Maverick Philosopher

Political Tactics: Downplay the Culture War Pro Tempore?

I tend to side with Kari Lake on the wisdom of a pro tem tactical downplay as we head for 2024. But here is the other side of the argument. 

Put simply, the big mistake in thinking the culture war isn’t the most critical issue heading into 2024 is that all of American politics is now one big culture war. The culture war is the only issue because the cultural war is everything now. When one side stakes its claim to political power on offering abortion up until birth and transgender operations for 8-year-olds, and holds out these policies as proof of its moral authority, we’re way past arguing over how to get the economy back on track. There’s no going back to that kind of politics.

Tucker Carlson hit on this at the end of his big speech at Heritage recently. He compared the values of the political left to the values of the Aztecs, who sacrificed children to their bloodthirsty gods — and he wasn’t wrong. Our politics, he argued, have shifted profoundly in a relatively short period of time. Instead of arguing over the best means to bring about an agreed-upon common good, we no longer agree about what the common good is.

As for Tucker Carlson, his defenestration, and what our boy is fixing to do about it, see Megan Kelly. 

The level of political polarization in this country is astonishing. An article at The Nation begins like this: "The horrific murder of Jordan Neely on a New York subway spoke volumes about the tolerance of racial violence in the American social order."  What planet does the author live on? The planet Unsinn. 

See our earlier discussion on the tactical question. 

How the Dems Will Win in 2024

Victor Davis Hanson explains.

Here's an alternative scenario from Paul Kengor.

"If RFK [Jr.] goes third party, it would be doomsday for Democrats. It could bring Donald Trump back to the White House. And if that happens, Democrats [will] have only themselves to blame for their idiotic, authoritarian policies on everything from vaccine mandates to drag queen story hours to transgender athletes bullying girls."

Comments now enabled.

Trump the Only Way Forward

Conservatives Lost the Culture War and the Trump Agenda is the Only Path Forward

Refreshingly realistic but also deeply troubling. I fear the author is right. Conservatives lost the culture war and so now: 

Conservatives do not have a viable path to political power any other way. The issues of national survival are of primary importance. There is no point in fighting a culture war if we don’t have a country in which this war can take place. [. . .]

Trying to rehash these old battles in the present political moment, when institutional Christianity no longer has any meaningful political or cultural clout, is a waste of time—at least at the national level.

COVID-19 made the weakness of American Christianity painfully clear. Protestant and Catholic churches alike overwhelmingly declared themselves nonessential during the spring of 2020. That was, sadly, merely an acknowledgement of a longstanding reality.

Virtually no one today cares what the pope or any megachurch pastor, for that matter, has to say about political and cultural life. Their endorsements do not move the needle and their influence has had little to no bearing, even on their own flocks, when it comes to preserving the older standards of Christian morality and decency.  

[. . .]

We live in a country where the president says it is antisemitic to ban trans surgery for minors. And yet you will strain yourself trying to hear any priest or pastor say a word in response. Millions of Americans are hurting, desperately confused about their very identity and sexual impulses, and the leaders of the churches have almost nothing to say. Nonessential workers indeed.

[. . .]

One wonders what purpose, at this point, the differentiation between denominations even serves. Pope Francis, just like John MacArthur, agrees with the leftist view of racism. And Tim Keller, just like Pope Francis, lauds mass immigration. On the most prominent liberal issues of our day there is total agreement among the leaders of the West’s supposedly different Christian denominations. 

America has a moral majority, all right. It’s just liberal. The Left controls every institutional power center in America. Wall Street, the media, the universities, Hollywood, the military—you name it—everywhere the liberal consensus reigns supreme. There is not a single Fortune 500 company in America, not one, that would denounce transgender surgery for minors. 

Those institutions shape the public consciousness in a way social conservatives simply cannot. Manufactured consent is real and all around us. A large portion of Americans simply accept whatever their televisions and cellphones tell them to believe no matter how perverted, wrong, or harmful. Even many of those who do not agree with it, at least bow to the moral consensus. Think of all those many millions who got vaccinated, not because they wanted to, but because their “job required it” or because they couldn’t “travel without it.”

The idea that large numbers of Americans are going to “wake up” and “push back” is simply a cope. That’s not how popular opinion works. The idea that Americans are going to see transgenderism as a bridge too far is, I think, much overhyped. I remember the gay marriage “debates,” such as they were. I remember Prop 8 passing in 2008 in California. I also remember how none of these setbacks for the Left ultimately had any bearing in the end. By 2015, gay marriage was the law of the land. Today it is untouchable liberal orthodoxy supported by a majority of Americans, including large numbers of “conservatives.”

Deploying more 10,000-word essays on teleology and the new natural law isn’t going to solve the social issue problem either. Millions of Americans didn’t start shoving dildos in orifices, guzzling sex change hormones, and consuming billions of hours of pornography a year because they read an article or heard an argument. These sexual and social perversions spring from a much deeper source, one that isn’t going to be solved by policy wrangling in D.C. think tanks. 

The spiritual crisis that afflicts the West runs far deeper than most social conservatives want to admit. They don’t understand how bad things really are, which is why they stand around, mouths agape, as they try to figure out what a “furry” is or why U.S. military officers dress up in leather “pup play” fetish gear while they sodomize each other in uniform and then post photos to social media.

In light of our ongoing moral and spiritual crisis, I fully expect that the Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney controversy is merely a blip that will soon pass. In the 1990s Ikea ran the world’s first commercial featuring a gay couple. In 2022, Ikea was valued at $17 billion. Go woke, go broke? 

Sure. 

The Matt Walsh’s of the world won’t want to hear this, but trying to fight the Left on gender with desiccated Socratic arguments (“What is a woman?”) is a losing battle. Owning liberals with facts and logic is mostly a waste of time.Political power doesn’t flow from scoring debate points in the “free marketplace of ideas.” It comes from the willingness to impose one’s beliefs on others and possessing the resources to do so. 

All morality requires enforcement. 

The Left implicitly understands that point. They are more than happy to crush their opponents. Just ask Donald Trump, John Eastman, Douglas Mackey, or any of the January 6 defendants. Strip away civilization and politics boils down to the distinction between friend and enemies. [You need a reference to Carl Schmitt here, son.] That’s why the White House hosted a trans day of visibility just two days after a transgender terrorist murdered six Christians in Tennessee. 

At some point, every political regime must put its foot down. Some people think cannibalism is wrong, others think that it is right. If the former are to prevail politically they must be willing to use force against the latter. In the end, this is what morality requires. This is what morality is. 

BV: The sound point here is that morality is just a lot of impotent prescriptions and proscriptions without an enforcement mechanism. But that is not to say that might makes right.  If the enforcer is to enforce good  and not evil, then the enforcer must either be God or, here below, godly men and governments.

Conservatives and Christians today simply lack the force of will to impose their social morality on the Left. That is why they lose cultural battles and the Left wins. Conservatives aren’t even willing to mock their enemies. If you want to make “respectable” social conservatives and Christians uncomfortable, call a prostitute a “whore” in their presence. Mock OnlyFans as a den of “sluts.” Express deep revulsion at sodomy. Watch them writhe in psychic pain. 

Such firm moral condemnation, I am frequently told, is “judge-y” and “un-Christian.” “We” need to “watch our tone” as “we” seek to “draw others to the faith.” As their flock comes under attack from wolves, the shepherds condemn those who would fight back. There are many such cases. 

The deep-rooted weakness of the American Christian Right is a serious problem. I wish it wasn’t this way. I wish my fellow Christians had more spirit. I wish our leaders would lead. That isn’t the reality we have, though, as much as I may wish otherwise.

Right now, conservatives in deep red areas can still fight cultural battles at the local and state levels. Even some purple states, at the local level, still provide a way to maneuver against the Left’s cultural hegemony. Everywhere else, and at the national level especially, conservatives must sideline the cultural battles in favor of the issues of national survival.  

Trump showed that even in our degraded moral culture, a huge percentage of Americans still want the nation to survive. They don’t hate themselves despite all the propaganda to which they’ve been subjected. The old pre-World War II conservative consensus in favor of protectionism, non-intervention, and immigration restrictions is still enormously popular. 

If we win on those fronts and secure a future for our country then, and only then, will we have a chance to fight once again for the family, for our faith, and for a return of moral decency. 

That day, however, is still a long way off. We have work to do. 

 

DEI and Crash Dummies

DIVERSITY demands that crash dummies be of all sizes, shapes, races, ethnicities, animal species including trans-species hybrids such as the Cat Man, and also 'genders' including trans-dummies, and let's not exclude living humans who 'identify' as crash dummies the better to facilitate their exit from life's freeway. 

EQUITY will then be served: an equal outcome will be achieved by all dummies including the dumb-assed Dems who 'identify' as inanimate dummies when they are 'merely' transgressive leftards.

INCLUSION rules out, or excludes, all conservatives from serving as crash dummies, and rules in all fat, ugly, 'vertically challenged,' and 'differently abled' persons especially such politicians as Lori Lightfoot and John Fetterman.

What am I mocking?

The Only Way Out is Through

The urge to retreat is tempting, but the only way out is through. To float above the fray in the manner of a Rod Dreher is not the way; the only way out is through.

Minervic flights and the consolations of philosophy cannot be enjoyed when the barbarians are at the gates of one's stoa. 

Now you know why I mix the abstruse and theoretical with the political and practical.

Conservatives, especially those of them given to contemplative pursuits, need to make their peace with activism in order to secure and defend the spaces of their quietism.  And this with blood and iron if need be. 

The owl of Minerva is a tough old bird, but no phoenix capable of rising from its ashes.

When the world and its hopelessness are too much with us, one can and must beat a retreat into the private life and the pleasures and pursuits thereof:  body culture, mind culture, hobbies, family life, the various escapes (which are not necessarily escapes from reality) into chess, fiction, prayer, meditation, history, pure mathematics and science, one's own biography and the pleasant particulars of one's past, music, gardening, homemaking . . . . But all this by way of recuperation for the battle.

I pity the poor activist for whom the real is exhausted by the political.  But I detest these totalitarians as well since they seek to elide the boundary between the private and the public.

So we need to battle the bastards in the very sphere they think exhausts the real.  But it is and must be a part-time fight, lest we become like them.  Most of life for us conservatives must be given over to the enjoyment and appreciation, in private, of the apolitical:  nature, for example, and nature's God.

The only way out is through.

Trump, Adultery, Morality, and the Alinskyite Left

Substack latest

Climate 'Theology'

Tucker Carlson has a bad habit of referring to climate alarmism as climate 'theology.'  I know what he is trying to say, but it is unseemly for a conservative to misuse a perfectly good word and denigrate that to which it refers. Natural theology, which is a branch of philosophy, is a legitimate inquiry, as is theology proper, which is not a branch of philosophy. A second example:

In the left-wing rag of record, the NYT, we find:

“When you buy gold you’re saying nothing is going to work and everything is going to stay ridiculous,” said Mackin Pulsifer, vice chairman and chief investment officer of Fiduciary Trust International in New York. “There is a fair cohort who believes this in a theological sense, but I believe it’s unreasonable given the history of the United States.”

So to believe something 'in a theological sense' is to believe it unreasonably.  It follows that liberals have plenty of 'theological' beliefs.  In the 'theology' of a liberal, theology can be dismissed unread as irrational.

And then there is the misuse of 'metaphysics.' I'll save that rant for later.

The wider pattern is the secularization of religious language.

Take ‘retreat.’ Time was, when one went on a retreat to get away from the world to re-collect oneself, to meditate on the state of one's soul and on first and last things. But now one retreats from the world to become even more worldly, to gear up for greater exertions in the realms of business or academe. One retreats from ordinary busy-ness to prepare for even greater busy- ness. 

Another perfectly good word has been destroyed. 

As I have said more than once, if you are a conservative, don't talk like a damned 'liberal.' Why the sneer quotes? Because there is nothing classically liberal about contemporary liberals who are ever on the slouch toward leftism, and its most noxious variant, 'wokery.' 

Realize that we are in a war, and in a war one does not give ammo to the enemy. Do not validate, by employing, the Left's obfuscatory terminology. Never use 'woke' without sneer quotes. Never use words like 'homophobic' or 'transphobic.' Never use 'Islamophobia' as I once caught the great Victor Davis Hanson doing. A phobia is an irrational fear, and there is nothing irrational about fear of radical Islam. 

Language matters. Some battles are won and lost on linguistic ground. Leftists understand this. They understand that he who controls the language controls the debate. This explains the Left's unremitting  Orwellian abuse of language and their asinine question-begging and question-burying neologisms.

Expressive Individualism

Is Trump an example?

Substack latest.

DIE: 'Equity' Can Get You Killed

Here:

America’s top medical schools, worried [that] they have too few minority students, are doing something about it. They are lowering academic standards for admission and trying to hide the evidence. Columbia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Mount Sinai, and the University of Pennsylvania have already done so. The list already tops forty, and more are sure to follow.

A 'progressive' would call that progress. I suggest that you never use 'equity' or 'progressive' without the sneer quotes. 

Question for the syntactically punctilious: In the sentence immediately preceding, are the inverted commas being used to mention, to sneer, or both?

'Equity' is an obfuscatory woke-left coinage the purpose of which is to elide the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.  The tactic is to promote the confusion of equality of opportunity -- which everyone is for -- with equality of outcome. The latter would be good if it naturally came about. Unfortunately, the various hierarchies of life make that impossible without massive governmental interference.  For it is a plain fact that individuals and groups are not equal by any empirical measure. (People are loathe to admit this because the admission sounds 'racist,' 'sexist,' 'ageist,' 'ableist,' etc., and being fearful, they fear being tagged with these pejoratives. But in a contest between a smear word and Reality, the latter wins in the end.) 

The achievement of equality of outcome requires equalizing agencies with vast power centered in a Sino-styled Sicherheitsstaat, a security or police state with social credit scores and omni-intrusive surveillance. But note that even then you would not have 'equity,' i.e., equality of outcome, because the equalizers would not be equal in power, position, pelf, and perquisites to the equalized. Would-be socializers, equalizers, and top-down planners typically imagine themselves ending up among the socializers, equalizers, and planners and not among the socialized, equalized, and planned.  More importantly, history shows that outcome-equalization from the top down leads to inanition as in the good old USSR the menus of whose restaurants listed many a dish only one of which was available: borscht. Yum!

Leftists are semantic smugglers. They are trying in this instance and in others to pass off something destructive under cover of something appealing.  Equality of opportunity, equality of political rights, equality before the law, etc. appeal to almost all of us. So what the stealth-ideological leftist does is to use this attractive wrapping to smuggle into uncritical heads the pseud0-value, or disvalue, 'equity,' understood as governmentally enforced equality of outcome or result.

Now my dear friends: if we we don't punch back hard against this destructive nonsense we are 'screwed,' all of us, even the wokesters themselves, and their usefully-idiotic fellow travellers, though their evil and cooperation with evil disallows their cognizance of the fact.  

If you haven't had enough of this delightful topic, here is an exchange between Bill Maher and Bernie Sanders in which B. S. demonstrates what a clueless and/or mendacious specimen he is.

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.

Depredatory Wokery: Resist and Refuse

The good Baron over at Gates of Vienna has some worthwhile suggestions. (HT: Bill Keezer)

My main suggestion is that you vote with your wallet. For example, if your alma mater requests money, tell them, politely but firmly, no dice as long as they support DIE. 

('Die' is the singular of 'dice.' Surely DIE is more fitting an acronym that DEI, which, technically speaking, is not an acronym at all, but a mere abbreviation.)

In other news: no self-defense allowed in Canada.  

Steel Yourselves, Conservatives

This is a good article. Read it. Not just analysis. The author makes some suggestions for action.

And I learned a new word from it, polycule.

The Musket Canard, its F-15 Counterpart, the Need Canard, and 2A

Tony Flood commenting on my Substack entry ARs and Cattle Cars:

Excellent all around, Bill. Pithy opener and rises from there, especially the fixed meaning/variable application distinction. (Good biblical hermeneutics, too.) Will propagate. 

Besides the musket canard, there's its F-15 counterpart, which recently came out of Biden's mouth (I wonder who put it there): to take on the US government, you'd need fighter jets and maybe some nukes, not measly AR-15s. This invites patriots to rhetorically ask Brandon whether they should put such items on their wish list, if that's what it would take to neutralize a tyranny's threat (2A's raison d'être). Does might, after all, make right? Given a nuclear-armed George III, should Washington have thrown in the towel? I'm sure you could make the point I'm cornering more convincingly.

Thank you, Tony. Your comment raises a number of issues. I'll mention two here. I solicit your response.

 

1) I agree that the Second Amendment's raison d'être is to keep tyranny at bay.  Historically, that was why it came to be.  (If there is an historian in the house, I am open to correction.) Tactically, however, it might not be wise to harp on this point lest you provoke a Biden-type response.  There are other reasons for 2A.  One has to do with defense of self and of certain others (spouse, children, et al.)

 

I argue as follows. If I have the right to life, then I have the right to defend my life, and you (plural) have the correlative duty not to take my life. But if I have the right to life, then I have the right to acquire, keep, and bear instruments appropriate for the defense of my life.  What count as appropriate instruments will depend on circumstances, and circumstances change.  If the criminal element is armed with semi-automatic 9-mm pistols with 13-round magazines, then surely the law-abiding citizen must be allowed  to own such firearms. A fortiori given that the government, which is charged with the protection of life, liberty, and property, is in many (not all) places refusing to do its job and is instead empowering criminals by defunding the police, eliminating cash bail, emptying the prisons, opening the borders, and similar 'reforms.' (Note the woke-left's Orwellian use of 'reform.')

 

Besides keeping the government and the criminal element in check, there are two further reasons why the citizen's "right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." One is that guns are needed by some in pursuit of their legitimate occupations. Ranchers use AR-15s to thin out the predatory coyote population. (By 'coyote' I mean a species of canine.) A fourth reason is that firearms have legitimate sporting applications such as marksmanship competitions.

 

2) This brings me to the Need Canard. 

You can have a right to a thing whether or not you now have or will ever have a need for it. So the best response to the leftist who asks, "Why do you need a semi-automatic firearm?" is wrong question! Stop the pointless conversation right there. "The question is not whether I need one; the question is whether I have a right to one." Then explain that the right to appropriate means of self-defense follows from the right to self-defense which in turn follows from the right to life.

Depending on the sort of leftist you are dealing with you could then go on to explain why you do need a gun. But the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Generally speaking and admitting exceptions, leftists need to be defeated, not debated. Debate is worthwhile only with open-minded truth seekers. Truth, however, is not a leftist value. At the apex of the leftist's value hierarchy stands POWER. That is not to say that a leftist will never speak the truth; he will sometimes, but only if it serves his agenda. 

Related: Floridians do not welcome home invaders.

Four Ways to Vote

1) There is voting proper, with a ballot at the polling place. It won't do much if any good except at the local level. And even there it won't do any good if proper procedures are not followed, something that cannot be taken for granted these days.

2) There is 'voting with your feet.' Sick of crime in New York? Sick of the fools with power whose policies insure that there will be crime and ever more crime? Move to Florida.

3) There is 'voting by social cancellation.' Have any of your friends 'gone woke'? Politely inform them that their willful self-enstupidation deprives them of the privilege of your friendship. Why should they get the benefit of interaction with someone sane, reasonable, mentally awake, and morally straight?

4) There is 'voting with your wallet.' This alone is most effective and for reasons I needn't state. In second place comes (2), and in third (3). (1) comes in last.

"The first shall be last and the last shall be first" to adapt a scriptural saying.

1984 Bumpersticker

It read: 1984 is not an instruction manual.

True, but it may be that some of the novel's dystopian ideas can be turned against the Left.

Losertarian Update

A tip of the hat to Dmitri Dain for sending us here where we read:

Libertarian Marc Victor dropped out of Arizona’s closely watched Senate race on Tuesday, encouraging voters to cast their ballots for Republican Blake Masters in his challenge to Sen. Mark Kelly (D).

Polls had shown Victor garnering support in the low single digits, but his small bloc of supporters could provide a critical boost to Masters, as surveys show the Republican only trailing Kelly by a few percentage points.

“Don’t vote for Marc Victor for Senate, vote for Blake Masters,” Victor said on Tuesday. “Blake’s in a very tight race here with Mark Kelly, and I want to see him win.”

Victor met virtually with Masters prior to dropping out of the race and posted a video of their roughly 20-minute conversation.

Hats off to Marc Victor for his good sense. To vote for him would have been utter folly since it is (a) certain that he would not have been elected and (b) certain that he would have siphoned off votes needed by the impressive Blake Masters to defeat the disgusting Mark Kelly.

Once more: politics is a practical game. Without the power to implement your policies, they are nothing but hot air and paper. Don't throw away your vote on unelectables. Don't confuse a political party with a discussion society. 

Marc  Victor is a local gun guy. Here is one of his videos. Here is another. He talks sense! 

Third Parties as Discussion Societies in Political Drag

Substack latest.

 

 

The Losertarian Party

The Libertarian Party is for losers. If you are a conservative who votes Libertarian, you are a damned fool. You say you stand on 'principles'? Principles are great. And some of the Libertarian ones are salutary. But principles without power are just paper.  Politics is a practical game. Wise up and get with the program. Don't throw away your vote on unelectables.

You have heard me say many times that politics is a practical game. I don't mean that it is unserious. Some games are serious; chess is one, life is another. Life is as serious as cancer, and the wrong people in power can put a serious dent in your living of your life. 

Hot LInks

Facebook blocked my page because of my refusal to sign up for Facebook Protect. They wanted me to set up two-factor authentication 'for my protection.' I decided not to go along on their phishing expedition.  Not that I have any objection to 2FA as such. You ought to use it for all your sensitive sites financial and otherwise.  

Blocked from FB,  I opened an account at Twitter. I'll use it mainly to advertise my Substack articles.  

I was using FB mainly for linkage, so some of that will be brought back here.

Reasons to be vaccine-hesitant. 

Something to consider: Do you think that a government that lies repeatedly and brazenly about things that can be easily checked, such as the security of the border, will hesitate to lie about things not so easily checked such as the efficacy of vaccines?

Murray Rothbard on How We Can Win

If I started quoting it, I'd quote the whole thing. Please read it for your own good.

Moral Community and Civil War

Malcolm Pollack writes, and I respond in blue:

 

Visited your blog today . . . and saw this striking passage:

 

But also: haven't the barbarians forfeited their (normative) humanity to such an extent that they no longer deserve moral consideration? Do they form a moral community with us at all? 

 

I am just asking. Or is inquiry now verboten?

 

It's not verboten - I think it's pretty clear that the foe has already asked it of our side and found us fit for exclusion. (Joe Biden's "Red Speech" made that plain enough.)

BV: Yes. Biden's 'semi-fascist' is a weasel-word equivalent in meaning to 'fascist,' which itself is an abuse of a legitimate term.  The Left's favorite 'F' word is a toxic blend of psychological projection and Orwellian subversion of language. Leftists drain the term of its descriptive meaning so as to employ it as a semantic bludgeon.

But it is chilling, nevertheless, to be asking it in serious immediacy, rather than as a speculative, worst-case example of where we might get to if we aren't careful. It seems though, that now we really are pretty much there, and that is - even for folks like us who have been thinking so hard about the road ahead for so long - a grim mile-post.

 

BV: Yes, we appear to be reaching a critical juncture at which  we will either put the destructive Left in its place and start the long march back to comity, or else advance into hotter and hotter forms of civil war, thereby weakening ourselves over against our geopolitical adversaries who believe we are ripe for collapse if the right shocks are administered. (For example, what has the Biden administration done to protect the power grid? Nothing. The ChiComs could easily knock out most if not all of it. The Biden admin, however, thinks delusionally that the non-threat of 'white supremacy' and the very distant possible threat of 'climate change' are imminent existential threats.) 

 

What makes our predicament so dire is that the worst of the threats to the Republic are not external, but internal, emanating as they do from the extreme ('woke') Left which has infiltrated all of our institutions aided and abetted by a vast number of Useful Idiots  who do not understand what is happening.

 

I have read a great deal in recent years about the history of civil war, and when things get to this point - when large numbers of people begin seriously questioning whether their fellow-citizens have forfeited their claim to moral inclusion (which really is the same as saying they are no longer to be seen as fellow humans) - then a nation is approaching the final exit. 

 

BV: Yes, if you are using 'human' normatively and not merely biologically. I am reminded of someone who when asked how many men he had killed, replied in effect, "Not a one, I killed only communists."

 

What strikes me here is to look back over your own slow and cautious approach to this point over these many years: always thoughtful, always trying to hang on to the better angels of the American nature, and always wary of the most inflammatory and divisive voices on the Right. 

 

BV: You understand me, Malcolm, and I am deeply appreciative of that fact as well as of your gentlemanly conduct even when I was unduly harsh in my responses to you. You and 'Jacques' [a Canadian academic philosopher who must use a pseudonym to protect himself against the depredatory Left which is apparently even more vicious up there than down here] have had an influence on me.

 

But here you are. (And so am I.) When those who hate you have branded you as unpersons, and make clear that they want you dead and gone, to keep your own circle expansive enough to include them is just unilateral disarmament, and suicidal folly. Woe that we should have lived to see such times in America.

 

BV: I should make clear, though, that when I asked in the passage you quoted "whether the barbarians have forfeited their (normative) humanity to such an extent that they no longer deserve moral consideration," I was not asking rhetorically. I was not making a statement but genuinely  asking a question. And the same goes for the question whether they, the barbarians, form a moral community with us at all.  By barbarians I mean  the BLM and Antifa thugs and all who would erase our history and traditions together with the criminal element in which blacks are 'over-represented,' as well as all the civilized-looking enablers of the explicitly barbarous from Biden on down, and let's not leave out the hidden operatives who pull the strings of puppets such as Biden.

 

As a philosopher, my interest in these questions is not just here-and-now practical, although it is that inasmuch as I cannot do philosophy if I am dead or in prison. I am no Boethius.  My interest is also theoretical.  We are not just clever land mammals, bits of the Earth's fauna. We are also persons, rights-possessors, and as such equal regardless of race, sex, and other biological differences.  Here is a mighty bulwark against the biologism of the (true) fascists.   To the extent that the alt-Right moves in that direction I must oppose them.

 

This bring me to the topic of tribalism. I have been strenuously opposing it. Unfortunately, it appears to be the historical norm (statistically, not normatively).  If the reversion to the tribal is inevitable, then I fear that humanity is finished given the existence of WMDs.

 

Still and all, I have been considering that a pro tempore white tribalism might be necessary, though not in itself desirable, given the vicious assault on Western civilization that we are seeing.  We should discuss this, Malcolm, practically and theoretically. What is to be done by people like us who are not about to withdraw into the petty particulars of private life, but want to do our bit to preserve a civilization that has made it possible for us and so many around the world to live long and productive lives. You and I are not about to acquiesce in the suicide of the West or accept dhimmitude, whether of the Islamist, Communist, or 'woke' variety. And so it becomes quite the pressing question whether our political enemies have forfeited their normative humanity and can still be tolerated. Toleration, you have heard me say, is a great value of the classical liberalism of the Founders. But toleration has limits, as I have also repeatedly said. We are approaching those limits, and the patience of patriots is wearing thin.

 

If the USA, as she was founded to be, collapses, there will be nowhere left to escape to. The rest of the Anglosphere is shot.

'Democrats' Aping National Socialists

Excellent commentary here:

In two years, the Nazis went from being a fringe party to having a stranglehold on the German government and people. It was then that they unleashed their previously subdued anti-Semitism, from boycotts to book burnings to de facto discrimination to de jure separation (Nuremberg laws) and, finally, to the Final Solution.

We can be almost sure that, if we asked any German in 1932 whether it would be okay to enslave and murder Jews, he would most certainly have said no. But within two years, Jews would officially be defined as an inferior race and have their political and economic freedoms curtailed. Within a decade, millions would be murdered.

As Martin Niemöller suggests in his 1946 poem “First they came,” the Nazis were able to accomplish their goals by taking baby steps of oppression with little discernible pushback from a willfully gullible public.

So it is that we find ourselves in America in 2022 with fascism ascendant. And unlike what the media would want you to believe, it’s not Donald Trump who’s leading the parade. For just over two years, we’ve seen the evil of fascism take hold as it’s never held sway before. Consider the following:

In the summer of 2020, Democrats rained hell down on America by allowing, encouraging, and funding urban terrorists who destroyed property, attacked citizens and the police, and killed dozens of people.

In 2020 and beyond, despite years of watching Democrats assail election integrity, anyone who questioned the highly unlikely outcome of the 2020 election was branded as an anti-democratic conspiracy nut and accused of supporting insurrection.

The riot that occurred on January 6, 2021, was labeled an “insurrection” and hundreds of citizens who had been welcomed into the US Capital or standing on its grounds were arrested, labeled as terrorists, and thrown in solitary confinement for months without charge or bail. At the same time, among the crowd were provocateurs in whom the FBI was suspiciously uninterested.

By politicizing the Department of Justice, the Biden administration and other Democrats have used the “insurrection” pretense to harass, intimidate, arrest, and jail Trump’s supporters, members of his administration, and his legal team. This harassment eventually led to the unprecedented step of the Justice Department and the FBI raiding the home of the former president and future presidential contender.

Beginning in 2020, in response to COVID, primarily Democrat-run states and municipalities across the country instituted draconian lockdown edicts that eviscerated individual rights, destroyed small businesses, and ostracized or arrested individuals who resisted. Simultaneously teachers’ unions nationwide forced school shutdowns, leading to extraordinary declines in student learning and dramatic increases in youth depression. Those seen questioning the efficacy of or damage from such lockdowns and shutdowns were unconstitutionally muzzled when the administration covertly worked with social media companies to silence and de-platform them.

The Biden administration issued mandates for rapidly developed vaccines of dubious efficacy and unknown danger; then coerced private enterprises to enforce them. Questioning that policy or non-acquiescence with it was seen as a proxy for opposition to the regime, so the government and allied businesses threatened and destroyed livelihoods.

When Americans stood up to school boards, complaining about their children being exposed to sexualization in schools or being accused of being racists because of the color of their skin, Biden’s Justice Department branded them as terrorists.

The Biden administration’s threatening, intimidating, and jailing of its opposition set the backdrop for Joe Biden’s extraordinary speech on September 1, when he stated, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” This was not a campaign speech; this was the President officially addressing American citizens…and calling 70 million of them terrorists.

Rights and Needs

You can have a right to a thing whether or not you have or will have a need for it. So the best response to the leftist who asks, "Why do you need a gun?" is wrong question! Stop the pointless conversation right there. "The question is not whether I need one; the question is whether I have a right to one." Then explain that the right to appropriate means of self-defense follows from the right to self-defense which in turn follows from the right to life.

Depending on the sort of leftist you are dealing with you could then go on to explain why you do need a gun. But the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Leftists need to be defeated not debated. 

Is the January 6th 'Insurrection' the Left's Reichstag Fire?

I put the title question to an historian. Here is his response:

It is not too far of a stretch to consider January 6^th as the Left’s Reichstag fire, in that the Left is portraying the former event, chaotic but minor, as a serious insurrection against the Republic, the very Republic that the Left despises, as the Nazis despised the Weimar Republic. Obviously, the Reichstag Fire Decree (suspension of habeas corpus and all the basic freedoms) , coupled with the arrest of thousands of Communists, went much further in suppressing the civil liberties of those opposed to the Nazi Party, but one sees something of the same pattern in the Left’s reaction today, as in the imprisonment without bail of many innocent persons who were in the Capitol on January 6^th, and in the attempt to destroy the MAGA movement by discrediting President Trump and ostracizing, as much as possible, those who support him.  

But I would say that another similarity should be kept in mind: that of the massive street violence of ANTIFA and other leftist and nihilist groups in the months preceding the 2020 election, violence encouraged and condoned by the Democrat Party in its urban bastions and among its national leadership; for me, these riots are akin to the violent and murderous actions of the SA [Sturmabteilung] in the 1920s and early 1930s by which the Nazis sought to beat its opponents into submission and to create a climate of fear and disorder.

Related: Roger Kimball, Regime Propaganda, Ray Epps, and The New York Times

Thomas Klingenstein on Trump's Virtues

Outstanding! Memorize it and propagate it.

I am very happy to have discovered Klingenstein. He is right on target. Here is a short (4:28) explanation of the war we are in. This is the truth. Face it!

Identity Politics: Is it Possible to Remain Classically Liberal?

There is an identity politics of the Left and an identity politics of the Right. The second kind became obvious to me when, after objecting to the tribalism of blacks, Hispanics, and other racial/ethnic groups, and after calling for a transcending of tribalism, I was countered by certain alt-rightists/neo-reactionaries who reject any such transcending and think that what is needed is a white tribalism to oppose tribalisms 'of color.'

 

While I reject the destructive falsehoods of left-wing tribalists, and understand the urge of 'alties' to oppose them with vigor, I don't want to go into reactionary mode if I can avoid it. The reactionary is defined by what he reacts against. I want to move in a positive direction. I want to reject identity politics of both the Left and the Right by transcending them both. To be identity-political is to take one's primary self-identification to be a tribal or group identification, an identification in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, disability, socio-economic class, or some combination of these.

 

That is not how I self-identify, and I believe that no one should self-identify in that way. I identify as a person, as a rational being, as a free agent, as a truth-seeker, as a lover of the good and the beautiful, as a conscious and self-conscious subject. I do not primarily self-identify as an object in nature, a two-legged land mammal, or in any such way. Of course, I am an animal, a genetically human animal, essentially (not accidentally) Caucasian, and essentially (not accidentally) male, whence it follows, contrary to current leftist lore, that I cannot change my race or my sex. But while I am an animal, I am also a person, a spirit.

 

Here is one problem we face. Our enemies on the 'woke' and thus tribalist Left reject this scheme which ultimately rests on a personalist and theistic foundation. They are an existential threat to us, where an existential threat is not merely a threat to one's physical existence, but also, and more importantly, a threat to one's way of life as a spiritual, cultural, and historical being as opposed to a mere biological system for whom biological survival is the only value. There is no reaching these 'woke' folk  with talk of persons and rights and the equality of persons and of rights. That is to them just bourgeois ideology that serves only to legitimate the extant social order. They are tribalists who refuse to transcend their tribal identifications and see themselves as persons, as rational beings, as autonomous agents. But not only that, they are also race realists despite their obfuscatory and logically inconsistent talk of race as a social construct. The inconsistency doesn't bother them because truth is not a leftist value, and logical consistency can count as a value only to those for whom truth is a value. This is because truth enters into the definition of logical consistency. 

 

The problem, then, is that it is probably not possible to defeat our enemies -- who, nota bene, do not want peaceful coexistence -- except by going tribal ourselves, and engaging them in the way they apparently want to be engaged, with blood and iron. Either that, or we accept political dhimmitude. And so a certain amount of pro tempore white tribalism may be needed to counteract the tribalists 'of color.' 

 

I would like it not to be true, but I fear that it is. 

The Dialogue Form

Scott Johnson, Learning from Euthydemus:

The dialogue form is conducive to venturing otherwise forbidden thoughts in a time of persecution. The form might usefully be employed to address the shibboleths shoved down the throats of students like Euthydemus in our own day. Let us have our best teachers turn to the dialogue form with students touting “equity” versus equality, “affirmative action” and racial preferences versus equal treatment, the history of the founding of the United States versus the 1619 Project, the quandary of “reparations,” and so on.

2A and the Origin of Rights

Your right to defend your life with appropriate means is not conferred by the State and would not be affected by repeal of 2A. That right is no more conferred by the State than the right to life from which the right to self-defense follows.

The same holds for all of the rights specified in the Bill of Rights.

Many conservatives say that our rights "come from God." I don't deny it. But in terms of political  tactics, it is probably a mistake to affirm it. It is enough to say that our rights do not come from the State. For if you bring God into the discussion, you risk alienating those atheists who are otherwise open to persuasion. 

If I want to persuade you of something, I will get nowhere if I employ premises that you do not accept. So if my otherwise open-minded interlocutor gets the impression that the affirmation of natural rights will commit him to the existence of God, if he gets the impression that if  rights do not come from the State, then they must come from God, then we risk losing an ally in the fight against our political enemies.

We need all the allies we can get. The Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable must be broad and big-tented  to defeat the forces of nihilism.  

Tactically, it suffices to say that our rights are rooted in rerum natura, in the nature of things, and leave it to the philosophers to wrestle with the question as to what exactly this means and whether there can be natural rights without divine support.

The Orwellian Abuse of Approbatives: 'Democracy'

An approbative word or phrase is one the conventional use of which indicates an approving or appreciative attitude on the part of the speaker or writer.  The opposite is a pejorative.  'Democracy' and 'racism' as currently used  in the USA and elsewhere in the Anglosphere are examples of the former and the latter respectively. If we distinguish connotation from denotation, we can say that approbatives have an axiologically positive, and pejoratives an axiologically negative, connotation. 

Approbatives are like honorifics, except that the latter term is standardly used in reference to persons.

You will have noticed by now that the hard Left, which has come to dominate the once-respectable Democrat Party, has become infinitely abusive of the English language as part of their overall strategy of undermining what it has taken centuries to build. They understand that the subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

And so these termitic Orwellians take the word 'democracy,' and while retaining its approbative connotation, (mis)use it to denote the opposite of its conventional referent. They use it to mean the opposite of what it standardly or conventionally means.  What they mean by it is either oligarchy or in the vicinity thereof. Hillary Clinton, for example, regularly goes on about "our democracy." But of course, in violation of the Inclusion plank in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion  (DEI) platform, "our democracy" does not include what Hillary calls "deplorables" or what Barack Obama calls "clingers." Whom does it include? Well, her and her globalist pals.

A clever piece of linguistic chicanery. Take a word or phrase with a positive connotation and then apply the Orwellian inversion algorithm. Use 'democracy' in such a way that it excludes the people.

Crossposted at Substack.

Real or Fake, Leftists Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

The Left not only exploits real problems for its political gain, it also manufactures problems for the same purpose. COVID-19 is real and so is Putin's war against Ukraine. But both are being used by the left to advance its agenda. We may reasonably differ about the extent to which these unfortunate developments have been and are being exploited by leftists, but no objective and fair-minded observer of the passing scene could deny the fact of the exploitation.

When the Left runs out of real crises, it creates more out of thin air.  Our distinguished president recently informed us of the terrible threat posed by 'ghost guns.'  Here is a definition from the reflexively left-leaning  Brady site:

Ghost guns are unserialized and untraceable firearms that can be bought online and assembled at home. 

This definition makes no sense. The (proper) parts of a firearm are not firearms. If I buy a kit of unassembled parts, I have not bought a firearm, and if I by a firearm, I have not bought the unassembled parts of one. But I am famously charitable and so I offer the following coherent reformulation:

Ghost guns are unserialized and untraceable firearms the parts of which can be bought online and assembled at home. 

Is there a problem here? If there is, it pales in comparison with the problem of our unenforced and wide open southern border across which all sorts of things and people are flooding to the detriment of the Republic. Among the contraband: guns.

You would have to be quite blind not to see that the Biden bunch is deploying one diversionary tactic after another.

Yes, I Repeat Myself

Leftists constantly repeat their brazen lies in the hope that eventually they will be taken for truths. So we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable need constantly to repeat truths. Not our truths, for there is no such thing as 'our' truth or 'my' truth or 'your' truth.' Truth is not subject to ownership. If you have it, you have it without possessing it.

 

So speak the truth and speak it often. Don't be afraid of repeating yourself. Living well is impossible without repetition. All learning, all teaching, all physical culture, all musicianship require repetition. No mastery of anything, no improvement in anything, is possible without repetition. Can you play that riff the same way every time? If not, keep practicing. 

 

By practicing blows, whether verbal or physical, you learn how to land effective ones.

Real and Merely Apparent Incoherence on the Left: Four Examples

1) Leftists, supposedly 'for women,' champion the right of biological males to compete in female sporting events.

The incoherence here is real and rooted in the conflict between opposing leftist commitments. On the one hand, leftists champion the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the marginalized, even when the latter  bear the lion's share of the responsibility for their condition.  On the other hand, contemporary leftists embrace an absurd social constructivism  according to which racial and sexual differences are social constructs with no basis whatsoever in biological reality.

The incoherence is easily avoided. Leftists need to temper their enthusiasm for the downtrodden, etc. while jettisoning the absurd social constructivism.  They need to show more respect for biological science. Don't they fancy themselves on the side of science?

2) American leftists, much exercised over the COVID-19 pandemic, support draconian measures against citizens while allowing illegal aliens from all lands to flood into the country untested and unvaccinated. If they are convinced that the Chinese virus, so-called because of its origin, is so terrible, why do the leftists who control the current administration permit the incursion of illegals who bring a variety of diseases with them, not to mention Fentanyl which is also a major threat to the health of the populace?

In this example the incoherence is merely apparent. There is no logical conflict  between infringing the liberties and livelihoods of citizens while inviting in and celebrating noncitizens in all their glorious 'diversity'  if one is motivated by globalism and hatred of one's own country. The left is being the left by not allowing a crisis to go to waste.

3) Leftists, supposedly 'for the workers,' allow and indeed encourage an influx of illegal aliens the economic effect of which is to drive down wages for the working-class citizen.

This example is like the immediately preceding one. And again the incoherence is merely apparent. If one is motivated by the desire to destroy one's own country, as she was founded to be, then it makes sense to impoverish the lower and middle class citizens who stand athwart the left's globalist agenda and to support and empower illegal aliens who do not share or even understand American values and  can be expected to enlarge the ruling elite's power base.

4) Pro-lifers who insist that all black lives matter, including pre-natal black lives, are accused by leftists of being white supremacists. 

Here too there is no real conflict between competing leftist commitments. If you see politics as a form of warfare, and want to win at all costs, then you will use every tactic at your disposal including the 'Orwellian smear' to give it a name. 

The Biden Inflation Octopus

He looks like a farmer because he is one.  He invariably talks sense.  No deracinated globalist, he is rooted, grounded, and  'based' -- to stoop to an unnecessary innovation in current lingo.  He's my man, Hanson:

The Democrats will suffer historic losses in the November midterms. 

This disaster for their party will come about not just because of the Afghanistan debacle, an appeased Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of the southern border, the supply chain mess, or their support for critical race theory demagoguery.  

The culprit for the political wipeout will be out-of-control inflation—and for several reasons.  

One quibble. Tactically, it is not a good idea to predict loss for our enemies. It makes our side complacent. It is better to assume that the fight is tooth and nail, bite and scratch, right up to the end.   

Leftists are not likely to be intimidated or demoralized by our bold predictions. They live for the political. That is their sphere and for them it exhausts the real.  That's all they've got and so they fight to the end by any and all means.  We are at a disadvantage.  I call it the Conservative Disadvantage. Not only are we hobbled by our virtues, we cannot bring to the fight the full measure of our enthusiasm  precisely because we understand that the political does not exhaust the real.

And seriously, do you think the Dems are likely to abjure the electoral chicanery that contributed to their win in 2020?

Now go read the article.  Excerpt:

Fifth, Americans know that our current inflation is self-induced, not a product of a war abroad, an earthquake, or the exhaustion of gas and oil deposits. 

Biden ignored the natural inflationary buying spree of consumers who were released from being locked down for nearly two years unable to spend. 

Instead, he encouraged gorging that huge demand by printing trillions of dollars of funny money for all sorts of new redistributionist entitlements, green projects, and pet congressional programs. 

The Biden Administration eroded the work ethic. It kept labor non-participation rates high by subsidizing with federal checks those staying at home. 

It nihilistically slashed gas and oil production by canceling federal leases, oilfields, and pipelines while pressuring banks not to lend for fracking. 

In just a year, Biden reduced America from the greatest producer of gas and oil in the history of civilization to an energy panhandler begging the Saudis and Russians to pump more of the oil that America needs but will not tap for itself. 

Three Lockean Reasons to Oppose the Democrats

The main purposes of government are to protect life, liberty, and property. Subsidiary purposes are subordinate to the Lockean triad. This is lost on the present-day  Democrat party which has been hijacked by the hard Left.  Despite what they say, they are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property. So if you value life, liberty, and property, then you must not vote for any Democrat.  Why 'any'? Because Democrat politicians are under party discipline and toe the party line. The one or two exceptions prove the rule. Because these exceptions are few and not reliably exceptional, my rule stands.

 

The Republicans in their timid way do stand for life, liberty, and property. Or at least some of them do. And they have become less timid under Trump's tutelage. Lindsey Graham, for one,  located his manly virtue and put it to work during the Kavanaugh confirmation. His recent behavior is less inspiring. In any case, the choice is clear. Vote Republican, never vote for any Democrat, and don't throw away your vote on unelectable third-party candidates.  As for the third point, you must never forget that politics is praxis, not theoria. What matters is not to have the best theory, but the best implementable theory.  No implementation of policy without power. No power without winning. Win, gain power, implement ameliorative policies.  If you don't have your hands on the levers of power, you are just another talker like me.  Two other related maxims.

 

First, it is folly to let the best become the enemy of the good. Second, politics is never about perfect versus imperfect, but about better versus worse. You find Trump deficient in gravitas? Well, so do I and defective in other ways to boot. But he was better than the alternative in 2016 and he will be better than the alternative in 2024. (And thank you, Sleepy Joe, for making Trump's virtues and accomplishments stand out so clearly.)

 

I will now briefly list some, but not all, of the reasons why the Democrats are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property despite any mendacious protests to the contrary.

 

ANTI-LIFE. The Dems are the abortion party. They support abortion on demand at every stage of fetal development. They are blind to the moral issues that abortion raises. They absurdly think that abortion is merely about women's health and reproductive rights. They are not ashamed to embrace such Orwellian absurdities as that abortion is health care. To make matters worse, they violate the sincerely held and cogently argued beliefs of fellow taxpayers by their support of taxpayer funding for abortion.  You will recall that the 'devout Catholic' Joe Biden reversed himself on the Hyde Amendment. He showed once again who and what he is, a political opportunist grounded in no discernible principles, not to mention a brazen liar whose mendacity is now compounded by being  non compos mentis, not of sound mind.  

 

ANTI-LIBERTY. The Dems are opposed to free speech, religious liberty, and self-defense rights. They regularly conflate free speech with 'hate speech' and religious liberty with 'theocracy.' And this while going soft on genuine theocratic regimes such as Iran's. All of this puts them at odds with the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. And in general we can say that contemporary Democrats are anti-Constitutional inasmuch as an open or living constitution, which they advocate, is no constitution at all, but a mere tabula rasa they hope to deface with their anti-American leftist ideology.

 

ANTI-PROPERTY. Today's Democrats, as hard leftists, are ever on the slouch toward socialism, which, in full flower (to put it euphemistically) requires central planning and government ownership of the means of production. That is where they want to go even though, as stealth ideologues, they won't admit it.

 

But let's assume that the statement I just made is exaggerated and that Dems really don't want socialism as it is classically defined. Still, they are anti-property in various ways. They think that we the people have to justify our keeping whereas government doesn't have to justify its taking. That is precisely backwards. They don't appreciate that the government exists for us; we don't exist for the government. They confuse taxation with wealth redistribution. And by the way, the government is not us, as Barack Obama has said. 'The government is us' is as perversely knuckle-headed as 'Diversity is our strength.' The latter stupidity is plainly Orwellian. What about the former? Pre-Orwellian? 

 

Finally, you need to understand that private property is the foundation of individual liberty.

Use it or Lose it?

Substack latest.

If you want to maintain your physical fitness, you must exercise regularly. Use it or lose it!  Not so long ago  I thought that the same principle had a political application: if you want to maintain your freedoms, you must exercise them.  Use 'em or lose 'em! But times have changed.  And when times change, the wise re-evaluate. I'll give two examples.

Why I Will not Support my Alma Mater: An Open Letter

2 November 2021

 

Cheryl Mott Smith

Executive Director

Gift Planning

Loyola Marymount University

[email protected]

 

Dear Cheryl Mott Smith,

 

I am an LMU graduate, class of '72. I am now in a position to make substantial monetary contributions to causes I deem worthy. LMU will not be on my list. As a classical liberal, I oppose the increasingly leftward lurch of LMU since the '60s and its uncritical embrace of the destructive and culturally-Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda. I stand for free speech, open inquiry, and the pursuit of truth. This retired philosophy professor will not support the transformation of universities into leftist seminaries. I will post this letter online and encourage others to write similar letters. A copy will be sent to the LMU president.

 

Sincerely,

 

Dr. William F. Vallicella

 

P. S. After composing the above, this outrage came to my attention.

 

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

 

I hope others will write similar letters to their alma maters. One effective and nonviolent means of opposing the depredations of the destructive culturally-Marxist race-delusional Left is by reducing their funding. You cannot reach them with reasoned discourse: they do not inhabit the plane of reason. But everyone understands money and its withholding.

 

Speaking out has some value, but one runs the risk of being 'cancelled,' 'doxxed,' and otherwise harassed.  But no one needs to know that you are refusing contributions to 'woke-stitutions.' A cute coinage that just now occurred to me. Too cute perhaps. 

 

Cross-posted at my Facebook page where it has snagged 24 likes, 30 comments, and one share, so far.

Opponents or Enemies?

If you shrink back from regarding your political opponents as enemies, you do not appreciate the threat they pose. You are not taking them seriously enough. They pose an existential threat. Such a threat is not merely a threat to one's physical existence; it is a threat to one's way of life, to one's cultural and spiritual traditions and heritage.   Human life is not merely biological. 

The Fix We Are In: How Should We Respond to the 'Woke' Revolutionaries?

The difference between paleo-liberal and post-liberal responses to the 'woke' Left is well described in a recent Substack entry White tribalism is a third response. I have been entertaining (with some hospitality) the notion that whites may need to go tribal pro tempore, for the time being, in order to defend themselves and their interests (which are not just their interests but the interests of civilization and high culture) against the various tribalisms promoted by the Left. Call it Tribalism Pro Tem.

 

But so far my 'official' position on this weblog and elsewhere  would fall under the paleo-liberal or classically liberal rubric. As I see it, a sound conservatism, American conservatism I call it, takes on board what is good in classical liberalism.  Against Deneen, whose position is limned in the above-linked Substack piece by N. S. Lyons, I would object that there is no inevitability to the slide from the classical liberalism of the Founders, which was respectful of traditions, to a society of atomized, deracinated individuals. I suspect that Deneen succumbs to the classic slippery slope fallacy.

 

This just over the transom from a reader:

A question for you:  It seems like I'm one of the alt-right "tribalists" you take yourself to disagree with.  (Correct me if I'm wrong.)  But do we really disagree?  Let me try to clarify my position a little.

 

I'd be very happy to live in a society where race and other tribal markers don't matter much.  They could be a purely personal or social kind of thing with no political meaning.

 

On the other hand, when I look around and see how non-white (etc.) tribalism is being weaponized against white people, and specifically white-Euro-Christian men, it seems to me that we have no practical​ option other than consciously identifying as the tribe under attack.  It's largely a defensive thing.  We are being attacked as​ white people, or white men, so it's not enough to just call ourselves "Americans" or "Canadians" or whatever.  Those civic identities have already been deconstructed or rejected by the people who hate us and seek power over us.  They just don't care.  And others like us are not going to be motivated by appeals to these more abstract categories when their enemies are attacking them for being white, and male.

 

So it's in this (weird) context that I think white men should be conscious and proud of their "tribal" identity, as a healthy and empowering response to the hateful tribalism of others.  In a different context I wouldn't advocate this kind of tribalism.  Against a society that says it's shameful and immoral to be a white man--which, let's be frank, is what they're really saying--we should affirm that there's nothing wrong with us, that we like ourselves and won't apologize for being who we are.

 

Do you disagree?

I agree with qualifications, caveats, and codicils.

 

I can't see that a white-tribal or white-male-tribal response to the pernicious tribalisms promoted by the Left is a good solution in the long run.  But in the short run I see no acceptable alternative to a pro tempore white tribalism.  So I don't disagree with my reader on the practical plane. But as a theist and a personalist, I consider a self-identification as a member of a tribe to be a false self-identification.  I am not just an animal of a particular sex and race, and because I am not just that, any self-identification as just that is a false self-identification.  I am more than that.  And I would add that my life-project is to realize that 'more' and to achieve individuation as a person. This individuation is not a given but a task. It is a spiritual task.  This is an existentialist motif expressed in a neo-Kantian way. But this is not the place to expatiate further on this theme.

 

Who am I ultimately? Just a token of a type? Just an interchangeable member of a particular tribe of animals? You wouldn't have to be a theist to reject this sort of crude self-identification. One could take oneself to be zoon logikon in Aristotle's sense, a rational animal.  One could reject God and the soul and still achieve a loftier self-apperception than that of a bit of the Earth's fauna determined by the biological categories of race and sex.  Now I accept the biological reality of race and sex: they are not social constructs. 'Society' -- whatever that is -- did not 'assign' me my male sex upon birth. The very notion is absurd. Nor did any group. Nor can I interpret myself as black or female and thereby bring about a change of race or sex.  Race and sex are neither social constructs nor personal constructs. My reality is logically and ontologically antecedent to my self-understanding. Indeed, I am essentially (as opposed to accidentally) Caucasian and male. An essential (accidental) property of a thing is a property that thing cannot (can) exist without.

 

My interlocutor will probably feel that I am sidestepping the pressing, practical issue by raising the questions that most deeply interest me, namely, those about the metaphysics of the self.  He will remind me that I am no Boethius and would have a very hard time investigating the metaphysics of the self in the gulag or under torture. And he would be right to so remind me.

 

Suppose a black guy gets in my face and attacks my whiteness and all of its values and virtues (objectivity, punctuality, self-control, ability to defer gratification, love of learning, etc.) I will point out that his smart phone would not exist if it were not for the cultural goods  produced in the West and the values and virtues just listed.   I will point out that no high culture at the level of the West came out of sub-Saharan Africa.  I will point out his ingratitude at the thousands that died in the U.S. Civil War to free the slaves. I will remind him that slavery existed on the continent of North America long before the Unites States of America came into existence, and that the moral and philosophical foundations of this polity made possible the elimination of slavery.

 

And so I would do something I would prefer not to do, namely stick up for the white tribe.  And I would do it as long as I had to do it. I would play the role part-time of the pro tem white tribalist. But at the same time that I was playing this role out of a necessity imposed on me ab extra, I would not forget who I am really am.  And who is that? Well, there are several options the exploration of which does not belong here.  But let me just note that if you are a classical theist you will not take yourself to be identical to an animal slated for utter destruction in a few years determined by your biology.

 

One more point which I think is very important. I wrote above of whiteness and its values and virtues. But we whites do not own these virtues and values any more than we own the truths of mathematics and natural science. They are universal and belong to all. It is just that whites have proven to be so much better at their discovery, articulation, dissemination, and so much better at living in accordance with them and reaping the benefits from such living.  If blacks want to improve their lives, they will have to engage in some serious cultural appropriation, which is not really cultural appropriation given the universality of the virtues and values.  They will have to order their lives along the lines of the 'white' virtues and values that they foolishly denigrate. 

Is There a Political 'Use it or Lose it' Principle?

If you want to maintain your physical fitness, you must exercise regularly. Use it or lose it!  Not so long ago  I thought that the same principle had a political application: if you want to maintain your freedoms, you must exercise them.  Use 'em or lose 'em! But times have changed.  And when times change, the wise re-evaluate. I'll give two examples.

In the present political climate, if I exercise my right to free speech I may lose the right. Use it and lose it.  This is because vast numbers nowadays do not recognize any such right.  For these people, dissent is hate; so if your speech is dissenting speech it is hate speech, which cannot be tolerated.  Dissent is hate, and hate is violence, and violence is racism! Of course, dissent is not hate, and hate is not violence, etc. but these truths are irrelevant in an age of groupthink and mass delusion.  Truth is passé in the Age of Feeling. So if you speak your mind calmly, reasonably, and with attention to facts, but sail against the prevailing winds, you may find yourself de-platformed, 'cancelled,' and put on a watch list of dissidents, and perhaps a 'no fly' list.  After all, conservatives are 'potential terrorists.' And white conservatives are of course 'white supremacists.'

So here is my thought: The exercise of a right in a society in which that right  is no longer widely recognized but is instead perceived as hurtful, hateful, 'racist,' etc. has no tendency to secure that right; on the contrary, the exercise of the right endangers both the right and the exerciser thereof.  The same goes for the mere invocation or mention of the right. 

Here we may have the makings of an argument against speaking out. But we will have to think about this some more.  Civil courage is a beautiful virtue but it is sometimes trumped by that of prudence.

My second example is the right to keep and bear arms, an individual right, one that is protected and secured, but not conferred, by the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution.  To exercise this right openly, as by 'open carry,' is inadvisable.  You may think that you are standing on your rights, and by exercising them securing them,  but in a society dominated by group-thinking leftists, your constitutionally-guaranteed rights are not respected or even acknowledged. You are arguably undermining your rights and their exercise.  You are reinforcing their mindless fears and fantasies. After all, prominent progressive politicians view the NRA as a domestic terrorist organization! What then will they think of you if they see you packing heat? It would be best to conceal both your weapons and your views.

The practice of ketman is advisable. Rod Dreher:

Ketman is the strategy that everyone in our society who isn’t a true believer in “social justice” and identity politics has to adopt to stay out of trouble. On Sunday, I heard about a professor in a large state university in a state that yesterday went for Trump, who is filled with constant anxiety. He believes that his interactions with colleagues and students are filled with the potential to destroy his career. Why? Because all it takes is an accusation of racism, sexism, or some other form of bigotry to wreck a lifetime of work. This is the world that the identity politics left has created for us. 

More on ketman later.

For the Left, the Issue is Never the Issue

'Never' is too strong, but close enough:

Let me explain. As per the graphic, for the Left, the real issues are not protection of children and anti-terrorism. They are but distractions from the real issues. The real issues are suppression of dissent, erosion and ultimate elimination of constitutionally-protected  civil liberties such as those guaranteed by the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution, expansion of centralized (federal) government control with concomitant violation of states' rights as guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment, not to mention institution of an omni-invasive Sino-styled surveillance apparatus and 'social credit' register to further limit dissent, stifle liberties, and 'cancel' livelihoods.

But why do the leftists who now dominate and control the Democrat Party want these things? To insure their gaining and maintaining of power in perpetuity, to be sure. But that is only half the answer.  Why do they want power? They want it not just because they exult in its exercise and increase, but because they want it to forward their agenda, which is the destruction of the American republic as she was founded to be. Obama announced the goal brazenly: to fundamentally transform America, not to make needed reforms and improvements, but to transform her fundamentally.  But conservatives, who in the end conserve nothing, and are content to talk and write and conduct seminars on cruise ships, are slow on the uptake, and, hobbled by their civility and other virtues,  cannot bring themselves to believe that their political opponents are political enemies who mean what they say and out for their political liquidation.

So when Tucker Carlson, et al., say that the leftists are out for power, that is not a good answer. After all, we of the Coalition of the Reasonable want power too. Bear in mind that power is good.  (If it weren't, omnipotence would not be counted among the divine omni-attributes.)  Without power one cannot implement the good. The difference is that we want power to implement constructive ends whereas the Coalition of the Treasonable who bow and scrape before the heads of evil regimes, who open the border during a pandemic, who empower criminals, who undermine the rule of law, want power so as to achieve destructive ends. 

Am I alleging that everyone on the Left knowingly promotes evil? No. Some leftists are fools, others are ignorant, still others are useful idiots, others still are suborned by their greed and power-hunger. TDS continues to drive many insane . It's a mixed bag.  But there is no moral equivalence here between Left and Right any more than there was between the S.U. and the U.S.

Resist Not the Folly of the Fool

Resist not the folly of the fool who is his own undoing. 

Apply this maxim to the leftist whose race- and sex-delusionality increases daily. If you encourage by not resisting the acceleration of his madness, you may hasten the day when common sense reasserts itself.