Can it Happen Here?

It is happening here. We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave, and we haven't been for a long time. Most Americans are now willing to give up their birthright, liberty, for a mess of pottage. Safety and security are their main concerns. The orchestration of fear by the powers that be is a primary tool for forcing us into political dhimmitude. The masked masses, complicit in their own cancellation, are proving easy to control.

Dreher explains in under six minutes.

While Dreher is an eminently decent man, he is pre-eminently stupid in his opposition to Trump. He doesn't understand that we are involved in a war and that in a war you have to take sides, and that attempting to float above the fray and be 'objective' -- while appropriate for a political philosopher as opposed to a political activist -- plays right into the hands of the enemy.

 

Vito Caiati responds with a little help from Winston Churchill:

Your comment on Rod Dreher in this morning’s post (“While Dreher is an eminently decent man, he is pre-eminently stupid in his opposition to Trump. He doesn't understand that we are involved in a war and that in a war you have to take sides, and that attempting to float above the fray and be 'objective' -- while appropriate for a political philosopher as opposed to a political activist -- plays right into the hands of the enemy”) brought to mind Winston Churchill’s broadcast of June 22, 1941, following the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia. His words, those of one of the most stalwart opponents of communion of the inter-war years, are worth remembering when dealing with “conservatives” such as Dreher and his kind, who confront nothing comparable to the hard and unpleasant political choice of the British Prime Minister:

No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no words that I've spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. . . .

We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us. Nothing. We will never parley; we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land; we shall fight him by sea; we shall fight him in the air, until, with God's help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its people from his yoke.

Any man or State who fights against Nazism will have our aid. Any man or State who marches with Hitler is our foe. . . .

It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and to the Russian people. We shall appeal to all our friends and Allies in every part of the world to take the same course and pursue it as we shall, faithfully and steadfastly to the end.

We have offered to the Government of Soviet Russia any technical or economic assistance which is in our power and which is likely to be of service to them.”

We are indeed in a “war” with an implacable domestic enemy in which the tide of battle has dramatically and rapidly turned against us. What is most frustrating about Dreher is that he spends every day reporting on the assault by the Left on our culture, traditions, institutions, and freedoms, and yet he believes that we have the luxury of waiting for the coming of some pristine conservative leader, someone  più raffinato e puro than Trump. While he waits, the Republic is further undone by its enemies.

Exactly right, Vito. Dreher shares the characteristic referred to in your penultimate sentence with many so-called conservatives. They are waiting for someone "more refined and pure" to come along, a 'true conservative,' in a bow tie perhaps, who speaks and writes elegant English and displays all of the social graces, a clubbable man, a man cut from the same cloth as a George F. Will, or a Bill Kristol, not a boorish, mean-tweeting alpha male from the mean streets of NYC willing and able to slice into such effete  opponents as Jeb! Bush with mockery and derision.  These pseudo-cons are flummoxed and distracted by Trump's style so much so that they cannot pay attention to the deeply American substance of his words and his (not merely promised, but implemented) policies, policies they themselves pay lip service to but lack the cojones to implement. 

What are we to make of people like David Brooks and David French? Human behavior is multi-motivated and these two are undoubtedly complex and many-sided men with much good in them; I can't shake the idea, however, that a not inconsiderable driver of their behavior  is a desire for social acceptance by the elites and invitations to the most exclusive of Beltway soirees.  

French, for example, opposes abortion. A man comes along, a man much lied about and maligned, a patriotic American, who, though something of a sybarite in his personal behavior, yet accomplished much to stop the slaughter.  So what does French do? He throws in with Biden and the pro-abortion gang.  

If the distinction between style and substance were a stick, I would hit these pussy-cons over the head with it in a vain attempt at knocking some sense into them. 

Comments

[Vito B. Caiati]

Bill, when you write, "A man comes along, a man much lied about and maligned, a patriotic American, who, though something of a sybarite in his personal behavior, yet accomplished much to stop the slaughter. So what does French do? He throws in with Biden and the pro-abortion gang," you touch on the heart of the matter. To make such a choice reveals some deep moral flaw and a certain unseriousness--as if politics, in this case, is not in the end about life and death--in the very persons who delight in vaunting their virtue. Related to this is Dreher's certainty that the opponents of the Left will be silenced and sidelined by the tools of "soft totalitarianism," however constraining these may be, rather than those of "hard totalitarianism." Of this, I am not at all sure, since signs of the latter variant are already evident in, for instance, the inhuman detention and relentless prosecutions of citizens present at the U.S. Capitol or the thinly veiled threats by Biden's Justice Department to monitor parents ("domestic terrorists") who protest CRT at school board meetings. The line between soft and hard totalitarianisms is not fixed; instead, one mergers into the other, and the Left, aided by their comrades among federal bureaucrats, prosecutors, and judges, will find ways to move it if necessary. I am not sure why Dreher is so sure that the line will not be altered, but his conviction of its fixity makes it easier for him to stand in the wings waiting for his ideal conservative champion to appear, after all, he reasons, no one is going into an American gulag. (By the way, sorry for my typo "stalwart opponents of communism," not "communion").

[BV]

Vito,

You are right to question Dreher's distinction between hard and soft totalitarianism. There is nothing to stop an eventual transmogrification of the former into the latter. You rightly cite the inhuman detention of the Capitol trespassers, the prosecution and persecution of those merely present at the 6 January 'insurrection,' and the vicious slander of concerned parents as 'domestic terrorists.' Add to that the systematic abuse of language. Insurrection?

>>I am not sure why Dreher is so sure that the line will not be altered, but his conviction of its fixity makes it easier for him to stand in the wings waiting for his ideal conservative champion to appear; after all, he reasons, no one is going into an American gulag.<<

That is a plausible explanation of Dreher's attitude.

[BV]

To Dreher I would say: either join the fight, or shut up and retreat to a monastery. But he won't shut up. He loves to write and comment and hold forth. So do I. But I understand what he doesn't, namely, that one must take sides here.

There is a case to be made for retreating from the political entirely, especially if one is a Christian. This world is a vanishing quantity. Why are we so exercised over it? The temporal is next-to-nothing compared to eternity. "We have but one night to spend in this bad inn." (Teresa of Avila) If the totalitarians come for us, we should allow ourselves to be imprisoned or slaughtered. We should stand fast in our faith and "resist not the evildoer."

Dreher won't retreat from the political, nor will he join the fight. Is this a viable way? It strikes me as an untenable compromise.

[BV]

What about me? What's my way? I try to live in accordance with the following propositions:

1. This world cannot satisfy anyone with spiritual depth. To live for it alone is spiritual and intellectual folly. A life worth living is a life in pursuit of the Absolute.

2. I am a moral and intellectual weakling as compared to Boethius, say, and would not do well under torture or imprisonment. I would not under such circumstances be able to prosecute the quest for the Absolute. Therefore:

3. I must give some time and attention to the defense of the conditions that allow me to live what I deem the highest life, the life in pursuit of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. As an American, I must do my paltry bit to defend the Republic, to defend America as she was founded to be, against the destructive Left. I must join the fight. But:

4. I must now allow myself to be swallowed up by the political. I must live the life of the part-time warrior and the part-time monastic, mystic, philosopher, religionist, and conscience-follower. The latter roles must dominate the warrior role.

[Joe Odegaard]

Well. Here is some more Winston Churchill. We have made this mistake before., and made it hugely. This is from "The Gathering Storm," 1948 edition (mine is falling apart), page 347: "There was sense for fighting for Czechoslovakia in 1938 when the German Army could scarcely put half a dozen trained divisions on the Western Front, when the French with nearly sixty or seventy divisions could most certainly have rolled across the Rhine or into the Ruhr. But this had been judged unreasonable, rash, below the level of modern intellectual thought and morality. Yet now at last the two Western Democracies declared themselves ready to stake their lives upon the territorial integrity of Poland. History, which we are told is mainly the record of the follies, and miseries of mankind, may be scoured and ransacked to find a parallel to this sudden and complete reversal of five or six yeas of easy-going placatory appeasement, and its transformation almost overnight into a readiness to accept an obviously imminent war on far worse conditions and on the greatest scale." • • • • ! ! ! But this had been judged unreasonable, rash, below the level of modern intellectual thought and morality. ! ! ! • • • •  And here we are going down the the same path, it seems. — Joe Odegaard, Architect and Barbarian.