How many times have we seen it from the liberal media? They detail a large gathering, with the insufferable comment “no masks.” The mask has been the crutch for the panic peddlers, something they think offers a total shield against COVID. Wrong. It doesn’t. I wore a mask and I still contracted the virus last November. Second, the so-called experts led by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his crew have clung to mask-wearing even for those who have been vaccinated which is nothing but theater. If we go down the list, the experts have been wrong on just about everything. Contracting this virus via surfaces, masks, testing, reopening schools—you name it. They have tried to scare us into submission over a virus with a 90+ percent survivability rate, plus three vaccines. This fear circus was never going to last.
After weeks of doom and gloom about a fourth wave—it hasn’t happened. Only Michigan is seeing a serious spike, possibly because Gov. Whitmer is keeping people locked up. Staying inside is the worst thing you can do. Meanwhile, Texas has reopened fully. There is no more mask mandate—and the state hasn’t seen a spike. Oh, and this occurred over five weeks ago. Sorry, spring break didn’t create a COVID doomsday. Why? We’re probably damn close to herd immunity, though Fauci will never say that. In the meantime, the narrative from the COVID panic peddlers and the liberal media about mask-wearing and social distancing took a hit with a new MIT study that says both are worthless. Oh, and the caps on indoors occupancy are also not backed up by science and keeping windows open, fans blowing, and overall fresh air circulating is just as good as a new filtration system. In other words, teachers’ unions really have no reason to stay home anymore (via CNBC):
The risk of being exposed to Covid-19 indoors is as great at 60 feet as it is at 6 feet — even when wearing a mask, according to a new study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers who challenge social distancing guidelines adopted across the world.
MIT professors Martin Z. Bazant, who teaches chemical engineering and applied mathematics, and John W.M. Bush, who teaches applied mathematics, developed a method of calculating exposure risk to Covid-19 in an indoor setting that factors in a variety of issues that could affect transmission, including the amount of time spent inside, air filtration and circulation, immunization, variant strains, mask use, and even respiratory activity such as breathing, eating, speaking or singing.
Bazant and Bush question long-held Covid-19 guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization in a peer-reviewed study published earlier this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America.
“We argue there really isn’t much of a benefit to the 6-foot rule, especially when people are wearing masks,” Bazant said in an interview. “It really has no physical basis because the air a person is breathing while wearing a mask tends to rise and comes down elsewhere in the room so you’re more exposed to the average background than you are to a person at a distance.”
The important variable the CDC and the WHO have overlooked is the amount of time spent indoors, Bazant said. The longer someone is inside with an infected person, the greater the chance of transmission, he said.
Opening windows or installing new fans to keep the air moving could also be just as effective or more effective than spending large amounts of money on a new filtration system, he said.
Bazant also says that guidelines enforcing indoor occupancy caps are flawed. He said 20 people gathered inside for 1 minute is probably fine, but not over the course of several hours, he said.
“What our analysis continues to show is that many spaces that have been shut down in fact don’t need to be. Often times the space is large enough, the ventilation is good enough, the amount of time people spend together is such that those spaces can be safely operated even at full capacity and the scientific support for reduced capacity in those spaces is really not very good,” Bazant said. “I think if you run the numbers, even right now for many types of spaces you’d find that there is not a need for occupancy restrictions.”
Six-feet social distancing rules that inadvertently result in closed businesses and schools are “just not reasonable,” according to Bazant.
So, the occupancy rules are garbage. Fresh air and fans are just as effective as an expensive filtration system. The six-feet apart rule is ridiculous, and masks don’t protect you all that much. So, Fauci was wrong. The experts were wrong. But they’re so arrogant they cannot admit a mistake. They’ve taken a scared straight approach. Bill Maher actually offered a biting and rational commentary on how a) liberals are just as misinformed as the people they mock regarding this virus, and b) the experts opted not to give it to us straight which set us on this messaging mess that’s plagued us for a year. Yes, Maher made a pun about Trump and bleach, but he’s a comedian and a liberal. He’s bound to make a joke—but the overall message is clear: this isn’t the time to be mixing politics with the messaging on COVID. Fauci is a bureaucrat. The CDC director is a bureaucrat. They all have agendas. And they’re not gods. They’re not oracles. They were wrong. They’ve been wrong. And now they want us to live in fear because of variants. Sorry, the variants aren’t more lethal, so again they get a shovel to the face. We’re done. And you cannot tell us what we can and cannot do on the Fourth of July, doc. Your time is up. Shut up and let us reopen at will.
Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott lead the way. Oh, and teachers now have to get back to work for real this time.
Some people thought James Burnham’s identification of liberalism with civilization’s suicide was hyperbolic. In light of American institutions’ embrace of anti-Americanism, what would they say now?
I have been thinking a good deal recently about Arnold Toynbee’s much-quoted observation that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” As an historical proposition, I’d say that it was like the story of the curate’s breakfast egg. “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!” “Oh no, my Lord, I assure you!” the curate replied. “Parts of it are excellent!”
And yet we all see the pertinence of Toynbee’s point. While there are, as a matter of historical fact, plenty of civilizations that succumb to invasion, occupation, and subjugation, there are also many that wither from within from a failure of self-confidence, of (for the Bergsonians out there) élan vital, of what your philosophy graduate student likes to call thumos: spirit, gumption, “heart,” manliness.
The fact that no one can even speak of “manliness” today without looking over his shoulder these days is an index that thumos is on the endangered species list (along, as it happens, with sperm counts in the Western world). Why this should be is a fraught question—something whose answer is “overdetermined” as our Freudian friends like to say.
One major reason, I submit, is that the dominant ideology of the modern West is an ideology of suicide, what the philosopher James Burnham identified as “liberalism.”
It goes without saying that when it comes to terms being “overdetermined,” “liberalism” is right up at the top. The word has its root in līber, free, which is why it used to be said the tolerance was a defining characteristic of liberalism. Edmund Burke was a liberal in this sense, as was Matthew Arnold, David Hume, James Madison, and other founding fathers.
But that was a long time ago. Nowadays, “liberalism” is distinguished above all by its illiberalism and intolerance. Thus the ideology of “wokeness” and the prevalence therein of the rhetoric of “microaggressions,” “trigger warnings,” and “safe spaces.” If being offended is grounds for interdicting speech then the goal is not tolerance, comrade, but conformity. And it is a short step from that realization to a bureaucracy whose primary aim is the enforcement of that conformity.
I suspect that certain wrinkles in our current political dispensation would have surprised Burnham. I don’t believe that he foresaw the humid, hothouse dimension of “the way we live now.” The more exotic precincts of sexual enfranchisement, for example, would have prompted a raised eyebrow, as would such phenomena as the military provision of “maternity flight suits,” “gender reassignment” surgery, and spurious charges of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” But in essentials, he correctly identified the pathology.
The issue, Burnham saw, is that modern allotropes of liberalism have equipped us with an ethic that is far too abstract and too empty to inspire existential allegiance. Modern liberalism, Burnham wrote in Suicide of the West,
does not offer ordinary men compelling motives for personal suffering, sacrifice, and death. There is no tragic dimension in its picture of the good life. Men become willing to endure, sacrifice, and die for God, for family, king, honor, country, from a sense of absolute duty or an exalted vision of the meaning of history. . . . And it is precisely these ideas and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked, and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary, and irrational. In their place liberalism proposes a set of pale and bloodless abstractions—pale and bloodless for the very reason that they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling and in suffering. Except for mercenaries, saints, and neurotics, no one is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Security payments.
Thus it is that Burnham could conclude that the primary function of liberalism was to “permit Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution,” to view weakness, failure, even collapse as not as a defeat but “as the transition to a new and higher-order in which Mankind as a whole joins in a universal civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions, divisions, and discriminations of the past.”
Sound familiar? Of course, it does. It’s the hit tune that is playing on every college campus, and that echoes throughout the bulletins emitted by HR departments of major corporations, and the bleatings of Hollywood stars, media “celebrities,” and woke personalties whose affluence is matched only by their ignorance and unconscious commitment to mouthing the sanctioned progressive clichés of the moment.
A Two-Pronged Attack
I bring up James Burnham’s contention that the ideology of liberalism is a prescription for civilizational suicide not because I want to argue his case but as a prolegomenon, what Kierkegaard called a “preliminary expectoration,” regarding the curious pincer movement we see at work in America today.
One of the strangest things about the current administration (I hesitate to call it the “Biden Administration” because Joe Biden is clearly just a puppet in the hands of the factions and personalities that engineered his “election”)—one of the strangest features of the administration, I say, is the breathless velocity with which they are proceeding the bring about that “fundamental transformation of the United States of America” that Biden’s predecessor and (possibly) puppet master Barack Obama promised.
The current administration is behaving as if it had a huge popular mandate. In fact, it won, if it won, by the narrowest of margins. (I’ll repeat parenthetically here what I have said elsewhere: I believe Donald Trump actually won but that the concerted efforts of his opponents overturned the election.) And stepping down from the top spot, the election of 2020 was a disaster for the Democrats, though not, I predict, as much of a disaster as the 2022 election will be. And yet here they are behaving as if Karl Marx, if not Mao Zedong himself, had elected instead of a senile factotum who was supposed to bring back “normalcy,” national unity, and political “bipartisanship.”
How’s that working out? I am going to ignore the disaster at our Southern border, the fiscal nightmare that Biden’s spending and tax programs are causing, and even the brewing international emergency that his supine posture regarding China and Iran (combined with his belligerence towards Russia) are fomenting. I’d just like to mention two prongs of that pincer movement I mentioned above. They might seem like minor, unrelated initiatives. I think they speak to a deep and spiritually unified rot in the American soul.
The first claw of the pincer was the announcement a few days ago that the state of Virginia was seeking to eliminate special courses in advanced mathematics for high school students before the 11th grade. Why in heaven’s name would they do this? Why, in order to foster “equity,” of course—which is to say, in order to foster the malign spirit of egalitarianism and prevent any students from excelling.
Quoth a Virginia educrat named Jennifer Allard,
Many of our students do not have access to the mathematics that they will need either in their personal or professional adult lives. The issue of inequity in mathematics education makes it essential for us to initiate serious discussions among a variety of stakeholders to achieve the critical mass necessary to catalyze change in school mathematics.
“Stakeholders.” Do you have to read any further? The truth is that some people (not I, alas) are clever at math, others are not. It is a matter of national security that we encourage those who are clever at math to excel. Allard and her colleagues are pursuing the lowest common denominator, a course of action that our opponents in China, Iran, and Russia will only applaud.
Cancerous Critical Race Theory
The attack on excellence and achievement is one side of the pincer movement. The other side is the injection of Marxist ideology, dressed up in a new rhetorical garb, into not only our school but also the workplace and throughout the federal government.
As commentator Stanley Kurtz noted in the New York Post on Friday, “Joe Biden’s Department of Education has signaled its intent to impose the most radical forms of critical race theory on America’s schools, very much including the 1619 Project and the so-called anti-racism of Ibram X. Kendi (which advocates a massive and indefinite expansion of reverse discrimination).”
What is “critical race theory”? Many readers of American Greatness will know, But I think the documentary filmmaker and writer Christopher Rufo, who has done as much as anyone to expose the toxic nature of the movement, is right: “most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it.”
Although it was born in the fetid corridors of academia, CRT (as it is often abbreviated) has escaped from the laboratory and is infecting the population at large. “[I]t has,” Rufo writes, “increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions over the past decade. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human-resources departments, in the form of diversity-training programs, human-resources modules, public-policy frameworks, and school curricula.” But what is it, exactly?
It is radical Marxism, dusted off and given lessons in the new vocabulary of anti-America “resistance”: climate change, “heteronormativity,” and racism, racism, racism. As Rufo observes,
Its supporters deploy a series of euphemisms to describe critical race theory, including ‘equity,’ ‘social justice,’ ‘diversity and inclusion,’ and ‘culturally responsive teaching.’ Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that ‘neo-Marxism’ would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, critical race theorists explicitly reject equality—the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To them, equality represents ‘mere nondiscrimination’ and provides ‘camouflage’ for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.
So here we are. There were some people who thought that James Burnham’s identification of liberalism with civilization suicide was hyperbolic. They also tended to scoff at the idea that the primary function of liberalism was to “permit Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” I wonder what they would say now?
In November 2020, the people who voted for Joe Biden believed they were electing a moderate – a middle of the road, get back to the status quo working class guy who rejects the radical overreach of lunatic Leftists like the Squad.
Those voters were wrong.
Biden scoffed at the idea that he would be a radical President fueled by Marxism – going so far as to look into the camera and say “Do I look like a socialist with a soft spot for rioters?”
The answer he wanted was “No. You don’t.”
The reality, however, is another story.
The first one hundred days of this so-called “Biden Administration” has seen overreach after overreach – a Radicalism delivered with near religious zeal.
Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” the nation; the Biden Administration is actually following through, and doing it at breakneck speed.
During the campaign Biden scoffed at the Green New Deal; now he is looking to implement it in the form of a so-called “infrastructure bill.”
Before the election, Biden poo-pooed the packing of the Supreme Court and the removal of the filibuster. But post-election, Senate Democrats wasted no time in pursuing those ends – not to mention pursuing the end of the Electoral College and making DC a State (both of which would require Constitutional Amendments, but they’re not letting that stop them).
Biden vowed to “restore the soul of the nation” when he ran for President. But as President, his administration is pushing the divisive race politics of the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement and the equally Marxist “critical race theory” charlatans. Meanwhile, this Department of Justice under this so-called “Great Uniter” is pursuing political retribution against Trump supporters while Congressional Democrats pursue a “domestic terrorism” bill that would criminalize their political opposition.
All the while, Biden continues to accuse us of “systemic racism.” But not just him. Everyone in his Administration from his Vice President to the UN Ambassador do as well.
This week his Department of Education announced that a divisive “Critical Race Theory” curriculum for History and Civics would be implemented in public schools around the nation.
And it’s all happening at breakneck speed.
People as a general rule do not respond well to drastic and sudden change. And all we’re getting from the White House is drastic and sudden change.
This kind of overreach never ends well.
It’s science, really. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And the more radical the initial action, the more radical the reaction will be.
If children were taught history in school – not the fictionalize garbage version of history spawned from critical race theorists, but actually history – they would see that this kind of extreme overreach is always met with pushback. And the pushback can be ugly.
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I’m reading the 8-volume History of the English People by 19th Century British historian John Richard Green. This week I got to the Tudor Dynasty. And while most of us know a lot about Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, I confess, I didn’t know nearly as much about the brief reign of Henry’s son Edward VI until I read about it this week.
Edward was all of nine years old when he came to the throne. Since Henry VIII knew his time was short, he instructed that a Council of Regents be established to guide Edward VI during his minority.
But then Henry died, and Edward’s uncle the Earl of Hertford didn’t let the grass grow under his feet before he began radically altering everything.
Hertford, tossed aside a Council of Regents and instead made himself Lord Protector. Then he went to town.
Henry’s Church of England was not radical enough for Hertford who was a staunch Protestant. So he tossed it aside and decreed that England was now a Protestant country. Catholics who weren’t fortunate enough to flee the country were arrested and some were executed. To ensure he had support, the Lord Protector bestowed titles and land on his allies to keep them loyal to him. Hertford even gave himself a new title – Duke of Somerset. Hey, if you can’t profit from government, what’s the point, right? When Parliament balked at all this radical overreach, the Duke packed the Parliament with supporters loyal to him.
Parliament packing. Court packing. Radicals love to pack.
This radical overreach didn’t end even when the Duke of Somerset was executed for treason. Instead, it went on apace under a new Protectorate, John Dudley Duke of Northumberland.
The English people held out hope that when Edward VI reached his majority he would put a stop to the radical overreach done by his uncle and his allies. But Edward was raised as a staunch Protestant. There really was no hope that things would be different when he came of age and began to rule in his own right.
But Edward never came of age. His reign ended when he was but fifteen years old.
And as he was dying, Edward himself eschewed the Act of Succession that named his older sister Mary as his successor. He didn’t want the Catholic Mary to follow him on the throne. Nor did his very Protestant Council. Instead, Edward named his sister Elizabeth (the daughter of Ann Boleyn) as his successor.
But Northumberland feared Elizabeth would have no use for him, so he convinced the dying King to name instead Edward’s distant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, as successor. Jane Grey was the granddaughter of Edward’s aunt Mary Tudor and naming her successor against an Act of Parliament was flat-out lawless.
Upon Edward’s death, Jane was crowned Queen. But it didn’t last. By then, the English people had enough of this radical overreach and the pushback was immense. The people rallied behind Henry VIII’s eldest daughter Mary who marched on London. The supposed “Queen” Jane was sent to the Tower, and Mary crowned Queen.
Green summarizes this era of radical overreach during the reign of Edward VI this way, and while you read it think of the overreach and radicalism of the Biden Administration:
For great as were the changes which Henry had wrought in the severance of England from the Papacy and the establishment of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown, they were wrought with fair assent from the people at large; and when once the discontent roused by Cromwell’s violence had been appeased by his fall England as a whole acquiesced in the conservative system of the king. This national union however was broken by the Protectorate. At the moment when it had reached its height the royal authority was seized by a knot of nobles and recklessly used to further the revolutionary projects of a small minority of the people. From the hour of this revolution a new impulse was given to resistance. The older nobility, the bulk of the gentry, the wealthier merchants, the great mass of the people, found themselves thrown by the very instinct of conservatism into opposition to the Crown. It was only by foreign hirelings that revolt was suppressed; it was only by a reckless abuse of the system of packing the Houses that Parliament could be held in check. At last the Government ventured on an open defiance of law; and a statute of the realm was set aside at the imperious bidding of a boy of fifteen. Master of the royal forces, wielding at his will the royal authority, Northumberland used the voice of the dying Edward to set aside rights of succession as sacred as his own. But the attempt proved an utter failure. The very forces on which the Duke relied turned against him. The whole nation fronted him in arms. The sovereign whom the voice of the young king named as his successor passed from the throne to the Tower, and a sovereign whose title rested on parliamentary statute took her place. [Emphasis Dianny’s]
Note that emphasized passage: “the royal authority was seized by a knot of nobles and recklessly used to further the revolutionary projects of a small minority of people.”
Boy, does that sound familiar.
The Biden Administration is pushing an agenda that is devoid of what Green calls a “fair assent from the people at large.”
Like the actions of Edward’s Protectorate, the radical overreach of the Biden White House is destroying any national unity we may have.
And like Edward VI himself, Biden is not the one wielding the authority here. He too has let the government of, by and for the people be “seized by a knot” of radical Leftists looking “to further the revolutionary projects of a small minority of people.”
I think it’s safe to say that the American people will only put up with so much before we, like the English people at the time of Edward VI, will tolerate no more.
My biggest concern is just how much of this history will repeat?
When Mary I ascended to the throne, she didn’t simply restore the country to the Church of England as envisioned by her father. Instead, she overreached in the extreme opposite direction. Mary restored Roman Catholicism and this time it was Protestants who were burned at the stake. There’s a reason Mary I became known as “Bloody Mary,” and it wasn’t because it was her favorite drink.
The only thing that saved the English people from the push and pull of this kind of religious extremism and radical overreach was the ascension to the throne of Elizabeth I eleven years after the death of Henry VIII. But in those eleven years a hell of a lot of damage was done.
Extremism is always met with extremism.
You know, Jesse Kelly has said on numerous occasions that there will be an equal and opposite reaction to the unfettered advance of Marxism in this country. And that reaction will be so extreme that people will realize the American First nationalism of President Trump was as harmless as a kitten.
It’s the way of the world.
You can’t push people to the brink and not expect pushback. But the Biden Administration, the Democrats in Congress, even the American media, are pushing us too hard and too far. And their extremism may very likely be met with a reactionary extremism that pushes us just as hard and just as far in the opposite direction.
Are there ways to put the brakes on this radical overreach from the White House and the Democrat Left as a whole? Are there ways to do it before we get to the point of reactionary extremism?
Boy, I hope so. To put it in the context here, it would be nice to go from Edward VI directly to Elizabeth I and skip the radical reactionary overreach of Mary I entirely.
At this point, however, I’m not sure if we can.
Sure, we could wrest control of Congress out of the hands of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, and that might slow things down. But it won’t stop it. Too many elected Republicans simply accept the radical narrative of the Left and refuse to fight back against it.
There’s no better example of that than the Senate Republicans. Time and again, Senate Republicans have proven themselves feckless and timid. After all, the radicals running the Biden Cabinet were confirmed by both Democrat and Republican Senators. Only twenty Republicans voted against the confirmation of that radical crank serving as Biden’s UN Ambassador. Fourteen Republicans voted to confirm the Critical Race Theory-spouting Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. And the Defense Secretary who is seeking to purge the military of non-Democrat voters was confirmed with a vote of 93 to 2.
The truth is, the solution will not be not found on the Federal level. In my opinion, Washington DC is lost.
So what are our options?
Well, as Jesse Kelly puts it, “Balkanize. If you can, move to an area that is red and make it redder. You will absolutely need the protection of likeminded people in the days to come.”
Biden, that so-called “Great Uniter” who is “restoring the soul of the nation” is in reality polarizing and dividing the country at breakneck speed. Better to get yourself to a safe place before the choice to leave is taken out of your hands.
The benefit of living in a Republic rather than a Monarchy is we have a great deal more autonomy (at least for now). We can (at least for now) vote with our feet. Perhaps that is the one thing that will prevent the coming pushback like the kind seen in sixteenth century England when Mary ascended to the throne.
Or perhaps it is already too late. Perhaps the die is cast and America is heading for an inevitable split.
Though at this point, I’m not sure America splitting into red and blue is a bad thing.
Questions surround Joe Biden’s political affiliation as he has
continued to push for aggressive measures championed by liberal
Democrats. Even the Democrat Party’s most extreme leftist lawmakers have
recently praised Biden for his efforts.
On Friday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Biden has exceeded progressives’ expectations,
claiming Biden’s willingness to negotiate has led to more progressive
legislation. The congresswoman admitted most lawmakers believed Joe
Biden’s administration would be “much more conservative,” but instead is
relieved to see Biden willing to side with progressives.
“A lot of us expected a much more conservative administration,” AOC
said. “I think that his…active invitation and willingness and
collaboration with progressives in his first 100 days has been very
impressive.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Biden’s environmental policies are a
good first step in the right direction, adding that he wants to see
them passed regardless of Republicans’ misgivings. While Biden tries to
credit himself for searching for bipartisan solutions, Sanders said
Democrats should push for another reconciliation process.
“If my Republican colleagues refuse to do what the scientific
community tells us we must do [and] what the overwhelming majority of
Americans want to do, then we gotta do it alone,” Sanders stated. “I
hope we will have Republican support.”
Both AOC and Sanders added, they also hope Biden’s legislative
proposals can be added to in the future, particularly with funding.
Ocasio-Cortez also said while she agrees with the fundamental purpose of
Biden’s infrastructure plan, she disagrees with the $2 trillion budget
price by claiming there should be more. Sanders agreed and said more
work will need to be done even if the bill passes.
In the meantime, Biden is expected to try and pass his new reforms through executive orders, bypassing Republican lawmakers.
Article by Rod Dreher in The American Conservative
Why Are Conservatives In Despair?
As many of you know, David Brooks and I are friends. I can tell you
that it’s hard to find a more generous and decent man anywhere. That’s
really true, and that, besides my innate loyalty to friends, is why I
ball up my internal fist whenever I hear people criticize him harshly.
And it’s why I’m not going to publish any comments on this blog that
criticize him personally (as distinct from criticizing his ideas). But I
also recognize that David is dispositionally and convictionally more
liberal than I am, and far more optimist about the way of the world.
This is a preface to say that his column today is halfway about me and people like me.
It starts like this:
Those
of us who had hoped America would calm down when we no longer had
Donald Trump spewing poison from the Oval Office have been sadly
disabused. There are increasing signs that the Trumpian base is
radicalizing. My Republican friends report vicious divisions in their
churches and families. Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump
line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks.
It’s
as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top,
and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.
What’s
happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the
election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is
facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of
warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of
the country as they conceive it.
The first important survey data to understand this moment is the one pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discussed with
my colleague Ezra Klein. When asked in late January if politics is more
about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the
country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.
The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked
Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big,
beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to
embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our
lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants,
and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”
Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”
This level of catastrophism, nearly despair, has fed into an amped-up warrior mentality.
“The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares,” Jack Kerwick writes in
the Trumpian magazine American Greatness. “The good man must spare not a
moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he
may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the
vulnerable.”
Here’s why it’s “halfway” about me.
As
you know, I was never a Trumper, but also not a Never Trumper — and
Brooks’s column today illustrates why. I did not and utterly do not
share the sense among the Never Trumpers (Republican or Democrat) that
the system is basically okay, and the country is basically okay. Neither
did I share the view that Donald Trump was any kind of solution.
My book Live Not By Liescame
out on September 29 last year, but the manuscript was completed in
March 2020, before Covid became the catastrophe is has been, and before
George Floyd was killed. When the paperback is eventually published,
those two tectonic events will be in an additional chapter, but so too
will be the rise of QAnon on the Right, and the insane behavior of many
on the Right in the post-election period. I had not seen that Kerwick
quote before Brooks’s column, but that is the kind of logic that one
uses to steel oneself to behave like Bosnian Serb militia at Srebrenica.
I want no part of it.
(That said, read the whole Kerwick column;
the quote Brooks uses is much less offensive in context. Berwick is not
talking about going on the offense. He’s talking about being defensive
against rioters and Antifa. He’s saying if you want to protect yourself,
your property, and your neighborhood from these bullies, you have to be
prepared to be violent in response to violence. I
actually agree with that. Some Christians are pacifists; most are not. I
am not. If Berwick had not written the odious paragraph Brooks cited, I
would have agreed with his column.)
Anyway, Brooks goes on:
Republicans
and conservatives who believe in the liberal project need to organize
and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their
own side. This is no longer just about Trump the man, it’s about how you
are going to look at reality — as the muddle its always been, or as an
apocalyptic hellscape. It’s about how you pursue change — through the
conversation and compromise of politics, or through intimidations of
macho display.
I can tell a story in
which the Trumpians self-marginalize or exhaust themselves. Permanent
catastrophism is hard. But apocalyptic pessimism has a tendency to
deteriorate into nihilism, and people eventually turn to the strong man
to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.
OK, let’s get to work.
Here’s
the one good thing I can say about this analysis: “macho display” is a
real problem on the Right. Yesterday here in Budapest, I was talking
with some political-minded Hungarians about the situation in the US. I
told them that we conservatives hurt ourselves by falling for loudmouth
grifters who are good at being performative, but don’t actually get
anything done. “Owning the libs” is fine, I guess, but it’s not the same
thing as accomplishing real change. I have zero interest in lib-owners
who separate the gullible from their money, and who rage impotently (but
profitably) while the Left consolidates its victories.
That said,
the column is the kind of thing you’d have expected to see in a liberal
St. Petersburg newspaper in 1915. I don’t say that to be insulting. I
say it descriptively. It is the opinion of an intelligent, cultivated
liberal observer who cannot see how bad things have become. The fact
that Donald Trump was no kind of realistic solution does not mean that
the conditions that led to his rise are false, or that the Republicans
who see things apocalyptically are wrong. I too would have been one of
the 51 percent of conservatives in that poll who said that politics is
primarily about “ensuring the survival of the country,” though I emphatically
do not believe the threat to us comes from terrorists, criminals, and
illegal immigrants. The threat to us comes primarily from the elite
leadership class in government, academia, corporate America, media, and
other institutions.
It is true that conservatives are badly led,
and that those who think things will be okay if we just cling tighter to
Trump are only making things worse, if only because they have chosen a
false solution. But I genuinely don’t understand how any non-progressive
person can think things are basically fine. Let me put a fine point on
it: I don’t understand how any non-progressive person can be anything just short of apocalyptic, given the state of things.
Let me explain.
We
are living in a country whose elites are teaching us to see each other
primarily on the basis of race, and to hate each other for it. Look at
what political scientist Zach Goldberg has found:
1/n No, the NYT (and likely other outlets) didn't always do this (i.e., '[Name of person], who is white...') to the same extent that they have over the past decade or so. pic.twitter.com/wHB0hXs3r4
Trend is nearly identical for 'who is black'. The two series are correlated at r=0.98 (their first differences correlate at r=0.87). pic.twitter.com/WLGAQ1BoBd
The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE)
is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th
grade, effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as
they usually would in the school system.
Loudoun
County school board member Ian Serotkin posted about the change via
Facebook on Tuesday. According to Serotkin, he learned of the change the
night prior during a briefing from staff on the Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI).
“[A]s
currently planned, this initiative will eliminate ALL math acceleration
prior to 11th grade,” he said. “That is not an exaggeration, nor does
there appear to be any discretion in how local districts implement this.
All 6th graders will take Foundational Concepts 6. All 7th graders will
take Foundational Concepts 7. All 10th graders will take Essential
Concepts 10. Only in 11th and 12th grade is there any opportunity for
choice in higher math courses.”
His post included a chart with what appeared to be set math courses for 2022-2030.
VDOE
spokesperson Charles Pyle indicated to Fox News that the courses would
allow for at least some variation depending on students’ skill level.
“Differentiated instruction means providing instruction that is catered
to the learning needs of each child (appropriate levels of challenge and
academic rigor),” Pyle said.
On VDOE’s website, the state
features an infographic that indicates VMPI would require “concepts”
courses for each grade level. It states various goals like “[i]mprove
equity in mathematics learning opportunities,” “[e]mpower students to be
active participants in a quantitative world,” and “[i]dentify K-12
mathematics pathways that support future success.”
Because
most black students, for whatever reasons, are disproportionately
underachieving in math, the state, in its bountiful compassion, is going
to level everybody else down. You know what’s going to happen, then,
right? The rich will be able to afford to take their kids out of public
schools and put them into schools where they won’t be held back to the
standards of the weakest students. The middle class and the poor are out
of luck.
How is this justice? This kind of thing is advancing everywhere in this new America.
This
neoracist ideology, which has become the dominant ideology among
American elites and their institutions, is going to destroy the country.
I honestly do not understand why writers like my friend David Brooks
are not alarmed by this. I’m not kidding: Critical Race Theory is going to destroy America as we know it, as this Christopher Rufo explainer makes clear.
Bari
Weiss, this blog, and others have been reporting on the very important
fight going on in elite NYC public schools over the effects of critical
race theory on the curricula there. Its important because whatever
happens with the elites — the future power-holders in this country — is
important. If you wanted to know what was going to be common on campuses
nationwise in 2021, you would have done well to look at the Ivies a
decade earlier. Allow me to quote fromLive Not By Lies:
In
our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a
crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies,
intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction.
“[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the
network and the new institutions that are created out of those
networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a
revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does
not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working
through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”
This
is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual
discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the
Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward
the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many
European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization
that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse
books of philosophy.”
Arendt warns that the twentieth-century
totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can
come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time,
most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals
as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social
justice warriors.”
This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the
broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a
similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW
ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked
by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own
traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to
give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of
social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical
theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being
confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are
transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.
The
social justice cultists of our day are pale imitations of Lenin and his
fiery disciples. Aside from the ruthless antifa faction, they restrict
their violence to words and bullying within bourgeois institutional
contexts. They prefer to push around college administrators, professors,
and white-collar professionals. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were
hardened revolutionaries, SJWs get their way not by shedding blood but
by shedding tears.
Yet there are clear parallels—parallels that those who once lived under communism identify.
Like
the early Bolsheviks, they are radically alienated from society. They
too believe that justice depends on group identity, and that achieving
justice means taking power away from the exploiters and handing it to
the exploited.
Social justice cultists, like the first Bolsheviks,
are intellectuals whose gospel is spread by intellectual agitation. It
is a gospel that depends on awakening and inspiring hatred in the hearts
of those it wishes to induce into revolutionary consciousness. This is
why it matters immensely that they have established their base within
universities, where they can indoctrinate in spiteful ideology those who
will be going out to work in society’s institutions.
This
is happening to us right now! And these radicals, in power in
institutions and corporate suites, are advancing their illiberal
revolution, within the formally liberal rules of our society. Amazon is
deciding not to publish certain kinds of books — which is its right, but
which is also illiberal. Publishers are withdrawing books based on
certain unproven accusations against writers. Here in Budapest, I was
discussing yesterday with some Hungarians the complaints from Hungarian
liberals that the Orban government and its supporters monopolize the
media and suppress dissenting views. While I have only been here a few
days, and don’t yet know how much of that is true, I can say for sure
that our own leading media, while not under any kind of government
pressure, nevertheless absolutely and without apology marginalize views
they dislike. Remember, the process that resulted ultimately in Bari
Weiss resigning from the Times began when the paper refused to
publish an op-ed from a US Senator whose view — that the National Guard
should be called in to stop rioting — was shared by over half the
American public. [UPDATE: A reader points out correctly
that I got that wrong — that they published the op-ed, but it caused
intense blowback in the newsroom, and ultimately the firing of James
Bennet. — RD] If you are waiting to see op-eds seriously opposing BLM,
or transgender ideology, or anything else beloved of our ruling class,
in our top newspapers, or if you are hoping for fair coverage of these
issues from our major media, you are on serious drugs.
I hear all
the time from college students telling me about how afraid they are to
say what’s on their mind in their classes, for fear of being failed by
their professors, or attacked by a mob of students. This has been going
on for years; I have the receipts in my email in-box. Do you ever read
about this in our mainstream media? Rarely, if ever. They only see what
they want to see. This is all happening in an America that is formally
liberal and democratic, but there’s nothing liberal and democratic about
any of it.
This week we saw a white police officer shoot to death
a black teenage girl who was in the process of trying to stab another
black female. He saved the life of a black woman — and for that, he was
denounced by the usual suspects as a racist killer, and one of the
richest and most powerful athletes in the country, LeBron James, tweeted
out the cop’s face and a threat. Why anybody would want to be a police
officer in a country like ours is becoming, I have no idea. In the name
of this utopian ideology, we are destroying our schools, and we are
destroying the ability of the police to maintain law and order. Hannah
Arendt, whom I quote in LNBL, said something similar happened in
pre-totalitarian Germany and Russia:
The members of
the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of
civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded
unjustly in the past forced their way into it.
And
now we get to gender ideology. I won’t recap here the many cases to
which I’ve drawn attention of American children being catechized in
these malicious lies in schools. Yesterday I met a young Hungarian
scholar, and talked to him briefly about the “Uncle Jay Should Move To Budapest”
post, and how gender ideologues in schools are teaching American and
Canadian kids to reject what their parents say, and to regard their
parents as backward fools. His eyes widened, and he said, “I did my PhD
thesis on how the first thing totalitarian regimes do to start gaining
control is to insert themselves into the family, and began to separate
children psychologically from parents.”
The
day after the Chauvin verdict, Philadelphia Public Schools teaches
kindergarteners that “George Floyd was killed by a police officer” and
that America is built on a “pyramid of hate” culminating in “genocide.”
The
lesson plan, produced by Philadelphia’s Office of School Climate and
Culture, instructs kindergarten through second grade teachers to
encourage students to discuss “what happened to George Floyd and the
goals of the Black Lives Matter movement.”
The teachers are told
to share a “social story” presenting the case in racial terms: “George
Floyd was killed by a police officer”; “Mr. Floyd was African American,
the officer was white.” The lesson teaches that for years, “some police
officers have hurt African Americans.”
Finally, the teachers are
asked to discuss the “Pyramid of Hate” with the children as young as
four years old, teaching that “our society” is built on “biased
attitudes,” “systemic discrimination,” and “bias-motivated violence,”
which can lead to “genocide.”
From the documents, this “Pyramid of Hate” designed by the ADL:
Read the fine print. We go from a “lack of self-reflection or
awareness of privilege” to “cultural appropriation,” and ultimately to
genocide. The clear implication is that if you don’t stamp out things at
the base, you will eventually have genocide.
This is stone-cold ideological indoctrination designed to smear anybody who objects to left-wing radicalism as a potential génocidaire. This week, in the establishment publication Foreign Policy, an essay appeared calling for truth commissions and reparations in the wake of the George Floyd verdict.
I could go on.
It’s happening.
It’s happening right now in America, and it’s accelerating. Contra
David Brooks, though there are indeed some dark American hearts, the
greater darkness is not in the hearts of Americans, but in the hearts of
these proto-totalitarian elites who are transforming the country. When
Brooks faults alarmists like me for failing to recognize that the way to
achieve change is through the “conversation and compromise of politics”
I feel that I’m being gaslit. Yes, I would very much like to discuss
conversation and compromise — but this is not on offer from the
illiberal left, and its establishment enablers. I don’t understand why
Brooks and those like him can’t grasp how the things happening in the
country look to so many of us. Talk to the left-liberals Bari Weiss,
Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying about “conversation and compromise of
politics.” It scarcely exists. We are being demonized and driven out of
our jobs and livelihoods, having our children propagandized by
ideologues trying to separate them from their families and even their
understanding of themselves as male or female, and being told that we
are guilty of racist bigotry simply for believing in rewards for
achievement — things that were common in America until the day before
yesterday.
The reason I wroteLive Not By Lies
is because people who grew up under communist totalitarianism could see
all this coming, and have been trying to warn their fellow Americans.
The book has become by far my biggest seller, despite the fact that, by
contrast to The Benedict Option (also a big seller), it has
received almost no mainstream media attention. I’m sure that there was
no conspiracy to suppress attention to the book. It’s just that the idea
that the United States is moving towards “soft totalitarianism” strikes
people in the ruling class as crazy — this, despite the many examples I
give in the book, and every week in this blog space. They cannot
comprehend what’s actually happening in this country. Once again, I turn
to Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (also quoted in Live Not By Lies):
There
is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by
means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a
liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to
totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which
we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense
and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.
This
is how I read columns like David Brooks’s: as rationalizations to
explain away the intrinsically incredible, but actually existing, state
of affairs. Brooks duns the radical pessimism of the Right, but he
doesn’t actually engage with why so many of us are radically
pessimistic, and whether or not we have a right to be, considering the
things we believe.
Again, part of my own despair is that at this
point on the Right, we have the ever-useless Republican Party, and
impotent and often crackpot rage of the fire-in-the-belly Trumpers, who
give their minds over to dipshit conspiracies like QAnon, while their
enemies, having marched through the institutions, are now marching
outward, conquering everything. One problem is that good people like
David Brooks want to defend liberal democracy, but liberal democracy is
ceasing to exist, because even the liberals are now illiberal. The time
to have defended liberal democracy is when the mobs were coming for
professors like Nicholas and Erika Christakis at Yale. We are supposed
to believe now, though, that what is now mainstream on the left — e.g.,
Biden’s coming push for mainstreaming Critical Race Theory in US public
schools — is in any way classically liberal or democratic?
And
when people get sick and tired of two standards of justice for people of
different races, and get fed up with their children being told that the
should hate themselves for being white, and that maybe, despite having
man-parts, they might actually be female, and people start fighting back
substantively — with public protests and legislation, not tweets and
lib-owning commentaries — these same defenders of liberal democracy are
going to wonder how on earth we got here.
In conversation with a
politically aware Hungarian yesterday, I explained to him why I thought
the totalitarianism coming into being in the US now is “soft” — because
it presents itself in therapeutic terms, and because it is being carried
out under cover of “liberal democracy.” He looked at me, cocked his
brow, and said, “But you know, it won’t stay soft for long.”
No,
it won’t. What I suspect will happen is that many of us on the Right
will get sick and tired of being pushed like this, and some will react
in destructive ways (e.g., January 6). This will give the state, and its
allies in corporations, the justification they want to crack down hard.
That’s
why we who are its targets had better refuse false hope, and prepare to
hold out for the long run, while we still can. I hope that we can
figure out some ways to put a stop to this, but at this point, in the
first half of 2021, I seen nothing and no one on the horizon. We cannot
afford to sit back and wait for a savior figure. One of the most
important lessons the Right should have learned from the Trump
administration is that performative anti-wokeness is useless. You have
to know how to use power to get things done.
Ultimately, though,
our core problem is spiritual — and that’s not something that can be
solved through politics. But that’s something for another post. Let me
restate a Brooks passage:
The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll
asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big,
beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to
embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our
lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants,
and our priority should be to protect ourselves.” Over 75 percent of
Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters
chose “our lives are threatened.”
For me, my personal challenge, as a man of the Right and as a Christian, is how to live through this:
It’s
a big beautiful world, mostly full of good people, but our lives are
threatened by a loss of God, and of a deep sense of the Good, and by
technocratic, progressive ideologues who call Evil good, and who are
forcing on us a world in which identifying the good and living
faithfully to it is becoming more difficult. How can we resist this
without surrendering to an Evil that promises falsely to help us?
