The Little Red Blog

On Ideas and Ideologies

{Mikhail Epstein is a Russian-born literary scholar and essayist. He moved to America from Moscow in 1990; he has taught at Emory University in Atlanta, and has also been a Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory at Durham University (UK), where he founded the Centre for Humanities Innovation. He has written and lectured extensively on Russian philosophy; his book Cries in the New Wilderness has been hailed as “a work of extraordinary artistic and philosophical imagination”. His essay “On the Totalitarianism of Ideas” appeared in the New England Review, Spring 2002 edition.}

“Facts,” as John Adams said, “are stubborn things.” What is less often noted is that ideas can be as stubborn as—or even more stubborn than—facts. Wherever ideas come from, once inside our heads they can be nearly impossible to dislodge; we are far more likely to forget facts than to forget ideas.

In his essay, “On the Totalitarianism of Ideas,” Mikhail Epstein asserts that all ideas present what we might call a “totalitarian temptation”. Ideas are, in Epstein’s view, the most dangerous weapon ever devised—not so much because of the ideas themselves as because of us, the irrational creatures who make use of them.

In his essay “On the Totalitarianism of Ideas,” Epstein writes:

The twentieth century may well go down in history as the Age of Ideas. Never before have people’s minds been ruled as in our century by ideas in the form of national and class ideologies, state ideocracies, personal ideomanias and ideaphobias.

What even is an “idea”? Epstein explains:

An idea is an abstract concept turned into an impulse of the will, an insistent thought turned into an urgent desire. Ideas rule over the consciousness of masses; they become a material force and replace the world around us. Never before has our planet been enveloped in such a thick ideosphere: unlike the blue atmosphere, this is a red sky hovering over our heads. How else to explain the tremendous slaughters of the twentieth century than by the participation of great ideas in military affairs? An arrow kills one man, a bomb hundreds or thousands. Only an idea can wipe out millions. Ideas, and the people who become their instruments, are guilty of the most terrible crimes of the century: world wars and civil wars, death camps, atomic explosions, ecological catastrophes, and political terror.

Ideas have lifespans; they fall out of fashion, lose their allure, become obsolete. Outdated ideas “look like relics of gigantic fossils that once inhabited the earth but died out in a climate of spiritual overheating. All these mammoths, dinosaurs, tyrannosaurs, these colossal monsters that once ruled over the minds of millions of people, are now being turned into museum pieces characterized by decade: the twenties, the thirties, the forties…“Collectivization,” “Trotskyism,” “Enemy of the People,” “Socialist Realism,” “The Struggle with Cosmopolitanism,” “The Conquest of Outer Space,” “The Doctors’ Plot,” “Workers of the World, Unite,” “The Red Front,” “Blood and Soil,” “The Aryan Race,” etc. ¹

Relics they may be, but their power, even after it has been spent, is undeniable:

We gaze at them with curiosity, amazed by their powerful muscles, their gigantic organs, their taut joints. Yet at the same time we are perplexed: How could these dusty stuffed animals once have inspired so much terror and ecstasy; how could they even have supported their own weight and not been destroyed by the mere gravitation of the earth? Their former vitality still poses a melancholy puzzle for us…Some of the monsters have a heavy teardrop frozen in each eye—a sign of their torment beyond the grave and their disgust at their own ugliness. The crooked, jeering grin on their faces, combined with the mournful, tear-stained expression of their eyes, gives them a certain unnatural stateliness. Will the temples of the third millennium perhaps be decorated with these chimeras of the twentieth century, as the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was decorated with the chimeras of the pagan Dark Ages?

The main problem with ideas, according to Epstein, is how easily they can be turned into ideologies. An ideology is an idea elevated to the status of an icon, a Holy Grail, a Grand Unified Theory which explains everything, especially the future, and thereby relieves its adherents of the burden of thinking. There is, says Epstein, “a gap between the partial content of each idea and its all-embracing totalitarian form”; the ideologue, the true believer, is oblivious to the gap.

While any idea might contain a germ of truth, an ideologue mistakes that germ for the entire organism. In any ideology, the part, says Epstein, has been mistaken for the whole, “as in the ancient Latin expression, ‘pars pro toto,’ ‘the part for the whole’—from which indeed the concepts of partisanship (‘partialness’) and totalitarianism (‘wholeness’) arose. This is the principle of ideological thinking, which promotes some particular idea to the position of an absolute.” Ideology is a mental disease, an epistemological illusion in which imaginary dots are connected to form an imaginary map of an imaginary world.

Demonstrating the ease with which this can occur, Epstein offers hypothetical “calendrical ideologies,” each of which elevates one month above the others: Aprilism, Marchism, Decemberism, etc.  He imagines an ideologue writing a “New Aprilist Theses”:

“This outpouring of life from beneath its snowy shroud, this intoxicating tang in the air, this saffron eiderdown on the trees, these plumes of ice-banner in the piercingly blue sky—all this is life in its purest expression, awakened but not yet coarsened, revealing its deepest secrets with the mysterious tenderness of infancy. March is still too stiff and frost-bound, May is already overexuberant and overfamiliar, in comparison with the perfectly delicate, subtle charm of April.” ²

The Aprilist ideologue cannot allow the month any flaws or allow other months any good qualities at all. He will challenge anyone who claims that April is the cruelest month. “Every ideology,” writes Epstein, “involves a ‘pro’ and a ‘con,’ and if the qualities of April are all marked by plus signs, the other months, both preceding and following, are arrayed on a descending scale.” Pick a month, any month, at random and you can construct an ideology on its behalf; pick an idea, any idea, at random—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the free market, equality, God, atheism, the Constitution, states’ rights, the Second Amendment, feminism, democracy, America First—and you can do the same.

“Every ideology,” Epstein declares, “is a sort of tangent to the circle of life rather than an arc of that circle; arbitrarily taking some one point as its origin, it promotes that point as ‘the key point,’ ‘the foundation,’ and proceeds to erect upon it a staggering superstructure—staggering more and more perilously, the further it goes off on its tangent. Thus it turns out that some one nation, or one class, or one theory, or one technological or medical scheme, must reform, save, regenerate, and beatify the whole world. An ideology is a stratagem by which one of the parts captures the Whole. This is why every ideology is a cross between the partisan and the totalitarian: it begins with a party and ends with totalitarianism, and in this metamorphosis lies its whole aim and essence.” ³

Alas, we are all susceptible, all vulnerable to ideologies, pulled by epistemological gravity into their orbit. “Totalitarianism is in our blood,” Epstein asserts. “No sooner does an idea arise than it takes on all the attributes of totality—all must devote their whole lives to it, all other designs and aspirations must be harmonized with it, it must capture the hearts and determine the fates of multitudes, of all mankind.” ⁴  Dreams of a Grand Unified Theory are uncomfortably similar to nightmares of a Final Solution.  

You would think, then, that our aim should be to eradicate ideological thinking, to oppose ideologies in any form and of any kind, and to promote epistemological humility; if totalitarianism is in our blood, we must develop antibodies against it. Epstein, however, suggests a different approach, which I will address in my next post.

_____________________________

¹ The fossilized ideas--in some cases, little more than slogans--to which Epstein refers lived, for the most part, in the Soviet Union. Americans can substitute “American Exceptionalism,” “Shining City on a Hill,”  “The Founding Fathers,” “Rugged Individualism,” “Manifest Destiny,” “The New Deal,” “The New Frontier,”  “America First,” and so on.

² “New Aprilist Theses” is a play on Lenin’s “April Theses” of 1917, which were roundly denounced at the time even by fellow Bolsheviks—Georgi Plekhanov called them “lunacy”. By October of that year, the theses were Bolshevik policy.

³ Epstein’s description of ideology brings to mind the term “meme,” coined by Richard Dawkins for “ideas that spread from person to person within a culture, viral phenomena that may evolve in a manner analogous to biological evolution.”  Memes are now part of our digital culture, as is the concept of “going viral”. Like memes, ideologies are viral ideas; they catch on largely because they simplify (oversimplify) an unbearably complex world. Unfortunately, they are often fatal.

⁴ In this passage, Epstein is singling out Russians as especially vulnerable to ideology and totalitarianism. I have taken the liberty of applying that more generally to humans at large.

This and That

Does God exist, and, if so, what's His deal? Steven Nemes (at Arc Digital) provides answers, with an explanation involving cats:

The real existence of a cat is not a part of that total complex of individuated properties which make up the particular cat which we experience. The unexperienceable real existence of the experienceable cat must therefore be something that is somehow “outside” of the cat, and yet “pointed at it” in such a way that the cat exists. How can this be?

Not since Erwin Schrodinger has a cat taken on such metaphysical significance!

This is easy to understand if we say that the existence of the cat consists in its standing on the receiving end of an existence-endowing relation to “something else.” And this “something else” must ultimately be such that it is not an individual thing with a certain nature and various determinate properties. Why is that? Because it is not as if existence is external only to cats. No individual thing that has a certain nature and various determinate properties, whether it is a cat or a dog or whatever, is going to have existence as an “internal” part of it. Rather, any such thing will only exist insofar as it is related to a “something else” that is not itself an individual thing with properties but rather pure existence itself. And this “pure existence itself,” according to classical theists, is God.

If you are not persuaded by Nemes’ argumentum ad cattum, he also invokes the guitar deity Pat Metheny:

Pat Metheny playing on the guitar not only starts the performance of a song but also keeps it going and guides it to its finale for as long as he continues playing. If he were to stop playing, the song would cease. So also with God: He not only begins the existence of things but also maintains it through time. This means that the continued existence of the world through time is a result of God’s constant “preoccupation” with sustaining his act of creation.

This is theology as it should be done, with air-tight reasoning and homespun analogies that us common folk can understand. Dog-lovers and fans of Eric Clapton are welcome to weigh in on the subject. 

Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia | by Steven Nemes | Nov, 2020 | Arc Digital

We can all rest easy: an anonymous law officer “working in the Baltimore/Washington suburbs” has assured us all (via The Federalist) that neither he nor his colleagues plan to arrest us for exceeding the recommended guest limit for Thanksgiving, even if our busybody neighbors tip them off:

Many police officers I know are using their discretion to refrain from strictly enforcing sanctimonious and unconstitutional edicts amid a moral panic. In a world where the police in the United States are routinely compared to Nazis, these officers look the other way. They choose to not use the power of the executive to enforce new rules that didn’t make much sense.

It is reassuring to know that police decide for themselves which laws are to be enforced, against whom, and when. In fact, I fail to see why we pass laws in the first place—should we not simply trust police to use their sound instincts and common sense as to what behaviors to proscribe?

Although “Anonymous” agrees that elected officials (“Governors, mayors, and executives”) issue mandates and decrees, it is still the unelected “rank and file police officer who is tasked with enforcing them.” “Anonymous” follows in the footsteps of President Andrew Jackson, who, defying the unelected judges of the Supreme Court, said “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.”  

“Anonymous” talks turkey to power when he concludes:

If the police are called on your Thanksgiving get-together, you’ll most likely not know it or get a polite knock on your door. The officer will probably enjoy the smell of a home-cooked meal and be glad others are enjoying Thanksgiving after a year like 2020. If you aren’t scared, invite the officer in for some turkey and stuffing. Tip: I like dark meat.

I Won’t Arrest You For Celebrating Thanksgiving, And No Good Cop Would (thefederalist.com)

Lastly, the once respected Jonathan Turley explains, as best he can, the legal strategy being employed by President Trump and his “elite strike force” of attorneys. Turley suspects that Trump has in mind a high-risk “Death Star” maneuver:

In “Star Wars,” a struggling rebellion was in full retreat on every front against an overwhelming force in the Empire. The rebels were left with just one strategy and literally one shot. Luke Skywalker had to skim the surface of the Death Star along a trench and fire a round into a small thermal exhaust port to travel down an air shaft and cause an explosion in the core reactor. Then poof! No more Death Star.

As Turley explains it, in this case the “trench” is comprised of the various state election systems, the “exhaust port” is the Electoral College, Trump’s attorneys are “X-wing fighters,” the state legislatures and Congress are the “air shaft,” and the Electoral Count Act [ECA] of 1887 is the “core reactor”.  He also mentions Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden, who are perhaps the R2D2 and C3PO of this adventure.

It all sounds very entertaining and could well be a holiday box-office blockbuster.

It strikes me as odd, however, that Turley seems unconcerned that the “Death Star” which Trump is attempting to destroy is American democracy. He concludes his article by declaring, All one can say, to paraphrase Han Solo’s parting words before heading out for Death Star, is “Hey, Rudy [Giuliani]. May the Force — and the ECA — be with you.”

Apparently, in Jonathan Turley’s troubled mind, Rudy Giuliani is Luke Skywalker. To quote (out of context) Turley’s own words, “It is enough to make an Ewok weep.”

The Death Star Strategy: Is Trump Contemplating The Ultimate Constitutional Trick Shot?

Sunday Sermon

{President John F. Kennedy was murdered on November 22, 1963. This song was written in 1968 after the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. With all due respect to the year 2020, 1968 remains the worst year of my lifetime.}

Dion DiMucci, “Abraham, Martin and John”:

Anybody here seen my old friend Abraham?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed a lot of people but it seems the good they die young
You know I just looked around and he's gone

Anybody here seen my old friend John?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed a lot of people but it seems the good they die young
I just looked around and he's gone

Anybody here seen my old friend Martin?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed a lot of people but it seems the good they die young
I just looked around and he's gone

Didn't you love the things that they stood for?
Didn't they try to find some good for you and me?
And we'll be free
Someday soon, it's gonna be one day

Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill
With Abraham, Martin, and John

Dion – Abraham, Martin and John Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

Listen: (13) Abraham * Martin and John *** Dion - YouTube

Or this: (13) Bob Dylan & Clydie King - Abraham, Martin & John - YouTube

Saturday Lecture: "Many Tears and Much Bitter Sorrow"

{Today’s lecture is about Russian history specifically, but it is more generally about the long-standing blight of anti-Semitism in Russia and throughout Christian Europe. Centuries before the Holocaust, there was Russia’s “Pale of Settlement” and a continent-wide history of pogroms directed against the Jewish people.¹ One of the great shames of the Russian intelligentsia was its failure to repudiate the nation’s anti-Semitic past, much less to oppose its anti-Semitic present.}

Bruce Lincoln, from In War’s Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War:

Official anti-Semitism found an unabashed champion in Ivan Durnovo, who became head of Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1889. Durnovo found staunch allies not only in Tsar Alexander III and Konstantin Pobedonostsev (hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church), but also in Grand Duke Sergei, Alexander III’s younger brother and newly appointed Governor General of Moscow. “My brother Sergei does not want to go to Moscow before the Jews are cleaned out,” Alexander reportedly told Durnovo in May 1891.

Durnovo had already taken steps to achieve precisely that end. On March 28, 1891, he had published a decree that forbade Jews to live in Moscow. ² Most were to be expelled instantly, while the minority who had obtained special rights of residence were given three to twelve months to liquidate their business enterprises, move to the Pale some thousands of miles away, or leave the Empire altogether. Word of Durnovo’s decree reached Moscow the next day, the first day of Passover. That very night, Cossack-reinforced police units surrounded the entire Zariade Quarter, where the poorest Jews lived in sprawling tenements just one step removed from the slums of Khitrovka.

“The whole Quarter was ransacked, apartments forced open, doors smashed, every bedroom without exception searched, and every living soul, men, women, and children, routed out,” wrote Harold Frederic, the Times correspondent in Moscow. “Over seven hundred men, women, and children were dragged at dead of night through the streets to the police stations. They were not even given time to dress themselves.” A few were sent to prisons, others exiled to Siberia, and most shipped directly to towns and cities in the Pale. None was given opportunity even to pack clothing for the journey, let alone assemble what few valuables they might have possessed. Passover, 1891, had begun.

Within three months, some seventeen-thousand Jewish artisans, petty shopkeepers, and workmen were driven from the city. Then it was the turn of the more prosperous Jewish merchants and traders, whose numbers totaled perhaps another four thousand. In return for large bribes, the police sometimes allowed them a few weeks of grace, but all except the richest merchants and those professionals with university educations had to face the inevitable expulsion within a year. Some were men of considerable property, but all had to dispose of their shops, businesses, and factories at a bare fraction of their recognized worth to Russians anxious to take advantage of their misfortunes. Informers received liberal rewards for exposing Jews who attempted to escape expulsion.

In January 1892, when temperatures plummeted to thirty degrees below zero, “crowds of Jews dressed in beggarly fashion, among them women, children, and old men, with remnants of their household belongings lying around them, filled the unheated station of the Brest railroad,” one observer remembered. “Jews who had lived in Moscow fifteen, twenty-five, and even forty years were forcibly removed to the Pale of Settlement.” All that was left to the handful of Jews allowed to remain in Moscow was their cemetery. Only in 1906 was the Moscow Synagogue allowed to re-open, “having seen many, many tears and much bitter sorrow.”

Almost as appalling as this terrible destruction and injury was the reluctance of Russians to speak out in the Jews’ defense. Even Count Leo Tolstoy made no protest until the great Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev drew up a petition against the government’s anti-Semitism. Tolstoy signed, but minimized his signature by explaining that he would sign anything that Soloviev saw fit to write.

Tolstoy’s reluctance to defend the Jews was part of a long tradition of apathy and prejudice shared by many prominent Russians. For Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s poet of freedom at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Jew was “contemptible” and came stealthily as a spy and informer. Two decades later, Turgenev saw in the Jew an object of ridicule: “He really was absurd despite the desperate situation in which he found himself,” Turgenev wrote in one of his short stories. Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky all spoke against anti-Semitism in a few private letters and a handful of journal articles, but in their literary work they portrayed the Jew in the stereotypical Russian manner nonetheless.

__________________________

¹ The Pale of Settlement was a western region of Imperial Russia with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917 in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden. Most Jews were still excluded from residency in a number of cities within the Pale as well. A few Jews were allowed to live outside the area, including those with university education, the ennobled, members of the most affluent of the merchant guilds and particular artisans, some military personnel and some services associated with them, including their families, and sometimes their servants. The archaic English term pale is derived from the Latin word palus, a stake, extended to mean the area enclosed by a fence or boundary.

The Pale of Settlement included all of modern-day Belarus, Lithuania, and Moldova, much of Ukraine and Poland, and relatively small parts of Latvia and western Russian Federation. It extended from the eastern pale, or demarcation line inside the country, westwards to the Imperial Russian border with the Kingdom of Prussia (later the German Empire) and Austria-Hungary. It composed about 20% of the territory of European Russia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement

² Durnov’s brief Wikipedia entry does not mention his decree of 1891. It does, however, include this mixed assessment of the man’s abilities:

“Although not a capable statesman, he was a good communicator, capable to earn trust of his superiors. Count Sergei Witte described him as "a pleasant Marshal of Nobility, a pleasant governor, a pleasant Deputy Minister of the Interior. But he was not a cultured or intelligent person; rather, one rather limited in his abilities. A hospitable, polite, and very cunning man."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Durnovo

Dana Loesch Doubles Down on Her Ignorant, Malevolent Accusation That Barack Obama Says Disagreeing With Him Is Racist

When Obama was elected, the nation collectively celebrated its first black president regardless of individuals’ political affiliation. (Dana Loesch, November 2020)

I hope he fails. (Rush Limbaugh, referring to President-elect Barack Obama, January 2009)

Lest we forget the reign of terror, executive overreach, and constitutional peril that was the Obama administration, Dana Loesch (The Federalist) uses the occasion of Obama’s just released presidential memoir (which she refers to as Everybody Who Disagrees with Me Is Racist, Part II) to remind us. * In her article, pithily headed "Obama's second memoir doubles down on his divisive, arrogant smear that disagreeing with him is racist," Loesch airs a few of her many Obama-related grievances, untainted as they are by any hint of racism on her part.

Readers who are so inclined should feel free to fact-check Ms. Loesch’s charges for themselves, charges that amply document “the identity politics, cancel culture, and government abuse the Obama administration used to tear the nation apart,” all of which is why we (by which I mean “white people”) can no longer have nice things. To wit:

During his presidency, Obama weaponized the Internal Revenue Service to thwart the free speech of Americans who didn’t share his politics, which led to the IRS settling with various groups and publicly apologizing, something Obama never did. ¹ In fact, Obama weaponized as many government agencies as he could to extend his punitive reach beyond its constitutional limits.

He used the banking system in Operation Choke Point to snuff out legal businesses he and his party ideologically opposed. He used his disastrous “Fast and Furious” gun-running program, which resulted in the deaths of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent and an agent with Border Patrol, to push for gun control.

Obama also spied on members of the press and tried to charge journalist James Rosen as a “criminal co-conspirator” through the Espionage Act of 1917. According to the Associated Press, “Trump may use extraordinary rhetoric to undermine trust in the press, but Obama arguably went farther — using extraordinary actions to block the flow of information to the public.”

The Obama administration used the 1917 Espionage Act with unprecedented vigor, prosecuting more people under that law for leaking sensitive information to the public than all previous administrations combined. Obama’s Justice Department dug into confidential communications between news organizations and their sources as part of that effort. ²

In 2013, the Obama administration obtained the records of 20 Associated Press office phone lines and reporters’ home and cell phones, seizing them without notice, as part of an investigation into the disclosure of information about a foiled al-Qaida terrorist plot. Obama also weaponized government surveillance against his political opponents and sent government agencies to harass private citizens for carrying out civic duties.

There is a certain nostalgia to Ms. Loesch’s "oldies but goodies" litany; bless her heart, she didn’t even mention Benghazi! Having established to her own satisfaction the many reasons why people of all races, creeds, and colors should despise Barack Obama, she concludes in the same high dudgeon with which she began:

According to Obama, everyone who disagrees with him does so not because his policies are illogical or because his arguments target a straw man; it’s because everyone else is a bigot.

It would have helped her case, I think, if Ms. Loesch had supplied even a single quotation from Obama to substantiate her claim—which, IMHO, does not sound like something the man would have said out loud, much less committed to paper. Is it possible that Ms. Loesch has not even read Obama’s book (or had someone read it to her)? 

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/17/obamas-second-memoir-doubles-down-on-his-divisive-arrogant-smear-that-disagreeing-with-him-is-racist/

* If you are unfamiliar with Ms. Loesch, I find the following biographical blurb (which accompanied her first book, Flyover Nation: You Can’t Run a Country You’ve Never Been To, published in 2016) so charming it bears reprinting:

“Dana Loesch believes in Christianity, patriotism, traditional marriage, and the right to bear arms, among other quaint ideas. For the elites in DC, Los Angeles, New York, and Silicon Valley, that makes her as bizarre as a three-headed dog. Loesch is alarmed that America is fracturing into two countries--not North and South, but Coastal and Flyover. Worse, the people in charge don't understand the first thing about how most of the country thinks and lives. In Flyover America, people believe criminals should be punished. Coastal America focuses on rehabilitation. Flyovers think the Declaration of Independence was crystal clear: All men are created equal. For Coastals, Black Lives Matter--but anyone who adds that all lives matter must be a racist. Coastals think they understand firearms because they watched a TV movie about Columbine. Flyovers get a deer rifle for their thirteenth birthday.”

Ms. Loesch also used to be the official spokesperson for the NRA. Her resume also includes this gem, courtesy of Wikipedia: 

In 2016, Loesch labelled the mainstream media as "the rat bastards of the Earth. They are the boil on the backside of American politics. I'm happy frankly to see them curb stomped." When her quote resurfaced after a mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland in 2018, Loesch said she had meant she wanted some news stories to be curb-stomped and was not encouraging violence against journalists.

She sounds like a peach, albeit one that is sadly misunderstood. For confirmation of her peachiness, I recommend this fascinating, lengthy profile from St. Louis Magazine (October 2018):

https://www.stlmag.com/longform/the-making-of-dana-loesch/

¹ Obama was famous for apologizing at the drop of a hat, but only to other nations and only for America’s supposed “sins”. As for the infamous “IRS-gate scandal”: the agency at that time was headed by Lois Lerner, an administrative holdover who had been appointed by George W. Bush and had also served in government during the George H.W. Bush administration. Why Ms. Lerner allowed Obama to “weaponize” her remains a mystery, one which even a Republican-led Congressional investigation was unable to solve.     

² It seems to have slipped Dana Loesch’s "mind" that the George W. Bush administration put New York Times reporter Judith Miller in jail for eighty-five days for refusing to reveal her source for a story.  

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy...

{Note: it is only 7 a.m. here in the Mountain West, and I have already shared, on Facebook, articles about new COVID-related social restrictions in Montana, about right-wing defiance of such restrictions (conservatives are the new Martin Luther King, who died so you would not have to follow public health guidelines during a pandemic--freedom!), about the War on Thanksgiving ("Grandma, would you like some extra COVID with your turkey?"), and about Trump's attempt, on his way out the door, to make life harder for people with disabilities. I thought all the insanity was supposed to end after Election Day; in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, "Oh my god, am I here all alone?"}  

In an opinion piece for NBC News, Michael Conway, former Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, says that we should all want incoming President Joseph Biden to issue a blanket pardon to outgoing President Donald Trump, because reasons.

I cannot even…

Mr. Conway’s distinguished resume includes work for the Democratic National Committee; he has been a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. I am sure his heart is in the right place when he suggests that we accept, or even request, a pre-emptive pardon for the single most corrupt individual ever elected to the presidency (and I am including Richard Nixon and Warren G. Harding).

If there is ever to be a time when we test the notion that, in our system, no one is above the law, this is it. I do not expect President Biden to make the legal pursuit of Donald Trump a priority, but neither do I expect him to get in the way of such pursuit, much less to issue a pardon.

Donald Trump belongs in jail.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-biden-should-pardon-trump-we-democrats-should-want-him-ncna1247986

At Law & Liberty, George Weigel worries about the future of our democracy, and who can blame him?

Weigel revisits the work of the late Fr. John Courtney Murray, author of We Hold These Truths (published in 1960) and widely regarded (and widely criticized) as having been a leader in attempts to reconcile traditional Catholicism with America’s liberal democracy. Weigel wishes to establish “Murray’s continuing salience as a clear-minded thinker about American democracy and its discontents.” He writes:

“As those discontents have become ever sharper, to the point where even non-“doomists” must wonder how the American democratic experiment in ordered liberty will renew and revitalize itself, Murray’s warnings from more than a half-century ago, and his analysis of the roots of a possible crack-up of American political culture, strike me as remarkably prescient and well worth pondering today.”

Let us ponder together, then. Weigel claims that “The most striking, even ominous, sentences in We Hold These Truths follow immediately after Murray has analyzed the ‘dissolution’ of the original ‘American consensus,’ or public moral culture, under several malign influences: the impact of an Ockhamite theory of freedom-as-willfulness mediated through Benthamite utilitarianism and Jamesian pragmatism; the scientific revolution and the rise of empiricism; and the theological disarray of mainline American Protestantism.” ¹

For what it’s worth, and because I am currently knee-deep in the subject, I feel I should note that Russian neo-idealists at the turn of the 20^th century were also unhappy with (among other things) empiricism, utilitarianism, scientism, pragmatism, positivism, Ockhamite nominalism, and Reformation-derived individualism.  In 1902, they elaborated on their complaints in a collection of essays, Problems of Idealism. Their unhappiness, alas, would only increase in the decades that followed--not that I am suggesting our fate will resemble theirs.

In any case, after a bit more preliminary throat-clearing, Weigel reveals Murray’s prophetic sentences:

That decay in the public moral culture, with its inevitable consequences in political culture and politics itself, was rather far advanced, Murray cautioned. Then came the voice of Murray-the-prophet, who loved what was best in the American experiment but feared that its foundations were crumbling, with potentially grave public results: “Perhaps the dissolution, long since begun, may one day be consummated. Perhaps one day the noble, many-storeyed mansion of democracy will be dismantled, leveled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged.”

If I read the above passage correctly, George Weigel is saying that Americans in the year 2020 are living in a barn, or, worse, in a tool shed (which houses a forge). I know that some sections of this great nation are in need of upkeep, and I realize our infrastructure has seen better days—but a barn? A tool shed?

Weigel’s primary concern is that we have lost the moral fiber needed to sustain the tensile strength needed to sustain our form of government: “If the moral and intellectual foundations that make self-governance for the common good possible were to collapse; if the “truths” on which the American democratic experiment relied for its tensile strength were no longer held,” he writes, then we are, in a word, doomed. ³

When it comes to American democracy, I repeat what Mahatma Gandhi said when asked his opinion of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.” Some cynics contend that our sainted Founders did everything they could to guard against the democratic principle, constructing a Rube Goldberg government of checks, balances, federalism, legislative gridlock, and the Electoral College, all of which were designed to ward off the horrifying possibility that the American people might someday attempt to govern themselves.

We even fought a bloody civil war to decide whether the propositions in the Declaration of Independence—"All Men are created Equal” and so forth—were anything more than rhetorical flourishes; after which, we set those same propositions aside—perhaps back in the barn or the shed—so they would not become dull from overuse.

It is indisputably true that a self-governing nation requires citizens who are informed, attentive, and self-governing themselves—morally speaking, that is. It is also true that We the People have always fallen short on both knowledge and virtue, possibly because we are too busy living our own lives to invest much time and energy to governing the lives of our neighbors. That, alas, is one of the many reasons why democracy remains the worst possible form of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried. ⁴

Now, if you will excuse me, I must go out to the tool shed to forge some additional weapons of tyranny. Perhaps I will begin by issuing some public health mandates and non-binding guidelines...

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https://lawliberty.org/forum/recovering-the-moral-basis-of-democracy/

¹ The phrase “Ockham to Bentham to James” was immortalized in 1910 as “the saddest of possible words” by Franklin Pierce Adams. ²

² Upon further review, I seem to have confused “Ockham to Bentham to James” with “Tinker to Evers to Chance”; I therefore retract my remark, with apologies to all. Obviously, “Ockham and Bentham and James” were three-fourths of Notre Dame’s famous “Four Horsemen” backfield, immortalized by Grantland Rice in 1924. The fourth horseman, as I recall, was Ronald Reagan, aka “George Gipp”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball%27s_Sad_Lexicon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_(American_football)

³ I should note that, according to Orlando Figes, at the outset of the 20^th century “There was a general feeling that Russian civilization was doomed.”

⁴ I am citing Churchill, of course, but I will wager that some Russian (Pobedonostsev?) said something similar.

The Attack of the Soft Totalitarians

{Note: ‘The Totalitarians” would be an excellent name for a band; 'The Soft Totalitarians" does not have quite the same punch.}

At Real Clear Books, Rod Dreher graces us with a preview of his new book, Live Not by Lies (the title is taken from Solzhenitsyn, who Rod Dreher resembles in the same way that the singer Tiny Tim resembled Pavarotti). ¹ There is nothing so becoming as borrowing moral capital from a man who spent decades in the Soviet gulag. Speaking of unimaginable suffering, did you know that Rod Dreher has been made to feel uncomfortable among his fellow journalists for holding conservative views?

Dreher, you may recall, is the religious Right’s very own Paul Revere, riding forth from The American Conservative and shouting The SJW’s are coming! The SJW’s are coming! And they’re bringing MTD’s with them, too! ² Live Not by Lies is the latest iteration of his by now familiar alarum: They will go after you and your family! The time is short! Don’t think it won’t happen just because it hasn’t happened yet!   

Dreher’s basic argument continues to be: the illiberal Left is in the process of imposing a “soft totalitarianism” upon all who dare dissent from its “woke” agenda. In support of his thesis, he invokes Huxley’s Brave New World, Czeslaw Milosz, China’s “social credit system, a techno-totalitarianism of which Mao Zedong could only have dreamed,” and the late Rene Girard, whom Dreher cites as having warned that “The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.” ³ To which Dreher adds: “Survivors of Communism are saying the same thing: that liberalism’s admirable care for the weak and marginalized is fast turning into a monstrous ideology that, if it is not stopped, will transform liberal democracy into a therapeutic form of totalitarianism.”

All in all, that is some heavy artillery to bring to an ideological snipe hunt. Dreher’s latest example of “therapeutic totalitarianism” is the fact that (he claims) “A curious thing is happening in the immediate aftermath of the US presidential election: Facebook, Eventbrite, and other gatekeepers of the electronic public square are refusing to let Trump supporters organize protests through their platforms. No one should be surprised. Now and in the days to come, Big Tech and Woke Capital — that is, financial firms and corporations that embrace progressive values — will ramp up their campaign to marginalize and silence dissenters.” 

Gatekeepers, it seems, are wont to excluding the rabble from entrance—shocking! Next thing you know, commercially-licensed bakers and florists will insist on the right to refuse their services to selected members of the public for any arbitrary reason at all. Rod Dreher, however, should not be surprised by gatekeeping, much less shocked; veteran journalist that he is, he knows full well that the media, social or otherwise, is under no obligation to print, broadcast, or otherwise distribute anything it finds inappropriate or unacceptable. Dreher himself, for example, selects which comments to publish in response to his articles at The American Conservative; he even sometimes cautions would-be commenters that he will block them if they are insufficiently civil, relevant, or deferential to whatever bounds he places on the discussion.  

Still, one must admire Dreher’s uncanny knack for continuing to write, promote, and sell books about how he and his spiritual/ideological brethren are being marginalized, intimidated, ostracized, silenced, etc. The loudest voices in America today are the ones incessantly screaming You will not silence us! Is it totalitarian of me to wish they would, every now and then, shut up?

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https://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2020/11/16/a_quiet_totalitarian_revolution

¹ Please note that I am not disparaging either Mr. Dreher or Mr. Tim; I am simply acknowledging the iconic status of both Solzhenitsyn and Pavarotti.

² For the uninitiated: “Social Justice Warriors” and “Moralistic Therapeutic Deists,” respectively.

³ If you look up the phrase “rhetorical overkill,” you may well find yourself looking at a picture of Rod Dreher. Also: is there any contemporary group that plays the “victim” card more often and with more gusto than conservatives? Even Supreme Court justices are joining the whine-fest: e.g., Samuel Alito, who recently delivered a speech (to the Federalist Society) titled, I believe, “Why Does Everybody Keep Picking on Us?”

Sunday Sermon: Encompassed by Mystery

Stephen Graham, from The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary (1917):

The world is like a theater, is it not? The theater should reflect the world and touch man to a remembrance of his mystery. He comes into it to be stirred by pity and fear, not simply to be amused between dinner and sleep. He comes into it not merely to receive but to partake. Such a theater is the world, with its marches and processions, its lively and its heavy measures, its sacrifices, its words of ancient wisdom from the lips of priests, words of prophecy from its oracles, the joyful choruses and jubilations, its sympathies and choruses of sadness, its manifold movements and counter-movements.

It is good to realize this theater in the heart. It is good to realize all that is happening here in Russia at one and the same time: the tramping to cities and factories to get work, the tramping to the monasteries to find God, the third-class carriages of the trains filled with people, the uproarious taverns in which is all manner of exchange of rude ideas, the beautiful churches alight with candles and paintings, the little theaters and cinemas as crammed as the churches, the bazaars and fairs, the prisons, the poor prisoners on the road clanking their chains.

Every common sight is charged with significance. Looking at those chains on those convicts, we can see emblems of human destiny. There exists in Russia a whole beautiful and sad literature about chains and fetters. Russian hermits and holy men have been known to wear chains voluntarily as one of their rites of world-negation. Dostoevsky found Siberia, after personal experience there, to be the supreme place for the understanding of the world.

We are encompassed about by mystery. Every common sight is a rune, a letter of the Divine alphabet written upon all earthly things. Man’s heart is a temple with many altars, and it is dark to start with, and strange. But it is possible with every ordinary impression of life to light a candle in that temple till it is ablaze with lights like the sky. That is the function of ordinary sights—to be candles. Our night of ignorance is lit up then with countless stars, and it is no less night, but more, more beautiful.

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Stephen Graham (1884—1975) was a British journalist, travel-writer, essayist and novelist. His best-known books recount his travels around pre-revolutionary Russia and his journey to Jerusalem with a group of Russian Christian pilgrims. Most of his works express his sympathy for the poor, for agricultural laborers and for tramps, and his distaste for industrialization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Graham_(author)

Saturday Lecture: What Are Conservatives Trying to Conserve?

Edmund Fawcett (from Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition):

To survive, let alone flourish, liberal democracy needs the Right’s support. It needs, that is, conservatives who accept liberal and democratic ground rules. Yet conservatism began life as an enemy of liberalism and never fully abandoned its reservations about democracy. Conservatism endured in modern politics by cooperating with liberalism and soon learned how to prevail in democracy. Liberal democracy of the kind that thrived in Western Europe and the United States after 1945 grew from that historic compromise by the Right. When, as now, the Right hesitates or denies its support, liberal democracy’s health is at risk.

With the Left in retreat, both intellectually and in party terms, the Right commands politics at present. But which Right is that? Is it the broadly liberal conservatism that underpinned liberal democracy’s post-1945 successes or an illiberal hard Right claiming to speak for ‘the people’?

Conservatives from the start have quarreled with each other as well as with liberalism and democracy. Should they compromise with their historical opponents, or resist? Should the fight be primarily in party politics over power and government, or in intellectual and cultural life? Those questions for conservatives have never gone away. A chaos of voices has often made it hard to say what, if anything, conservatives stand for. At the same time, the very fierceness and endurance of the contest suggests that all sides have believed there existed something tangible worth fighting for.

In the perplexing rush of modern change, conservatives have spoken to a universal human desire for familiarity and stability—for tomorrow to be like today. As defenders of order and property, however, conservatives overcame their hesitations and soon spoke up for capitalism and its demands—the great servant of material progress that restlessly turns societies, lives, and outlooks upside down.

Conservatives, that is, have forever faced two ways. They promise stability and upheaval, continuity and disruption. By temperament, they swing from confidence in their record and pride in their creed to fear that success will be snatched away and that their beliefs are widely ignored. Puzzling as it sounds, conservatives have largely created and learned to dominate a liberal modern world in which they cannot feel at home.

There is nothing eternal about liberal democracy. Many shrewd and well-informed people worry that its day is already done. [We on the Left should view conservatism] with recognition, puzzlement, and alarm: recognition of the Right’s party-political and intellectual strengths; puzzlement at neglect of those strengths by a Left that knows too little of how the Right thinks and by a Right that exaggerates its intellectual and cultural disadvantages; alarm at the rise of the hard Right, which faces mainstream conservatives with a  clear choice: find allies to their Left with whom to rebuild and hold a shaken center or join the Rightward rush from the liberal democratic status quo.

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Edmund Fawcett is a British political journalist who describes himself as a “left-liberal” or a “liberal leftist”. Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition is his latest book, released in September 2020. His previous books include Liberalism: The History of an Idea. He is a maternal uncle to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

In Brief

In the wake of yet another contentious election, Francis Menton (self-styled Manhattan Contrarian) has identified our fundamental electoral problem: the undue influence exerted by what he calls “basket case cities” and the people who live therein.

He explains:

What do I mean by "basket case" cities? They are the poster children for the failure of government spending to improve people's lives and incomes, cities in decline where decades of government programs have brought only shrinking populations, vast vacant zones, fleeing businesses, high crime and low income. Yet they provide very large electoral majorities for the candidate promising to further expand the failed programs.

Menton’s examples of basket case cities include Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. In addition to dwindling populations and escalating murder rates, these cities have something else in common (and it’s not what you think):

All of these cities have been under continuous rule of Democrats since beyond human memory. The last Republican mayor left office in Philadelphia in 1952, Detroit in 1962, and Milwaukee in 1960.

Skeptical readers may suspect that Menton is maintaining a deliberate and strategic silence about the elephant of a different color that occupies metropolitan areas: the racial diversity, that is, of his basket case cities. Far be it from me to suggest that Menton, who lives in Manhattan, wants to denigrate or disenfranchise people of color; but there are a disproportionate number of such people in the cities he targets.

After listing various reported irregularities and alleged shenanigans in last week’s election, Menton directs our attention to the nefarious forces at work:

We should not lose track of the even bigger ongoing political corruption in the basket case cities. That is that these places are filled with large numbers of local non-profit organizations, calling themselves “community service” organizations or “anti-poverty” programs, that function effectively as political organizations on behalf of the Democratic Party. These organizations are funded by some combination of taxpayer dollars, and/or charitable donations claimed to be eligible for tax deductions, based on the idea that they are fighting poverty, but in fact they never raise a single person out of poverty, and their principal function is to be sure that 90% of the vote in these areas comes in for the Democrats. Whether there also may be some additions to vote totals as necessary to overcome Republican vote elsewhere in the state on election night is actually a small part of the problem.

Ah, yes: the tyranny of the registered non-profits, those barely disguised shills for the Democrats, partisan wolves in compassionate sheep's clothing. First, they register you to vote; next, they offer to harvest your ballot; finally, they send you home with an I Voted sticker and a reminder to please return to their office before the next election.

Menton ends with what one assumes is a rhetorical question:

The basket case cities are poor and declining precisely because they are controlled by self-serving self-perpetuating political machines that misdirect taxpayer anti-poverty funds into the preservation of their own power, while the poor get trapped in a lifetime of poverty. Are we really dumb enough to let these same people control the presidential elections?

Another way to phrase that question is, are we smart enough to prevent “these same people” from voting in the future? To which the answer is, We’re working on it.

I give Francis Menton credit for having topped Hillary Clinton’s historically ill-advised “basket of deplorables” remark. He has conjured entire basket case cities filled with, or at least governed by, deplorables, by which he means Democrats.  

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-11-5-the-ascendancy-of-the-basket-cases-2020-edition

At The American Conservative, Curt Mills reviews three recent books about American populism: Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland, Thomas Frank’s The People, No! and Michael Anton’s The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. Although the first two books are written by left-leaning journalists, Mills is surprisingly generous with his praise: “Anything Frank writes is worth picking up. Few others write history on the early 20th century with such apparent passion,” he says, while remarking of Perlstein’s effort, “It is his fourth installment of mid-century, American conservative history and it is his best, besting the magisterial Nixonland.”

As for Michael Anton, who worked briefly in the Trump administration on the basis of his world-historic call to arms in 2016 ("The Flight 93 Election"), Mills notes Anton's remark that “If I have any criticisms of President Trump, my answer is always the same: there’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.” Anton’s perspective on populism is apparently the same as his perspective on Trump: the solution to populism’s shortcomings is more populism. Of course, Donald Trump is no more a populist than he is a self-made man or a shrewd negotiator; he is a lifelong PR stunt of his own devising, the misshapen product of his own imagination and his father's money, a con man and a demagogue, and the living, breathing incarnation of the fictional "Lonesome Rhodes". 

Mills concludes:

All three authors look back more than they look forward. As America hunkers down for a potentially hellacious winter, reflection on how we got here is certainly in order. Anton sees a point of “no return.” It allows him to wave off populist objections to Trump’s rule: that the president hasn’t exited foreign theaters, that he’s governed too conventionally economically, and that he sees the stock market as his scorecard. Others see an older, more inchoate history here. “If you just noticed that voters threw the bums out in 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018, and now likely 2020, maybe you’d realize that ads and the jibberings of DC elites don’t matter to voters,” liberal activist Matthew Stoller wrote this year of recent federal elections. “They want results and aren’t getting them.” It’s a message as optimistic as Frank’s, but without the satisfying clarity of an Anton or Perlstein. But if it’s right, it implies the “age of populism” has only just begun.  

Mills fails to note that it is precisely the Trump brand of populism that has brought us to the bring of what he calls “a potentially hellacious winter”.

Like Mills, I highly recommend Reaganland and The People, No! because I have read and admired previous work by those authors. On the other hand, and unlike Mills, I would advise readers not to waste a single precious second on anything written by Michael Anton, whose bright idea in 2016 (“The Flight 93 Election”) was that voters should crash the nation in order to keep it out of Hillary Clinton’s hands.

Mission accomplished, Michael; heckuva job.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/power-to-the-people/