Maverick Philosopher

The Left's Verbal Theft

A Substack warning to foolish conservatives.

Black Lives Maga!

The South Bronx comes out for the Orange Man. 

The video is about eight minutes long and puts me in mind of the old "Joe and Eddy" tune from the early '60s, There's a Meeting Here Tonight. 

Black support for Trump makes perfect sense. These black citizens understand that an endless influx of illegal aliens will have a disproportionate impact (to put it mildly) on them. After all, where will the illegals be sent? To Martha's Vineyard?  They will be sent and are being sent to black neighborhoods  where they take over the schools, the playgrounds, drain the social services, etc. 

Black citizens, most of whom are law-abiding, understand that the rule of law is good for them, and that the cadre leftists who have infiltrated and now control the Democrat Party have contempt for said rule, despite their mendacious mouthings  to the contrary, mouthings that are belied by their actions.

My use of 'disproportionate impact' above is slightly ironic, as I am sure my astute readers have noticed. The leftist line is that the enforcing of laws is 'racist' because strict enforcement and appropriate punishment has a 'disproportionate impact' on blacks. And of course it does. But that doesn't make it 'racist' on any reasonable definition of the term.  It can't be racist if it is true.

'Disproportionate impact' is exactly what one would expect given the well-established fact that blacks as a group are more criminally prone than other groups.  And this even after adjusting for police brutality, and other forms of police malfeasance.  

We conservatives are not racists or fascists with an 'authoritarian personality structure.' We stand for liberty and (therefore) for limited government. We appreciate that cops are a necessary evil.  I dilate further in  Cops: A Necessary Evil. 

UPDATE (5/21)

Is Trump the first populist Republican? No surprise The Militant sticks  up for him.  Meanwhile, James Carville, junkyard attack dog, barks himself silly. (Looks like the video I was looking for has been removed.)  What could the lovely Mary Matalin see in him?

'Progressive' and 'Conservative'

In their contemporary usages these terms are mainly misnomers.

If progress is change for the good, there is little progressive about contemporary 'progressives.' They are more accurately referred to as regressives. Or do you think that allowing biological males to compete in women's sporting events is a change for the good? It is obviously not, for reasons you will be able to discern without my help.  That is just one example among many.

As for so-called 'conservatives,' what do they ever succeed in conserving? These 'conservatives' are good at conserving only one thing: their own perquisites, privileges, pelf, and position. The things they are supposed to conserve they allow to be destroyed, among them,  the rule of law, our rights and liberties as enumerated in the Constitution, our national heritage as embodied in monuments and statues to great men, the very distinctions, principles, and values that underpin our republican form of government.  They will soon be gone forever,  and the Left will have won, if we the people don't push back pronto. 

But it may be too late for effective resistance, sunk as we Americans are in the warm bath of our own decadence.  We shall see.

Meanwhile, don't get too excited about all this. This world's a vanishing quantity and we with it.  The wise live for something that transcends it, but without dogmatism and doctrinal narrowness.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Lawrence Auster on Bob Dylan

I was surprised, but pleased, to find that the late Lawrence Auster, traditionalist conservative, photo above, 1973, had a deep appreciation and a wide-ranging knowledge of Dylan's art.  Born in 1949, Auster is generationally situated for that appreciation, and as late as '73 was still flying the '60s colors, if we can go by the photo, but age is not even  a necessary condition for digging Dylan, as witness the case of Thomas Merton (1915-1968) who was early on into Dylan and Baez.  Auster's Jewishness may play a minor role, but the main thing is Auster's attunement to Dylan's particularism.  See the quotation below.  Herewith, some Dylan songs with commentary by Auster.

The Band, I Shall Be Released.  Auster comments:

This Dylan song can seem amorphous and mystical in the negative sense, especially as it became a kind of countercultural anthem and meaningless through overuse. But the lyrics are coherent and profound, especially the first verse:

They say everything can be replaced
They say every distance is not near
But I remember every face
Of every man who put me here.

The modern world tells us that everything is fungible, nothing is of real value, everything can and should be replaced—our spouse, our culture, our religion, our history, our sexual nature, our race, everything. It is the view of atomistic liberal man, forever creating himself out of his preferences, not dependent on any larger world of which he is a part. The singer is saying, No, this isn’t true. Things have real and particular values and they cannot be cast off and replaced by other things. And, though we seem to be distant, we are connected. I am connected to all the men, the creators and builders and poets and philosophers, and my own relatives and friends, who have come before me or influenced me, who created the world in which I live.

Most Likely You'll Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine). 

First off, some comments of mine on the video which accompanies the touched-up Blonde on Blonde track.  The video is very cleverly constructed, providing a synopsis of milestones in Dylan's career.  The first girl the guy with the acoustic guitar case is walking with is a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, the girl 'immortalized' on the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album cover.  But now we see the pair from the back instead of from the front.  She is replaced by a second girl representing Joan Baez.  (Dylan's affair with Baez helped destroy his relationship with Rotolo.) Then the guy gets into a car and emerges on the other side with an electric guitar case.  This signifies Dylan's going electric in '65 at the Newport Folk Festival, a change  which enraged the die-hard folkies and doctrinaire leftists who thought they owned Dylan as a mouthpiece for their views.    A quick shot of a newpaper in a trash can with the headline "Dylan Goes Electric" appears just in case you missed the subtlety of the auto entry-exit sequence.  After that we see a downed motorcycle representing Dylan's motorcycle accident, an event that brings to a close  the existentialist-absurdist-surrealist phase of the mid-60s trilogy, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.  After the accident Dylan is further from the mind and closer to the earth.  Dylan the psychedelically deracinated returns to his roots in the Bible and Americana with John Wesley Harding. The girl in the brass bed is an allusion to "Lay Lady Lay" ("lay across my big brass bed") from the Nashville Skyline album.  Dylan then coalesces with the man in black (Johnny Cash), and steps over and through the detritus of what remains the hippy-trippy 60's and into the disco era, his Christian period, marked by the 1979 Slow Train Coming and a couple of subsequent albums, his marriage to a black back-up singer, and on into the later phases of the life of this protean bard on a never-ending tour.

Here is what Auster has to say about the song:

By the way, that’s the first time I’ve seen “judge” rhymed with “grudge” since Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” from Blonde on Blonde. Here’s the recording.

Dylan’s lyric (not for the first time) is pretty appropriate to our situation:

Well the judge
He holds a grudge
He’s gonna call on you.
But he’s badly built
And he walks on stilts
Watch out he don’t fall on you.

There is now on the U.S. Supreme Court an intellectually sub-par Puerto Rican woman whose entire career has been essentially founded on a grudge against whites, a judge who makes her pro-Hispanic, anti-white agenda an explicit element in her judging. “The judge, she holds a grudge.”

Sotomayor is not the first of that kind, however. Another Supreme Court sub-competent, Thurgood Marshall, openly stated to one of his colleagues that the philosophy behind his judging was that “It’s our [blacks’] turn now.”

Spanish Harlem Incident.  (From Another Side of Bob Dylan)  Auster's take:

Thinking about the murder of motivational speaker and “positive, loving energy” guru Jeff Locker in East Harlem this week, where he had been pursuing an assignation with a young lady not his wife but got himself strangled and stabbed to death in his car by the damsel and her two male accomplices instead, I realized that this is yet another contemporary event that Bob Dylan has, in a manner of speaking, got covered. Here is the recording and below are the lyrics of Dylan’s 1964 song, “Spanish Harlem Incident,” where the singer, with his “pale face,” seeks liberating love from an exotic dark skinned woman, and is “surrounded” and “slayed” by her. The song reflects back ironically on the Jeff Locker case, presenting the more poetical side of the desires that, on a much coarser and stupider level, led Locker to his horrible death. By quoting it, I’m not making light of murder, readers know how seriously I take murder. But when a man gets himself killed through such an accumulation of sin and gross folly, a man, moreover, whose New Agey belief in positive energy and transformative love apparently left him unable to see the obvious dangers he had put himself in, there is, unavoidably, a humorous aspect to it.

SPANISH HARLEM INCIDENT

Gypsy gal, the hands of Harlem
Cannot hold you to its heat.
Your temperature is too hot for taming,
Your flaming feet are burning up the street.
I am homeless, come and take me
To the reach of your rattling drums.
Let me know, babe, all about my fortune
Down along my restless palms.

Gypsy gal, you’ve got me swallowed.
I have fallen far beneath
Your pearly eyes, so fast and slashing,
And your flashing diamond teeth.
The night is pitch black, come and make my
Pale face fit into place, oh, please!
Let me know, babe, I’m nearly drowning,
If it’s you my lifelines trace.

I’ve been wonderin’ all about me
Ever since I seen you there.
On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I’m riding,
I know I’m ‘round you but I don’t know where.
You have slayed me, you have made me,
I got to laugh halfways off my heels.
I got to know, babe, ah, when you surround me,
So I can know if I am really real.

 There's more.  There's always more.

The Band, I Shall Be Released.  Auster comments:

This Dylan song can seem amorphous and mystical in the negative sense, especially as it became a kind of countercultural anthem and meaningless through overuse. But the lyrics are coherent and profound, especially the first verse:

They say everything can be replaced
They say every distance is not near
But I remember every face
Of every man who put me here.

The modern world tells us that everything is fungible, nothing is of real value, everything can and should be replaced—our spouse, our culture, our religion, our history, our sexual nature, our race, everything. It is the view of atomistic liberal man, forever creating himself out of his preferences, not dependent on any larger world of which he is a part. The singer is saying, No, this isn’t true. Things have real and particular values and they cannot be cast off and replaced by other things. And, though we seem to be distant, we are connected. I am connected to all the men, the creators and builders and poets and philosophers, and my own relatives and friends, who have come before me or influenced me, who created the world in which I live.

Most Likely You'll Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine). 

First off, some comments of mine on the video which accompanies the touched-up Blonde on Blonde track.  The video is very cleverly constructed, providing a synopsis of milestones in Dylan's career.  The first girl the guy with the acoustic guitar case is walking with is a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, the girl 'immortalized' on the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album cover.  But now we see the pair from the back instead of from the front.  She is replaced by a second girl representing Joan Baez.  (Dylan's affair with Baez helped destroy his relationship with Rotolo.) Then the guy gets into a car and emerges on the other side with an electric guitar case.  This signifies Dylan's going electric in '65 at the Newport Folk Festival, a change  which enraged the die-hard folkies and doctrinaire leftists who thought they owned Dylan as a mouthpiece for their views.    A quick shot of a newpaper in a trash can with the headline "Dylan Goes Electric" appears just in case you missed the subtlety of the auto entry-exit sequence.  After that we see a downed motorcycle representing Dylan's motorcycle accident, an event that brings to a close  the existentialist-absurdist-surrealist phase of the mid-60s trilogy, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.  After the accident Dylan is further from the mind and closer to the earth.  Dylan the psychedelically deracinated returns to his roots in the Bible and Americana with John Wesley Harding. The girl in the brass bed is an allusion to "Lay Lady Lay" ("lay across my big brass bed") from the Nashville Skyline album.  Dylan then coalesces with the man in black (Johnny Cash), and steps over and through the detritus of what remains the hippy-trippy 60's and into the disco era, his Christian period, marked by the 1979 Slow Train Coming and a couple of subsequent albums, his marriage to a black back-up singer, and on into the later phases of the life of this protean bard on a never-ending tour.

Here is what Auster has to say about the song:

By the way, that’s the first time I’ve seen “judge” rhymed with “grudge” since Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” from Blonde on Blonde. Here’s the recording.

Dylan’s lyric (not for the first time) is pretty appropriate to our situation:

Well the judge
He holds a grudge
He’s gonna call on you.
But he’s badly built
And he walks on stilts
Watch out he don’t fall on you.

There is now on the U.S. Supreme Court an intellectually sub-par Puerto Rican woman whose entire career has been essentially founded on a grudge against whites, a judge who makes her pro-Hispanic, anti-white agenda an explicit element in her judging. “The judge, she holds a grudge.”

Sotomayor is not the first of that kind, however. Another Supreme Court sub-competent, Thurgood Marshall, openly stated to one of his colleagues that the philosophy behind his judging was that “It’s our [blacks’] turn now.”

Spanish Harlem Incident.  (From Another Side of Bob Dylan)  Auster's take:

Thinking about the murder of motivational speaker and “positive, loving energy” guru Jeff Locker in East Harlem this week, where he had been pursuing an assignation with a young lady not his wife but got himself strangled and stabbed to death in his car by the damsel and her two male accomplices instead, I realized that this is yet another contemporary event that Bob Dylan has, in a manner of speaking, got covered. Here is the recording and below are the lyrics of Dylan’s 1964 song, “Spanish Harlem Incident,” where the singer, with his “pale face,” seeks liberating love from an exotic dark skinned woman, and is “surrounded” and “slayed” by her. The song reflects back ironically on the Jeff Locker case, presenting the more poetical side of the desires that, on a much coarser and stupider level, led Locker to his horrible death. By quoting it, I’m not making light of murder, readers know how seriously I take murder. But when a man gets himself killed through such an accumulation of sin and gross folly, a man, moreover, whose New Agey belief in positive energy and transformative love apparently left him unable to see the obvious dangers he had put himself in, there is, unavoidably, a humorous aspect to it.

SPANISH HARLEM INCIDENT

Gypsy gal, the hands of Harlem
Cannot hold you to its heat.
Your temperature is too hot for taming,
Your flaming feet are burning up the street.
I am homeless, come and take me
To the reach of your rattling drums.
Let me know, babe, all about my fortune
Down along my restless palms.

Gypsy gal, you’ve got me swallowed.
I have fallen far beneath
Your pearly eyes, so fast and slashing,
And your flashing diamond teeth.
The night is pitch black, come and make my
Pale face fit into place, oh, please!
Let me know, babe, I’m nearly drowning,
If it’s you my lifelines trace.

I’ve been wonderin’ all about me
Ever since I seen you there.
On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I’m riding,
I know I’m ‘round you but I don’t know where.
You have slayed me, you have made me,
I got to laugh halfways off my heels.
I got to know, babe, ah, when you surround me,
So I can know if I am really real.

 There's more.  There's always more.

Beware of Projecting . . .

. . . your attitudes and values into others.

Leader of the Stack. Excerpts:

We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally.  

It is dangerous to assume that others are like we are.  (I am thinking right now of a very loving and lovable female neighbor  who makes that dangerous assumption: she has a 'Coexist' sticker affixed to her bumper.)

Liberal 'projectionism' — to give it a name— can get your irenic self killed.

 

[. . .]

 

There can be no peaceful coexistence in one and the same geographical area over the long term except under classical liberalism.  For classical liberalism alone is tolerant of deep differences and is alone respectful of our equally deep ignorance of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.  Why must we be tolerant? Because we do not know. The classical liberal  is keenly aware of the evil in the human heart and of the necessity of limited government and dispersed power. So he is justified in making war against fanaticism, one-sidedness, and totalitarian systems of government whether theocratic or 'leftocratic.'  It would not be a war of extermination but one of limitation. It would also be limited to one's geographical area and not promoted abroad to impose the values of classical liberalism on the benighted tribalists of the Middle East and elsewhere.

Finally, can American conservatism and the ideology of the Democrat Party in its contemporary incarnation peacefully coexist? Obviously not, which is why there is a battle for the soul of America. Either we defeat the totalitarian Left or we face a nasty trilemmatic trident: acquiesce and convert; or accept dhimmitude; or be cancelled in one’s livelihood and then eventually in one's life.

Lifestyle Rightism

Sohrab Ahmari is against it. Clean living and self-improvement are no substitute for political action. One form of Lifestyle Rightism is Rod Dreher's Benedict Option which Ahmari dubs "the New Frontierism" and criticizes for its ahistoricity.

Ahmari's article rehearses  one aspect of the old problem of activism versus quietism. Can one productively blend the two? I am pulled in both directions. I expose my inner conflict over at Substack.  

And that brings me to the topic of inner conflict. One of the reasons I am so fascinated by Tom Merton is because he was one conflicted hombre caught between contemptus mundi and love of the world and its blandishments. He couldn't keep quiet about The Silent Life (the title of one of his better books) and was quite obviously driven by a desire for literary fame. The guy is lovable because so human unlike, perhaps, the man referred to in The Sacred Monster of Thomism, which details the life and legacy of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, that most paleo of the neo-Thomists. (Richard Peddicord, O. P., St. Augustine's Press, 2005) But when it comes to intellectual penetration, Garrigou-Lagrange far surpasses the loose, literary, and liberal Merton. I read both, respect both, and am grateful for both.

Is Political Catholicism the Only Genuinely Political American Intellectual Movement?

In Liberalism's Good and Faithful Servants, Adrian Vermeule spends eight long paragraphs out of ten explaining why "What passes for the American intellectual right is a sorry thing." He's a clever writer and his catalog of the varieties of epicene political quietism is of some interest. Only in the last two paragraphs, however, does he get to the point and tell us what he is for. Would that he had announced that at the outset, to save our time and patience. The heart of the article is in the ninth paragraph:

The only intellectual movement on the American scene that is genuinely political is so-called integralism or, as I think a more accurate term, political Catholicism. This political Catholicism is frequently accused by critics of a will to power (or, more pompously, a libido dominandi). In a certain sense, the accusation is true. Indeed, it is far more true than the critics, whose horizons are truncated by the basic compromise with liberalism, can begin to understand. The political Catholic looks at the series of false alternatives offered by the localists, the free-marketers, the cheerleaders of martyrdom—national or local action? state or market? Rome or the catacombs? —and says, “Yes, both/and; I will take them all.” The political Catholic wants to order the nation and its state to the natural and divine law, the tranquility of order, precisely because doing so is the best way to protect and shelter the localities in which genuinely human community, imbued with grace, can flourish. Conversely, those localities are to be protected as the best way to generate well-formed persons, who can rightly order the nation and the world towards truth, beauty, and goodness, rooted in the divine. Not everyone must engage in politics in the everyday sense, but some should make a vocation of political action in the highest sense. The political Catholic thinks that not even the smallest particle of creation is off-limits to grace, which can perfect and elevate any part of nature, even the state and even the market.

Well, why not be an integralist?  My answer is over at Substack. 

Related: Does Classical Liberalism Destroy Itself?

Does Classical Liberalism Destroy Itself?

Joe Odegaard sends us to The Orthosphere where we find Classical Liberalism Destroys Itself. The opening paragraph is stylistically brilliant, especially the concluding sentence, and I agree with the paragraph content-wise, though not with the quotation from Dreher:

“Classical liberalism detached from the Christian faith is what got us here.” 

Rod Dreher, “David French: Not Woke Enough For The Times?”  The American Conservative (Feb. 16, 2023)

The above is from a long thumb-sucker in which Dreher sadly ponders the performative conservatism of David French.  Performative conservatism means striking conservative poses rather than striking blows that actually conserve.  Performative conservatives have plenty of principles but precious few wins.  Dreher is himself what Sam Francis called a “beautiful loser,” which is to say a conservative pundit who is admired for his prose, his erudition, his broadmindedness, and his many, many friends on the left, but who is not and cannot be admired for success.  French and Dreher are the spiritual sons of George Will, a belletristic bimbo and court clown who went down fighting by the Queensbury Rules.

As I said, brilliant writing and a delightful skewering of that yap-and-scribble lap dog of the Left, George Will, of the Beltway bow-tie brigade. There is only one mistake: the rules are Queensberry, not Queensbury. My pedantry having now been satisfied, I proceed to the substantive issues.  My disagreement begins with the second paragraph:

Classical liberalism is detached from Christian faith because classical liberalism detached Christian faith from public life. It did this intentionally and by design. Does Dreher really not understand that the first task of classical liberalism was to liberate men and women from classical Christianity. Some emancipated Christians went straight to atheism while others chose a couple of generations of decompression in the halfway house of liberal Christianity. Many worked as thoughtful Christian conservative columnists who believe that the United States was not really a Christian country until passage of the Fourteenth, perhaps Nineteenth, amendment.

The bias of the author surfaces with "the first task of classical liberalism was to liberate men and women from classical Christianity." Not so. The task was to separate church and state, not to "liberate" men and women from "classical" Christianity. What does "liberate" mean here? And what is "classical" Christianity? Roman Catholicism? Some form of Protestantism? The author is attributing nefarious motives to the Founders who were classical liberals and men of the Enlightenment.  A government that is neutral on such theological questions as the divinity of Jesus Christ and the tri-unity of God and that allows for freedom of religion and the freedom to practice no religion is not inimical to Christianity but tolerant of different forms of Christianity as well as tolerant of other religions and of those who practice no religion. 

There may be some truth in Dreher’s proposition that classical liberalism only works so long as the United States contains a great many Christians. But that is just additional evidence that classical liberalism destroys itself. It is a simple and obvious historical fact that Christians fare no better under classical liberalism than they fared under the Roman Emperor Nero. The disappearance of Christians under the former is not so swift and sanguinary as under the latter, but it is equally certain.

The "obvious fact" is neither obvious nor a fact. Would the author prefer to be a practicing Christian under Nero or under Biden? Christians obviously fare better now under Biden and those who pull the puppet's strings than they did under Nero.  And the talk of "equal certainty" is a wild exaggeration. Undoubtedly, Christianity is presently under assault. That is an obvious fact.  But there is no necessity that Christianity succumb. There is no inevitability at work here.

More importantly, there is nothing in the nature of classical liberalism that necessitates that Christians be forced into latter-day catacombs.  After all, the touchstone of classical liberalism is toleration. Toleration is part of the very essence of classical liberalism. That toleration extends to Jews, Christians, and even Muslims if the latter renounce Sharia (Islamic law), which is incompatible with the principles and values of classical liberalism. Toleration has limits.  Perhaps the thought of people like the author is that if you tolerate many different views, then you must tolerate all, including the view that Christianity must be destroyed. But the inference from Many to All is a non sequitur. Logically viewed, all slippery slope arguments are invalid.   If we tolerate the consumption of alcoholic beverages, must we also tolerate drunk driving? Obviously not.  To tolerate drinking is not to tolerate drunkenness, let alone drunk driving. To tolerate drinking by adults is not to tolerate drinking by children. To tolerate private inebriation is not to tolerate public inebriation. And so on.  A government that tolerates sodomy in private between consenting adults can also tolerate the existence of private schools in which it is taught that sodomy is a mortal sin.  Why not?

Besides the Many to All fallacy, there is also the fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this.) From the fact that classically liberal government has been followed temporally by the decadence and insanity all around us (wide open national borders, celebration of worthless individuals, destruction of monuments to great men, the institutionally-mandated DEI agenda, et cetera ad nauseam) it does not follow logically that the first is the cause of the second.

Dreher admits as much when he writes

“I cannot imagine a form of government and a social compact that most of us can consent to, that upholds classical liberal standards without a broadly shared religion..”

Nor can I.  I cannot imagine that form of government and social compact because classical liberal standards necessarily destroy a broadly shared religion.  Classical liberalism destroys a broadly shared religion because it removes all civil disabilities from apostates and infidels.  The natural result is that there are more of both and the broadly shared religion disappears.

I disagree with Dreher. We don't need a broadly shared religion; what we need is a minimal conception of the common good to which most of us can consent, whether we are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, etc.  Of course, the commonality of a broadly shared religion freely subscribed to by its adherents would greatly enhance comity.  Imagine the social harmony and social cohesion we would all enjoy if each of us, sincerely, and without coercion, subscribed to and lived by the Baltimore Catechism!  But that is hopelessly utopian. Our Protestant brethren would surely raise a stink to high heaven.

I even more strongly disagree with the author. We are being told that classical liberalism "necessarily destroys a broadly shared religion because it removes all civil disabilities [liabilities?] from apostates and infidels." First of all, where does this necessity come from? There is no necessity or inevitability at work here.  That's the slippery-slope trope once more. And again, to tolerate broadly shared religions is not to destroy them.  And what exactly is the author proposing? A politically totalitarian theocracy? What  then  would he do with the "apostates" and "infidels"?   What penalties would he exact? Would he support a throne-and-altar form of 'woke cancellation'? 

To mask the disappearance of the broadly shared religion, our court clowns and progressive propagandists have invented preposterous pseudo-religions like Judeo-Christianity, or now “People of Faith.”  What this shows is that our broadly shared religion is that there shall be no broadly shared religion—classical liberalism, in short.

I agree that there is no such specific religion as Judeo-Christianity, but by that reasoning there is no such specific religion as Christianity either given the manifold sects and doctrinal divergences. My friend Dale Tuggy, noted philosopher of religion, is a unitarian, a denier of the divinity of Christ, and someone who thinks (gasp!) that Platonism has nothing to contribute to Christianity. And he has said bad things about Trump in my presence. But he is probably a better Christian than me in some ways.

And surely it is a slovenly misuse of 'religion' to refer to classical liberalism as a religion. Call it an ersatz religion if you like, but note that an ersatz X is precisely not an X. A salt substitute such as potassium chloride is not table salt (sodium chloride).

The irony is that Dreher knows this and says as much when he writes about Christianity and not politics.  Christianity cannot survive as a broadly shared religion if it does not possess a political community in which apostasy comes at a price, and from which infidels are rigorously excluded.  Classical liberalism forbids both of these necessary measures, and this is why Christianity and classical liberalism both are doomed.

This is doubly mistaken. Christianity can easily survive as a broadly shared religion under a limited, constitutionally-based government whose provisions secure, inter alia, religious liberty. No politically totalitarian theocracy is need to assure Christianity's survival.  Toleration and limited government suffice. Of course, we have neither now. So what we have to do is get back to American conservatism which includes a sizable admixture of classical liberalism. I understand what animates those on the Reactionary Right, just as I understand what inspires those on the Alternative Right who, unlike the Orthospherians, think that Christianity is the problem, it having weakened us and made us unfit for living in this world, the only one (they think) there is. But both of these right turns lead to dead ends. There will be no return to throne-and-altar conservatism.  

Finally, neither Christianity nor classical liberalism are doomed. Again the inevitability 'argument' which is akin to the slippery-slope trope, and the fallacies of Many to All, and post hoc ergo propter hoc.   That being said, things in the near-term look bad indeed, and I am none too sanguine about turning things around and returning to America as she was founded to be.

Every Generation Faces a Barbarian Threat in its Own Children

Top o' the Stack.

Related: Our Little Barbarians. Excerpts:

Recently, an establishment called Nettie's House of Spaghetti in New Jersey announced they will no longer allow children under 10 to dine at their restaurant.

The move caused controversy, with some respondents applauding the policy and others accusing Nettie’s staff of being “child haters.” But the top commenter at MSN.com summed the issue up succinctly:

“We don't hate your kids,” she wrote. “We hate your parenting.”

[. . .]

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin observed. “As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Failing to recognize this truth is deadly. President Ronald Reagan once warned that “[f]reedom is never more than one generation away from extinction”; focusing on freedom, however, as so many today do exclusively, is to put the cart before the horse. For Reagan’s statement is only true insofar as virtue is never more than one generation away from extinction.

[. . .]

Ancient Greek philosopher Plato spoke about this when saying that a child should ideally be raised in an atmosphere of nobility and grace (i.e., our modern culture’s antithesis) so that he can develop an “erotic” — as in emotional, not sexual — attachment to virtue. Once accomplished, he’ll be more likely to accept the dictates of reason upon reaching the age of reason.

Would it kill the writer to insert a parenthetical reference to the passage in Plato where the philosopher makes the claim attributed to him?  More importantly, 'erotic' in a Platonic context, while it does not mean sexual, is not well glossed as 'emotional.' 'Aspirational' would be much better. Eros is the love of the lower for the higher, the love by one who lacks for that which he lacks. Socrates' love of wisdom is erotic or rather 'erothetic': God's love of Socrates is agape, the love of the higher for the lower, a love predicated on fullness.  The love of friends who are equals is philia.  Each of these three different forms of love is different from sexual love, if you want to call sex love.

[. . .]

So take heed, because the brats running around in restaurants today will be running, and ruining, the country tomorrow — and those who’ve not mastered themselves will be mastered by tyrants.

The truth of the first independent clause is exemplified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That this narcissistic tweeting twit, this know-nothing, this overgrown teenage girl can be elected (twice) to  the Congress of the greatest nation that has ever existed presages the soon-to-occur fall of said nation.  I predict that it will occur before the Earth is rendered uninhabitable by 'climate change' including the "boiling oceans" Al Gore warned us about recently at Davos, Switzerland, a country with enforced borders.

"But she was elected by the people!" True, assuming no electoral 'irregularities' (to put it euphemistically); but a democracy in which the people lack the virtue to vote wisely is no better than a monarchy  and in many cases far worse. 

Here you will find the latest moronic outburst by the tweeting twit.

Scruton on Foucault

Although linkage does not entail endorsement, I do endorse the following from Powerline:

Roger Scruton’s charming and invaluable memoir, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, includes a chapter explaining how he first started turning in a conservative direction (he wasn’t raised one—his father was a devoted semi-socialist Labourite), when he witnessed first-hand the student revolt in Paris in May 1968. He was repelled by the spectacle, and concluded that ‘whatever these people are for, I’m against.’

But what were the student protestors for? He recounts arguing with a radical acquaintance on the scene over the question:

What, I asked, do you propose to put in place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom your owe your freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? . . .

She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses [The Order of Things], the bible of the soixante-huitards [“sixty-eighters,” as the May protestors are still known], the text that seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the epistime, imposed by the class that profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. [Emphasis added.]

No Alternative to (Classical) Liberalism

I wrote yesterday, "There can be no peaceful coexistence in one and the same geographical area over the long term except under classical liberalism." But what is classical liberalism?  Here I found an adequate characterization:

Fukuyama follows John Gray in defining liberalism in terms of four broad characteristics. It is individualist in asserting the moral primacy of the person over the collective, egalitarian in affording the same legal and political status to all citizens, universalist in viewing all human beings as possessing the same moral dignity, and meliorist in affirming the improvability of all social and political arrangements.

Fukuyama rehearses solid reasons for preferring liberalism to other forms of political association. Liberalism offers a more or less peaceful way of managing diversity in pluralist societies. It protects human dignity and autonomy through the rule of law. And it facilitates economic growth by protecting private property rights and the freedom to buy and sell.

This comports well with what I have been saying over the years.

Individualism. The individual is the locus of value, not the collective, certainly not the state, but also not the tribe or the family, whether extended or nuclear. Families are very important, far more important than leftists could ever understand; but they contribute to human flourishing only to the extent that they nurture strong, resolute, independent, individuals.  Individualism fits well with my anti-tribalism. Tribal self-identification is mis-identification.  You are not in your innermost essence a token of a type or a member of group but a potential individual charged with the task of self-individuation, the task of becoming a unique individual and thus something much more than an interchangeable token of a type or member of a group.  God is the supreme Individual; you are to become God-like. You could subscribe to what I just wrote even if you think God is but a regulative Ideal and not a reality. Self-individuation is a project and a task, not a given; to the extent that tribal and familial identifications impede this project they should be opposed. 

Individual persons are morally distinct: I am responsible for what I do and leave undone, and you for what you do and leave undone. People should be judged as individuals and on their merits.

Egalitarianism. People are manifestly not equal, either as individuals or as groups, except formally, that is, as rights-possessors. The classical liberal stands for equal legal and political rights for all citizens.  

Universalism. There are natural rights and they are the basis of civil rights. They are not conferred by governments. Well-crafted constitutions codify these rights. Legitimate governments enforce their protection.  Among natural rights are rights to life, liberty, and property.

Meliorism. The perfectibility of man is a dangerous leftist illusion that has led to the spillage of oceans of blood in the 2oth century. Classical liberalism is not leftism, and despite what many opine, classical liberalism is not inevitably on the slouch toward hard leftism. Human beings are deeply flawed, so much so that they cannot perfect themselves by any individual or collective effort. Whether or not there is 'pie in the sky,' there is certainly no 'pie in the future' achievable by human effort. The eschaton will not and cannot be immanentized, to adapt a formulation of Eric Voegelin which I take to mean that we cannot achieve, within history, and by purely human means, the summum bonum that religious types envisage as our ultimate end. 

All that being said and well understood, we can nevertheless make piecemeal improvements in the human lot. Things don't have to be as horrendously bad as they currently are.  There is better and worse in human affairs and with effort and commitment we can better some things somewhat.  The meliorist does not allow the unachievable best to become the enemy of the achievable better. His is not an all or nothing attitude.  He is neither a revolutionary nor a reactionary. 

Is There a Problem with Conservative Nationalism?

I have advocated an American conservatism that includes what I call enlightened nationalism.  

But this morning's mail brought notice of an article that decouples conservatism from nationalism. Brion McClanahan writes:

What is “American conservatism”?

[. . .]

But I know one thing that American conservatism is not: nationalism.

That hasn’t stopped modern American “conservatives” for hopping on that train.

Trump bought a ticket and rode it to success in 2016.

[. . .]

In fact, most American “conservatives” have long identified with decentralization, not nationalism.

For example, John C. Calhoun described himself as a “conservative,” and because he was a “conservative” he was a “State’s rights man.”

Translation: that means he wasn’t an American “nationalist.” He was a “Unionist” but never a “nationalist” because Calhoun understood that an American “nation” by a traditional definition never existed.

Here, as elsewhere, much depends on the definition of terms. McClanahan does not inform us as to the "traditional definition" of nationalism.  I am all for decentralization, limited government, states' rights, and the Tenth Amendment. Why should anyone think that these are incompatible with enlightened nationalism as I defined it (link above) in broad agreement with Trump's America Firstism?

John Pepple's Last Post and a Look Back

I stopped by John Pepple's place this evening and found not his latest, but his last, post. A twinge of nostalgia tinged with sadness ensued. We bloggers form a loose fellowship and when one of us moves on, whether by quitting the blogosphere, or, more drastically, by quitting the sublunary, certain emotions arise.  So long, John, it's been good to know you.  What follows is my first mention of his weblog, dated 13 July 2010:

JOHN PEPPLE WANTS A NEW LEFT

During our lazy float down the Rio Salado today, Mike Valle and I had a lot to talk about. He mentioned a new blog he had come across entitled I Want a New Left. The author, John Pepple, aims to develop a self-critical leftism.  Now, having read quickly through most of his posts, I am a bit puzzled by the same thing that puzzles Mike:  why does Pepple hang on to the 'leftism' label?

But labels aren't that important.  What is important are the issues and one's stances on them. On that score, conservatives like me and Mike share common ground with Pepple.  In his biographical statement he says that in college he majored in mathematics and took a lot of physics courses. "But this was during the late 60s and early 70s, when much questioning was occurring, and I ended up as a grad student in philosophy."  Sounds very familiar!  The 'sixties were a heady time, a time of ferment, during which indeed "much questioning was occurring."  I started out in Electrical Engineering at the same time but also "ended up as a grad student in philosophy."  I did, however, have a bit more luck career-wise and didn't experience the same difficulties getting into print.

Why did so many of us '60s types end up in philosophy?  Because we were lost in a strange land, traditional understandings and forms of world-orientation having left us without guidance, and we needed to ascend to a vantage point to reconnoiter the terrain, the vantage point that philosophy alone provides.

Political change, a species of the genus doxastic change, is a fascinating topic.  I recently stumbled upon an effort by a distaff blogger who documents her transition from a comfortable enclave of mutually reinforcing Democrats to the more open world of contemporary conservatism, and the hostility with which her turncoat behavior was rewarded.  She calls her blog Neo-Neocon.

The Epoch Times

A good source for those on our side. Here is a recent article.

Politics and Meaning: More on the Conservative Disadvantage

Here again is my Substack entry "The Conservative Disadvantage."  In it I wrote, "We don't look to politics for meaning. Or rather, we do not seek any transcendent meaning in the political sphere." Thomas Beale charitably comments (edited):

Just a short note on that post: your observation about meaning is  one of the most penetrating I have read for a long while -- it's one of those truths hiding in such plain sight that no one sees it. This phenomenon of the true conservative "not looking to politics for meaning" is deeper than the usual formulations according to which Marxist and other utopian ideologies are replacements for the old religions. This is because the whole question of where 'meaning' (and therefore worth) in life is found is the most fundamental question of the human condition. It's a Scruton-esque observation as well -- perhaps he even said something like this, although I don't remember it as pithily expressed as your version - - but he certainly thought that meaning for real people was in their daily lives well lived within clubs, theatres, the garden, nature.

In fact, re-reading your text, it's almost a shortest-possible definition of what it means to be (small-c) conservative by describing its negation. I particularly like the line 'A conservative could never write a book with the title, The Politics of Meaning.' 

Your characterisation of the conservative atheist I think is very nice as well.

My thanks to Thomas Beale for these kind comments.  Here are some additional remarks about meaning and the political to clarify and fill out what I wrote and perhaps ignite some discussion.

1) There is a distinction between 'existential' and  semantic meaning. Our concern here is solely with the first. There is also a distinction within existential or life meaning between ultimate and proximate meaning. When we ask philosophically about the meaning of  life we are asking about the ultimate and objective point, purpose, end, or goal of human willing and striving, if there is one.  We are asking whether there is an ultimate and objective purpose, and what it is.  Both of these questions admit of reasonable controversy. Some say that human life has no objective purpose. Any purpose it has must be subjective. Others say that it does have an objective purpose, but then disagree bitterly as to what it is. But that there are proximate and relative meanings in human lives is uncontroversial.  For one person, writing poetry is highly meaningful, for another a silly and meaningless waste of time.  

2) When I say that the conservative does not look to politics for meaning, I am referring to ultimate meaning: he does not look to politics for ultimate meaning.  One could be a conservative in my sense and find political activity proximately meaningful.  One could not be a conservative in my sense and find political activity ultimately meaningful.  For the conservative understands something that the leftist does not. He understands that  political activity cannot be our ultimate purpose because the political is not of ultimate value. This raises the question of the relation of the teleological to the axiological. The meaning-of-life question has both a teleological and an axiological side.

3) Teleological and Axiological Aspects of Existential Meaning

Teleology. Meaning bears a teleological aspect in that a meaningful life is a purpose-driven life.  It is difficult to see how a human life devoid of purposes could be meaningful, either proximately or ultimately, and indeed purposes organized by a central purpose such as advancing knowledge or alleviating suffering.  The central purpose must be one the agent freely and self-transparently chooses for himself. It cannot be one that is assigned ab extra. The central purpose must be both nontrivial and achievable.  A life devoted to the collecting of beer cans is purpose-driven but meaningless on the score of triviality while a life in quest of a perpetuum mobile is purpose-driven but meaningless on the score of futility.  But even if a life has a focal purpose that is freely and consciously chosen by the agent of the life, nontrivial, and achievable, this still does not suffice for ultimate meaningfulness.

Axiology. A meaningful life also bears an axiological aspect in that a meaningful life is one that embodies some if not a preponderance of positive non-instrumental value at least for the agent of the life.  A life wholly devoid of personal satisfaction cannot be called meaningful.  But even this is not enough.  The lives of some terrorists and mass murderers are driven by non-trivial and non-futile purposes and are satisfying to their agents.  We ought, however, to resist the notion that such lives are ultimately meaningful. A necessary condition of a life’s being ultimately meaningful is that it realize some if not a preponderance of positive non-instrumental objective value.  If so, a radically immoral life cannot be a meaningful life. Or so say I.

This might be reasonably questioned. According to David Benatar, "A meaningful life is one that transcends one's own limits and significantly impacts others or serves purposes beyond oneself." (The Human Predicament, Oxford UP, 2017, p. 18) By this definition, the lives of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot were meaningful, as Benatar grants. (19) Well, can a radically immoral life be a meaningful life? I say No; Benatar leaves the question open:

One response is to acknowledge that wicked lives can be meaningful, but then say that we should seek only positive meaning. Another option is to say that a life is not meaningful unless its purposes or ways of transcending limits are positive, worthy, or valuable. (19)

I pack quite a lot into the concept of an ultimately meaningful human life.  Such a life is one that is purpose-driven by a central purpose that organizes and unifies various peripheral purposes; a purpose that is freely  chosen by the liver of the life as opposed to imposed from without by the State, for example; a purpose that is neither trivial nor futile, and thus achievable; a purpose that is objectively morally permissible, and beyond that, objectively the best and highest life that a human is capable of; finally, a purpose that is redemptive.  But there is no space now to expand upon this last clause.  

4) But must a conservative seek an ultimate objective meaning or purpose? No, because he might not believe that one exists.  He would not be irrational in so thinking.  David Benatar serves as a a good, perhaps the best, example.

5) I have just set the bar very high, impossibly high some will say.  As I see it, one can count oneself a conservative while rejecting the conception of an ultimately meaningful life as I have defined it. 

What one cannot do as a conservative is seek ultimate meaning in the quotidian round, in "daily lives well lived within clubs, theatres, the garden, nature" to quote Beale glossing Scruton.  There is no ultimate meaning to be found there, but then again there might not be an ultimate meaning. One would then have to take whatever meaning one could get from mundane pursuits and makes friends with finitude.

Another thing a conservative qua conservative cannot do is look for meaning where the leftist looks for it.

6) A  fundamental error of the leftist is to seek ultimate meaning where it cannot be found, namely, in the political sphere, in sociopolitical activism, in the wrong-headed and dangerously quixotic attempt to straighten "the crooked timber of humanity" (Kant) by collective human action, to bring forth the "worker's paradise," to eliminate class distinctions, to end 'racism,' and 'sexism' and 'homophobia,'  'transphobia,' and other invented bogeypersons, to end alienation and the natural hierarchy of life and spirit in all its forms, and to transform the world in such a way that all meta-physical and religious yearnings for Transcendence are finally squelched and eradicated,  and to do so no matter how many 'eggs' have to be broken to achieve  the unachievable 'omelet.'

The leftist rightly sneers at mere bourgeois self-indulgence, material acquisition for its own sake, status-seeking, pleasure-seeking however refined, the 'lifestyles of the rich and famous,' etc. We conservatives who seek the true Transcendence can agree with leftists about that. But we reject their destructively cockamamie schemes and say to them: better the bourgeois life, or even the life of Nietzsche's Last Man, than your mad pursuit of the unattainable.

7) As for The Politics of Meaning, that is an actual title of a book by a pal of Hillary Clinton, Michael Lerner. It came out in 1996.  I wasn't referring to it specifically but mocking the notion that existential meaning worth attaining could be attained by political means.

Establishment Conservatives

ESTABLISHMENT CONSERVATIVES are singularly ill-equipped for fighting. Hobbled by their virtues, they cannot bring themselves to give as good as they get. Politics is war, but establishment conservatives don't want to believe it. Donald Trump tried to teach them, but they proved unteachable. Instead of getting with the program, they wasted time and energy undermining the one person capable of halting the leftist juggernaut.

These 'conservatives' are good at one thing only: conserving their own perquisites, privileges, pelf, and position. Everything they are supposed to conserve they allow to be destroyed, among them,  the rule of law, our rights and liberties as enumerated in the Constitution, our national heritage, the very distinctions, principles, and values that underpin our republican form of government.  They will soon be gone forever,  and the Left will have won, if we don't push back pronto. But it may be too late for effective resistance, sunk as we are in the warm bath of our own decadence.  We shall see.

We Must Work with Atheists to Defeat the Left

America is is where the West will make its last stand, or else begin to turn the tide. The rest of the Anglosphere appears lost. It is falling asleep under the soporific of 'wokeism,' the latest and most virulent form of the leftist virus. To assure victory we theists need to work with atheist conservatives. I agree with the following characterization of conservatism, apparently written by Jillian Becker, at The Atheist Conservative:

B.   On Conservatism

1. Individual freedom is the necessary condition for prosperity, innovation, and adaptation, which together ensure survival.

2.  A culture constituted for individual freedom is superior to all others.

3. Only the Conservative policies of the post-Enlightenment Western world are formulated to protect individual freedom.

4. Individual freedom under the rule of non-discriminatory law, a free market economy, the limiting of government power by democratic controls and constitutional checks and balances, and strong national defense are core Conservative policies.

A conservatism along these lines navigates a sane middle path between leftism and reactionary, throne-and-altar conservatism.  

I am a theist. But as I have repeatedly maintained over the years, atheism is a reasonable position. The reasonable is not the same as the  true. The reasonable is sometimes false, and the true is sometimes unreasonable. To ascertain the truth is not easy. Reason is a weak reed indeed. And despite my use of 'ascertain,' if we attain the truth we are rarely if ever certain that we have when the truths pertain to substantive matters. Humility is not just a moral virtue; it is an epistemic one as well. 

Nowadays there is talk of a 'postliberal' conservatism. We shall have to take a look at that. I suspect that it is a form of reaction insusceptible of resurrection, as a matter of fact, and even if patient of resuscitation, not worthy of it. It is a Lazarus that won't be raised and ought not be.

I have heard it said that a conservatism infused with classical liberalism is 'unstable' and will inevitably transmogrify into the madness of 'wokeism.' But that is a slippery slope argument, and they are all of them invalid.

Krauthammer's Fundamental Law Repealed

"To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil." (Charles Krauthammer)

 

Cute and clever, the oft-quoted saying is a nice piece of journalese, but not quite right, although it gets at part of the truth. Krauthammer's 'law' conversationally implies that conservatives do not think that contemporary liberals or leftists are evil. But surely many of us do. Leftists routinely slander us with such epithets as: sexist, racist, white supremacist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, and others. This is morally vicious behavior and to that extent evil.

 

It is important to face the fact  that many if not most so-called liberals are not good people. You are not a good person, for example, if you routinely dismiss legitimate concerns for the rule of law in the matter of immigration by accusing conservatives of having an irrational fear of foreigners. That is a bare-faced lie and a vicious refusal to take conservatives seriously as rational beings and address their numerous and powerful arguments.

 

A second problem with Krauthammer's 'law' is that intelligent conservatives do not think of most liberals as stupid but as having the wrong values, or, when they have some of the right values, not prioritizing them correctly. Generally speaking, political differences reflect differences in values and principles and presuppositions, not differences in intelligence or 'information.'

 

And that is why the phrase 'low information voter' is asinine. Beloved by 'liberals' it suggests that if the deplorables had more 'information' they would vote Left. That is a conceit risible in excelsis. 

The Left's Ingratitude

How ungrateful, and how wrong, to sneer at the very conditions of one's own existence, activity, and well-being! Nature and society, church and state, language and institutions, culture and mores, everything that one finds and was given, that one did not make, cannot make, and can improve only to a limited extent, and only with difficulty, and only with the tools that were handed down, but can easily destroy out of thoughtlessness, ingratitude, and perversity of will.

Robert Lewis Dabney on Conservatism

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent: Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. . . . Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now serves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

1897

Source: https://mildcolonialboy.wordpress.com/category/robert-lewis-dabney/

Vito Caiati on David Brooks

I solicited Dr Caiati's comments on David Brooks' Atlantic piece, What Happened to American Conservatism?  The lede reads: "The rich philosophical tradition I fell in love with has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression." That is a good tip-off to the quality of the article. Here is what Vito said, and I agree:

I am not the right person to write a response, since I have nothing but contempt for Brooks, whom I regard as a miserable opportunist at the service of the Left. (He is precisely the sort of creature that makes an ad hominem attack, usually best avoided, entirely appropriate.)  Any man who writes,

I’m content, as my hero Isaiah Berlin put it, to plant myself instead on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. If its progressive wing sometimes seems to have learned nothing from the failures of government and to promote cultural stances that divide Americans, at least the party as a whole knows what year it is

is either delusional for thinking that such a “moderate wing” actually exists and that “the party as a whole” is an entity that fosters national comity and is actually concerned for the welfare of the citizenry or, in my view, is simply acting in bad faith.  No true conservative of whatever stripe can have anything to do with this intellectually and morally bankrupt party, which is entirely dominated by the Left and which wages an unceasing war against the very traditions, customs, and legal system that Brooks supposedly values so highly. 

.......................

Now for my two cents. Useful idiots such as Brooks are worse than hard leftists. They live in the past, blind to the present, and unwittingly advance the very causes that they, as conservatives, are supposed to be opposing.   Here is what I had to say four years ago. The passage of time has only reinforced my points:

The Op-Ed pages of The New York Times are plenty poor to be sure, but Ross Douthat and David Brooks are sometimes worth reading.  But the following from Brooks (28 October 2016) is singularly boneheaded although the opening sentence is exactly right:

The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre-­political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community. But recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party. Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics, Scripture behind voting guides. Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.

Come on, man.  Don't be stupid.  The Left is out to suppress religious liberty.  This didn't start yesterday.  You yourself mention conscience, but you must be aware that bakers and florists have been forced by the state to violate their consciences by catering homosexual 'marriage' ceremonies.  Is that a legitimate use of state power?  And if the wielders of state power can get away with that outrage, where will they stop? Plenty of other examples can be adduced, e.g., the Obama administration's assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The reason evangelicals and other Christians support Trump is that they know what that destructive and deeply mendacious stealth ideologue  Hillary will do if she gets power. It is not because they think the Gotham sybarite lives the Christian life, but despite his not living it.  They understand that ideas and policies trump character issues especially when Trump's opponent is even worse on the character plane.  What's worse: compromising national security, using high public office to enrich oneself, and then endlessly lying about it all, or forcing oneself on a handful of women?

The practice of the Christian virtues and the living of the Christian life require freedom of religion. Our freedoms are under vicious assault by leftists  like Hillary. This is why Trump garners the support of Christians.  

The threat from the Left is very real indeed.  See here and read the chilling remarks of Martin Castro of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.  Given Castro's comments the name of the commission counts as Orwellian. 

The Conservative Mind

Innovations are presumed guilty until proven innocent. There is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs, usages, institutions, arrangements, techniques, and whatnot, provided they work. By all means allow the defeat of the outworn and no-longer-workable: in with the new if the novel is better. But the burden of proof is on the would-be innovator: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Conservatives are not opposed to change. We are opposed to non-ameliorative change, and change for the sake of change.

 

And once again, how can anyone who loves his country desire its fundamental transformation? How can anyone love anything who desires its fundamental transformation?

 

You love a girl and want to marry her. But you propose that she must first undergo a total makeover: butt lift, tummy tuck, nose job, breast implants, psychological re-wire, complete doxastic overhaul, sensus divinitatis tune-up, Weltanschauung change-out, memory upgrade, and so on. Do you love her, or is she merely the raw material for the implementation of your  idea of what a girl should be?

 

The extension to love of country is straightforward. If you love your country, then you do not desire its fundamental transformation. Contrapositively, if you do desire its fundamental transformation, then you do not love it.

An Admiring but Critical Note on an Edmund Burke Quotation

A quotation and a question:

Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to [of] justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Edmund Burke, letter to François-Louis-Thibaut de Menonville, 1791, bolding added.

A fine statement to which I largely agree, but I have one reservation. An  external check upon the wills and appetites of individuals who will not check themselves is necessary if there is to be civil order.  But the administrators of the external check are cut from the same crooked timber as the rest of us.  Our trust in them must therefore be cautious and as limited as the power we grant them. The conservative assessment of human nature is sober and realistic: every true conservative knows that power goes to the heads of its possessors, and this regardless of how paltry the power may be. 

Who checks the checkers? Who keeps them in check?  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  The checkers cannot be expected to check themselves any more that the Roman Catholic hierarchy can be expected to check the concupiscence of its clerics and punish priestly paedophiles and ephebophiles with sufficient severity. They will protect their own first, setting the interests of the institution above the interests of those  they are supposed to serve.  The same goes for government which can degenerate into a self-serving hustle like any hustle.  So-called civil servants too often serve themselves first and those they are supposed to serve second if at all.

A sound conservatism must advocate checks and balances across the board with every individual and group kept in check and keeping in check.  For one example, armed civilians are needed to keep both the criminal element and government in check, just as government is need to keep armed civilians in check via the enactment and enforcement of reasonable gun laws.

A sound conservatism will not succumb to the authoritarian temptation; it must take on board as much of classical liberalism as is necessary to stymy the drift toward the totalitarian. The true conservative treads the via media between knee-pad Toryism and anything-goes libertarianism. 

Good Relations and Deep Relations

Given the limitations of our postlapsarian predicament, good relations with others must needs be limited relations. Familiarity breeds contempt. Propinquity militates against politeness. Conservatives understand that a certain formality in our relations with others, both within and without the family, helps maintain respect. Formality helps keep in check the incivility bred of familiarity.  Reserve has a preservative effect.   Saying less more often accrues to our benefit than saying more. How often have you brought trouble upon your head by simply keeping your mouth shut? 

So much for good relations. Deep relations are another story. In them we court danger. We go deep, we probe, we 'let it all hang out' after midnight of the work-a-day round. You should run the risk from time to time.  Risk rejection and worse. Otherwise, when it comes time to die, you won't be able to say that you really squeezed the fruit of the lemon tree. 

A Groundless Stereotype about Stereotypes

Not all stereotypes are negative; some are positive. And not all stereotypes lack a fundamentum in re; some are based in reality. I just made two distinctions. 

It is a stereotype both negative and without a foundation in reality that all stereotypes lack a foundation in reality.

Political Observations

The short statements below are from my Facebook page.  It is important to explain to the open-minded and politically uncommitted, in a pithy and non-polemical way, what American conservatives stand for.  The American conservative, as I use the term, is neither a throne-and-altar neo-reactionary, nor is he an alt-Right tribalist. His conservatism takes on board the best of classical liberalism. You could call him a paleo-liberal. And of course he is far from the yap-and-scribble, do-nothing 'cruise ship' pseudo-conservatives who are willing to accept political dhimmitude so long as their perquisites and privileges and invitations to the tonier Beltway salons remain intact.  

 

My 'voice' over at Facebook is usually polemical, unlike the shorts below. I tread the razor's edge between saying what needs to be said about incendiary topics and getting de-platformed.  Polemical discourse, including invective, mockery, and the rest are justified by the fact we are engaged in a war with the destructive Left over the soul of America.  You are welcome to join me, but just be sure to read the pinned post at the top of the page.

 

THE FIRST OBLIGATION OF GOVERNMENT

 

The main obligation of a government is to protect and serve the citizens of the country of which it is the government. It is a further question whether it has obligations to protect and benefit the citizens of other countries. That is debatable. But if it does, those obligations are trumped by the main obligation just mentioned. I should think that a great nation such as the USA does well to engage in purely humanitarian efforts such as famine relief. Such efforts are arguably supererogatory and not obligatory.

 

NATIONALISM AND 'FAMILIALISM'

 

America First is as sound an idea as that each family has the right to prefer its interests over the interests of other families. If my wife becomes ill, then my obligation is to care for her and expend such financial resources as are necessary to see to her welfare. If this means reducing my charitable contributions to the local food bank, then so be it. Whatever obligations I have to help others 'ripple out' from myself as center, losing claim to my attention the farther out they go, much like the amplitude of waves caused by a rock's falling into a pond diminishes the farther from the point of impact. Spouse and/or children first, then other family members, then old friends, then new friends, then neighbors, and so on.

 

The details are reasonably disputable, but not the general principle. The general principle is that we are justified in looking to our own first.

 

ENLIGHTENED NATIONALISM

 

AMERICA FIRST does not mean that that the USA ought to be first over other countries, dominating them. It means that every country has the right to prefer itself and its own interests over the interests of other countries. We say 'America first' because we are Americans; the Czechs say or ought to say 'Czech Republic first.' The general principle is that every country has a right to grant preference to itself and its interests over the interests of other countries while respecting their interests and right to self-determination. America First is but an instance of the general principle. The principle, then, is Country First.

 

ENLIGHTENED NATIONALISM AND CHAUVINISM

 

America First has nothing to do with chauvinism which could be characterized as a blind and intemperate patriotism, a belligerent and unjustified belief in the superiority of one's own country. America First expresses an enlightened nationalism which is obviously compatible with a sober recognition of national failings. Germany has a rather sordid history; but Germany First is compatible with a recognition of the wrong turn that great nation took during a well-known twelve-year period (1933-1945) in her history.

 

 

NATIONALISM, NATIVISM, ISOLATIONISM

 

An enlightened nationalism is distinct from nativism inasmuch as the former does not rule out immigration. By definition, an immigrant is not a native; but an enlightened American nationalism accepts immigrants who accept American values, which of course are not the values of the Left or of political Islam.

 

An enlightened nationalism is not isolationist. What it eschews is a fruitless meddling and over-eager interventionism. It does not rule out certain necessary interventions when they are in our interests and in the interests of our allies.

 

So America First is not to be confused with chauvinism or nativism or isolationism.

Is Patriotism a Good Thing? What is a Country?

The following goes deeper into the issues involved in my Substack article Patriotism and Jingoism. I respond to comments from 'Jacques' from November 2015. My responses are in blue. 

............................

I read your blog every day.  Quite apart from the high level philosophizing, it's a rare bit of political sanity and rationality and decency.  Academic philosophy is now thoroughly controlled by the most evil and insane factions of the Left.  It's good to know that real philosophy, and real political philosophy in particular, is still alive in the hearts and minds of some individual people, even though the philosophical institutions are dead or hopelessly corrupt.  Thank you! 

BV:  You're very welcome.  I am happy to have you as a reader and correspondent. While academic philosophy is not thoroughly controlled by the  Left, not yet anyway, you are not far from the truth.  

But I do have a quibble about your recent post on patriotism, where you write:

"... As Socrates explains in Plato's Crito, we are what we are because of the laws. Our country and its laws have overseen our nurturance, our education, and the forming of our characters. We owe a debt of gratitude to our country, its laws, those who have worked to maintain and defend it, and especially those who have died in its defense."

This argument (if it's valid) must have a suppressed premise.  The premise must be something like the following:  "It is good that we are what we are", or "Some of the features of our characters that are due to our country and its laws are features for which we should be grateful". 

BV:  Right, my argument is an enthymeme and those tacit assumptions are in play; without them the argument is invalid. 

Of course, the inference would only be valid given some further assumptions, e.g., that our country and its laws have not also caused us to have other features that are so bad or regrettable that, all things considered, it would be reasonable to wish that our characters hadn't been shaped by our country and its laws in any way. 

BV:  I agree.

But in any case, I don't think that these suppressed premises are true.  Not if they are meant to support the conclusion that, in general, patriotism is good--let alone that, in general, it is a virtue. 

If my character was shaped by my experiences growing up in Maoist China, say, then it seems entirely possible that most or all of the features of myself that I came to have as a result of those experiences are bad.  Or they might be features that just have no particular value or disvalue.  At any rate there seems to be no reason to expect that, for any arbitrary person whose character was formed by any arbitrary country or legal system, the relevant features will be such that, on balance, this person ought to be grateful for whatever it was that caused him to have these features.  To be sure, those who were lucky to have been formed within good countries or good legal institutions should probably be patriotic, for the kind of reason that Socrates gave; but this is not to say that patriotism in general is a duty or a virtue or even a good thing in any respect.

BV:  Your critique up to this point is a good one and I accept it.  I take you to be saying that I have not given a good argument  for the thesis that in general patriotism is a good thing.  For whether it is good or not will depend on the particular  patria, the particular country, and its laws, institutions, and traditions.  Presumably, citizens of North Korea, Cuba, Nazi Germany, and the USSR ought not be or ought not have been patriotic.  But much depends on what the object of patriotism is.  What exactly is that which one loves and is loyal to when one is patriotic? More on this below.

I would suggest that there is no basis for healthy patriotism beyond the fact that my country is MY country.  The reason why I should have some loyalty to my country, or love for it, is just that it is mine.  Not that, in being mine, it has shaped my character.  Not that its laws are better than others, or that they encode certain 'propositions' which a rational being should believe, or anything like that.  But if this is right, the proper object of healthy patriotism is not a country in the sense that you seem to have in mind, i.e., a government or set of political or legal arrangements or traditions.  Because that kind of thing is not really mine, in any deep sense, and because that kind of thing is not something I can love or feel loyalty towards.  So if this suggestion is right, the proper object is my 'country' in the sense of the concrete land and people, not the state or its laws.  [emphasis added by BV.] (And this distinction seems especially important nowadays.  You would not want to confuse the real America that Americans may properly love with the weird, sick, soft-totalitarian state that now occupies America.)

BV:  You rightly appreciate that a proper discussion of this topic requires a careful specification of the object of patriotic love/loyalty.  You say it is "the concrete land and people, not the state and its laws." Suppose I grant that for the nonce.  Why should I love/be loyal to my country just because it is mine? That is not obvious, indeed it strikes me as false.  I take you to be making two separate claims.  The first is that one should display some patriotism toward one's country.  This first claim is a presupposition of "The reason why I should have some loyalty to my country, or love for it, is just that it is mine." The second claim is that the only reason for so doing is that the country is one's own.  

But do you really want to endorse the first claim?  Even if country = "concrete land and people,"  there are possible and perhaps also actual countries such that you wouldn't want to endorse the first claim.  As for the second, if you endorse it, will you also say that the only reason you should be loyal to your spouse, your parents, your siblings, your children, your friends, your clan, your neighborhood, your gang, and so on is because they are yours?  Should you be true to your school only because it is the one you attend?   

The above doesn't sound right.  That a friend is my friend is not the only possible legitimate reason for my being loyal to him, assuming it is a legitimate reason at all.  A second legitimate reason is that when I was in trouble he helped me.  (And so on.)  That my country (concrete land and people) is my country is not the only possible reason for my loving it and being loyal to it; other legitimate reasons are that the land is beautiful  -- "purple mountain majesties from sea to shining sea" --  and that the people are self-reliant, hard-working, frugal, liberty-loving, etc., although how many of these people does one encounter theses days?  

You write, "The reason why I should have some loyalty to my country, or love for it, is just that it is mine."  Do you intend the 'just' to express a biconditional relation?   Are you proposing

1. One should have some loyalty for one's country or love for it if and only if it is one's own country

or

2. If one should have some loyalty for one's own country or love for it, then it is one's own country?

Is my country's being mine a necessary and sufficient condition of my legitimate patriotism, or only a necessary condition thereof?  On a charitable reading, you are affirming (2). 

What is a Country?

If patriotism is love of and loyalty to one's country,  then we need to know what a country is.  First of all, a country will involve

a. A geographical area, a land mass, with more or less definite boundaries or borders.

But this is not sufficient since presumably a country without people is no country in the sense of 'country' relevant to a definition of 'patriotism.'  A backpacker may love the unpopulated backcountry of a wilderness area but such love of a chunk of the earth and its flora and (non-human) fauna is not patriotic love.  So we add

b. Having a (human) population.

Are (a) and (b) jointly sufficient?  I don't think so.  Suppose you have a land mass upon which are dumped all sorts of different people of different races and religions, speaking hundreds of different languages, with wildly different habits and values and mores.  That would not be a country in a sense relevant to a definition of 'patriotism.'  It seems we must add

c. Sharing a common culture which will involve  such elements as a common language, religion, tradition, history, 'national narrative,' heritage, a basic common understanding of what is right and wrong, a codification of this basic common understanding in law, and what all else.

I should think that each of (a), (b), and (c) are necessary to have a country.  'Jacques' apparently disagrees. He seems to be saying above that (a) and (b) are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. I say they are individually necessary but not jointly sufficient.  I say further that the three conditions just specified are not jointly sufficient either, or not obviously jointly sufficient.  For if the basic common understanding of right and wrong naturally evolves toward a codification and detailed articulation in written laws, then we are well on the way to 'the political.'

And isn't it obvious, or at least plausible, that if a country cannot exist without geographical borders, that these borders cannot be merely geographical in nature, but must also be political as well?  

Take the Rio Grande.  It is obviously not a social construct.  It is a natural feature of the earth.  But the southern border of the USA, its border with Mexico, is a social or socio-political construct.  It is 'conventional' not 'natural.'  The southern border  might not have been the Rio Grande.  But as things are, a river serves as the southern border.  

My point is that, while a  border must be naturally or physically realized by a river, or a coastline, or the crest of a mountain range, or by a wall or a fence (an electronic 'fence' would do) or whatever, borders are also political entities.  Thus the Rio Grande is both a natural feature of the earth but also a political entity.  And so what I want to say is that nothing can count as a country in the sense of 'country' relevant to a definition of 'patriotism' if it is not a political entity.  Two countries bordering on each other cannot border on each other unless both are political entities.

Can I argue this out rigorously?  I don't know.  Let me take a stab at it.

A country is a continuant: it remains numerically the same over the period of time, however short, during which it exists.  And while a country can gain or lose territory without prejudice to its diachronic numerical identity, it will cease to exist if it loses all its territory, or lets itself be invaded by foreigners to such an extent that its characteristic culture is destroyed (see point (c) above).  So a country must defend its border if it wishes to stay in existence.  But for the USA to defend its southern border is not for it to defend a river.  It is to prevent non-citizens from crossing illegally into a country of which they are not a citizen.  Am I begging the question?  Perhaps.  I'll have to think about it some more.

In any case it seems intuitively obvious to me that we need

d. Under the jurisdiction of a government.

But it is important to distinguish between a government and a particular administration of a government such as the Reagan administration or the Obama administration (regime?).  Consider the bumper sticker:

What does 'government' mean here?  It means either the current administration or some administrations, but presumably not every administration.  It cannot mean the institutional structure, with its enabling documents such as the Constitution, which structure outlasts particular administrations.  That is shown by the American flag above.  What does it signify? Not the Nixon admin or the Obama admin.  It signifies the ideals and values of America and the people who uphold them.  Which values?  Liberty and justice are named in the Pledge of Allegiance.  But not social justice, or material equality (equality of outcome or result).

The person who would display a bumper sticker like the above does not fear the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or the institutional structure of the USA or the values and ideals it enshrines.  Take a gander at this sticker:

Someone who displays this supports the U. S. Constitution and the Second Amendment thereto in particular.  What he fears is not the U. S. government in its institutional structure; what he fears are gun-grabbing administrations.  What he fears are lawless, hate-America, gun-grabbing, liberty-infringing, race-baiting leftists like Barack Obama and Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton.

In sum, I suggest that an adequate definition of 'country' must involve all of (a)-(d) supra.  But this is a very difficult topic and I am no expert in political philosophy. 

Patriotism versus Jingoism

A meditation for Flag Day, 2021. 

Substack latest.

I Didn't Start Out Conservative

Like many conservatives, I didn't start out as one.  My background is working class, my parents were Democrats, and so was I until the age of 41.  I came of age in the '60s.  One of my heroes was John F. Kennedy, "the intrepid skipper of the PT 109" as I described him in a school essay written in the fifth grade.  I was all for the Civil Rights movement.    Musically my heroes were Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.  I thrilled to his Blowin' in the Wind  and his other civil rights anthems. 

As I see it, those civil rights battles were fought and they were won.  But then the rot set in as the  party of JFK liberals became the extremists and the destructive leftists that they are today. For example, Affirmative Action in its original sense gave way to reverse discrimination, race-norming, minority set-asides, identity politics and the betrayal of Martin Luther King Jr.'s  dream that people be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." To judge people by the content of their character is to judge them as individuals which is precisely the opposite of what tribalists and identity politicians do.

As liberals have become extremists, people with moderate views such as myself have become conservatives.  

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, a good day to read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail and reflect on how the race-delusional totalitarians who now infest the Democrat Party have strayed from King's ideas and vision.

To Be Human

To be human is to be flawed; to be conservative is to know this.

You Want Anti-Government? I'll Give You Anti-Government!

Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that is the opposite of the one contemporary Democrats are aiming to impose upon us.  The following passage is surprisingly prescient now that Sino-surveillance is upon us and will only get worse.  Needless to say, I do not hold that government must of necessity fit Proudhon's description: there is such a thing as limited government.

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Of course, I don't accept that property is theft. On the contrary! Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem with private property is not that it is private, but that too few own too little and in a way that is protected from criminal and governmental seizure.  That is why firearms are the most important private property. You can't eat, wear (though you can bear), or live in a gun, but guns are the means for the maintenance of  ownership of the aforementioned.

Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that is the opposite of the one contemporary Democrats are aiming to impose upon us.  The following passage is surprisingly prescient now that Sino-surveillance is upon us and will only get worse.  Needless to say, I do not hold that government must of necessity fit Proudhon's description: there is such a thing as limited government.

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Of course, I don't accept that property is theft. On the contrary! Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem with private property is not that it is private, but that too few own too little and in a way that is protected from criminal and governmental seizure.  That is why firearms are the most important private property. You can't eat, wear (though you can bear), or live in a gun, but guns are the means for the maintenance of  ownership of the aforementioned.

The Conservative Mind

Innovations are presumed guilty until proven innocent.  There is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs, usages, institutions, arrangements, techniques, and whatnot, provided they work.  By all means allow the defeat of the outworn and no-longer-workable: in with the new if the novel is better.  But the burden of proof is on the would-be innovator: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  Conservatives are not opposed to change.  We are opposed to non-ameliorative change, and change for the sake of change.

And once again, how can anyone who loves his country desire its fundamental transformation?  How can anyone love anything who desires its fundamental transformation? 

You love a girl and want to marry her.  But you propose that she must first undergo a total makeover:  butt lift, tummy tuck, nose job, breast implants, psychological re-wire, complete doxastic overhaul, sensus divinitatis tune-up, Weltanschauung change-out, memory upgrade, and so on. Do you love her, or is she merely the raw material for the implementation of your currently uninstantiated idea of what a girl should be?

The extension to love of country is straightforward.  If you love your country, then you do not desire its fundamental transformation.  Contrapositively, if you do desire its fundamental transformation, then you do not love it.

Innovations are presumed guilty until proven innocent.  There is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs, usages, institutions, arrangements, techniques, and whatnot, provided they work.  By all means allow the defeat of the outworn and no-longer-workable: in with the new if the novel is better.  But the burden of proof is on the would-be innovator: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  Conservatives are not opposed to change.  We are opposed to non-ameliorative change, and change for the sake of change.

And once again, how can anyone who loves his country desire its fundamental transformation?  How can anyone love anything who desires its fundamental transformation? 

You love a girl and want to marry her.  But you propose that she must first undergo a total makeover:  butt lift, tummy tuck, nose job, breast implants, psychological re-wire, complete doxastic overhaul, sensus divinitatis tune-up, Weltanschauung change-out, memory upgrade, and so on. Do you love her, or is she merely the raw material for the implementation of your currently uninstantiated idea of what a girl should be?

The extension to love of country is straightforward.  If you love your country, then you do not desire its fundamental transformation.  Contrapositively, if you do desire its fundamental transformation, then you do not love it.

The New Right: More Combative, Less Conservative

Culturally, the Left won; so what's to conserve? The Old Right, bow-tied and bespectacled, gentlemanly and erudite, has proven impotent to slow down, let alone stop, the Left's long march through the institutions and their subversion of them. Assembled in their well-appointed 'cucksheds,' the likes of George F. Will fiddle with ideas while the Republic burns.  Enter the New Right which, as David Azzerad puts it,

. . . is anchored in the realization that the conservative project in America today is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary one. We lost. They won. Painful as it is to admit, we no longer feel at home in our own country. In this progressive theocracy in which all must worship at the altar of Wokeness, conservatism, if one can still even call it that, is more about overthrowing than conserving. Burke’s edifying exhortation—“Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna”—must be altered to suit the times: Sparta was your inheritance, now reclaim her.

As such, this new Right has a decidedly unconservative temperament. It is spirited, manly, and combative. We fight with the same intensity, resolve, and clarity of purpose with which the Left fights. And we fight not to stem our losses, but to win. As Pat Buchanan once wrote, we “want to engage the Left on every front; to defund it; to drive it back into the redoubts whence it emerged decades ago. We want to return to their places of honor the republican beliefs, cultural norms and moral values we were raised with.”

This new Right understands not just ideas, but power. The Left’s ideological hegemony is not principally the result of better ideas, but of its long march through the institutions. We understand the need to build new institutions—in particular those with the power to shape public opinion—and to reconquer lost ones or, at the very least, defund them. The universities, in particular, must be brought to heel.

Absolutely. Defunding the leftist seminaries is a job each of us can do right now.  Every day brings news of a new outrage and an additional reason to divest the institutions of the Higher Enstupidation.  For example,  the cancellation of Mike Adams, and that of Flannery O'Connor by Loyola University Maryland.

The Catholic Universities are among the worst of the leftist seminaries. They are neither Catholic nor universities. 

Related: Defunding: The Most Effective Weapon in Our Arsenal?

Addendum (7/31): "Every day brings news of a new outrage . . . ." A bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Just this morning I learned that a dean at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell was fired for stating in an e-mail that "black lives matter, but also, everyone's life matters."

On Transcending Tribalism

Jonathan Haidt:

Humans are tribal, but tribalism can be transcended. It exists in tension with our extraordinary ability to develop bonds with other human beings. Romeo and Juliet fell in love. French, British and German soldiers came out of their trenches in World War I to exchange food, cigarettes and Christmas greetings.

The key, as Cicero observed, is proximity, and a great deal of modern research backs him up. Students are more likely to become friends with the student whose dorm room is one door away than with the student whose room is four doors away. People who have at least one friend from the other political party are less likely to hate the supporters of that party.

But tragically, Americans are losing their proximity to those on the other side and are spending more time in politically purified settings. [. . .]

Haidt is right that tribalism can be transcended, at least to some extent, and that proximity and interaction can facilitate the transcending.  But he is far more optimistic that I am.

What Haidt ignores is that there is no comity without commonality, as I like to put it.  You and I can live and work together in harmony only within a common space of shared values and assumptions and recognized facts.  But that common space is shrinking.

Take any 'hot button' issue, Second Amendment rights, for example.  What do I have in common with the anti-gunner who favors confiscation of all civilian firearms, or only slightly less radically, wants to ban all hand guns or semi-automatic weapons?  To me it is evident that my right to life grounds a right to self-defense, and with it a right to acquire the appropriate means of self-defense.  If you deny this, then we have no common ground, at least not on this topic.  On this topic, we would then be at loggerheads.  If you then work politically or extra-politically  to violate what here in the States are called Second Amendment rights, then you become my enemy.  And the consequences of enmity can become unpleasant in the extreme. Push can come to shove, and shove to shoot.

In a situation like this, proximity and interaction only exacerbate the problem.  Even the calm interaction of scholarly argument and counter-argument does no good.  No matter how carefully and rigorously I argue my position, I will not succeed in convincing the opponent, with only a few exceptions.  This is a fact of experience over a wide range of controversial topics, and not just in politics.  The only good thing that comes of the dialectical interaction is a clarification and deeper understanding of one's position and what it entails.  If you think, say, that semi-automatic weapons ought to be banned for civilian use, then you and I will never find common ground.  But I will perfect my understanding of my position and its presuppositions and better understand what I reject in yours.

After we have clarified, but not resolved, our differences, anger at the intransigence of the other is the likely upshot if we continue to interact in close proximity whether in the same academic department, the same church, the same club, the same neighborhood, the same family . . . .  This is why there are schisms and splits and factions and wars and all manner of contention.

Anger at the intransigence of the other can then lead on to the thought that  there must be something morally defective, and perhaps also intellectually defective, about the opponent if he holds, say, that a pre-natal human is just a clump of cells.  One advances -- if that is the word -- to the view that the opponent is morally censurable for holding the position he holds, that he is being willfully morally obtuse and deserves moral condemnation.  And then the word 'evil' may slip in and the word 'lie': "The bastard is not just wrong; he is an evil son-of-a-bitch for promoting the lie that an unborn child is just a clump of cells, or a disposable part of woman's body like a wart." The arguably false statements of the other get treated as lies and therefore as statements at the back of which in an intent to deceive. And from there it ramps up to 'Hillary is Satan' and 'Trump is Hitler.'

One possible cure for  this unproductive warfare is mutual, voluntary, segregation via a return to federalism.   I develop the thought in A Case for Voluntary Segregation.  I say 'possible' because I am not sure the federalist route is sufficient.  Secession and partition are other options, not to mention the one no sane person could want: full-on hot civil war.  We are already beyond cold civil war, what with the Left's violent Stalinist erasure of monuments and memorials (and not just that).

So while Haidt is right that proximity and interaction can promote mutual understanding and mitigate hostility, that is true only up to a point and works only within a common space of shared assumptions, values, and recognized facts.  (His examples, by the way, were poorly chosen: Romeo and Juliet were young Italians; the French, German, and British soldiers were Europeans.)  Absent the common space, the opposite is true: proximity and interaction are precisely what must be avoided to preserve peace.  

The Problem and Three Main Solutions

The problem is how to transcend tribalism.  I count three main solutions, the Liberal, the Alt Right, and the Sane (which is of course my view!)

There is first what I take to be Haidt's rather silly liberal solution, namely, that what will bring us together is proximity and interaction. He assumes that if we all come together and get to know each other  we will overcome tribalism.  This borders on utopian nonsense.  It is precisely because of proximity and interaction that many decide to self-segregate.  The more I know about certain individuals and groups the less I want to have to do with them.  The Marxist thugs of Black Lives Matter, for example.  By the way, 'thug' is not code for 'nigger.'  'Thug' means thug.  Look it up.  The Antifa fascists are another example. The anti-white White Fragility racists. I could go on.

At the other extreme we find the 'alties' and neo-reactionaries.  They have a sound insight, namely, that there are unassimilable elements and that they must be kept out.  For example, Sharia-supporting Muslims are unassimilable into the U. S. because their values are antithetical to ours, perhaps not all of their values, but enough to make for huge problems.   

The success of e pluribus unum depends on the nature of the pluribus.  A viable and vibrant One cannot be made out of just any Many.  (Cute formulation, eh?) The members of the manifold must be unifiable under some umbrella of common values, assumptions, and recognized facts.  One proposition nation cannot be made out of many tribes of immigrants unless the many tribes of immigrants accept OUR values, American values, and our propositions.  The tribalism is overcome or at least mitigated by acceptance of a unifying set of American values and ideas.

The alt-rightists, however, do not really offer a solution to the problem of transcending tribalism since their 'solution' is to embrace an opposing tribalism. They are right about the reality of race, as against the foolish notion that race is a social construct, but they push this realism in an ugly and extreme direction when they construe American identity as white identity, where this excludes Jews. American identity is rooted in a set of ideas and values.  It must be granted, however, that not all racial and ethnic groups are equally able to assimilate and implement these ideas and values.  Immigration policy must favor those that are.  

The sane way is the middle way.  To liberals we ought to concede that diversity is a value, but at the same time insist that it is a value that has to be kept in check by the opposing value of unity.   Muslims who refuse to accept our values must not be allowed to immigrate.  They have no right to immigrate, but we have every right to select those who will benefit us.  That is just common sense.  The good sort of diversity is not enhanced by the presence of terror-prone fanatics. Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country. 

What we need, then, to mitigate tribal hostility is not more proximity and interaction, but less; fewer 'conversations' not more; less government, more toleration, voluntary segregation, a return to federalism, a total stoppage of illegal immigration, and a reform of current immigration law.

Will any of this happen?  Trump has taken steps in the right direction.  Flawed as he is, he is all we have, and best we have who is ready, willing, able, and electable. You know what you have to do come November.

President Trump's Mount Rushmore Speech

Roger Kimball appreciates its magnificence and writes about it brilliantly:

The president was especially strong in challenging what is perhaps the most obnoxious manifestation of our petulant antinomianism—that species of politically correct intolerance that has come to be called “cancel culture.” In essence, cancel culture is the malignant inversion of liberalism’s defining virtues, openness and tolerance. It is born of historical ignorance and a stunning lack of empathy—an ironic fact, since one of the chief premises of cancel culture is its own supposed superior sensitivity. 

In fact, the emotional payload of cancel culture is not more sensitive than its accommodating alternative, just more narcissistic. It operates by proxy, filing claims for redress on behalf of a ghostly population of abstractions: “indigenous peoples,” slaves of yesteryear, and on and on in an endless litany of complaint. 

What is not at all abstract, however, are the effects of cancel culture. As the president noted, it is wielded as a weapon, “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.” In a word, cancel culture is “the very definition of totalitarianism” and is “completely alien to our culture and our values.” It should have “absolutely no place in the United States of America.” And here is where his speech took on a steely seriousness. “This attack on our liberty must be stopped,” he said, “and it will be stopped.” 

In short, the president has promised to cancel cancel culture. Is that a contradiction, a violation of the spirit of tolerance he has promised to uphold? No. 

The enemies of civilization routinely use and abuse its freedoms in order to destroy it. Candid men understand this and act to prevent it. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.”

[. . .]

We know that all of our most pathological cities have been run as Democratic monopolies for decades. Donald Trump had the temerity to point this out. We know that our public schools are increasingly factories of left-wing, anti-American indoctrination. The president had the temerity to point that out as well. The narrative is that Trump is a crude and bumbling ignoramus, but can you imagine Joe Biden or any other Democrat in office today having the moral courage and clarity of mind to say this:

The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities run by liberals, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism and other cultural institutions. Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country—and to believe that the men and women who built it, were not heroes, but villains. The radicals’ view of American History is a web of lies—all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition. 

The Conservative

A conservative is one who harbors no illusions about human nature. His is an unblinking view into the depths of human depravity, and especially the depravity let loose by those in the grip of utopian, world-transforming schemes.

A Note on Feminism and My Conservatism

Although I am a conservative, I am not a 'throne and altar' conservative. Nor am I the sort of conservative who thinks that everything traditional trumps everything newfangled.  (The conservative's presumption in favor of the traditional is defeasible.) And of course it is silly to think that conservatives oppose change; it is just that we don't confuse change with change for the better.

Traditionally, women were wives and mothers whose place was said to be the home.  (Either that, or they lived with their parents or entered a nunnery.)  Now the traditional wife and mother role is a noble one, and difficult to fill properly, and I have nothing but contempt for the feminazis who denigrate it and denigrate those who instantiate it.  May a crapload of obloquy be dumped upon their shrill and febrile pates.   But surely women have a right  to actualize and employ their talents to the full in whichever fields they are suited to enter, however male-dominated those fields  have been hitherto.  They must, however, be suited to enter those fields: no differential standards, no gender-norming,  no reverse discrimination.

Simone Weil, Edith Stein, and Elizabeth Anscombe are wonderfully good philosophers, and much better than most male philosophers.  I know their works well and consider them to be my superiors both intellectually and morally.  (And I don't think anyone would accuse me of a lack of self-esteem.)  It would have been a loss to all of us had these admirable lights been prevented from developing their talents and publishing their thoughts.

This makes me something of a liberal in an old and defensible sense.  But I don't use 'liberal' to describe my views. 'Liberal' has suffered linguistic hijacking and now is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable in sense from 'leftist.'  Anyone who reads this site soon learns that one of my self-appointed tasks is to debunk the pernicious buncombe of the Left.  As someone who maintains a balanced and reasonable position -- does that sound a tad self-serving? -- I am open to attack from the PC-whipped leftists and from the reactionary, ueber-traditionalist, 'throne and altar' conservatives.  To my amusement, I have been attacked from the latter side as a 'raving liberal.'  (I respond in the  appropriately appellated Am I a Raving Liberal?)

So much for a brief indication of where I stand with respect to feminism.

Addendum

Having stuck up for the distaff contingent I must now express a certain distaste for their tendency toward tribalism, group-think, and identity-fetishization.  Herewith, a congressional depiction thereof.  I cannot recall whether this was SOTU 2020 or 2019:

 

Why We Defend Donald Trump

Replying to a young friend who loathes the man, Malcolm Pollack explains why so many of us stand with President Trump despite his manifold and manifest faults:

I make no case that Donald Trump is any kind of a saint. He is enormously vain (as all presidents are, with the possible exception of Calvin Coolidge), he lacks dignity and gravitas, he calls people childish names, he can be vulgar (though surely no more so than LBJ, Clinton, and a host of others), he is a philanderer (though of course JFK and Clinton put him to shame in that department, with the latter likely being guilty of actual rape). He is, as you say, not one to show much in the way of humility (though of course he is a dwarf in that regard compared to his immediate predecessor, whom Mike Bloomberg — Mike Bloomberg! — called “the most arrogant man he’d ever met”).

He is, however, the duly elected president of the United States, elevated to office by a vast segment of the traditional American nation who rightly have felt despised and marginalized for a long time now by their globalist, “progressive” overlords — a scornful and condescending secular priesthood who occupy, by powerful means of enforcement, the commanding heights of media, academia, popular culture, and the enormous edifice of the unelected, administrative state. Donald Trump was seen by these “Deplorables” — and rightly so — as their last hope against a leftist juggernaut that sought to trample into dust all of the founding norms and traditions of the American nation, to throw open the borders, to distend and distort the Constitution into gelatinous goo, and to crush all resistance by a combination of judicial activism, executive fiat and suffocating social ostracism.

Trump’s voters understood that the First and Second Amendments, those great bulwarks of liberty, were under increasingly withering assault; they had to look no further than Canada, Britain, and Europe — where the people are forcibly disarmed, and criticism of government policy is now enough to land you in jail — to see what lay ahead if the eight -year catastrophe of the Obama administration were to be repeated by re-installing those despicable grifters the Clintons. They saw in Donald Trump, for all of his obvious flaws (and yes, they are just as obvious to me as they are to you), a man who genuinely loved the free and self-confident America of his youth, who saw the nation’s long story, though of course tainted by sin and error (as all national stories are), as a story of the triumph of the human spirit, guided by a set of transcendent principles rooted in the natural, God-given dignity of every human being, and given form by a Constitution unlike any ever seen in history: the product of the coming together at a unique moment in the development of mankind by men of genius (compared to whom, by the way, our current crop of “statesmen”, including both Trump and his predecessors, are intellectual gnats).

Donald Trump clearly, if only intuitively, understood the existential horror of this century-long acceleration of consolidating, totalizing statism, the effect of which is to reduce men to children, and to crush from existence the essential mediating layer of “civil society” — the great web of voluntary and independent association that forms the sinews and ligaments of healthy, organic societies — replacing it with an atomizing, vertical order in which every man and woman depends first and foremost upon the great State above, from which all blessings — and all guidance — must flow.

The conservative commentariat does not pay sufficient attention to the Left's assault on civil society. So I am pleased that Mr Pollack has reminded us of this "great web of voluntary and independent association" that stands between the naked individual and Leviathan.  

For more on civil society see my

Subsidiarity as Bulwark Against the Left's Assault on Civil Society

and 

Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society

Roger Kimball on Roger Scruton (1944-2020) on Tradition, Authority and Prejudice

Here:

Sir Roger wrote several times about his political maturation, most fully, perhaps, in “Why I became a conservative,” in The New Criterion in 2003. There were two answers, one negative, one positive. The negative answer was the visceral repudiation of civilization he witnessed in Paris in 1968: slogans defacing walls, shattered shop windows, and spoiled radicals. The positive element was the philosophy of Edmund Burke, that apostle of tradition, authority, and prejudice. Prejudice? How awful that word sounds to enlightened ears. But Sir Roger reminds us that prejudice, far from being synonymous with bigotry, can be a prime resource in freedom’s armory. “Our most necessary beliefs,” he wrote, “may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and . . . the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss.”

A necessary belief, I take it, is one that we need to live well.  And it may be that the beliefs we need the most to flourish are ones that we cannot justify if our standards are exacting.  It is also true that a failure to justify a belief can lead to skepticism and to a loss of belief.   But which prejudices should we live by? The ones that we were brought up to have?  Should we adopt them without examination?  

Here is where the problem lies. Should we live an unexamined life, simply taking for granted what was handed down?  Think of all those who were brought up to believe that slavery is a natural social arrangement, that some races are fit to be slaves and others to be masters.  Others were brought up to believe that a woman's place is in the home and  that any education beyond the elementary was wasted on them.  Punishment by crucifixion, the eating of human flesh, and so on were all traditionally accepted practices and their supporting  beliefs were  accepted uncritically from supposed authorities.  "That's the way it has always been done." "That's the way we do things around here." "Beef: It's what's for dinner." It is not that the longevity of the practices was taken to justify them; it is rather that the question of justification did not arise.  Enclosed within their cultures, and shielded from outside influences, there was no cause for people to doubt their beliefs and practices.  Beliefs and practices functioned well enough as social cement and so the questions about truth and justification did not arise.

The opposite view is that of Socrates as reported by Plato: "The unexamined life is not worth living."  For humans to flourish, they must examine their beliefs and try to separate the true from the false, the justified from the unjustified, the better from the worse.  Supposed authorities must be tested to see if they are genuinely authoritative.  The cosmogonic myths and the holy books contradict each other; hence they cannot all be true. Which is true? Might it be that none are true? Then what is the ultimate truth about how we should live? 

Man come of age is man become aware of the great dualities: true and false, real and unreal, good and evil. Man come of age is man having emerged into the light of spirit, man enlightened, man emergent from the animal and tribal.  Mythos suppressed and Logos ascendent, inquiry is born, inquiry whose engine is doubt. While remaining a miserable animal, man as spirit seeks to know the truth.  To advance in knowledge, however, he must question the handed-down.

The problem is the tension between the heteronomous life of tradition, authority, prejudice, and obedience, and the autonomous Socratic, truth-seeking life, a life willing to haul everything and anything before the bench of Reason, including itself, there to be rudely interrogated. In different dress this is the old problem of Athens and Jersualem in its stark Straussian contours.  

The problem is real and it is no solution to appeal to tradition, authority, and prejudice. On the other hand, there is no denying that the spirit of  inquiry, the skeptical spirit, can and in some does lead to a weakening of belief and a consequent loss of the will to act and assert oneself and the interests of one's group. Decadence and nihilism can result from the spirit of inquiry, the skeptical spirit. The West is in danger of perishing due to lack of will and a lack of belief in our values as we let ourselves be replaced by foreign elements.  Europe faces extinction or dhimmitude if it does not affirm its will to live and take measures against the invasion of representatives of an  inferior unenlightened culture.  

Burke saw with penetrating insight that freedom was not the antonym of authority or the repudiation of obedience. “Real freedom,” Sir Roger observed, “concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.”

Really? So I am truly free when I bend my knee to the sovereign? True freedom is bondage to the lord and master? Sounds Orwellian. Could real freedom, concrete freedom, be a form of obedience? Perhaps, if the one obeyed is God himself. But God is absent. In his place are dubious representatives.

My interim judgment: Scruton's conservatism as presented by Kimball is facile, superficial, and unsatisfying. It is a mere reaction to Enlightenment and classically liberal excesses.

Another typically aporetic (and therefore inconclusive) conclusion by the Aporetic Philosopher. It seems right, fitting, and helpful unto enlightenment that a maverick should be an aporetician.

Scruton Quits the Sublunary

Sir Roger's earthy tenure lasted a mere 75 years.  Philosophy is an old man's game, as I heard it said in my youth; Sir Roger fell short of the Russellian by 22 years.   Steven Hayward of Powerline:

In the introduction to his book The Meaning of Conservatism, Scruton writes that “Conservatism may rarely announce itself in maxims, formulae, or aims. Its essence is inarticulate, and its expression, when compelled, skeptical.”

Why “inarticulate”? Because, as he explains elsewhere, the liberal has the easy job in the modern world. The liberal points at the imperfections and defects of existing institutions or the existing social order, strikes a pose of indignation, and huffs that surely something better is required, usually with the attitude that the something better is simply a matter of will. The conservative faces the tougher challenge of understanding and explaining the often subtle reasons why existing institutions, no matter how imperfect, work better than speculative alternatives.

Well, an essence cannot be inarticulate, only a person or his literary production.  It would be better to say that the essence of conservatism is not wholly articulable. It cannot be made into a system, and the conservative is indeed skeptical of comprehensive theories. He stands on the terra firma of a gnarly reality which, though intrinsically intelligible, is only partially intelligible to him; a reality independent of human dreams, wishes, and wants.

Hayward goes too easy on the contemporary liberal or 'progressive.'  He should have pointed out that the 'liberal' will tear down what provably works without assurance that anything better can be put in its place. 'Progressives' have shown their willingness to break millions of eggs for an omelet the  possibility of which they have no good reason to believe in. The Left is pointlessly destructive and ever on the slouch toward the big Nihil.

American Conservatism

My brand of conservatism could be called American. It aims to preserve and where necessary restore the values and principles codified by the founders. Incorporating as it does elements of classical liberalism and libertarianism, American conservatism is far from throne-and-altar reaction. While anti-theocratic, it is not anti-religious. It stands for individual liberty and its necessary supports, private property, free markets, and limited government. It is liberal in its stress on liberties, but conservative in its sober view of human nature, a nature easily corrupted by power and in need of restraint. It avoids the reactionary and radical extremes. It incorporates the values of the Enlightenment. American conservatism presupposes the existence of “unalienable rights” which come from nature or from “nature's God.” First among the liberties mentioned in the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution is religious liberty which includes the liberty to exercise no religion. It is first in the order of exposition and (arguably) first also in the order of importance. The second liberty mentioned is free speech. Both of these classically American values are under assault from the utopian Left which has taken over the Democrat party in the USA.

As against certain factions of the alternative Right, American conservatism insists that the United States is a proposition nation: the propositions are in the founding documents. I don't see how that could be reasonably denied. These propositions define the American identity and provide a bulwark against the identity politics shared by the cultural Marxists and their alt-right opponents. But I also don't see how it could be reasonably denied that the discovery and articulation of classically American principles and values was achieved by people belonging to a certain tradition and will be preserved, if it is preserved, only by people in that tradition or who can be assimilated into it. This has consequences for immigration policy.

To allude to e pluribus unum, a One cannot be made out of just any Many. Some groups are unassimilable. I take it to be axiomatic that immigration must be to the benefit of the host country, a benefit not to be defined in merely economic terms. And so I ask a politically incorrect but perfectly reasonable question: Is there any net benefit to Muslim immigration? Immigrants bring their culture with them. Muslims, for example, bring with them a Sharia-based, hybrid religious-political ideology that is antithetical to American values. We are under no obligation to allow the immigration of subversive elements. The founding propositions are universally true; they are not the property of whites even though whites discovered them. But such propositions, while true for all humans and in this sense true universally, are not recognized by all humans, and not presently capable of being recognized or put into practice by all humans. The attempt to impart these propositions to some groups will be futile, especially if it involves force, or can be interpreted by the group in question as a cover for an attempt to dominate or control them for ulterior motives. The implication for foreign policy is that the USA must adopt an enlightened nationalism and not attempt to teach the presently unteachable.

The Dissident Right

Here:

The dissident right is, to some degree, a reaction to the shift on the Right, among the Buckleyites mostly, to embrace the blank slate and egalitarianism. This was mostly due to the infestation of neoconservatives and libertarians. The neocons brought with them that old Marxist belief that society can be willed into any shape you like, regardless of the people in it. Libertarians, like Marxists, simply refuse to accept the reality of the human condition. As a result, the mainstream Right implicitly embraced the blank slate.

 

Bergoglio the Benighted Aims to End Latin Mass Permission

There was and is something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view.

Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate  human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction  kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order.  Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents.  Suppose all that.

Still, religion would have  its immanent life-enhancing  role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning.  Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering.  Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides, or rather provided, is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent all expressed in the richness of its traditional Latin liturgy. 

Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk.  Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'  And then there was the refusal to teach hard-core doctrine and the lessening of requirements, one example being the no-meat-on-Friday rule.  Why re-name confession 'reconciliation?  What is the point of such a stupid change?  

A religion that makes no demands fails to provide the structure that people, especially the young, want and need.  Have you ever wondered what makes Islam is so attractive to young people? (One prominent example is John 'Jihad Johnny' Walker Lindh who was baptized Catholic.)

In its zeal to become 'relevant,' the Roman church succeeded only in making itself irrelevant.  Its cultural relevance is now practically nil. Is any Catholic today dissuaded from contraception or abortion or divorce by Catholic teaching? Do priests have the authority that they still had in the '50s and early '60s? Are any of them now taken seriously as they once were?  And who can take seriously an ancient church that allows its teaching to be tampered with by a leftist jackass such as Bergoglio?

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians out to submerge the Transcendent in the secular.  The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clientele, the conservatives and traditionalists.  

The church should be a 'liberal'-free zone.

There was and is something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view.

Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate  human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction  kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order.  Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents.  Suppose all that.

Still, religion would have  its immanent life-enhancing  role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning.  Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering.  Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides, or rather provided, is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent all expressed in the richness of its traditional Latin liturgy. 

Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk.  Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'  And then there was the refusal to teach hard-core doctrine and the lessening of requirements, one example being the no-meat-on-Friday rule.  Why re-name confession 'reconciliation?  What is the point of such a stupid change?  

A religion that makes no demands fails to provide the structure that people, especially the young, want and need.  Have you ever wondered what makes Islam is so attractive to young people? (One prominent example is John 'Jihad Johnny' Walker Lindh who was baptized Catholic.)

In its zeal to become 'relevant,' the Roman church succeeded only in making itself irrelevant.  Its cultural relevance is now practically nil. Is any Catholic today dissuaded from contraception or abortion or divorce by Catholic teaching? Do priests have the authority that they still had in the '50s and early '60s? Are any of them now taken seriously as they once were?  And who can take seriously an ancient church that allows its teaching to be tampered with by a leftist jackass such as Bergoglio?

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians out to submerge the Transcendent in the secular.  The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clientele, the conservatives and traditionalists.  

The church should be a 'liberal'-free zone.

Obesity is Not a Disease

Contemporary liberals spout nonsense about an 'epidemic' of obesity or obesity as a public health problem.  True, we Americans are a gluttonous people as witness competitive eating contests, the numerous food shows, and the complete lack of any sense among most that there is anything morally wrong with gluttony.  The moralists of old understood something when they classified gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins.

Obesity is not a disease; so, speaking strictly, there cannot be an epidemic of it.  There are two separate issues here.  One is whether obesity is a disease.   But even  if it is classified as a disease, it is surely not a contagious disease and so not something there can be an epidemic of. 

I know that 'epidemic' is used more broadly than this, even by epidemiologists; but this is arguably the result of an intrusion of liberal-left ideology into what is supposedly science.   Do you really think that 'epidemic' is being used in the same way in 'flu epidemic' and 'obesity epidemic'?  Is obesity contagious?  If fat Al sneezes in my face, should I worry about contracting the obesity virus? There is no such virus.   

Obesity is not contagious and not a disease.   I know what some will say: obesity is socially contagious.  But now you've shifted the sense  of 'contagious.'    You've engaged in a bit of semantic mischief.  It is not as if there are two kinds of contagion, natural and social.  Social contagion is not contagion any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck. 'Social' in 'socially contagious' is an alienans adjective.

Why then are you fat?  You are fat because you eat too much of the wrong sorts of food and refuse to exercise.  For most people that's all there is to it.  It's your fault.  It is not the result of being attacked by a virus.  It is within your power to be fat or not.  It is a matter of your FREE WILL.  You have decided to become fat or to remain fat.  When words such as 'epidemic' and 'disease' are used in connection with obesity, that is an ideological denial of free will, an attempt to shift responsibility from the agent to factors external to the agent such as the 'evil' corporations that produce so-called 'junk' food.

There is no such thing as junk food.

There are public health problems, but obesity is not one of them.  It is a private problem resident at the level of the individual and the family. The totalitarians of the contemporary Democrat party don't want you to know this. They want total control, including control of what you eat. They want, so to speak, the whole enchilada. 

Here are some arguments pro et con as to whether or not obesity is a disease.

Political Hatred: A Look Back at Nixon

Has any president of the United States been the object of deeper hatred than Donald Trump? Abraham Lincoln perhaps. But in recent decades only Richard Nixon comes close.  Both Nixon and Trump elicit mindless rage, and for similar reasons.  The elites hate both because they have no class.  That's the short answer. For nuance we turn to Paul Johnson's 1988 In Praise of Richard Nixon, which contains a wealth of insights that can be put to use in the present to understand the Trump phenomenon. Here are some excerpts (emphases added, and brief comments in blue):

What makes Nixon’s insistence that the world is run by realpolitik and national interest even more objectionable to liberals is that he is as much an idealist as they are; but in his way, not theirs. Streetwise in the global metropolis, Nixon is nonetheless in many respects an old-fashioned evangelical American patriot. He rose by hard work from humble origins to the world’s highest office. He is deeply grateful to the fair and free society which made such an ascent possible, and he is anxious to pay his debt to it. He also believes, as all Americans up to recent decades were taught to believe, that providence has been good to America as a whole, and that America as a society and a great power has incurred reciprocal obligations. He states openly: “Almost nowhere else on earth are people as secure and as prosperous as in the United States. Both our great power and our great blessings challenge us to adopt policies in both foreign and domestic affairs whose ultimate goal is to make the world safer and better.”

Liberals find this tone of voice, coming on top of the realpolitik, insufferable. They feel it is sanctimonious, hypocritical, sly, self-seeking. They believe it springs from a devious nature incapable of truth. [They called him Tricky Dick] The idea that it might be totally and passionately sincere is inconceivable to them. From the start, then, liberal antipathy to Nixon was and is based on a profound misunderstanding of his moral character.

Dislike is deepened by social contempt. It is often assumed by foreigners, and believed by Americans themselves, that class plays no part in American politics. This may be generally true, but there are certainly exceptions, and the anti-Nixon syndrome is one of them. Nixon was a hard-working man who raised himself not from romantic poverty but from the dullest of lower-middle-class backgrounds. He did so early and quickly and without acquiring any of the social graces or eccentricities or gimmicks or rhetorical flourishes or parlor tricks which make a climber interesting. Nor did he ever learn to hide his obvious ambition or cloak it in the progressive sentiments of the day.

Like everyone else in politics, Nixon wanted fame and power, but he did not know how to make his yearnings culturally respectable. There was nothing about him—his school, his tastes, his choice of language, his friends, his interests, his heroes, his reading—that was remotely fashionable. He could at times be gauche, say the wrong thing, make the awkward, grating gesture. To East Coast liberals from assured, easy backgrounds and Ivy League schools, he appeared to be everything they most detested: brash, self-seeking, uncultured, greedy for money and power, devoid of noblesse oblige, hard and materialistic. They could not bear the thought of being ruled by him and his like. Immediately after the 1960 presidential election, a victorious John F. Kennedy contemptuously summed up this feeling: Nixon, he said, “went out like he came in—no class.”

To a European, this comment, coming from the son of a man who was little better than a financial gangster, is full of ironies. The Kennedys, to an outside observer, far from embodying the principle of American legitimacy, appear rather to illustrate the rapacity with which a predatory immigrant clan exploits the opportunities America offers: the unscrupulous father amassing wealth so that his indulged and conscienceless offspring may buy their way into office and power. Visiting Washington as British Prime Minister shortly after Kennedy was elected, Harold Macmillan commented: “It’s rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable North Italian town.” As time goes by, and the sins of the Kennedys multiply with the generations, the comparison seems ever more apt.

But whatever their moral shortcomings—and these were seen less clearly in the 1960’s than now—the younger Kennedys possessed enviable social advantages. They not only had a lot of money but had never been put to the coarsening trouble of earning it. They made the appropriate cultural noises. They had the right academic and media connections, and could buy more if necessary. They had their own court historians and tame editors. They spoke the liberal vernacular with zeal if not from inner conviction. Most important of all, they exercised, like any other self-assured aristocracy, however ersatz, a powerful appeal over the intelligentsia, which will always prefer a graceful prince to a self-made man. To the intellectuals, and to East Coast liberals generally, the 1960 election was between “us” and “them,” a Manichean struggle between enlightenment and materialism.

In fact it was one of the most corrupt elections of modern times, with the Democratic machine forced to play all its grubby cards to get Kennedy elected at all. He won by a whisker in circumstances which will always make the validity of his election dubious. It says a lot for Nixon’s old-fashioned notions of patriotism and decorum—“no class” notwithstanding—that he refused to challenge the result. And so it was that Camelot came into being, the glittering antithesis of Nixonian suburbia: in the foreground, cerebral rhetoric, haute couture, patronage of the arts; in the background, sexual athletics with Mafia molls, shielded by a compliant press.

[. . .]

_____________

So in 1968 Nixon became President after all, and great was the gnashing of teeth in the liberal middle and upper classes. His was the first postwar administration from which the East Coast establishment was largely excluded, its places taken by men, often Californians, anti-intellectuals, and provincials, who aroused in the liberal soul a peculiar detestation. That Nixon set about fulfilling his campaign promise of scaling down, then ending, the Vietnam war was neither here nor there: once again, it was the tone that was objectionable.

Nixon made no secret of the fact that he disliked the metropolitan media. Worse, he developed an alarming skill at speaking over the head of the media directly to the American people, taking it upon himself to voice the hopes and fears of what he termed “the silent majority.” [Just like Trump, but without Twitter.] While never exactly popular—incapable, perhaps, of being popular with any wide section of the community—he became an extremely effective populist.

If the Nixon victory of 1968 was hard for the liberals to bear, his landslide of 1972 was insupportable, particularly since Nixon had openly accepted the Democratic candidacy of Senator George McGovern as an opportunity for the contest he had sought: Middle America against progressive pandaemonium. “Here is a situation,” Nixon exultantly told his staff, “where the Eastern establishment media finally has a candidate who almost totally shares their views.” He added that the “real ideological bent of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and the three TV networks” was “on the side of amnesty, pot, abortion, confiscations of wealth (unless it is theirs), massive increases in welfare, unilateral disarmament, reduction of our defenses, and surrender in Vietnam.” At last, then, “the country will find out whether what the media has been standing for during these last five years really represents the majority thinking.”

Nixon’s overwhelming victory, carrying the Electoral College 521 to 17 and picking up over 60 percent of the popular vote, ought to have settled the matter. But it did not. Although the events which led up to Watergate and Nixon’s abdication are extremely complicated, one salient fact must be borne in mind. The Eastern liberal establishment never really admitted the legitimacy of the Nixon administration. From the start, the media interests which spoke for the establishment treated the Nixon presidency as in some metaphysical sense an outlaw regime whose true, unconstitutional character would eventually be exposed. The powerful barons of the Eastern press and TV felt themselves morally and constitutionally entitled to snatch back the power he had secured from the voters by (as they saw it) chicanery. All they needed was a pretext.  [Sound familiar?]

Nixon played into their hands. His deep sense of insecurity, reinforced by what was now almost a paranoid hatred and fear of the press, led him to confuse a perfectly justified desire to prevent the media from publishing state secrets—as they had done in the case of the Pentagon Papers and other documents—with the routine skulduggery of party-political espionage. The result was the Watergate mess.

_____________

In essence, Watergate was a mess and nothing more. The Nixon administration’s record of misuse of power and raison d’état was no worse than that of Truman and Eisenhower, and considerably better than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s. There was none of the personal corruption which had marked the rule of Lyndon Johnson, let alone the gross immoralities and security risks of John F. Kennedy’s White House. Nixon’s sins were venial and sprang mostly from misplaced loyalty. The notion that he plotted an assault on the Constitution and the rule of law is a malicious invention.

Indeed, the way in which the opportunities offered by Watergate were exploited by the Eastern media, aided by a hostile Congress—a key element in the story—and by a section of the legal establishment to whom Nixon was anathema, is a frightening example of how the will of a popular majority can be frustrated and overturned by the skillful manipulation of press and TV. This was the first media Putsch in history, as ruthless and anti-democratic as any military coup by bemedaled generals with their sashes and sabers. It is obvious that Nixon, a responsible and experienced statesman preoccupied with the international problems of the early 1970’s, not least the appalling Middle East crisis of autumn 1973 and its disastrous economic aftermath, consistently underestimated the unscrupulousness of his media enemies and their willingness to sacrifice the national interest in the pursuit of their institutional vendetta.

So great was the inequity of Nixon’s downfall that future historians may well conclude he would have been justified in allowing events to take their course and in subjecting the nation to the prolonged paralysis of a public impeachment, which at least would have given him the opportunity to defend himself by due process of law. But once again his patriotism took precedence over his self-interest, and he cut short the national agony by a voluntary abdication. In defeat he was dignified and not at all disposed to recriminate. The episode wrecked his official career, but going through the fire strengthened and refined his moral character. By a curious paradox Richard Nixon was one of the very few people who emerged from the Watergate affair with credit. But he remained, and remains, as mysterious as ever.

_____________

Fallen statesmen rarely rise again. But it pays them to live long. Nixon, like Herbert Hoover before him, has survived nearly all his enemies. And he has made much better use of his retirement than Hoover did. Few men have been more successful at putting the past behind them and looking firmly into the future.

His new book is only one example of the assiduity and genuine excitement with which Nixon scans the distant horizons of geopolitics. There are few retired Washington giants—Henry Kissinger is an exception—who keep themselves so well briefed on the state of the world, or who have more worthwhile observations to make about it. In its modest way, 1999: Victory Without War is an excellent geopolitical primer, which, if academics were not so prejudiced, could well serve as an introductory textbook in courses in political science.

By the term “victory” in the title, Nixon does not mean an ideological or economic conquest but rather a process of persuasion whereby the freedoms generally recognized as desirable and productive can be more widely, and eventually universally, spread. He looks first at the present posture of the two superpowers. Then, in three carefully argued chapters, he shows how the United States can peacefully prevent the Soviets from making risky forward moves, how it can match and refute Soviet propaganda in the uncommitted world, and, not least, how it can effectively negotiate with Moscow to reduce tension and arms budgets.

Nixon next turns to the three economic-growth areas—Western Europe, which he calls “the fragmented giant”; Japan, the “reluctant giant”; and China, the “awakened giant”—which will in his judgment expand the present two superpowers into five, and shows how each of them can play a constructive role in the negotiation-from-strength process he envisages. He then provides a survey of Third World theaters of conflict where competition between economic and political systems is most intense.

_____________

Nixon’s final chapter concerns the United States itself, and is a plea that Americans will reinforce their material success by a return to the pristine idealism of the men who created what he calls “the animating principles of our country.” In his view, the new thinking which Gorbachev is urging his Soviet comrades to adopt should be matched by a fundamental reappraisal of America’s conduct and role. Nixon wants Americans to be remembered “not just as a good people who took care of themselves without doing harm to others” but as a “great people” who went “beyond the call of duty” in helping to enlarge the freedoms enjoyed all over the world.

This is the kind of traditional nationalist idealism which Nixon’s critics find insincere and repellent. To me, as an outsider who feels none of this emotional hostility to the ex-President, it seems patently sincere, almost painfully so. Moreover, I think it strikes echoes among a very large number of ordinary Americans. One of Nixon’s greatest strengths is his nose for what the voters feel at any given time. There can be few men whose judgment of the American political scene is so shrewd and penetrating, as well as surprisingly objective. [Nixon had a Trumpian nose, to put it anachronistically.]

Most ex-Presidents are anxious to offer their advice to those who succeed them, and find themselves consulted often out of mere courtesy. Nixon’s advice, by contrast, is eagerly solicited and often taken. He probably exercises more political influence than any other Western statesman not actually in office. Considering the depths of degradation from which he has climbed, this is a remarkable achievement.

In thus rehabilitating himself, Nixon has displayed courage, endurance, persistence, patience, skill, and—there is no other word for it—magnanimity. This greatness of heart is something his enemies never dreamed he possessed, and helps to explain their misunderstanding of his nature. “No class”: today, the cruel snobbery of the phrase reflects solely on the man who uttered it, and whose own reputation declines with every fresh unveiling of the record. To the contrary: the last fifteen years have shown that Richard Nixon has a lot of class. But it remains to be seen whether history will give him the justice his contemporaries denied him.

Matthew Schmitz on George Will

The True Con in First Things.  Unnecessarily harsh? You decide.

Are You a Right-Wing Extremist? Take this Test!

The following is from a Salon article. The enumeration is mine; I did, however, preserve the order of the bulleted list in the Salon piece. After each item you will find brief and not-so-brief commentary by your humble correspondent.

The XRW chart contains 20 examples of behavior which could indicate right-wing extremist values and suggest that a person is being radicalized into joining that dangerous movement.

Some of these warnings are:

1) Describe themselves as 'Patriots'

A patriot is one who loves his country.  Patriotism is a good thing, a virtue. Like any virtue, it is a mean between two extremes. One of the extremes is excessive love of one's country, while the other is a deficiency of love for one's country. The patriot's love of his country is ordinate, measured, within bounds.  The patriot is neither a chauvinist (jingoist) nor a neutralist. Both are anti-patriots. He loves his country with an ordinate love. He loves it and seeks its improvement, but not its "fundamental transformation." One does not love that which one wishes fundamentally to transform. One who does seek such a "fundamental transformation" is no patriot.   

The patriot is also not a xenophobe since ordinate love of one's country does not entail hatred or fear of other countries or their inhabitants.

Patriotism, defined as the ordinate love of, and loyalty to, one's country is morally justified.  It is justified analogously as love of, and loyalty to, one's family is justified. You love your spouse and you are loyal to her. The partiality this implies is not only morally permissible; it is also morally obligatory.  Similarly with the partiality the patriot displays toward his country.

There is nothing 'extreme' about being a patriot.

2) Refers to Political Correctness as some left wing or communist plot.

Political Correctness does in fact originate with the Communist Party.

Communism as a political force, though not quite dead, is moribund; but one of its offspring, Political Correctness, is alive and kicking especially in the universities, the courts, in the mainstream media, in Hollywood, in the Democrat Party, and indeed wherever liberals and leftists dominate. To understand PC one must understand the CP, for the former is child of the latter.

In her fascinating memoir, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (Oxford 1990), Healey mentions the tendency leftists have of purging one another on grounds of insufficient ideological purity: it is almost as if, for a leftist, one can never be too far left. Healey writes:

The great irony of the McCarthy period is that we did almost as much damage to ourselves, in the name of purifying our ranks, as Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover and all the other witch-hunters combined were able to do. One of the most catastrophically stupid things we ever did was to choose this moment to launch an internal campaign against white chauvinism. (125)

'White chauvinism' was the term used in the '50s in CPUSA circles for racism. After singing the praises of the Party for its commitment to racial equality, Healey continues:

However, with the white chauvinism campaign of 1949-1953, what had been a legitimate concern turned into an obsession, a ritual act of self-purification that did nothing to strengthen the Party in its fight against racism and was manipulated by some Communist leaders for ends which had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole campaign. Once an accusation of white chauvinism was thrown against a white Communist, there was no defense. Debate was over. By the very act of denying the validity of the charge, you only proved your own guilt. Thousands of people were caught up in this campaign — not only in the Party itself, but within the Progressive Party and some of the Left unions as well. In Los Angeles alone we must have expelled two hundred people on charges of white chauvinism, usually on the most trivial of pretexts. People would be expelled for serving coffee in a chipped coffee cup to a Black or serving watermelon at the end of dinner. (p. 126 emphasis added.)

Healey goes on to describe how she herself was brought up on a white chauvinism charge, was forced to admit guilt, sign a statement, etc. She details how it was impossible to criticize even the most incompetent of Black party members. (pp. 126-129)

Not much has changed in this regard. There is nothing a liberal fears more than to be labeled a racist, and, like 'fascist,' 'racist' is a term they apply indiscriminately to their political opponents as an all-purpose smear word.

3) Describe multicultural towns as 'lost'

I don't know what this is supposed to mean. No comment.

4) Looks at opponents as 'Traitors'

Surely some of the political opponents of conservatives are traitors and are rightly viewed as such by us.  But not all. Some are stupid. Some are ignorant. Some simply lack life experience and knowledge of history. Some have been brain-washed, or to put it more mildly: ill-served by their supposed 'educators.' 

No 'extremity' here.

5) Use the term 'Islamofascism'

Well, Islam, a combined political-religious ideology, is in fact totalitarian. If one conflates fascism with totalitarianism, then 'Islamofascist' is an accurate descriptive term.  If so, it is not 'extreme.' The calm and measured Michael Medved, no extremist, used 'Islamofascist' some years back and so did I. I no longer use the term because I reserve 'fascism' for the political ideology of Benito Mussolini.

6) Make generalisations about Muslims and Jews

Generalize we must. There is no thinking without generalization. But one can generalize well and arrive at truths or generalize poorly and promulgate falsehoods.

True generalization: Most of the terrorist acts in recent decades have been perpetrated by Muslims. 

False generalization: All of the terrorist acts in recent decades have been perpetrated by Muslims.

True generalization: Jews as a group are more intelligent than blacks as a group.

False generalization: Jews for centuries have been murdering Christian children and using their blood in religious ceremonies. 

Clearly, there is nothing wrong or 'extreme' with generalizing about Muslims and Jews -- and everything else -- so long as one does it correctly with attention to fact.

7) Have XRW extreme group stickers or badges on clothing and personal items

What, for example, the MAGA logo on a hat?

8) Make inaccurate generalisations about 'the Left' or Government

I need an example of one of these 'inaccurate generalisations.' Everyone is, or ought to be, opposed to inaccurate generalizations. 

9) Talk of an impending racial conflict or 'Race War'

Who is talking about a 'race war'?  Examples needed. There is of course much talk nowadays about the possibility of a hot civil war, and some of this talk emanates from the race-baiting Left.

10) Threaten violence when losing an argument, although claiming that XRW groups protest peacefully

This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The threats of violence are mostly from the Left. Consider the threats against President Trump.

11) Become increasingly angry at perceived injustices or threats to so called 'National Identity'

This is another example of a deep lack of self-awareness on the part of leftists.  It is certainly rich to hear identity-political leftists complain about those who speak of national identity.  As a matter of fact, nations do have their own unique identities, and every nation has a right to preserve its identity. There is nothing 'extreme' about that.

Salon article here.

Communism as a political force, though not quite dead, is moribund; but one of its offspring, Political Correctness, is alive and kicking especially in the universities, the courts, in the mainstream media, in Hollywood, in the Democrat Party, and indeed wherever liberals and leftists dominate. To understand PC one must understand the CP, for the former is child of the latter.

In her fascinating memoir, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (Oxford 1990), Healey mentions the tendency leftists have of purging one another on grounds of insufficient ideological purity: it is almost as if, for a leftist, one can never be too far left. Healey writes:

The great irony of the McCarthy period is that we did almost as much damage to ourselves, in the name of purifying our ranks, as Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover and all the other witch-hunters combined were able to do. One of the most catastrophically stupid things we ever did was to choose this moment to launch an internal campaign against white chauvinism. (125)

'White chauvinism' was the term used in the '50s in CPUSA circles for racism. After singing the praises of the Party for its commitment to racial equality, Healey continues:

However, with the white chauvinism campaign of 1949-1953, what had been a legitimate concern turned into an obsession, a ritual act of self-purification that did nothing to strengthen the Party in its fight against racism and was manipulated by some Communist leaders for ends which had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole campaign. Once an accusation of white chauvinism was thrown against a white Communist, there was no defense. Debate was over. By the very act of denying the validity of the charge, you only proved your own guilt. Thousands of people were caught up in this campaign — not only in the Party itself, but within the Progressive Party and some of the Left unions as well. In Los Angeles alone we must have expelled two hundred people on charges of white chauvinism, usually on the most trivial of pretexts. People would be expelled for serving coffee in a chipped coffee cup to a Black or serving watermelon at the end of dinner. (p. 126 emphasis added.)

Healey goes on to describe how she herself was brought up on a white chauvinism charge, was forced to admit guilt, sign a statement, etc. She details how it was impossible to criticize even the most incompetent of Black party members. (pp. 126-129)

Not much has changed in this regard. There is nothing a liberal fears more than to be labeled a racist, and, like 'fascist,' 'racist' is a term they apply indiscriminately to their political opponents as an all-purpose smear word.

Michael Anton on Tucker Carlson

Here

Damon Linker on Never-Trumping Neo-Cons

Why do never-trumping neo-con nitwits such as the bootless Max Boot allow Donald Trump to live rent-free in their heads and drive them crazy?  That's my formulation of the question, not Linker's,  but he provides a good answer to it ( emphases added):

More fully than any other faction in the American commentariat, neocon pundits believe axiomatically in the goodness of America — in the nobility of our national aims, and in the capacity of that nobility to sanctify the means we use to achieve them. They believe that all good things go together under the benign rule of the global Pax Americana. What's good for the United States is automatically good for all people of good will everywhere, who with our help get to enjoy ever-greater freedom, democracy, and prosperity. This is the neocons' faith. They believe it as fervently as any adherent of any religion.

But of course not everyone in American politics takes this view, and so there is partisanship, with the neocons working to uphold this pristine, highly idealized, and empirically unfalsifiable vision of the U.S. against various heretics and apostates from the faith. Until the rise of Trump, most of these heretics and apostates were found on the left, with a few (like Pat Buchanan) popping up from time to time on the paleocon right. From their home in the Republican Party, the neocons sometimes won these battles and sometimes lost. But the cause was righteous, so every defeat was admirable in its way and merely temporary — a prelude to the next victory.

Those who described Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 primaries as a hostile takeover of the Republican Party were correct — at least from the standpoint of the party's Washington establishment, which very much included the neocons. But unlike the establishment's other factions — wealthy donors and business interests out for another tax cut; lobbyists hoping to advance the interests of an industry or group of citizens — the neocons couldn't just play along with the changing of the guard. They were much too high-minded to accept the debasement of the presidency and the party. There was thus no place for them in the new order.

The neocons not only lost a policy battle. They also lost their perch, their perks, and their power in the party. That made, and still makes, Trump's victory intensely personal.

When the Trump haters set out to write their umpteenth denunciation of the president, calling him bad for the country, bad for the GOP, and bad for the world, they undoubtedly mean it. But they also have other motives. The rise of Donald Trump has above all been exceedingly bad for them. They're still angry about it, and they're still out for revenge, every single time they sit down to write.

Both leftists and neo-cons are obsessed with Trump the man. If they were really as high-minded as Linker says they are, they wouldn't take it all so personally. Besides being unhealthy, Trump-obsession is vicious and immoral. They should stop slandering him as a racist, xenophobe, Islamophobe, etc. and stop trying to 'get him' on some trumped-up charges.  The more his enemies vilify him, the more support he will get from the Coalition of the Sane.  What lefties and neo-cons should be discussing are his policy ideas.  See Michael Anton, The Trump Doctrine. 

We who support Trump do not do so because of his lack of class, his braggadoccio, his orange hair, inarticulate  tweets, exaggerations, and other blemishes, but because he is a patriot* with good ideas and the will to implement them.  He has delivered on his campaign promises despite the nasty obstructionism of the Dems, the media, and members of his own party.   We support him because he is willing to punch back hard against the enemies of America foreign and domestic.  We support him because he is not an ever-losing pussy like Jeb! Bush or a milque-toast maverick like John McCain.

____________

*Unlike Obama. No patriot seeks a fundamental transformation of his country.  What you love you do not seek fundamentally to transform.  Trump: MAGA. Obama, Hillary, and the Left: Destroy America as she was founded to be.

ADDENDUM (5/3). Jacques reacts:

A quick unsolicited thought about Linker's statement that the neocons were "too high minded to accept the debasement of the presidency and the party".  It is utterly absurd to describe these people as "high minded".  These are the same people who have supported futile bloody foreign adventures, for transparently phony reasons.  These are the people who always support Israel and its ethnonationalist policies while denouncing even the slightest hint of ethnic consciousness in white Americans.  Linker claims that they believe in the "goodness" of America.  I doubt that most of them really believe in anything.  They're utterly dishonest.  Calling themselves "conservatives" (of any kind) is dishonest.

 

But more importantly, it's absurd to think that the Republican party was "debased" by Trump.  We are talking here about a racket.  The function of the Republican party for many decades has been to fool its pathetic and deluded but fundamentally decent and patriotic base.  The party pretends to care about the well-being and religion and values of these people, but has never done anything for them.  On the contrary, the party represents crony capitalists, oligarchs, Washington insiders and lobbyists.  The policies of the party have always been designed to benefit the wealthy con artists in the party and the wealthier donors and interests who control it.  

 

Just think of George W. Bush, that semi-literate fool, orchestrating war with Iraq on the basis of absurd lies about Hussein's connection to bin Laden.  Millions died.  Ordinary Americans were killed and maimed for nothing.  At the same time, Bush was spouting leftist horseshit about "no child left behind" and getting teachers fired because they couldn't meet his Soviet-style diktats about the test scores that low IQ students were supposed to achieve.  (Of course the teachers cheated.  What were they supposed to do?)  He also gave us such memorable phrases as "the religion of peace" and celebrated Ramadan at the White House.  And all the while the country was being flooded with immigrants whose presence makes life ever more miserable for the Republican base.  

 

That was the neocon Republican party.  The party of pointless killing and "regime change" with no plan beyond "elections".  The party of leftist lies about race and IQ.  The party of multicultural inclusion and corporate capitalism.  Could that party be "debased"? 

 

From my perspective, Trump's tone is crude but--during his campaign at least--his message was infinitely more noble and high minded than anything these party insiders had ever said.  True, they don't use swear words and they (maybe?) don't bang call girls.  But their "ideas" were never anything more than a thin veneer meant to distract from their psychopathic greed and narcissism.

 

Comments now enabled.

 

A Good Summary of the Political Thinking of Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt on Political Power by Jürgen Braungardt.  Excerpt:

Political existentialism?

Schmitt is a political existentialist in the following sense: ‘The political’, that mode of human experience that expresses itself in interpersonal relations of power and struggle, is logically and temporally prior to all political institutions. It is expressed in the distinction between friend and enemy, which is from Schmitt’s point of view a fact of human psychology. We are naturally hostile not only to strangers, but to others. In this regard, his position is close to Thomas Hobbes. [Walter] Benjamin subverts this idea by adding a perspective of compassion: We may be hostile to strangers, but most of us are also strangers, aliens, immigrants, or refugees. We live in times of global migration, and nation states have lost their importance for the definition of political identity. But Schmitt would counter that any call for an inclusion of the “tradition of the oppressed” never brought us closer to a humanitarian turn in history. Instead, Marxist, anarchist, or liberal progress thinkers have several traits in common: they  dream of a better future, but by doing so they instrumentalize the present.  In reality, they attempt to overcome the political dimension, because for them the struggle for political power is dirty, and fundamentally, they want to abolish political power altogether. But politics with utopian aims often culminates in the creation of a Leviathan – an uncontrollable and powerful sovereign entity that forces us to abandon our humanity in exchange for the membership in a system that tends to become totalitarian.

That's a good insight on the part of Schmitt.  Anarchists and 'progressives' try to "instrumentalize the present," that is, to make of it a means to achieve a utopian state (condition) that will justify the violent and by bourgeois standards immoral means necessary in the present to reach the political eschaton in which the political as such will be aufgehoben. But the quest for 'pie in the future' reliably results in the creation of a totalizing monster state complete with gulag and Vernichtungslager in which our humanity is extinguished.

Carl Schmitt is eerily relevant at the present moment in American politics. And the unlikely Donald J. Trump has unwittingly made political philosophy come alive like never before. Read this:

The sovereign and the state of emergency

In his book “Political Theology” (1922), Schmitt famously declares that the sovereign is he who determines the state of emergency, and thus has the political power to act outside the boundaries of the law in times of crisis. With this definition of the sovereign, Schmitt distinguishes between the rule of the law, and the rule of people. Should we allow society to be ruled only by a system of by laws, which means that the actions of rulers also have to be law-abiding? Or should we accept that we need people to be in control of the system, who can at times override or disable the law in order to deal with an emergency, or with a situation for which the law has no provision? According to Schmitt, the essence of political power is the ability to suspend normal law and assume special powers, just like the ancient dictators did. In his definition, the exception defines the limit, and this boundary constitutes what politics is. The answer to “Who decides the exception?” is the precondition of the law being obligatory and being, in fact, obeyed. Even proto-liberals such as John Locke, admitted that the executive must be permitted the power to suspend the laws if necessary for the good of society. The conflict between executive and legislative branches of the government plays itself out in US constitutional law in the different interpretations of the power of the President, or in cases where the President overrides or evades congressional authority.

I am not suggesting that President Trump, in declaring a national emergency anent the southern border, is operating outside the law. But some whom I respect are claiming just that.  I am simply drawing attention to Schmitt's relevance to the question.

We are living in exciting times, philosophical times!  If I were a young man I would be worried, but I am not, and "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk."

Related: The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom

Addendum. Heather MacDonald needs to read Schmitt. Here is how her A Threat to the Constitutional Order ends:

For centuries, Western political theory has struggled with the problem of how to free individuals from the yoke of capricious power. Humanity’s greatest minds conceived of a government constrained by neutral principles. The ground rules in a constitutional polity are set in advance; they cannot be gamed to give one side of a political struggle an unfair and possibly insuperable advantage. The United States does need a wall on its southern border, accompanied by a radical revision of the legal-immigration system to prioritize skills, language, and assimilability. But if we remove the constitutional boundaries around each branch of government, as Trump’s emergency funding appropriation threatens to do, we will have lost the very thing that makes Western democracies so attractive to the rest of the world. The Supreme Court, when the inevitable legal challenges reach it, should strike Trump’s declaration down.

Heather Mac is telling us that the ground rules cannot be gamed to give one side an advantage.  Well, if she means that they ought not be gamed, then she is right. But they are gamed, and so they can be. If SCOTUS is dominated by leftists who think of the Constitution as a 'living document,' then their rulings will constitute serious 'gaming' in the form of legislating from the bench. How is that for a removal of constitutional boundaries between branches of government? Besides, the law has to be enforced to count as law in any serious sense.   If the Congress does not provide the funding necessary for proper enforcement of the immigration laws, then that too is a serious 'gaming' of the system.  If the Left does not respect the rule of law, then why is the chief executive not justified in declaring a national emergency?

It is all very well to speak of "the rule of law not of men," but when Congress refuses to uphold the rule of law then we may have a Schmittian state of exception wherein the chief executive may and perhaps must override the Congress.  I say "may have" because it is not clear to me that Trump's  declaration of a state of emergency is illegal or extralegal.