The Little Red Blog

A Troika of Deplorables

(To be clear: the authors referenced below—William Lind, Michael Anton, Timothy Gordon, and Michael Robillard—may be fine, decent human beings. It is only their political/ideological views which I deplore.}

According to William Lind (at The American Conservative), modernity is, among many other flaws, terminally ugly:

A curious aspect of today’s America is its combination of wealth and ugliness. In the past, money usually led to beauty: to classical, baroque, and art deco buildings, to the music of Biber, C.P.E. Bach, and Boccherini, to the art of Michelangelo, Titian, and Gainsborough. Now, money buys decadent art, painful music, and alienating architecture. Most prominent architects belong to the “turd in the punchbowl” school; they delight in forcing something disharmonious into a previously charming neighborhood. America’s commercial districts, with their endless strip malls and parking lots, have to be among the ugliest ever built. A southern mayor, speaking at a Congress on the New Urbanism, showed a slide of one of his city’s main streets and said, “I call this our corridor of crap.”

One need not share Mr. Lind’s ideology to agree with his premise that a good deal of the American landscape has been uglified. The disagreement revolves around who, or what, is responsible for the uglification:

Three reasons why we are awash in ugliness stand out. The first is the abolition of the concept of beauty by relativism. There are no objective standards. Everyone’s opinion is of equal value, and there are nothing but opinions.

A second reason is a change in the means of cultural transmission. Today, electronic screens are the means of cultural transmission, and they drive morals, aesthetics, and culture ever lower. Why? Because money is to be made by appealing to the widest audience, which means the least educated, crassest, and most vulgar. Relativism having abolished all standards, there are no limits on how low taste dare go.

A third force promoting ugliness: ideology, specifically the ideology of cultural Marxism, currently parading itself in the Emperor’s clothes of “wokeism.” 

Good Christ, does anyone on the Right know anything about “cultural Marxism”?

Anyone who can discuss the uglification of America without mentioning the word “capitalism” is either disingenuous or obtuse.

The Ugliness of Everything - The American Conservative

Michael Anton is one of the Right’s intellectual lights, which gives you some idea of the darkness on that edge of town. Nevertheless, Anton is not wrong when he explains:

The “socialism” with which we are most familiar today—high and progressive taxation, a generous welfare state, nationalization of key services such as health care, an expansive list of state-guaranteed “rights,” combined with the retention of private property and private ownership of most means of production—Marx and Engels deride as “bourgeois socialism,” i.e., not only not the real thing but fundamentally closer to bourgeois capitalism than to true socialism, much less communism.

In short: bourgeois socialism is not true socialism, much less communism.

Now, if only Anton had the sense to realize, or the honesty to admit, that it is therefore preposterous to equate American liberals’ efforts to bolster the welfare state (social safety net) with Marxism or Bolshevism. Alas, despite his having spelled it out, neither Anton nor his conservative colleagues seem able to understand, or willing to recognize, the difference between Communism and what is called in much of the world “democratic Socialism”; and so, on they go, Anton and his ilk, prattling about gulags and tyranny, pretending to be persecuted, marginalized, and silenced while commanding impressive speaking fees, book contracts, and prestigious think-tank fellowships.

Socialism and the Great Reset - The American Mind

Finally, at The American Mind, Timothy Gordon and Michael Robillard do their utmost to convince young readers not to go to college. Their rationale is as simple as it is specious:

The modern university has succumbed, in the name of the triple-headed god of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), to the hegemonic ideology of woke intersectionality. All decisions about staffing, curriculum, and student life must be minutely inspected for their adherence to dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy. Despite an ever-growing list of instances of campus hysteria, cancellation of conservative voices, and violent harassment of heterodox university speakers, the unquestioned cultural narrative persists: One must go to college in order to flourish as a full person in society.

Nor is this calamitous situation limited to the humanities; “Even traditionally rigorous courses of study have been blighted. Woke university professors have declared mathematics “a field dominated by whiteness and racism.” At the University of Toronto, one can now take a “Liberating Mathematics” course which seeks to “re-imagine” mathematics, offering the mathematically incompetent a handy excuse in the form of a “daring critique” of math, allegedly delegitimizing it as having drawn predominantly from “the experiences and narratives of men.” In formal logic, scholars have declared “there is much more to be done–especially on decolonizing our curriculum.” 

The authors wax predictably grim over the prospect of academic decolonization:

This woke takeover of the hard sciences is reinforced by an entrenched set of professorial and administrative hiring quotas, overbearing and overbroad institutional incentives and disincentives, and an oppressive campus culture submerged in the now-unquestionable presuppositions of woke orthodoxy. All this has engendered a reinvigorated cult of scientism.

Gordon and Robillard then briefly discuss Stalinism and Lysenkoism, thus linking American universities to Stalinist atrocities. They conclude by urging, “We need to encourage STEM-inclined Zoomers to circumvent the college-industrial complex altogether, to marry young and learn a trade, and to get on with their lives in a world hopefully soon delivered from woke-mathematics and nature-hating scientism.”

The authors have a book due for release soon from Regnery Press, titled Don’t Go to College: A Case for Revolution. The spirit of the Sixties lives on, albeit in unexpected quarters: “tune in” to Fox News and Infowars, “turn on” the woke liberal elite and the nefarious Deep State, and “drop out” of modernity to find your own, doubtless very different, Benedict Option.

Welcome to the New Dark Ages. The cost of one admission is your mind.  

 The Triumph of Scientism - The American Mind

The Three Horses of the Woke Apocalypse

Saturday Lecture: "The moral aspirations of the modern American Right"

{While Yoram Hazony, in his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery, traces "Anglo-American" conservative thought back to the 15th century, Alan Lichtman chose to locate the origin of America's "modern right" in the 1920s.} 

Alan Lichtman, from White Protestant Nation (2008):

The modern right arose in the 1920s out of a widespread concern that pluralistic, cosmopolitan forces threatened America’s national identity. Those Americans most inclined to protect what they perceived as embattled traditional values came from all parts of the nation. They lived in every kind of community, worked in numerous occupations, attended many different churches, or even lacked formal affiliation with a church. The vanguard of American conservatism in the 1920s, however, shared a common ethnic identity: they were white and Protestant and they had to fight to retain a once uncontested domination of American life.

At the core of right-wing politics in the 1920s and beyond was an anti-pluralistic ideal of America as a unified, white Protestant nation. Many factors, including race, religion, gender, nationality, and class, shaped America’s anti-pluralist tradition. But the vitality of that tradition flows from an evolving cultural nationalism that combined these factors in different ways at different times.

Positively, conservatives have insisted on upholding the values of America’s Anglo-Saxon pioneers. Negatively, they have kept the country on edge with Cassandra’s warning that pluralism would destroy the civilization that the pioneers had built. Virtually every dispute over radicalism, loyalty, reproduction, race, immigration, sexuality, crime, permissiveness, creationism, and school prayer had its forerunner in the ’20’s. So too did forms of right-wing political mobilization. These included the grassroots organizing of the Ku Klux Klan, the lobbying of patriotic and business associations, the defense of traditional womanhood by the DAR, the ‘scientific’ case for white Anglo-Saxon superiority, and the radio evangelizing of fundamentalist preachers. Support for private enterprise complemented the anti-pluralist tradition in debates during the era over taxation, regulation, welfare, anticommunism, and labor relations.

The Right has held together as a political movement since World War I through its core commitment to preserving white Protestant values and private enterprise (not ‘free’ enterprise). American conservative politics is not about limited government, states’ rights, individual freedom, or free markets. These are all dispensable ideas that the right has adjusted and readjusted to protect core principles. Conservatives have built their own versions of big government, carved out innumerable exceptions to free markets for business subsidies and friendly regulations, and restricted freedom in the interest of security. They have backed states’ rights, for example, on racial issues, but not on alcohol and drug use, pornography, abortion, and gay marriage. In defense of core values, conservatives shifted from isolationists before Pearl Harbor to aggressive warriors against communism and terrorism. They have abandoned protectionism for free trade, public education for private school vouchers, and deficit control for ‘supply-side’ tax cuts.

The moral aspirations of the modern American right have focused on the family. Control over women’s allegedly dangerous sexuality and autonomy is at the center of conservative politics. In this view, a morally ordered society requires a morally ordered family, with clear lines of divinely ordained masculine authority and the containment within it of women’s erotic allure. Salacious, non-motherly displays of female bodies, sex education in schools, abortion rights, easy divorces, and the tolerance of homosexuality and other forms of deviance undercut the reproduction and orderly progress of civilization. Feminist demands since the 1920s have upset manly and womanly distinctions and eroded patriarchy, de-feminizing women and feminizing men, and opening the nation and the family to conquest (rape) and subversion (seduction). The history of failed civilizations, conservative physician Arabella Kenealy wrote in 1922, “shows one striking feature as having been common to most of these great decadences; in nearly every case, the dominance and sexual license of their women were conspicuous.” 

Both religion and race have also mattered for conservatives who view nationhood as anchored in white, native-stock peoples and their distinctive culture. Since World War I, conservatives have been cultural, religious, and at times racial nationalists, dedicated to protecting America’s superior civilization from racially or culturally inferior peoples, foreign ideologies, sexual deviance, ecumenical religion, or the encroachment of so-called one-world government.

In the late twentieth century, white Protestants achieved a partial and uneasy rapprochement with white Catholics, with whom they found common ground on pro-family issues, communism, and militant Islam. This reflected both a decline of anti-Catholicism among white Protestant and the rise of a theologically and politically conservative Catholicism that put sexual morality, traditional gender roles, biblical truth, and the protection of Christianity above church teachings on labor, the death penalty, and social welfare.

Conservatism, like liberalism, resides not only in the electorate, political parties, and government, but also in the schools and churches, mass media and the high arts, fraternal groups and corporations, and civic and trade associations. Conservative politics has had an enduring appeal to Americans seeking the clarity and comfort of absolute moral codes, clear standards of right and wrong, swift and certain penalties for transgressors, and established lines of authority in public and family life.

In recent years, conservatives have framed the language of politics to dictate terms of the national debates and to put liberals on the defensive. Ultimately, conservatives have engaged in a struggle for control over American public life against a liberal tradition they see as not just wrong on issues but sinful, un-American, and corrosive of the institutions and traditions that made the nation great. To achieve their ambitious aims, conservatives have had to stay disciplined, mobilize their resources, and wage total war against liberals, with unconditional surrender as the only acceptable result.

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Allan Lichtman - Wikipedia 

Book Preview: "Conservatism: A Rediscovery"

{A book preview is what you write when you haven’t read the book in question but would like to express an opinion about it anyway. Since I’m not shelling out $14.99 (for the Kindle edition) for Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery, I will have to make my best guess, based on a brief excerpt and my powers of deduction, as to what it’s about.}

I have lost track of how many times, just in my own lifetime, American conservatism has been revived, restored, renewed, rediscovered, rehabilitated, and--mainly--relabeled. George W. Bush's ill-fated "compassionate conservatism" was hardly the first attempt to put lipstick on right-wing ideology. Decades before that, we had Frank Meyer's Cold War "Conservative fusionism," which was followed by "Neo-conservatism," the disillusionment with which led to the likes of Rod Dreher's "crunchy cons," which featured granola-eating, Birkenstock-wearing conservatives. There was (and is) Patrick Buchanan's holy war "cultural conservatism," with its "America First" motto. There are also post-liberals, integralists, paleoconservatives, constitutional conservatives, religious conservatives, free-market conservatives, traditionalist conservatives, Straussians, followers of Hayek, followers of Voegelin, die-hard fans of Joseph de Maistre, stubborn believers in Carl Schmitt, etc.      

Fortunately, someone has come along to sort out this endless profusion of heterodoxy and heresy, to correct the erring sectarians, and to put true-blue American conservatism back on its feet. Yoram Hazony has written what Rod Dreher calls "an astonishing book," making its author, according to Dreher, “not only [conservatism’s] most important public intellectual, but also its passionate prophet.” Dreher’s fulsome praise comes in response to the publication of   Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and Dreher is by no means alone in being astonished; other conservative thought-leaders have joined in the chorus. Ben Shapiro calls the book “fascinating, erudite, and mind-opening,” and R.R. Reno says that “Hazony’s powerful vision of conservatism for the twenty-first century is capable of steering the ship of state out of our present perils.” Even Peter Thiel, whose opinion counts because he is wealthy, is on board with Hazony’s “lucid exposition of a tradition of conservative nationalism that begins in the Old Testament and [continues] to our own moment.”

That is all, and I do not say this lightly, very exciting; or it would be if it were true. However, from what I can tell, and for all his obvious erudition, Hazony's premise would be at home on Fox News; contemporary America, he writes, is in a state of “permanent revolution and cultural devastation” beset by “an updated Marxism (calling itself ‘Progressivism,’ ‘Anti-Racism,’ or ‘Woke’) which has, in short order, “seized control of the institutions that had been, until only recently, responsible for the development and circulation of liberal ideas in America, Britain, and beyond.” Greg Gutfeld could not say it as well, but he would nod in agreement.

It is difficult to take seriously an author who insists that “By the summer of 2020, most of the important news media, universities and schools, big tech and other major corporations, and even the government bureaucracy and the military had adopted a policy of accommodating the new Marxism and advancing its agenda.”  Apparently, we are all Marxists now, what with our identity politics, our pronouns, our Green New Deal, our deconstructionism, and our hegemonic intersectionality: all of it straight out of the Communist Manifesto/Port Huron Statement/Herbert Marcuse's posterior!

All of which is to say, if Hazony does yeoman work in tracing the lineage, intellectual and historical, of the kind of conservatism of which he approves, he does nothing at all to temper the hyperbolic rhetoric which modern "conservatives" have long been fond of wielding. Nor does he do anything to defuse right-wing tropes about the Sixties; not unlike every pre-1980 issue of National Review, Hazony expressly challenges the post-World War II liberal consensus, which led, by the 1960s, to “a new liberal constitution that guaranteed the civil liberties of blacks and other minorities, but also banned prayer and Bible-reading from the schools and lifted earlier restrictions on divorce, pornography, immigration, and abortion.”

What, Hazony implicitly asks, hath liberalism wrought? Nothing short of “the shocking destruction of the Anglo-American cultural inheritance [and] the suppression or stigmatization of many of the most important ideas and institutions around which life in Britain and America had been built, including God and scripture, nation and congregation, marriage and family, man and woman, honor and loyalty, the sabbath and the sacred, among others.”

Look upon your works, Enlightenment liberals, and despair! At the same time, Hazony says, “In our day, conservatives have largely become bystanders, gaping in astonishment as the consuming fire of cultural revolution destroys everything in its path.” Conservatives didn’t start the fire, of course; but, according to Hazony, they haven’t done much to stop it, either. How in the world are we to survive this cultural and societal conflagration?

By returning to the past, says Hazony; that is, by “rediscovering the history and philosophy of conservatism, both of which by now have been largely forgotten.” This is in keeping with “an important principle of Anglo-American conservative thought: When faced with the disastrous consequences of a particular course of action, we must retrace our steps and restore, as much as possible, the conditions that existed prior to setting out on this course.” Onward we go to the past, before “the sudden rise of the new Marxists” spoiled everything that was good and decent about America.

I want to be clear: Conservatism: A Rediscovery seems well worth reading. You will learn much about the likes of John Fortescue, the 15^th-century author of In Praise of the Laws of England, and John Selden, a 17^th-century polymath ¹ acclaimed by Hazony as “perhaps the most important figure in Anglo-American conservatism.” You will learn Hazony’s “nine principles” that explain “what government is for and what it should do.” ² You will learn who and what imperils us and what to do about them. And you will learn something about living a "conservative life," as exemplified by Hazony, his wife, and their nine children. ³

You may even learn what all the fuss over the book is about, a fuss comparable to, say, the fuss over Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, or over J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, or over Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed. Conservatives seem to need to give each other pep talks from time to time to face the dreaded nihilistic abyss that is the secular modern West; and each pep talk is delivered by someone who is immediately declared the new spokesperson for conservatism. Today it's Yoram Hazony's turn; I can't wait to see whose turn it will be tomorrow. 

___________________________________________

Yoram Hazony - Wikipedia

John Selden - Wikipedia   

John Fortescue (judge) - Wikipedia

¹ Shame!

² I am pledged to secrecy, having signed an NDA. Also, as I mentioned, my free Kindle preview of Hazony’s book ended abruptly partway through Chapter One.

³ You might then read the essays at the online Law and Liberty symposium devoted to Hazony’s book, essays which take a somewhat more critical view of Conservatism than do Rod Dreher or Ben Shapiro.  Toward a New Traditionalism? – (lawliberty.org)

Saturday Lecture: "To secure purity in an impure world"

{What follows is the conclusion of a lengthy address given by Professor Joshua Mitchell at Bethlehem College in March of this year. Mitchell’s talk included references to the Reformation and to Jonathan Edwards and America’s “Great Awakening,” some observations about the French Revolution, the usual sprinkling of quotes from de Tocqueville, and some generalizations about Marxism. ¹ I hope this excerpt is clear enough without that background; if not, I have included a link to the original.}

Joshua Mitchell, from “The Church of the New American Awakening”:

I have here brought together a host of phenomena that many of us now intimate are related, but do not yet grasp are pieces of a larger comprehensive project. Purge words, cancel culture, innocence-signaling, wokeness, Trump Derangement Syndrome, the fixation on “clean” energy, the desire to eradicate “toxic masculinity,” along with claims about the perils of micro-aggressions and unconscious bias—what gathers all these together into a coherent whole is the Church of the New American Awakening that commands our national attention. Its liturgy involves the anxious attempt to secure purity in an impure world, by scapegoating someone or something out there, so that parishioners may declare themselves to be “without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:19).

Christians who believe that sin is original, that only Christ is without blemish or spot, can see in the host of phenomena the New American Awakening present a shallow apparition of Christianity itself. It is an incomplete religion. As such, Christians have the antidote to the poison. Most Americans today, however, are nominal Christians, who feel Christian guilt without understanding its depth. For them, original sin and Christ’s sacrificial offering are an embarrassment. They do not have the antidote to the poison; they have only the poison. Some are devout parishioners in the Church of the New Great Awakening, who scapegoat in order to purge the poison. Others stricken by the poison know that the cost of never-ending scapegoating is the destruction of the American regime itself and, so resist.

But with what weapons can they resist? The rhetorical weapons that brought them victory during the Cold War are of little use in this battle. We are not fighting Marxism or the French Revolution and its spiritual heir, Progressivism, those first two incomplete religions to plague the West in the aftermath of the Reformation; we are fighting the third incomplete religion, this time over the meaning of sin and how we achieve redemption.

The fate of the American regime now hangs on the question of whether we can recover the whole of the Christian understanding from which the Church of the New American Awakening offers fragments and pale imitations. For parishioners of this later Church, the redemption of the American regime can only be achieved by the destruction of the American regime. Christianly understood, it would seek the destruction of “the old man” so that “the new, spiritual, man” may emerge (Eph. 4:22-24). These parishioners, however, have something else in mind than a birth unto the spirit.

As it is now being worked through in the soul of America, every major action-item of the political party that houses the Church of the New American Awakening, without exception, intends redemption through destruction. Pushback against national borders; the unwavering insistence that fundamental political and economic transformations are necessary to address Climate Change; the disgust with “dirty” fossil fuels; the demand for wealth redistribution; the suspicion of and outright hostility to the idea of equal treatment under the law, and the resolve that every mediating institution in which citizens gather must be altered so as to become “inclusive”—all of these have at their root the supposition that the nation-state, market commerce, the petrochemicals that fuel it, the conventional generative family, our civic institutions, and our religious institutions are unclean and must be purged.

This is not politics; this is a religious quest to establish a sacrificial offering that takes away the sins of the world. As such, our problem in America today admits of no political solution. Either there will be a Christian reawakening in America that provides a feast to replace the crumbs offered by the Church of the New American Awakening, or America will perish.

America hungers. Who will feed it?

______________________________________

The Church of the New American Awakening - American Reformer

¹ One of the most noteworthy features of Professor Mitchell’s admittedly virtuoso performance is that he eschews the use of even a single quotation from the people whose ideas he so heatedly denounces; for that matter, he doesn’t even name any of those people. The transcript of his address includes plenty of quotes, but they are either from people Mitchell cites with approval (like Jonathan Edwards and Alexis de Tocqueville) or they are his own inventions, paraphrases disguised in quotation marks as if they were the “words” of someone else. Would Professor Mitchell allow his students to get away with relying so heavily on unsourced material?

Joshua Mitchell is professor of political theory at Georgetown University. His research interest lies in the relationship between political thought and theology in the West. He is also an avid conservationist, committed to stewardship on his small farm on the Eastern Shore, and is working on the development of the next generation of solar-electric sailboats. His most recent book is American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time (Encounter Books).

                               If it was good to be Awakened, why is it bad to be Woke?

Which Laws? Whose Liberty?

{Today's excursion is to the land of Law & Liberty, a website of some distinction.}

Please allow the good folks at Law & Liberty to introduce themselves:

Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and politics and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons.

This magazine brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to examining the first principles of a free society as they appear in law, history, political thought, and other aspects of culture.

For those of you who do not yet have your ideology-decoder ring, “classical liberal” is code today for “conservative”. Law & Liberty features a conservative perspective on the topics it covers; but, of the many conservative sites onto which I venture from time to time, its writers are less hyperbolic and more rhetorically responsible than most.

That said, here are some recent articles from L&L.

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In “Better Things Than Happiness,” Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug learns, thanks to a wise remark from one of her college professors, that happiness is overrated. She then gets around to Aristotle and is introduced to eudaimonia, which, she explains, “refers to a sense of wholeness, of completeness, and of peace. It refers to a flawless harmony between the person and the world outside the person, and of ultimate achievement for the individual. It is happiness, yes, but something bigger and better too—it is perfection: perfect happiness. The lucky few who achieve eudaimonic happiness can do so only after living most of their lives. In fact, Aristotle questions whether any man can experience eudaimonia prior to the moment of death. This is because the perfect happiness of eudaimonia emerges from a life well lived.”

“Call no man happy until he is dead,” advised Aristotle. I am glad that Ms. Birkhaug has learned early that “The way to happiness is through more important things” and that “Happiness is not something totally within human control.” Now she can get on with her life.

Better Things Than Happiness – Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug (lawliberty.org)

(If you’re interested, see also Jennifer Hecht’s book, The Happiness Myth)

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Theodore Dalrymple’s “The Oikophobic Will to Power” picks up on “the phenomenon of oikophobia, the dislike or even hatred of one’s own country.” According to Dalrymple (who is, I should point out, British), oikophobia “now seems so prevalent in western academic and intellectual circles as to be almost an orthodoxy or requirement for acceptance into the intellectual class. Of course, no social trend or phenomenon is entirely new or has an indisputable starting point: for example, George Orwell drew attention to English self-hatred many years ago. But the spread of oikophobia has been of epidemic proportion in late years.”

Since Mr. Dalrymple never identifies the oikophobic individuals he has in mind, it is very hard to take his claims seriously, including his claim about the hidden agenda behind oikophobia:

“Interest in, admiration for, or love of alien cultures, or even a single alien culture, is rarely if ever the reason for oikophobia. The latter is not the belief that, as the opening sentence of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey puts it, “they order these things better” there, and therefore we must emulate or copy. The oikophobe does not want sharia or Aztec human sacrifice, or any other foreign custom, in his own country. What he wants is power within it, and oikophobia is an instrument to achieve it by delegitimizing those he thinks already have it. He wants to replace one ruling class, as he sees it, with another – his own.”

It is amazing how easily and how accurately people can discern the true motives of their opponents, and how often those motives turn out to be selfish and unprincipled. The lust for power, says Dalrymple, is what drives “the intellectual class,” which believes that the way to their countrymen’s hearts is by openly despising their country.

I’m no expert on oikophobia, but the logic seems a little shaky to me.

The Oikophobic Will to Power – Theodore Dalrymple (lawliberty.org) 

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Spoiler: “Tocqueville’s Worst Fears” were that “the principle of equality, if carried to an illiberal extreme, would culminate in a “tutelary” despotism, in which government, even if elective, would deprive individuals of the freedom to act, aiming to regulate all their actions for the sake of what it “knew” was their good.”

Now you know the point of David Lewis Schaefer’s review of Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality. Piketty, a French economist, wants more income redistribution and more economic leveling; Schaefer, a Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, does not.

More precisely, Schaefer fears, as did Tocqueville, that further equality will come at the price of liberty. As Schaefer puts it:

Piketty is less concerned with promoting either political or individual freedom than he is with building a “state” strong enough to push “to its logical conclusion” the movement towards “real equality” as he conceives it—based, it would appear, on nothing more than an ambitious intellectual’s attraction to abstract principles. This is reminiscent of the armchair, “literary politicians” to whom Tocqueville and Edmund Burke attributed the origins of the terroristic French Revolution. Both Piketty’s principles and his policies are a perfect recipe for achieving Tocqueville’s democratic despotism.

A “perfect recipe”! It would be a shame to let it go to waste, would it not?

Tocqueville’s Worst Fears – (lawliberty.org)

 

Are We Great Again Yet?

{I apologize for subjecting readers to the following selections from 'American Greatness,' but it could have been worse; I could have chosen to blog about AG's latest screed from Victor Davis Hanson.}

Edward Ring, writing at American Greatness, argues that “everyone in the world [can] achieve the standard of living that we [Americans] take for granted”. Nor is he alone in his enthusiasm:

In April 2022, noted venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson posted the following quote on Facebook: ‘Our goal is to usher in an era of infinite abundance.’

Infinite abundance.

This phrase epitomizes the ongoing promise of California’s tech culture. Despite California’s many political shortcomings, the state’s technology sector continues to set the pace for the rest of the world. ‘Infinite abundance,’ evocative of an earlier tech mantra ‘better, faster, cheaper,’ is not only a defining aspiration of tech entrepreneurs; it is closer to being realized every day.

Next stop, Utopia!

While liberals have accepted the scientific consensus on climate change and have proposed policies—wind and solar energy, electric vehicles, etc.—to deal with the situation, conservatives, when they have not simply denied that a problem exists, have become techno-boosters and believers in “infinite abundance”: enough water, food, land, and energy for everyone, forever. This seems to be out of line with traditional conservatism, which preached limits and emphasized the need for prudence and for thrift; but conservatives today are a different breed.   

In fairness, Edward Ring acknowledges a fundamental difficulty:

Anyone fighting for abundance must nonetheless confront an inescapable fact: Every American on average uses four times as much energy as people in the rest of the world, and they use three times as much water. Furthermore, if anything, the per capita water use for Americans is understated. Nuances can alter the implications of fractional differences, but they cannot explain away multiples of three or four times. Can abundance for everyone be achieved without destroying the planet?

Despite that frank admission, Ring remains undaunted in his can-do American optimism; he never so much as suggests that Americans might have to lower our expectations of perpetual economic growth, much less that we might have to stop being wasteful, gluttonous consumers of the planet’s resources. Instead, Ring waves his magic wand and utters the magical incantation: “Policies that nurture abundance would [produce] leading-edge products and technologies that [would] address an insatiable, wholly justified demand” for more.

I hate to be pedantic, but, by definition, an “insatiable demand” can never be filled. It hardly seems “conservative” to promote insatiable demands; what would Russell Kirk or Michael Oakeshott have to say about such hubris?

Toward Infinite Abundance › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)   

Also at American Greatness, Brandon Weichert worries that we won’t live long enough to enjoy our infinite abundance, because “Biden Is Sleepwalking US into Nuclear War with Russia”. Again, this seems contrary to old-style conservatism, which encouraged American presidents to stand up to Soviet threats despite Moscow’s nuclear arsenal; defending “captive nations” was held, by the Right, to be a moral imperative.

Now, however, “A coterie of Russian officials have indicated their increasing willingness to risk nuclear war with the Americans and their NATO partners if the West does not stop its full-throated support for Ukraine in their endeavors to completely evict the Russian invaders from the embattled country.” Moreover, “The ongoing food, energy, and supply chain crises, as well as the potential for a nuclear world war, are all connected via Ukraine.” Mr. Weichert concedes that “The West was justified in assisting the Ukrainians to prevent a total Russian takeover of their besieged nation.” But enough is enough: “The time has now arrived,” he declares, “for the world’s great powers (namely, the United States) to use its immense power and leverage over the warring parties to end the conflict, restore some semblance of order into the region, and to avert a wider, unnecessary nuclear war with Russia.”

I will go on record as also wanting to avert nuclear war, with Russia or with anyone else. I get the sense, however, that Weichert is more interested in calling attention to Joe Biden’s perceived shortcomings (he calls Biden “frail and forgetful on a good day,” as well as “ignorant and corrupt”) than with serious policy analysis. Democratic Presidents, of course, have long been damned if they do (“Warmonger!”) and damned if they don’t (“Appeasement!”).

Weichert closes on this dire note: “Just as the leaders of Europe in the run up to World War I failed to recognize how their actions or inaction exacerbated the likelihood of total world war, we now need to seriously contemplate the possibility of a nuclear war with Russia over tiny Ukraine.” I am going to hazard a guess that President Biden and his various advisors are aware of the dangers and that they are, and have been, working behind the scenes to find or to broker some solution. That no solution has yet been found does not mean that no one is trying or that one will not be found.

Brandon Weichert takes the position that we tried to help an embattled ally, but now it’s time to throw in the towel; even a superpower can only do so much. He may be right, but it’s odd rhetoric to hear from our usually hawkish Right.

Biden Is Sleepwalking U.S. into Nuclear War with Russia › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)   

Books Report

The Survival of Western Culture, by Ralph Tyler Flewelling (1943)

If ever there was a time when it made sense to worry about “the survival of Western culture,” it was 1943, when a global conflict launched by a lunatic German dictator and an expansionist Japanese empire was at its height. Ralph Tyler Flewelling wrote The Survival of Western Culture before Hiroshima and before the full truth about the Holocaust was widely known; World War II was still undecided, and there was good reason to fear it would be won by the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, and Italy).

Flewelling, a Methodist minister and a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, was responding specifically to Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West; he was also addressing the growing existential fear that, regardless of which side won the war, Western civilization was in the process of being discredited.

Rejecting scientific materialism (but not science) and modern individualism (but not individual liberties), Flewelling spoke up on behalf of “spiritual achievements as yet embryonic and almost untried, and which may be distinguished from individualism under the higher term ‘personalism’.” Though skeptical of what he called “the myth of automatic progress,” he was nevertheless optimistic: “The democratic order may seem weak and even ephemeral to some,” he wrote, “but the spirit which seeks expression through it is vital and cannot perish.” Sounding distinctly Hegelian, he insisted that “To the very extent that the present world situation is disillusioning, to that extent is the demand for a better order destined to be realized. The age of material achievements, great as they are, cannot provide the permanent satisfactions of the living spirit of man.”

Flewelling’s conclusion—written, remember, in 1943—displays the utterly unjustified optimism of mid-century liberalism:

“For the first time now, we have a widespread conviction in the realm of religion that any goodness, purity, or love anywhere in the world is a manifestation of the Divine Spirit without respect to the special religious system under which it appears. Such recognition bespeaks a coming tolerance which will enable men of good will everywhere to join forces for the furtherance of world peace, of international amity, of a new impetus to the life of the spirit.”

At the same time as Flewelling was writing those words, trains packed with human beings were rolling toward Auschwitz and other extermination camps; smoke rose from the chimneys of death factories. People in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were going about their usual daily business. Flewelling cannot be blamed for not having known that the moral foundations of the modern West were crumbling beneath our feet. Eighty years later, we remain poised precariously atop a shaky new world order with which we have only begun to grapple.

Ralph Tyler Flewelling - Wikipedia

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The Neoconservative Mind, by Gary Dorrien (1993)

Neoconservatism would seem to be yesterday’s news; these days, right-wing Populism is all the rage (literally). But the two phenomena are not unrelated; if nothing else, their shared hatred for modern liberalism makes them kindred spirits.

Writing in 1993—a decade before George W. Bush put neoconservatives like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz in the saddle, egged on by the likes of Bill Kristol and John Bolton—liberal theologian Gary Dorrien undertook the daunting task of explaining The Neoconservative Mind. Dorrien, despite disagreeing with the substance of the neocons’ arguments, found much to admire: “Neoconservatives,” he wrote, “refuse to compromise or apologize for their beliefs, but rather proclaim the superiority of their convictions. Their arguments are advanced with distinctive power and energy. The in-your-face polemical style that they have perfected is less about promoting dialogue with opponents than with demolishing them. Neoconservatism,” Dorrien asserted, “faces up to modernity. It has the potential to become America’s first genuine conservative intellectual tradition.”

I suppose that, in 1993, one could afford to be generous towards an ideological movement that had not yet gained political power or launched, under false pretenses, a disastrous war; a movement that had not yet embraced torture and abandoned America’s support for the Geneva Conventions; a movement that had not yet committed this nation to endless war or to unprecedented domestic surveillance. Such generosity, in retrospect, was as undeserved as it was unreciprocated.

Dorrien’s book took seriously, and examined at some length, several of the leading neoconservative thinkers: Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Michael Novak, and Peter Berger. He traced neoconservatism’s roots in the disastrous ideological wreckage of the 1930s “old Left” and in the subsequent turn by many on the Left to anti-communism in the Fifties. Neoconservatives may have been late to the party thrown by the likes of ex-Communists like James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Whittaker Chambers, Will Herberg, and John dos Passos, all of whom had gravitated from Left to Right in the Fifties; but when they finally arrived, they made up for lost time with renewed enthusiasm for the ideological fight.

Dorrien believed the neocons had much to offer, despite their bellicosity. He thought that, because of their previous history on the Left, they could provide the synthesis of conservatism and liberalism that America needed. For Dorrien, “a genuine American conservatism would preserve what was most valuable in the American experience. It would prefer Washington and Calhoun over Jefferson and Jackson, but it would not disassociate itself from the Jeffersonian tradition. It would be anticommunist but opposed to McCarthyism. It would promote capitalism while also supporting trade unionism; it would accept many of the economic reforms of the New Deal as a bulwark against socialism. It would blend Lockean liberalism and Burkean conservatism.”

It would also, one assumes, bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan; it would be less filling, but it would also taste great. 

In the real world, while Dorrien was assessing neoconservatism through rose-colored glasses, Patrick Buchanan was busy announcing a jihad against modern liberalism, Ross Perot was busy establishing mindless Populism as a viable political alternative, and Newt Gingrich was busy enacting an American version of Carl Schmitt’s “politics as trench warfare”. The balanced, thoughtful, sensible conservatism that Dorrien sought, and even thought he had found, was nowhere in evidence outside the academy and (perhaps) the pages of Commentary magazine.

Dorrien claimed that, while neoconservatism was “not yet the reflective, deeply rooted, American conservatism” that the country needed, it was nonetheless “the most serious and still-promising effort of its kind that Americans are likely to see.” The sad truth is that he may well have been right.    

Gary Dorrien - Wikipedia

Christopher Rufo's Ideological Siege Warfare

Christopher Rufo is on a mission to, in his own words, “lay siege to our institutions.” He intends to oust, or at least to counter, the Leftist hierarchy, those tenured radicals from the Sixties who, having undertaken a long and devious march through the institutions, have brought us to the brink of—well, something. Mask mandates? High gas prices? Pronoun confusion? Civilizational ruin?

In April, Rufo gave a speech at Hillsdale College (motto: “We don’t need no stinkin’ federal money”) in which he laid bare the woeful facts of the last fifty years:

“The 1960s saw the rise of new and radical ideologies in America that now seem commonplace—ideologies based on ideas like identity politics and cultural revolution. The leftist dream of a working-class rebellion in America fizzled after the ‘60s, but the leftist dreamers didn’t give up. Abandoning hopes of a Russian-style revolution, they settled on a more sophisticated strategy—waging a revolution not of the proletariat, but of the elites. ¹ They would proceed not by taking over the means of production, but by taking control of education and culture—a strategy that German Marxist Rudi Dutschke called “the long march through the institutions”. This idea is traceable to Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote in the 1930s of “capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media, thereby transforming the consciousness of society.”

In non-pejorative terms, Gramsci's program can be rephrased as “Let’s try to spread our ideas wherever we can and convince people that systemic changes are needed.” Is it wrong to want to change and/or to shape people’s perceptions of the world? Antonio Gramsci has been charged with “fostering a power struggle through ideas,” which criticism is so bizarre that one can only assume that Gramsci’s real offense was unmasking both (a) the connection between ideas and power and (b) the hypocrisy of academics who accuse everyone but themselves of having hidden agendas. What, exactly, does Rufo or anyone else think is the alternative to "a power struggle through ideas"?  

In any case, Christopher Rufo informed his audience at Hillsdale that “This march through our institutions, begun a half-century ago, has now proved largely successful.” We can pause briefly to wonder whether Rufo has mistaken the conventional career paths of Sixties’ intellectuals—who, after graduating and post-graduating, became teachers, professors, media types, etc.—for a diabolical plot directed by Rudi Dutschke and the ghost of Antonio Gramsci. Does Rufo think that Sixties’ radicals should all have joined Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia? Who does Rufo think would have filled, post-1970, the available slots in American institutions of higher learning, if not the graduates of the Sixties? And yes, those Sixties-types, like everyone else before them and after them, brought with them their ideas and attitudes impacted and influenced by their experiences. None of this was a plot; it was a predictable generational change. Nonetheless, Rufo concluded with evident horror that “The revolutionary ideas of the ’60s have been repackaged, repurposed, and injected into American life at the institutional level.” ²

One wants to dismiss or even to ignore Christopher Rufo, who seems to have swallowed Glenn Beck’s whiteboard whole, but the man is inexplicably influential. He and his cohorts at City Journal have been instrumental in fanning the flames of panic over “critical race theory,” and they have more recently hatched unfounded charges of “grooming children” as their calumny du jour. Rufo is taken seriously on the Right; he therefore needs to be taken seriously on the Left as well.

Rufo is not just lobbing grenades of ill-conceived criticism at the Left; he is promulgating a political strategy for the culture war that he and so many on the Right are eager to wage. Here, in part, are the marching orders that he delivered in his Hillsdale speech:

“Institutions that promote ideologies such as critical race theory and radical gender theory have been captured at the structural level and can’t be reformed from within. The solution is not a long countermarch through the institutions. You can’t replace bad directors of diversity, equity, and inclusion with good ones. The ideology is baked in. That’s why I call for a siege strategy.”

Laying siege to American institutions sounds, well, radical, almost like something a Sixties' activist would have suggested; but any oncologist will tell you that radical surgery is sometimes necessary to remove a malignant cancer.

“You have to be aggressive,” Rufo urged. “You have to fight on terms that you define. And don’t pull your punches. We will never win if we play by the rules set by the elites who are undermining our country. We can be polite and lose every battle or we can be impolite and actually deliver results for the great majority of Americans who are fighting for their small businesses, fighting for their jobs, fighting for their families.”

In addition to echoing the tactical rhetoric of Saul Alinsky, Rufo seems to be advocating a lot of fighting at a time when Americans, regardless of political persuasion, seem exhausted. But Rufo has just begun to ask other people to fight:

“You have to mobilize popular support by ripping the veil off what our institutions are doing. We live in an information society, and if we don’t get the truth out, we will never gain traction against the narratives constantly refashioned and pushed by the left.”

So, information warfare, and then what?

“Decentralize public institutions like K-12 education. It is centralization and bureaucratization that makes it possible for a minority of activists to take control and impose their ideologies. Decentralizing means reducing federal and state controls in favor of local controls, and it ultimately means something like universal school choice, placing power in parents’ hands.”

Conservatives, in the world where Rufo resides, have, over the years, been too doggone nice, refusing to bring up contentious issues “out of a false sense of decorum”. They need to understand that, although “trust in institutions is a natural conservative tendency,” conservatives today “need to open their eyes. Our institutions are dragging our country in a disastrous direction, actively undermining all that makes America great. What is needed is to build alternative or parallel institutions and businesses in all areas.”

Rufo is correct on that latter point; there is no reason why conservatives cannot opt out of the mainstream and build their own redoubts of Right thinking, secular versions of Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option”.

On the other hand, I must demur regarding Rufo’s claim that conservatives traditionally “trust in institutions”; he is mistaking modern American conservatism for an older, more genteel conservatism. Barry Goldwater was not Edmund Burke; Ronald Reagan was not Michael Oakeshott; and Newt Gingrich was not Russell Kirk. The American Right, going back at least to the New Deal, has openly promoted an anti-institutional agenda and has, whenever it could, taken a wrecking ball to the institutions it despises. Institutions which have long been targeted by the Right include the federal government, the Supreme Court, the public school system, universities, and the media. When Rufo says, “Conservatives have long been resistant to attacking the credibility of our institutions,” he either does not know what he is talking about, or he is lying his posterior off. 

At Hillsdale, Rufo insisted that we not think of these issues “in terms of a Left versus Right dynamic.” Instead, he urges us to reframe the conflict as “a top versus bottom dynamic,” elites versus peasants. This is, of course, the new right-wing Populism onto which the boorish, buffoonish, billionaire Donald Trump stumbled, his outsized ego matched only by his bottomless reservoir of resentments and the utter unscrupulousness inherited from his father and nurtured by the legendary Roy Cohn. The Trump administration was a government of the one percent, by the one percent, and for the one percent; despite which, Christopher Rufo claims, “In terms of the top versus bottom dynamic, the choice today is between the American Revolution of 1776” (you know, the one led by slaveholding landed aristocrats and New England merchants) “and the leftist revolution of the 1960s” (you know, the one that didn’t happen).

Many of my friends on the Left insist that paying attention to the likes of Christopher Rufo is counterproductive. I disagree, and I fear we are in store for worse than Rufo if we choose simply to dismiss him and his ilk--J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, the folks at The Federalist and at the Claremont Institute, etc. These people are serious, they are passionate, they are organized, and they are well funded; the fact that they are wrong, and sometimes comically so, does not justify ignoring them. Dismiss them if you will as a joke, but know that, if you do, they may get the last laugh.

_______________________________________ 

Laying Siege to the Institutions | Imprimis (hillsdale.edu)

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

¹ Rufo’s belief that Sixties’ radicals were attempting to foment “a Russian-style revolution” can only be described as precious. It leads one to suspect that Rufo knows nothing about either the Russian Revolution or about America’s “New Left” in the Sixties. In fact, the more one reads from Christopher Rufo, the more one suspects he doesn’t know much about anything at all.   

² Credit where credit is due: “injected” is clever, implying that Sixties’ ideas are a cultural virus of some kind—probably developed and weaponized decades ago by the young Anthony Fauci in a Chinese laboratory.         

Stuff, and Nonsense

At First Things, Mark Bauerlein writes about the current “sorry situation of Catholic schools” (spoiler: they aren’t Catholic enough). Bauerlein offers some tips for reform that could be applied even to non-papist Catholic educational institutions.

For instance, he advocates that “educators maintain a clear distinction between high culture and everything else. In arts and humanities classes, the masterpieces must dominate.” It would be fruitful, indeed, for educators to lead classroom discussions on such issues as the “distinction” between “high culture” and “low culture” (or “middlebrow culture”); who assigns these labels in the first place, and who decides what fits into which category? Similarly, “What makes a ‘masterpiece’?” is an excellent question to pose, as would be “What is a ‘masterpiece’?” Those are probably not questions Bauerlein wants to encourage, but I think students would find them of interest.

Another Bauerlein suggestion is: “In history classes, let no Whiggish or progressivist notions of time and change enter. They frame the past as inferior; [students should] rightly understand history as ever a mix of gains and losses.” Fair enough, and food for thought: does history ‘progress’? What does ‘progress’ even mean? What are the downsides to ‘progress,’ and what is lost as history moves on? Readings could include such authors as Robert Nisbet, Saint Augustine, Karl Marx, Lewis Mumford, et al. 

Bauerlein then offers this nonsensical caution: “Diversity” and “inclusion” are but soft names for identity politics, and sow resentment, not fellowship, poisoning children’s minds with tribal suspicions. Never use those terms.” Why not discuss “diversity” and “inclusion”? Why not talk about their conceptual utility or disutility, their practical applications, and put their use and misuse into historical context? 

Finally, Bauerlein believes educators should privilege the past; “The call of “relevance” should be resisted, as should the drift toward contemporary readings. It’s a presentist impulse that matches too closely the world’s norms. As a rule, the old is better than the new.” As a rule, that rule is wrong. An educator's job is not to prepare students to live in the past—which is, after all, a foreign country; they do things differently there--but to know enough about it to help understand the present and shape the future. 

On the other hand, if students are steered towards ancient wisdom rather than towards contemporary pabulum, at least they won’t have to read Mark Bauerlein.

 The Sorry Situation of Catholic Schools | Mark Bauerlein | First Things

Have some sympathy for Victor Davis Hanson, who, with his recurring "woke" nightmares, must have a hard time sleeping at night. In a primal screed at American Greatness (a publication devoted mainly to belittling America), Hanson can’t stop gnawing at the bone of “wokeness”; he wonders, for instance, “whether the woke progressives now in power in Washington dislike the habits and traditions of the United States even more than [our enemies] do.” He claims that “the new woke United States exudes both arrogance and weakness, a fatal combination for a major power.” He warns that “In the West in general, and in the United States in particular, we are seeing a final fruition of decades of woke self-loathing.”

Obviously obsessed and wide-awoke, Hanson just cannot stop. He is utterly relentless, a latter-day Ahab repeatedly harpooning the great white woke whale: “The sight of a pride flag flying on the Kabul embassy as the most lavishly supplied and funded military force in history scrambled to fly home, abandoning allies and employees, was a bitter metaphor of the arrogance, ignorance, and impotence of woke ideology.” And again: “The idea of meritocracy is disappearing, replaced by woke reparatory fixations on race, in the manner the ideologically correct Soviet commissariat destroyed Russian institutions or Mao’s cultural revolutionary insanity destroyed millions of Chinese.”

What phantoms haunt the dreams of Victor Davis Hanson? “The millions of opportunistic mediocrities emerging from the shadows to mouth wokester shibboleths about climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion, identity politics, and transgenderism, while damning the customs, traditions, history, and values of a prior society that alone is responsible for their very affluence and leisure.” As I said, it must be hard for Hanson to get a good night’s sleep; perhaps he should try counting wokester shibboleths?

Losing what grip he ever had, Hanson reminds us that this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around: “This cannibalistic woke revolution is no Wobbly mine takeover, no 1960s Woodstock, not even a Black Panther, Weatherman, or Symbionese Liberation Army violent spasm. Instead, wokeism is so institutionalized that, like the Soviet Party or the adherents of Mao’s little red book, joining the virtue-signaling wokesters is seen as a smart career move. Going woke is a bully’s paradise, an indemnity against a past ill-considered tweet or a future peccadillo. Indeed, it is quasi-religious groupthink proselytizing.” 

Caveat lector: this is what sleep deprivation can do. Plagued by self-conjured demons of "wokeness," Victor Davis Hanson--a man intelligent enough to have written numerous books, to have taught at accredited universities (and at Hillsdale College), to have been named a Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and to have been awarded the National Humanities Medal--has become just another vitriolic voice in the increasingly unhinged right-wing chorus.  

When it comes to sleep, a good pillow can make a world of difference. If only there was a trustworthy pillow salesman to whom Victor Davis Hanson could turn... 

The Cycles of Revolutions in Our Midst › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

Victor Davis Hanson - Wikipedia

Wide awake and worried about Wokesters under the bed

 

Tuesday Miscellany

Randomly:

At Aeon, historian Daniel Herman writes about “Cowboy Progressives” to debunk claims that the American West was in bed all along with the post-Appomattox South. In fact, Herman explains, the West contained plenty of liberal, progressive, and even radical elements—and that, so far as Herman’s essay goes, is without even mentioning the labor history of places like Butte, Montana and northern Idaho, or the socialist politics of Washington state. Eminent liberal senators like Mike Mansfield (Montana), Frank Church (Idaho), Wayne Morse (Oregon), and George McGovern (South Dakota) also show that there is more to Western politics than are dreamed of in Amon Bundy’s philosophy (such as it is).  

A dissenting view on the origins of the US’s Right wing | Aeon Essays

On her Substack, Bari Weiss welcomes venture capitalist Katherine Boyle to tell us what an “unserious” country America has become:

For 80 years, beginning with the end of World War II, American deterrence and seriousness were in some ways synonymous—an undeniable force for growth and prosperity in business, in technology and in culture, making this country’s achievements the envy of the world. But as the century began, the loss of American seriousness accelerated just as our adversaries, Russia and China, became more serious about their own alternative projects. We can debate the causes of this decline. Some say economic stagnation. Decadence. An unmooring from our founding principles or the natural rise and fall of nation states. But whatever the reason, we all know what unseriousness looks like.

Ms. Boyle then itemizes our unseriousness: our “jumbled weekend withdrawal” from Afghanistan, COVID-induced mask mandates and school shutdowns (“Twenty years of educational gains and investment in schooling were “wiped out” by Covid policies, according to the United Nations”), failure to exploit our domestic fossil fuel capacity, surrender of our cities to homeless drug addicts, the political power of a gerontocracy, etc. Oddly, the single most damning indictment of America’s unseriousness goes unmentioned: our electing to the Presidency an unqualified real-estate huckster/reality TV star.

Anyway, the future can still be bright, says Ms. Boyle. We can build our way out of the doldrums: “The encouraging news, though, is that the loss of American seriousness is the deterioration of institutional will, but not our capability or desire to build new things. Building is a political philosophy. It is neither red nor blue, progressive nor conservative. It is averse to the political short-termism and zero-sum thinking that permeates our aging institutions that won’t protect us in this era. There is no fixed pie when it comes to building. Building is an action, a choice, a decision to create and move. It is shovels in the dirt with a motley crew of doers who get the job done because no one else will. Building is the only certainty. The only thing we can control.” 

With that in mind, I suggest we nominate Bob the Builder for President.

The Case for American Seriousness - by Katherine Boyle (substack.com)

Do vaccines work? Was the 2020 election rigged or stolen? Is “global warming” real? Was the Mueller probe a hoax? Is Ukraine run by Nazis? What is true and what is false, and how we can tell the difference, is of great significance both in our personal and in our public lives; which is why Crispin Sartwell, Professor of Philosophy at Dickinson College, suggests (at Aeon) that modernist and postmodernist thinkers—skeptics, relativists, pragmatists, deconstructionists, et al—would be well advised to settle on some working definition of truth, having scrapped all the older ones. Acknowledging that there were (and are) good reasons for dissatisfaction with traditional theories of truth, Sartwell nonetheless insists: “Truth may not be the eternal unchanging Form that Plato thought it was, but that doesn’t mean it can be destroyed by a few malevolent politicians, tech moguls or linguistic philosophers. The question of truth is as urgent, or more urgent, than ever, and I would say that despite the difficulties, philosophers need to take another crack—if not at ‘aletheia’ or truth as a joy forever, but at truth as we find it, and need it, now.”

Truth is real and philosophers must return their attention to it | Aeon Essays 

Lastly, at the Postliberal Order, Patrick Deneen shares his thoughts:

All the evidence today suggests that, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the rise of modern political conservatism, conservatives have not succeeded in conserving anything.

The development of mid-century conservatism as a political project relied upon advancing a theory of the Founding that that was pristinely liberal. The Founding by this telling was largely reducible to a set of philosophical ideas whose most distinct appeal lies in their liberal grounding as timeless and placeless principles. America was cast as an idea, a theory. Like the state of nature of the liberal philosophers who were of particular interest—particularly John Locke—the Founding came to be understood as a set of principles that transcended place and history and which were advanced as self-evident and universal.

We need not a “return to the Founding,” but a less theoretical and less ideological America. More history, less theory. More memory, less fantasy. More focus on what we must build that we might then seek to conserve, rather than defending to the last breath a philosophy of profligacy and hubris that continuously degrades whatever virtues remain. And, above all, conservatives—Americans as a whole—should undo the highly tendentious and abstract understanding of America that rests on libertarian wish-casting about the Founding. 

Deneen does not seem to consider that postwar conservatism’s real problem was not its “pristinely liberal” roots, but the fact that it was less an attempt to conserve anything than to reclaim a past which was either (a) imaginary (and thus not possible to reclaim) or (b) disreputable (and thus unworthy of being reclaimed). It was also—and Deneen makes this point—a knee-jerk reaction to Communism, which conservatives unfairly linked, out of ignorance or naked opportunism, to the New Deal. Moreover, if one takes at face value William F. Buckley’s expressed desire to “stand athwart History hollering ‘Stop’,” one sees that such conservatism was, by definition, doomed to futility. A better approach might have been to steer History on a different course or to divert History into a different channel; but stopping it was always going to be a pointless endeavor.

As Deneen has elsewhere made clear, he believes that American political ideology comes in two versions of one flavor: “Left liberalism” (Democrats and progressives) and “Right liberalism” (Republicans and conservatives). Like the late Phyllis Schlafly and the late Barry Goldwater, Deneen wants an ideological choice, not an echo. The alternative he promotes is something called “common good conservatism” (or “common good constitutionalism”); the details remain a bit sketchy.

What I Said at Harvard - by Patrick J. Deneen (substack.com)

Illustration from www.notbuyinganything.blogspot.com (2017)