that thin tissue of convention—seem to be the last buttress blocking the fall of unstable humans, almost all of them strangers in global numbers too massive for stability.

With norms gone, there’s no need for old-style takeovers. Today, write Levitsky and Ziblatt, “most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments… There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance… They may even [portray] efforts to improve democracy… combat corruption or clean up the electoral process.” Sound familiar? Like GOPP state legislatures?

Levitsky and Ziblatt provide the recipe for how this gets started. In every case, the outsider follows a period of social unrest attendant economic calamity. (Never forget bread and circuses.) For each case they examine, from Venezuela’s Chávez and Peru’s Fujimori to Hungary’s Orban and Trump, establishment politicians believed the upstart outsider had no chance of winning. And when he did win, the elites knew they could control him, then didn’t.

“If a charismatic outsider emerges on the scene, gaining popularity as he challenges the old order,” write the authors, “it’s tempting for establishment politicians who feel their control is unraveling to try to co-opt him. If an insider breaks ranks to embrace the insurgent before his rivals do, he can use the outsider’s energy and base to outmaneuver his peers. Then, establishment politicians hope the insurgent can be redirected to support their own program.”

But these insurgent upstarts are of a different psychological type, foreign to the more typical climber inspired by achievement, influence, or fame. Even a casual inspection of those noted, or further back to Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, reveals an ax to grind against some malignant inferiority or loss. Stalin, a victim of his drunken father’s frequent beatings and a carriage accident leaving his left arm disabled; Hitler, another target of his father’s fist, combined with the death of his dream to become an artist; Mao, a serial dropout; Trump, forever striving to show his father he was as worthy as brother Freddy despite Donald’s serial business failures (Trump Shuttle, New Jersey Generals, Taj Mahal, Castle, and Plaza casinos), and never accepted by New York’s old money. As Mary Trump opens her biography of uncle Donald, she quotes Victor Hugo, “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed.” These insurgent upstarts have infinite wills that run 24/7 in constant need of devouring other souls, striving to light their own. Such types are never corralled, controlled, directed. Their emotions are a chain reaction of almost random, spontaneous eruptions in search of recovery, from what, even they don’t know. When political insiders welcome these mental deformations, the illness is normalized and the insurgent gains credibility in the minds of the people, media, and donor class. “Abdication of political responsibility by existing leaders often marks a nation’s first step toward authoritarianism.”

How Democracies Die was written before Trump’s Big Lie of a “stolen election”—now a canonical litmus test. Though Trump tested the Lie in 2016 as prophylactic for his ego if he lost, just as years before when he claimed the Emmys were rigged because his gameshow didn’t win one. Using the Lie, GOPP state legislatures began to “clean up the electoral process,” or rewriting voter laws in 2020, in some cases seeking means to overturn elections if their candidate falls short. As a bit of prophecy, Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote in 2018, “American states, which were once praised by the great jurist Louis Brandeis as ‘laboratories of democracy,’ are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies, and even rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose.”

While Levitsky and Ziblatt correctly assign the New Right as guilty for America’s slide to fascism, they ignore that the New Right’s political extremism is a response to the New Left’s social extremes: the Sexual Revolution; 60s drug culture; counter-culture hippie movement; authoritarian political correctness; postmodernist dominance of the humanities; leftist segregation of identity politics. The New Left is no more capable of disposing of their hollow “diversity,” “inclusivity,” and “identity” mantras—much as the first two are reasonably desirable—for the unity of an American melting pot than the New Right can claim to be moral, Christian, or Constitutionalists. A sizable fraction of “the people” don’t want freedom and democracy. Instead, the New Right imitates their hero Mao Zedong as “political power grows from the barrel of a gun,” under the guise of gun rights and perversions of the 2nd Amendment paraded in state capitols for purposes of intimidation. And as we’ve seen here before, even Right-wing American “Christians” don’t want their Founder’s process of democratic governance in accord with Christian morality because authoritarian power over liberals matters more. This is tribal war. As our primate relatives prove, there’s only one survivor in this fight.

Buckle up, world. Like Rome, if these Ununited States tumble, they’ll smash everything they fall on. If you thought our response to 9/11 was a cataclysmic screwup, you just wait.


References not linked to above:

Paragraph 1: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, B/D/W/Y Broadway Books, 2018. “…in the first place…”: Ibid, pg. 7. “…democracy’s gatekeepers.”: Ibid, pg. 20. “…isolate and defeat them.”: Ibid, pg. 20.

Paragraph 8: “…by democratic norms.”: Ibid, pg. 7. “…to kill it.”: Ibid, pg. 7–8.

Paragraph 10: “…clean up the electoral process.”: Ibid, pg. 3.

Paragraph 11: “…their own program.”: Ibid, 15.

Paragraph 12: “…sins will be committed.”: Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, Simon & Schuster, 2020. “…toward authoritarianism.”: Ibid, pg. 19.

Paragraph 13: “…do not lose.”: Ibid, pg. 2.

July 4, 2022: It’s Not Only America: Is Christianity Imploding Worldwide?

In Seven Truths Trump Taught the World, we asked here, “What is a Christian? Complex as that answer can be, might we simplify it as one who at least attempts to practice the teachings of Christ?… But as the world has witnessed of America since 2016, David Hume’s assessment has been validated: ‘the highest zeal in religion and the deepest hypocrisy, far from being inconsistent, are commonly united in the same individual.’” In Are We Witnessing the Collapse of American Christianity? We found just half of America’s young people identify as religious, and over a third of Americans identify as nonreligious, a four-fold increase in 30 years. We looked at the most well-known scriptural verses and compared them not to people’s self-professed “devotion” but to their actions. Adding to the implosion, as Billy Graham Center director Ed Stetzer said on the BBC, some Christians are replacing Christ with Trump’s-affiliated QAnon, which 4 in 10 “Republicans” believe in. “Gullibility is not a spiritual gift, ” says Stetzer. As Baptist News Global’s Jeff Brumley wrote, “evangelical support for a scandal-ridden [Trump] could spell the end of Christianity in the United States.” It’s not science, reason, or liberals that threaten American Christianity most, not widespread pedophilia in the Catholic priesthood, sexual predation by or against Nuns, nor abuse by Southern Baptist clergy. It’s the wanton betrayal by the flock themselves. Betrayal not hidden or embarrassing to a specific sect of American Christians, it’s a badge of honor. Their party is more important than Christianity. But the U.S. is not alone.

In his strongest words to date against Patriarch Kirill, the pro-war leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Pope Francis slammed him for endorsing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “I spoke to him for 40 minutes via Zoom,” the Pope said. “The first 20 minutes he read to me, with a card in hand, all the justifications for war. I listened and told him: I don’t understand anything about this. Brother, we are not clerics of state, we cannot use the language of politics but that of Jesus.” Pope Francis warned Patriarch Kirill, not to become “Putin’s altar boy.” Kirill back’s Putin’s war crimes against Ukraine the way Trump does. Putin is “some peacekeeper,” Trump said. “He’s a genius. Smart, very smart.” So we’ve seen, with Ukraine’s ass-whipping of Putin’s Army and self-inflicted collapse of his economy. With 70-percent of Russians identifying as Orthodox Christian, Putin has lauded religion in Russia the way his counterintelligence Guns & Bible Campaign did the same for Trump-supporting Christians in the U.S. when Russian spy Maria Butina suckered the NRA and penetrated the Republican Party. In Putin’s Russia, the church is a tool of the State, as it is in the U.S. for Trump.

In an interview on PBS Newshour’s documentary Inside Russia, Russian Orthodox Arch Priest Ivan Garmisch said, “the only way to be a true Christian is to be a true Russian. The State and my faith are united. They can’t be separated. The values of the church and the State coincide.”

So, forget Mark 12:17; don’t leave to Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Coming from a nation where orthodox priests bless Russian weapons, this should be no surprise.

“Putin,” says Garmisch, is “a religious man and he takes part in the divine worship.” Like Trump, who held up a Bible as he stood beside a church for a photo op after unlawfully clearing peaceful protesters there. And yet Trump can name no verse, no book, no prophet in the Bible. Like Garmisch kissing missiles, theater for the tavern. Pretend belief is close enough.

In Russia, Father Garmisch regularly blesses brigades of Cossacks — once the Czar’s henchmen — who believe Russia should be governed by tradition, not the rule of law. And like Trump-Christians beating his opposition at Trump rallies, the good Christian Cossacks act as vigilantes for Mother Russia, hospitalizing those who disagree with Putin.

Surely a thrill to Father Garmisch and Patriarch Kirill, Putin bombed Ukrainian civilians throughout Easter.

In Brazil, the slogan among Christians used to be “Believers don’t mess with politics.” But in the 1970s, Brazil’s economy and politics began to crumble. Economically up and down, rife with corruption, with and without dictators, people wanted order. As Chayenne Polimédio writes in the Atlantic, “Brazil’s evangelicals came to recognize their new strength: Democracy is a numbers game. And their own numbers were growing,” while nonmilitant, mainstream Christians shrank.

In 1985, in the city of Anápolis in the rural state of Goiás, the leaders of the Assembly of God, a popular evangelical church, announced they would begin supporting candidates to run for office. The new slogan was “Brother votes for Brother.” Participation in politics by major Pentecostal denominations was a reversal in the faithful’s approach to politics. By 2016, with skyrocketing violence, record unemployment, and constant political scandals, Brazil spiraled into chaos. On May 12 of that year, a leader of the Assembly of God baptized in the Jordan River a lifelong Brazilian radical and political outlier by the name of Jair Bolsonaro; though he claims to be Catholic, baptized at birth. As Polimédio writes, “This was [Bolsonaro’s] most important act in formalizing his relationship with Evangelicals that he spent the early part of this decade cultivating… Bolsonaro placed his political fortunes in the hands of the evangelicals. Brazilians find Bolsonaro’s nostalgia for military dictatorship and even his disdain for democracy appealing, [able to unify] Christians sympathetic to a law-and-order governing style.” With our insurrection party’s redefinition of “law and order” as its opposite, we in America know what that means. Again, like Putin’s “divine worship,” Trump’s Bible pose, or Bolsonaro’s dunk in the Jordan, it doesn’t take much to convince those who don’t need convincing. Sounding like Trump’s authoritarians who “love the Constitution,” as Bolsonaro said, “You can’t change anything in this country with voting and elections.”

What Paul Waldman wrote of Trumpers applies to those above, “Trump taught them that shamelessness can be a kind of superpower. If you don’t care whether journalists (let alone your political opponents) point out your lies, then you have been liberated. And if you stop caring what anyone except what your most committed supporters believe, then not only can you ignore the truth, in the Republican’s case, you have to… lying is not only permitted but mandatory.” So much for Ephesians 4:25: “We no longer lie to one another. We only tell the truth.” Lies become the only way to compensate for one’s own betrayals; the only way to feel belonging when belonging is dead because the religion we once belonged to has been wrecked from the inside.

To watch prayerful humans parade their faux-faith alongside their normalization of violence, immorality, and fantastical conspiracies is to see the chaotic spiral of incongruities that must attend the disassembly of every once-inspiring system of order. This is what the ancients saw. The unraveling of their beliefs as forerunner to their civilization’s dissolution, vanishment, Dark Ages.

With these worldwide examples, perhaps Pope Francis would agree, we’re not talking about casual sinners here. These are apostates. Loathers, if not of Christ, certainly of his teachings because political power matters more.

And yet, while Christianity continues its decline in the U.S., worldwide numbers of self-identified Christians might not change much. Russian Orthodox Putin-worshipers will still claim to be Orthodox. Brazilian Bolsonaro-idolizers will still go to church. And 82% of Trump supporters who claim to be Christian will blatantly betray Christ for political power. They can’t conceal what they’re doing. They make Christianity a farce, a sham, surely an embarrassment to Christ, levied against him by “Christians” themselves. These are cults with a twist. Claiming to be one thing, acting as another.

But this view is one-sided. In a world of over 2 billion Christians, there are those who practice the ethical aspects of their faith, are faithful to the Teachings, and many more who try. These are the people we don’t hear about. Whatever their fraction of the whole, compared to what we do see, they appear to be in desperate retreat, losing to their radical brethren.