The Little Red Blog

Swift-Boating Taylor

Who among us has not wondered what conservative pundits think of Taylor Swift?

Wonder no more. Mark Hemingway, at The Federalist, has weighed in on the matter from his lofty perch on the political Right. Though he bears no animosity towards Ms. Swift, Hemingway does not approve of the mega-phenomenon she has become or the dire implications her popularity has for the state of American culture. His essay is titled “Taylor Swift’s Popularity Is a Sign of Societal Decline,” and Hemingway prefaces it by asking, “Audiences and elite tastemakers alike have decided Taylor Swift’s narcissistic lyrics and cliched music are a cultural triumph — but why would we celebrate this?”

Hemingway is no fuddy-duddy, mind you, no stuck-in-the-mud curmudgeon complaining that the kids are playing their hippity-hoppity music too darned loud. He is of an age to appreciate classic rock, i.e., back when it was good. He speaks highly of the Beatles, for instance; he compares Swift’s efforts unfavorably to the Fab Four’s “Eleanor Rigby,” and concludes that the latter is “a thousand times more sophisticated than anything Swift has ever done. More importantly, it is just two minutes and six seconds long and still one of the catchiest pop songs in history.” ¹

I will spare you further details of Hemingway’s extensive tirade and cut right to his conclusion:

The over-the-top celebration of Swift’s success says volumes about the stagnation of pop culture. At some point, we have to recognize that even if you embrace the limits of pop music, the distance between middlebrow entertainment and the lowest common denominator is enormous. Our need for shared artistic connection cannot be allowed to overwhelm a duty to also collectively seek out music that takes us places and challenges us with insights into the human condition, revelations about ourselves we didn’t know (or maybe didn’t want to know), and otherwise produces insights into the problems of others. And I, for one, already know enough to know Taylor Swift just doesn’t have it in her to do that.

It’s a shame that Taylor Swift’s success has made it impossible for Mark Hemingway to listen to “Eleanor Rigby” in peace; or, worse, to enjoy the stylings of the late Burt Bacharach, whose music, Hemingway wrote back in February, “didn’t just span six decades, it transcended them.” Bacharach’s “contribution to popular music was incalculable,” enthused Hemingway. Taylor Swift is but a musical novice compared to the composer of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”! ²  

Allow me to suggest that a more telling sign of societal decline than Taylor Swift’s popularity is the continued existence of The Federalist, for which both Mark Hemingway and his wife Mollie lie write on a regular basis. From Obama’s birth certificate to COVID conspiracies to 2020 election denialism, the Hemingway marital duo has helped The Federalist earn its reputation over the past decade as one of the nation’s leading purveyors of alternative facts, fearmongering, and demonization of those who have the temerity to disagree with it.

I think Taylor Swift will survive Hemingway’s disapproval.  

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Taylor Swift's Popularity Is A Sign Of Societal Decline (thefederalist.com)

¹ How Swift’s work measures up to “Yellow Submarine” or to the saccharine “She’s Leaving Home,” Hemingway does not say. While we’re on the topic of bad pop songs, however, let us not forget the execrable mess that was the 1968 pop hit “MacArthur Park”. Written by Jim Webb, who for a while was one of the best pop songwriters of his time, and recorded originally by Richard Harris, this crime against humanity topped the charts in Canada and Australia and rose to #2 in America. Unexpectedly, the song was later redeemed by Donna Summer’s (and Giorgio Moroder’s) brilliant 1978 disco version, perhaps the single best thing to emerge from the disco era.

² I do not want to denigrate Burt Bachrach, even though “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” spoiled three minutes of the otherwise brilliant film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Bachrach wrote many fine songs: “The Look of Love,” for one, and “Always Something There to Remind Me,” for another. It is not his fault that Mark Hemingway has chosen to bash Taylor Swift for no reason I can discern. Requiescat in pace, Burt.

What Hath Taylor Swift Wrought?

Friday Fuss

In case anyone thought that Pascal the existential Russian blue cat was alone in believing that the term "conservatism" is utterly inappropriate for the American political Right, the following is from Nathan Robinson (Current Affairs), who begins by quoting Noam Chomsky:

"There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future."

Nathan Robinson, in his own words:

It is a mistake to think that right-wing politics is about conserving much of anything. In fact, because the right is committed to the rule of the market, right-wing policies will unleash much more destruction than preservation. 

Right-wing populism has always been a fraud because it speaks the language of tradition, community, family, etc. but then supports policies that separate families, atomize communities, and obliterate traditional cultures. Understanding the fraudulence of the word “conservatism” is critical to seeing what the real consequences of the right-wing agenda will be, namely a very different and much worse world.  

“Conservatism” Conserves Nothing ❧ Current Affairs

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In his 2008 Book of Absolutes, William Gairdner set out to refute modern relativism, a task he undertook by constructing a strawman, and an exceptionally flimsy one at that:

The three key myths of modernity all have to do with repudiating controls. We accept as dogma the idea that our minds begin as blank slates (have no innate character-determining properties), that we are all inherently good people to start with (and if bad, are made so by poorly engineered societies that can be fixed up), and, finally, that we exist as freely choosing selves unencumbered by any constraints of temperament, biology, or pre-existing moral obligations or standards. We accept at face value the modern conceit that our minds, instincts, and societies start off clean and empty, to be filled with whatever meanings we choose.

The problem with Gairdner’s thesis is that it might have been accurate, and relevant, in the 18^th-century, but it is a mere caricature today.

Are “we” in the thrall of John Locke and his “blank slate” theory, and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief in mankind’s “natural goodness”? No, we are not, nor were we ever. Those theories were contested even as they were promulgated, and they have long since been debunked, discredited, and discarded. Today, we debate “nature vs. nurture,” we argue about genetic determinism and about the influence of external factors on individual development; our understanding of ourselves has been both challenged and deepened by the work of Darwin and Freud, not to mention by the catastrophes of modern history.  Are there really such things, we ask, as “unencumbered” and “freely choosing” selves? Modern thought is more likely to say that “free will” is an illusion. Post-Locke and post-Rousseau, subsequent thinkers, liberal and conservative alike, have made mincemeat of the simplified ideas that arose in the early modern era only to be complicated and confounded by experience (and, later, by neuroscience).

Despite which, Gairdner proclaimed that “we” are all in agreement on the prevailing “modern conceit,” to which one might respond as Tonto did to the Lone Ranger: “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

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William Gairdner, The Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defense of Universals (McGill—Queen’s University Press, 2008)

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“Kierkegaard worried that his age was going to swallow itself up in reflection; our age is closer to settling the planet Mars than it has ever come to the experience of reflection.” (D.C. Schindler)

Finally, at The Imaginative Conservative, in what is either a lengthy essay or a short book (complete with seventy footnotes!), theologian D.C. Schindler asks, “What Is Liberalism?” He insists that the question “is an essential one” and he goes on to explain:

In the present moment, the question of the “value” of liberalism—that is, modern political philosophy founded on “natural rights” and some version of the “social contract” theory—has emerged with an urgency it may never have had before. While preceding generations have simply taken liberalism for granted as the given context within which we make practical judgments about many other things, the current generation seems willing to raise astonishingly bold questions regarding liberalism itself. Is it the only possible way to think about politics? Is it the “best regime”? Can we not entertain the notion that there were good features in some of the older political forms that liberalism replaced? 

For Schindler, this is not mere academic chatter; it has existential significance. “How,” he asks, “ought we to live in the world we now occupy and respond to the reality of liberalism, which has established its place in the modern West over the course of five hundred years and increasingly around the globe?” In trying to come to terms with what Liberalism has wrought, Schindler provides a list (I know) of “twenty-five features of contemporary life that we take to be evident to anyone who cares to look around thoughtfully.” Taken as a whole, claims Schindler, “liberalism represents a transformation of human nature from the ground up; it is an extraction of human nature, root and branch, from the actual tradition in which it is embedded, so as to enable a truly radical re-interpretation of every dimension of human existence. Such a comprehensive re-interpretation is possible only in reaction to a comprehensive claim on human nature, which is just what Christianity makes by virtue of its universal ontological and historical scope, its mission into the depths of being and through the whole of human culture, all the way up to the world’s eschatological destiny.”

For those interested in pursuing the topic further, Schindler incorporates insights from Pierre Manent’s Intellectual History of Liberalism, with whom he agrees that the historical origins of liberalism stemmed from “the rejection of Christianity, specifically in the form of the Catholic Church, at least in its actual historical condition in the Middle Ages.” The ghost of Bill Occam cannot be far away!

What Is Liberalism? ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Wednesday with Pascal: Conserving Capitalism

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has chosen briefly to suspend his investigations of William of Occam, Blaise Pascal, and Lucien Goldmann so that he might turn his gaze to a question that keeps him, and no doubt many others, awake at night: Who stole conservatism?}

“America is in peril. The welfare of American men and women and the future of our youth are at stake. We dedicate ourselves to the protection of their political liberty, their individual opportunity, and their character as free citizens, which today are threatened by Government itself.” (Republican Party platform, 1936)

In his 2016 book, Who Stole Conservatism, Mario Di Nunzio did a superb job of demonstrating how, and why, the American Right became unmoored from anything resembling conservatism. Because I agree with Mr. Di Nunzio’s thesis—that conservatism was undone by its blind allegiance to capitalism—I will be quoting him at some length.

“Classical conservatism,” as Di Nunzio explains, was represented by the likes of Edmund Burke, Henry Adams, Richard Weaver, and Russell Kirk. While there were of course variations on the larger theme, “This kind of conservatism [featured] a great respect for tradition, enduring moral values, religion, and skeptical attitudes towards popular (especially political) enthusiasms.” Moreover, “It insisted not that novelty in society was bad but that core social, cultural, and political values should not be lightly sacrificed to passing fashion or self-interest. Community interest and community responsibility should reflect a society’s traditions, religious and ethical values, cultural heritage, artistic legacy, concern for others, political programs, and economic life.” This, claims Di Nunzio, was a conservatism “intended to serve stability, order, organic development, and the common good,” while avoiding “uncontrolled and unpredictable social upheaval.”

Set aside, if you will, your opinion of classical conservatism as described above; focus instead on how little it resembles anything offered by American “conservatives” in the last fifty years—or, if one accepts Di Nunzio’s framing, in the last hundred and fifty years. “An American conservative movement emerged,” he asserts, “during the post-Civil War Gilded Age; it directed its energies toward a defense of capitalism even at the cost of muting, altering, or even abandoning” what were thought to be essential tenets of a conservative worldview.

Before proceeding, we should distinguish between “conservatism” as temperament and “conservatism” as ideology. The former represents an ingrained resistance to change and an attachment to, or even a fondness for, existing cultural mores, social structures, and institutions—some more than others, of course. The latter comprises a political agenda based on so-called “first principles” (strong military, low taxes, devotion to the Second Amendment, and seething hatred of liberalism) and characterized increasingly by brashness, truculence, and sheer adolescent delight in giving offense.

The older conservative temperament was articulated in the 20th century by such writers as Joseph Wood Krutch, the Southern Agrarians, Richard Weaver, and Russell Kirk (who insisted that conservatism was not an ideology). The new conservative ideology has been spelled out since then by Newt Gingrich, Patrick Buchanan, Milton Friedman, and their many followers; it has also been spewed into the public square by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson.

As noted, Di Nunzio traces the bifurcation of conservatism back to the 19^th century. “Since the Gilded Age, conservatism in America has included an amalgam of sometimes incompatible ideas about politics, culture, and morality, but it has been dominated by its blind support for unregulated business enterprise.” Few things evoke cognitive dissonance more than the conservative support for capitalism, which, as Di Nunzio writes, “has been a dominant influence for change in society with little regard for preservation or continuity and much distortion of culture and values.” To hear capitalism--the socio-economic equivalent of Shiva, a destroyer of traditions and communities--being praised for its “creative destruction” and heralded (by conservatives!) for its endless innovations, is to experience an intellectual vertigo from which it is difficult to recover. “Capitalism,” as Di Nunzio says in the book’s introduction, “stole conservatism and holds it captive without apology.”

He offers select examples:

The right of an undiscriminating capitalism to invest in virtually any enterprise, however sordid or socially damaging, without interference or oversight by public authority, has been defended [by conservatives] as essential to the survival of human freedom. Conservatives have mounted no campaigns to protest the sleaziness of so much advertising or the constant drumbeat to stimulate consumerism. The modern American conservative offers impassioned support for the unchallenged right to buy arms without limits and does not [support] even the most limited restraints on the killing power of high-caliber assault weaponry. Witness, too, decades of virtually blind support for military expenditure and the blending of genuine patriotic support for the troops at risk with a blank check for the military/industrial complex (President Eisenhower’s warning about this may have inspired the more avid on the Right to accuse him of Communist sympathies). The sum of these parts composes a portrait of American conservatism fully out of touch with its roots.

Irrevocably committed to its defense of capitalism, the American Right has had to look elsewhere to account for the ills of Modernity--individualism, rootlessness, secularism, alienation, lowering of cultural standards, relativism, etc. The usual suspects include various European philosophers (e.g., Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, Derrida, Foucault, Gramsci, Marcuse) and the tenured professors who indoctrinate naive, servile students with their doctrines. Conservatives insist that our difficulties all stem from liberal arts students being taught to question authority—except, of course, the authority of their instructors and the iconic, subversive figures they invoke.

One suspects that if Adam Smith were to return from the grave and observe the world that the market’s Invisible Hand has created, he might call for Invisible Handcuffs with which to restrain it. Modernity’s “pervasive materialism” stems from the dominance of the market; its consequences “cannot be reconciled with and are, in fact, inimical to” classical conservatism. What passes for conservative thought in the 21^st century “is so intimately wedded to the pecuniary objectives of corporate capital [and] so tainted by capitalist distortions” that it is a travesty to call it “conservative”; it is “thoroughly materialist, perversely individualist, and narrowly focused on adjusting all political and economic policy to serve the manipulators of capital.” The new conservative discourse “shows little concern for the differences between [private] wealth accumulation and the pernicious social consequences of undisciplined enterprise. Public squalor, urban and rural, draws little conservative outrage, but taxes and government expenditures are assaulted as intolerable evils. Legislative efforts toward insuring access to healthcare or establishing an economic safety net for the neediest in society are dismissed as profligate public expenditure on behalf of the undeserving.”

Di Nunzio’s assessment preceded the American Right’s recent turn towards a faux populism led by a vulgar, cretinous billionaire, but that turn does not represent a break with conservatism’s pro-capitalism stance. America’s white working class has been mobilized to vent its “economic anxiety” against various imagined oppressors—Marxist professors and Critical Race Theorists on college campuses, transgender persons attempting to live their complicated, confusing lives, globalists and elitists, bureaucrats working for the Deep State, Hunter Biden—rather than against Wall Street and the Fortune 500. MAGA Republicans block attempts to raise the minimum wage, make it harder for workers to unionize, promote unpaid overtime and unsafe working conditions; but their populist rhetoric and their willingness to demonize all sorts of social and political “others” stokes their base. So long as the mobs, with their torches and pitchforks, don’t come for the plutocrats, the venture capitalists, the inheritors of wealth, and the despoilers of the planet: modern conservatives can stand a little anarchy.

America no longer has a conservative movement; it has instead “a perverse, adulterated, grossly distorted” ideological contraption that would horrify the likes of Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver. What this country needs is a good five-cent conservatism; where is Robert Taft when we need him?      

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Mario Di Nunzio, Who Stole Conservatism? (Praeger Publishing, 2016)

What hath Capitalism wrought?

Friday Frights

{You may not have noticed, but America is beset by tyranny and totalitarianism. Fortunately, astute observers like Glenn Ellmers and Walter Kirn are here to enlighten us. Wake up, sheeple!}

Despite the promise inherent in its title, Glenn Ellmers’ “You Got a License for that Tyranny?” does not discuss tyranny at all. Instead, the brief essay is a lesson in how to substitute invective for argument--which is not to say that Ellmers is incapable of presenting substantive anti-Left arguments, only that in this case he eschews them.  When you’re preaching to the converted, I suppose, there is no need for apologetics; you can safely assume that the congregants (in this case, readers of The American Mind) will be satisfied if you simply invoke the familiar epithets.

Which is precisely what Ellmers does (and all that he does), making the case against our Liberal overlords with nothing but a barrage of pejorative language, unleavened by even the slightest hint of respect or charity. Ellmers captures the flavor—not to say, the essence—of Liberal tyranny with a string of well-chosen words and phrases:  

Leftist ruling class, dysfunctional, sanctimonious, deranged, urban hipsters, moral superiority, social parasites, ruthless self-interest, ideological purity, insane, urban barbarism, bureaucratic oligarchy, anti-rational postmodernism, genteel Mafiosi, self-conscious managerial class, elite education and training, expertocracy, misplaced arrogance, unserious leadership, hostile incompetence, ideological posturing, absurd academic dogmas, propaganda, self-contradictory, incoherent, nihilistic.

That, it seems, is all we know about Liberalism and all we need to know.

I give Glenn Ellmers enormous credit for not having used the words “woke” or “Wokeism”. I also give him credit for noting, more or less as an aside, that “The United States is still relatively peaceful, prosperous, and secure.” That is something for which we should all be grateful, especially given all the unlicensed tyranny to which we are being subjected.  

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You Got a License for that Tyranny? - The American Mind

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In an interview worth quoting at some length, Montana-based author Walter Kirn (Up in the Air) bemoans the fact that “America has lost the plot”:

I’m 60 years old. I went to grade school in Minnesota, in very small rural public schools. I was aware from maybe the fourth or fifth grade, through film strips and prepared lesson plans from textbook companies, that we lived in an endangered world. Outside of basic teaching, we were given the overriding message that we should be optimistic about things like computers and space, but there was a louder drumbeat about pollution, racial division, and the Cold War.

Because I was an ambitious kid who wanted to succeed in school, I was always attempting to discern the lesson behind the lesson. What I saw was that I was being asked to be very concerned and anxious about mankind’s stupidity and selfishness. That seemed to be the lesson underlying the pollution lectures—that people in their cars and their desire to have too many things were dirtying up the world.

The Cold War lesson was more sophisticated and went on even longer into junior high and high school. It centered on books like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and other depictions of the dangers of a totalitarian world. We were asked to congratulate ourselves as young Americans on our freedom and clarity and basic goodness compared to this lurking threat from the Soviet Union, in which the citizens were all forced to think alike, act alike, and be alike.

Over the years, it has caused me great consternation that the heavy aversion to totalitarian, dictatorial, and top-down systems that was implanted in me is now kind of useless—and even dangerous. As I discern trends in our society that seem to resemble those I was warned against and raise my hand to say that I don’t like this, I’m told that, somehow, I’m out of step, I’m overly alarmed, and I’m maybe even on the wrong side.

But, I want to reply, this is only what a seventh-grade Minnesota public school student was taught to fear, taught to be on the lookout for, and now you’re telling me it constitutes some kind of dissident position to be afraid of these things? ¹

The final lesson wasn’t that any of this was inevitable, but that by growing up and being good citizens and standing with the right kind of people, it could all be averted. It was portrayed as navigable. It wasn’t portrayed as catastrophic but merely as a set of challenges that we would no doubt overcome. Even the Soviet Union and the threat of the atomic bomb were construed as something that would probably not occur because we were so strong, so influential, so virtuous.

Kirn, who was born in 1962, is perplexed that his seventh-grade understanding of America (“so strong, so influential, so virtuous) and of the world (“a set of challenges that we would no doubt overcome”) has to be either amended or defended. If only his rural Minnesota public education had included lessons on America’s unresolved racial conflicts, its political, social, and cultural turmoil, its foreign interventions and entanglements—really, if only Kearn had been exposed to anything that would have complicated, in the best sense of the word, his Midwest naivete.   

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Walter Kirn on How America Lost the Plot (palladiummag.com)

¹ Analogously: as a child, I was taught to be afraid of lions and tigers. Now that I’m seventy-five, you’re telling me that it’s neurotic for a grown man to be afraid of kittens?  

 

Aristopopulism and Its Discontents

Patrick Deneen, Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and noted author of Why Liberalism Failed, has published a new book, Regime Change, which purports to explain how to put Western culture back on its feet and redirect it toward its proper destination—anywhere but liberalism. Deneen, you see, is a charter member of the “postliberalism” movement, about which you can discover more at the Substack site, The Postliberal Order.

For Deneen, moving on from liberalism entails “the strategic formation of a new elite devoted to a “pre-postmodern conservatism” and aligned with the interest of the “many.” Their top-down efforts to form a new governing philosophy, ethos, and class could transform our broken regime from one that serves only the so-called meritocrats.” Deneen himself has accepted the term “aristo-populism” for his project, as if that makes it either more understandable or more palatable.

Deneen’s book has been highly anticipated, to say the least. At least two websites—Law & Liberty and Real Clear Books—have featured symposia on Regime Change. Surprisingly, the reviews have been mixed. Oliver Bateman, for one, in “Yearning for Collapse,” says that “Deneen is forced to employ a host of sophisticated circumlocutions to get around the fact that he is arguing for something akin to the 1932 Italian essay “The Doctrine of Fascism”.”

Bateman, mind you, does not call Deneen a Fascist; he merely notes that “Deneen's proposed solution to liberalism’s seemingly self-evident failures is an "aristopopulism" led by the newly-minted "self-conscious aristoi who understand that their main role and purpose in the social order is to secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people: the central goods of family, community, good work, and an equitable social safety net supportive of these goods, constraints upon corporate power, a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions.” In the end, Bateman suggests, how one assesses Deneen’s proposals depends on whether one agrees with his premise—that liberalism has failed, that America’s socio-cultural sky is falling, and that regime change is our only hope. ¹

Jarod Facundo is more accepting of Deneen’s premise but concludes that “Regime Change is frustrating because we do have what feels like a pathetic ruling class doing everything possible to preserve its status from critique, in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” But I’m not convinced that sexuality or gender fluidity are why we cannot have nice things. And my inner-Marxist tendencies tell me that even as Deneen cites various decreasing quality of life indicators, the only way out of this is through mass politics, which requires raising class consciousness—not a restrained, passive working class whose noble vibes rub onto the elites ruling over them.” ²

You would expect reviewers at Law & Liberty to be more sympathetic to Deneen’s opus, but Timothy Fuller is having none of it: 

Deneen’s “conservatism” is a revolutionary movement promoting a new elite to transform our lives. In rejecting existing American conservatism as a constrained form of liberalism, Deneen is appropriating the word in support of a revolution: “To constitute a political and social order worth conserving, something revolutionary must first take place: the priority of the liberal progressive agenda must be displaced for one that seeks stability, order, and continuity.” Revolution first, then preservation. How is this to occur? How is the spirit of his revolution to create a coherent, stable, non-revolutionary culture? Initiating radical change cannot ensure control of the consequences.” ³

Lastly, Elizabeth Kaufer Busch is thoroughly skeptical of Deneen’s analysis, his premise, and his proposals:

Deneen’s postliberal order embraces the need to moderate, train, and uplift the many, but who will moderate, uplift, and train the aristoi when they fall into error, as they inevitably will? Deneen’s regime change fails to provide adequate guardrails for them. Moreover, to what extent will the superficial maintenance of our liberal institutions dismantle the guardrails that do exist? While his common-good conservatism does not advocate physical rebellion, it explicitly circumvents constitutional and legal norms, and explicitly calls for “Machiavellian means” to produce the ends he seeks. At the very least, ruling out violence while advocating Machiavellianism is a contradiction in terms. But his apparent hope that the elite will arise via covert means may be even more insidious.” ⁴

It must be discouraging for Deneen to find his seeds of regime change falling on such stony ground or choked by weeds of skepticism; his ideas for hijacking the American experiment have even been referred to as “right-wing Marxism”! Still, we should give credit where credit is due; Deneen’s book is being read and it is provoking reaction, discussion, and disagreement even among his erstwhile allies. The extremism (or at least the implausibility) of his solutions is giving pause to many who admired Why Liberalism Failed. What author would not want to be at the center of such controversy? I would suspect that, so long as no angry mobs of critics carrying torches and pitchforks show up at his office at Notre Dame, Patrick Deneen will be content to know that his ideas as put forward in Regime Change are having consequences—if not necessarily the consequences he had in mind.

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Patrick Deneen (author) - Wikipedia

¹ Yearning for Collapse | RealClearBooks

² Ending Systemic Liberalism | RealClearBooks

³ Reactionary and Revolutionary – (lawliberty.org)

⁴ Renewal or Regime Change? – (lawliberty.org)

Friday Fragments

You would have to be entirely ignorant of postwar American politics not to find the following almost hysterically funny. Media Matters has helpfully compiled several of the latest right-wing complaints that Democrats are trying to—wait for it—“delegitimize the Supreme Court.” From Fox News to the Washington Examiner, from the Federalist to Steve Bannon’s War Room, it’s all the rage to be outraged at the idea of casting aspersions at one of the pillars of American government or at the corrupt hacks distinguished jurists who sit on the bench of the highest court in the land. ¹

I have neither the time nor the inclination to refresh anyone’s memory about how enthusiastic conservative Republicans were about impeaching Chief Justice Earl Warren back in the 1960s, or about how they spent decades loudly decrying “activist judges” and seeking to curtail the judiciary’s power. To say that conservatives did their best to "delegitimize" the courts, and SCOTUS in particular, is to put it mildly, and their attack on American institutions was just beginning. In 1980, Ronald Reagan became the first man to be elected President by campaigning on the novel idea that the government he wanted to lead was the enemy of freedom. Then, starting in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich, the GOP decided to go all in on delegitimizing institutions: public schools, higher education, the federal government, the courts, the media, liberal Christianity, etc. Patrick Buchanan stood up at the Republican national convention in 1992 and declared that the nation was engaged in a culture war and that liberals were out to destroy the American way of life.

We have now witnessed conservatives extend their cynicism to the nation’s electoral system and to the military, with the predictable result that a not insubstantial number of Americans now believe that elections are rigged, that the news is fake, that the Deep State subverts the will of the people, that “false flag” operations abound, and that the FBI and the Justice Department are given to launching, for political purposes, fraudulent and unfounded investigations. The American Right, taking its cue from the MAGA Man himself, is more inclined to believe Russia's Vladimir Putin than U.S. intelligence agencies.

So, yes, it’s funny to hear conservatives now defend the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, an institution for which they showed not the least respect in the recent past. I’m willing to concede that SCOTUS-punching is a partisan tactic both sides engage in for mostly disingenuous reasons. That, however, does not make Republicans’ high dudgeon in the face of demonstrated ethical lapses by the likes of Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas any less amusing.

¹ Right-wing media accuse the left of trying to “delegitimize the Supreme Court” after reporting shows conservative justices concealed conflicts of interest | Media Matters for America

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Amongst the many voices expressing discontent with the modern world, Paul Kingsnorth’s is among the more unfailingly interesting. In his latest sally against Modernity, he offers a modest proposal: “The West,” he says, “must die.”

That may sound radical, but Kingsnorth has his reasons:

Our whole world now, it seems to me, has been built to prevent any stumbling or wandering from ever happening. Nobody wants to get lost. Preventing us from ever getting lost is what the Machine is for. It is why we like it. It is why, piece by piece, day by day, word by word, it is killing us slowly.

Exchange meaning for control: that was the deal. Exchange beauty for utility, roots for wings, the whole for the parts, lostness and wandering and stumbling for the straight march towards the goal. That was the deal. Turns out it was a trap, and now look at us. Look at everything we know, and how little we can see. Look at us here, flailing, drowning, gasping as we sink into the numbers and words.

How are we going to get out of this one?

One answer, of course, is that we can turn on each other in an effort, if not to fix anything, to place the blame: “The culture wars,” writes Kingsnorth, “are a surface manifestation of a much deeper rift in the psyche of modern Western people. You only get a culture war when you no longer have a culture.” That last sentence sounds profound; I’m just not sure it makes sense.

Regardless, Kingsnorth struggles against the impulse to take a side:

The culture wars continue, and the camps are well defined. On one side, the ‘woke’ tribe - that curious agglomeration of international capital and elite progressive opinion posing as an uprising from below - works to invert the culture as it crusades against everything that the place has ever been or stood for. In response, the ‘based’ tribe rises up to ‘defend the West,’ but it can never seem to agree on what it is defending. What is this ‘West,’ after all? Is it an ethnic homeland, a religion, a set of principles, a particular economic or social model, or some other way of seeing or being? Nobody seems to agree.

Surveying the ongoing demolition of the pillars of my culture, I am sometimes, in my worst moods, tempted to join the defenders of the West in their work. But when I have calmed down, I remember that those pillars are mostly rotten anyway, and that those attacking them, repulsive as they can sometimes be, are not entirely wrong either. Something has gone wrong with this ‘West’, and those who highlight its past crimes are getting at something that maybe even they can’t quite put their finger on.

The West Must Die - by Paul Kingsnorth (substack.com)

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Lastly, let us hear from the late Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, from his essay “The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture”:

Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat. One can accept life and, at the same time, accept it as a defeat only if one accepts that there is a sense beyond that which is inherent in human history—if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred. A hypothetical world from which the sacred had been swept away would admit of only two possibilities: vain fantasy that recognizes itself as such, or immediate satisfaction which exhausts itself. It would leave us only the choice proposed by Baudelaire, between lovers of prostitutes and lovers of clouds: those who know only the satisfactions of the moment and are therefore contemptible, and those who lose themselves in otiose imaginings, and are therefore contemptible. 

Without the sacred, Kolakowski concludes, “Everything is then contemptible, and there is no more to be said.”

And yet people keep saying things, without regard for the sacred or, for that matter, for Leszek Kolakowski’s opinion. Critics of Modernity continue to insist that we can’t keep living this way, and yet here we are, doing exactly that.

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Kolakowski's "The Revenge of the Sacred" is found in his collection, Modernity on Endless Trial.

Saturday Lecture: The Perils of Quantitative Collosalism

“Our period could almost be defined as being essentially and primarily the ‘reign of quantity’.” (Rene Guenon)

Pitirim Sorokin, from The Crisis of Our Age (1941):

In the late Hellenic and Roman eras, sublime quality deteriorated. Its place was taken by ever-bigger quantity, and the greater the colossalism of the quantity, the better its regard. Temples, palaces, theaters, public buildings, monuments, sculptures, all became gigantic. The Colossus of Rhodes was 105 feet high; the Halicarnassus Mausoleum was 140 feet high. The size of sculptures and monuments like the Pergamene Frieze, the Farnese Heracles, the Arch of Titus, and the Triumphal Columns of Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, and Constantine were, comparatively, enormous. The Hellenic cities with their huge buildings and wide and long avenues were much larger than the Greek cities of the previous period. The fortunes of millionaires grew enormous. Gigantic choruses and orchestras developed, with numerous and much more complicated instruments. Theatrical plays involved hundreds of actors, animals, and accessories. Schools, colleges, learned and artistic societies, unions, and associations developed, each one larger than the last. Sciences and arts were now cultivated on a large scale. Mass education in arts and sciences, philosophy, and technology became established. A more widely spread school system was introduced. Mass preoccupation with politics became the rule. Mass growth — of unions, of men’s and women’s clubs with mass aesthetic connoisseurism; of mass amateurish philosophy; of mass theater and dramas; of mass religious revivals; of mass production of all kinds of cultural values — spread on a large scale. The size of the empire grew to pathological proportions. Quantity and show became the criteria of quality. The disease of external hugeness and of quantitative colossalism permeated the Hellenic and post-Hellenic Roman cultures.”

Quantitative colossalism was but a substitute for inability to create the great qualitative values. It was the line of least resistance accessible to any mediocrity. “Not being able to make them beautiful, they made them rich”— we can repeat what Pliny says about the huge theaters of his time. The more the creative quality deteriorated, the huger became the values produced. The less inner substance they had, the more showy they were. The more vulgar they were, the more popular they became. The bigger the temples became, the more hollow was the religion. The more generally mass education spread, the less genius appeared. The larger the empires grew, the more disorganized they turned out to be and the harder the lot of the citizens became. The larger the crowd of philosophers, the fewer great philosophers emerged. Erudition replaced creative genius; technique, inspiration; mechanical skill, creative originality.

Our sensate culture of today appears to be exactly in the same position. External glitter and quantitative colossalism already reign supreme in it. “The bigger the better” is its motto: hence our enormous skyscrapers, monuments, temples, school and college buildings, railroad stations, up to the monsters of Radio City and World’s Fairs. Quantitative colossalism tends to become the criterion of any great value. The best business firms are those which are hugest. The society leaders are those who are richest. The greatest empires are those which are most monstrous. The largest theaters become the best. The best show is that which attracts most people. So also the best preachers, teachers, orators, professors, ministers, and what not. The greatest scholar is he who is paid the highest salary or has the largest audience. The greatest university is the largest. The masterpieces of literature or art, philosophy or science, religion or politics are the best sellers bought by millions. “The biggest firm,” “the largest circulation,” “the biggest market of second-hand tires in the world”.

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Pitirim Sorokin - Wikipedia   

For more on Quantitative Collosalism: Kirkpatrick Sale’s “Human Scale” and E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”.

For more on the notions of Quantity and Quality: Rene Guenon's "The Reign of Quantity" and Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

Small is beautiful? Try telling that to the Colossus of Rhodes.

Wednesday with Pascal: What a Godawful Mess

{Caveat lector: in the wake of another of Kevin Slack's online lectures, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is in a mood today.}

In his memorable 1970 review of Bob Dylan’s appalling album Self-Portrait, Greil Marcus began by asking: “What is this shit?”

More politely, we could recall the exasperated cries of tennis great John McEnroe: “You cannot be serious!”

Either of those quotes captures my reaction to Professor Kevin Slack’s appalling online lecture on “Civil Rights and Black Power,” a lecture that is a farrago of one-sided interpretations, tendentious readings, and oversimplifications, along with discreet omissions of anything that might contradict or even complicate Slack’s preferred narrative.  

In fact, one could compose a litany of Slack’s omissions, and I will. To wit, he omits any mention of:

• Slavery
• Jim Crow
• lynchings
• the Ku Klux Klan
• Truman’s desegregation of the military
• the Dixiecrat Party
• Southern white resistance to school integration
• the emergence of “Christian academies” and “White Citizens Councils”
• Orval Faubus
• Little Rock
• George Wallace
• Alabama
• Lester Maddox
• Ross Barnett
• Mississippi
• Selma
• Montgomery
• bombing of Southern black churches
• the murder of Emmett Till
• the murder of Malcolm X
• the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.
• Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”
• Nixon’s policy of “benign neglect” of black communities
• “No one’s ever gonna out-n----- me again” (George Wallace)
• “We’ve just lost the South for a generation.” (Lyndon Johnson)
• “The white community, for the time being, is the advanced race” (National Review)

That, I would suggest, is a lot of contextual detail to have left out.

What, then, does Professor Slack cover in “Civil Rights and Black Power”? The following constitutes a reasonable precis, which I will call The Gospel of the Civil Rights Movement According to Professor Kevin Slack:

In the beginning, American Liberals supported keeping whites and blacks apart to avoid fighting between them. Liberals created restrictive housing covenants and the practice of “red lining” by banks to achieve de facto segregation. However, Liberals were caught between the rock of professing to be ‘color blind’ when it came to race, and the hard place of pushing for race-conscious policies (“affirmative action”). Basically, Liberals wanted to help people of color while pretending there was no such thing as color—silly Liberals! In the “New Deal,” FDR created the Fair Employment Practices Commission as a publicity stunt; the FEPC was a kind of Potemkin village of an agency that had no powers but symbolized Liberal opposition to discrimination in hiring. Then, in the Fifties, a liberal Supreme Court ruled that public schools had to be desegregated, but it said they could take their time getting it done, which everyone, North and South, agreed was reasonable. Americans wholeheartedly supported reasonable accommodations and equal rights for Negroes.

In the Forties and Fifties, Black Americans had made great progress, but then Liberals became radicalized, and the good times came to an end. In the Sixties, there were three Black factions in America: the “Black bourgeoisie,” the “beloved community,” and “Negroes with guns”. It was a full-time job for guilt-ridden white Liberals to pander to all three elements of the Black community; how their heads did spin!

The “Black bourgeoisie,” like bourgeoisie everywhere, imitated the (white) social and economic class above them. They tried to be white, to talk white, to act white; they straightened their hair, they minded their manners, and they favored gradual integration and incremental legal change over unruly civil disobedience and violence. At the same time, they postured as revolutionaries while combing their genealogies to see if they could qualify for membership in the DAR.

The “beloved community” was the brainchild of the notorious philanderer Martin Luther King, Jr., who envisioned a world where neither race nor marital fidelity mattered. ¹ It began as a church- and community-based movement, emphasizing legal parity and economic self-sufficiency; but King, afraid of being eclipsed by Black radicals, turned to the Left, denounced the war in Vietnam, and demanded affirmative action and a domestic Marshall Plan. He provoked violence, paradoxically, through his diabolical tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience, which forced law enforcement to beat the living hell out of protestors. Many leaders in Black communities opposed Martin Luther King, Jr. (even before they learned of his sordid sexual shenanigans). Joseph H. Jackson, for instance, a good Negro and President of the United Baptist Convention, USA, tried to keep the Civil Rights movement from tacking Left; he advised King to keep a clean nose and watch the plainclothes. King, of course, with the morals of an alley cat, refused to listen.

“Negroes with guns” was the brainchild of Robert Williams (author of a book by that title). He was soon joined by Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton (and the News), and Stokely Carmichael. They jointly invented Black Power, SNCC, and Identity Politics; later, they kidnapped Patty Hearst and bombed the Mexico City Olympics.

Other agitators included James Cone, a Black preacher whose message was “Jesus hates Whitey”; Malcolm X, who brainwashed Cassius Clay, accused Reverend King of being an Uncle Tom, and consorted with Muslims, Communists, and Third World radicals; Stokely Carmichael, who embraced the revolutionary politics of Frantz Fanon; Eldridge Cleaver, who flew to Cuba and presented Fidel Castro with a box of exploding cigars; and the Commie terrorist Angela Davis, who was awarded tenure at the University of California.

The Sixties were a very troubled, and troubling, decade. So much went wrong!  Conservatives in postwar America tried to stand athwart History yelling “Stop the desegregation!” Alas, they were only crying in the American wilderness. Voices of reason like William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater were drowned out by demagogues like Dwight Eisenhower—a RINO who sent federal troops into Arkansas.

Did Liberals at least have good intentions on the issue of race? No, they did not, according to Professor Kevin Slack. From FDR’s sham FEPC in the Thirties to the vague “with all deliberate speed” of Brown v. Board of Education and to welfare policies designed to keep Blacks mired in dependency, Liberals have always been virtue-signalers: white hypocrites who waved banners of tolerance while forcing blue-collar white neighborhoods and schools to desegregate but who simultaneously protected their own gated communities and sent their own children to private schools.

In closing, I take back every good thing I said last week about Kevin Slack. “Civil Rights and Black Power” is almost certainly the worst lecture I have had the misfortune to encounter; to paraphrase a man much more generous than I can bring myself to be, "Father, forgive him, for he knows not what he's talking about." If it weren’t for the fact that the Hillsdale College online course is free, I would demand my money back. As it is, I have several more lectures to endure.

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¹ Reading directly from FBI transcripts, Professor Slack is shocked to learn that Martin Luther King, Jr. had over forty extramarital affairs and that he participated in orgies that included rapes which he watched and cheered on. Professor Slack does not suggest that the FBI reports are in any way suspect or that they ought to be taken with a grain of salt; unlike today’s nefarious “Deep State” agencies, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was apparently on the right side of history.

1963: the aftermath of the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church 

 

Wednesday with Pascal: Score One for Hillsdale

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat seems almost disappointed that the latest online Hillsdale College lecture was, all in all, pretty darned reasonable. Neither Professor Kevin Slack’s delivery (nary a sneer to be found!) nor the lecture content itself afforded Pascal the opportunity to do what he enjoys the most: hissing, that is, scratching, and clawing at objectionable rhetoric and risible logic. Instead, he’s forced to concede that Hillsdale students could learn something from this lecture.}

You may color me surprised.

Aside from his dispassionate tone and given the time limit (34 minutes) imposed upon him, Kevin Slack delivers a fair and balanced account of the “Origins of the Radical Left”. I would have preferred that Professor Slack supplement his presentation with a good deal more newsreel footage—of marches, demonstrations, riots, protests, etc.—that would have evoked the temper of the times. The “New Left,” however abstruse and academic its origins, was fueled more by passions (outrage, indignation, resentment, anger, fear, guilt, etc.) evoked by contemporary events (wars, assassinations, racist policies, nuclear threats, etc.) than it was by ideology; in fact, one of the main charges hurled by conservatives against modern Leftists is that they are driven by emotion rather than by logical thought. Professor Slack, for whatever reasons, allows no emotion to intrude upon his otherwise admirable lecture. ¹

That aside, Slack gives his audience a brief survey of postwar Leftist thinking. He touches on (or at least mentions) Existentialism, Critical Thinking, and post-Freudian psychology; he cites authors such as Camus, Sartre, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Paul Goodman, and C. Wright Mills. Slack’s even-handed approach to the radical Left’s criticism of Liberalism likely stems from the fact that postwar conservatives lobbed similar charges against Liberalism; for instance, when Slack notes that C. Wright Mills asserted that America’s two political parties were indistinguishable (“not a dime’s worth of difference”), one thinks of the slogan “A choice, not an echo” associated with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign (a slogan which has been condensed over time to the epithet “RINO,” “Republican In Name Only”). The New Left and the American Right had little in common, but they shared a contempt for the Liberal establishment and for the “Liberal consensus” that reigned in Washington after World War II.    

I also commend Kevin Slack for not disparaging the motives of the left-wing thinkers whose ideas gave rise to the Sixties’ counterculture and to the radical New Left. Slack’s narrative indicates that their ideas were a reaction to the failures (perceived or otherwise) of the liberal order and to the horrors of the twentieth century—Bolshevism, Nazism, Fascism, the Holocaust, and the atom bomb. Rather than demonize the Frankfurt School thinkers, Slack rightly points out that they were “self-critical Marxists” who opposed Bolshevism and Stalinism. At no point does Slack suggest or even hint that Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse hated and wanted to destroy Western civilization (the usual charge against them from the Right); instead, he acknowledges that they were trying to formulate a vision of a more just and more humane society.  

One may quarrel, then, with Professor Slack’s choice of representative thinkers, or with his interpretations of their thought or his assessments of their influence; but one should express appreciation for his refusal to condescend, to hurl invectives, or to portray the likes of Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills as wanting, openly or secretly, to destroy America. To grant the good intentions of one’s ideological opponents is an important part of civil discourse, and one we are all in danger these days of forgetting. 

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¹ I will allow myself one quibble. At one point, Professor Slack says that Liberalism was labeled “the god that failed”. I believe he is incorrect. It was Communism that was so labeled and which was the subject of a book of essays (The God that Failed) by six ex-Communists: Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Stephen Spender, and Louis Fischer. Since Kevin Slack knows that Liberalism is not at all the same thing as Communism, I assume this was an unintended misstatement on his part.

Hillsdale College: A light unto the nations, a shining campus on a hill

Wednesday with Pascal: History, Hillsdale-Style

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat dutifully completed his assignment for the week, submitting to me his report on Professor Kevin Slack’s lecture, “Liberalism’s Rejection of Progressivism”. However, implausible as this may seem, Pascal’s submission has apparently been lost—in translation, in the Cloud, or somewhere on a flash drive or a hard drive, who knows? Pascal is understandably irate and refuses to rewrite the report. He has, however, given me permission to crib from his class notes to produce a rough summary of Professor Slack’s lecture. We can only be grateful that Pascal is being so reasonable about the situation.}

As Professor Kevin Slack explains to his audience at Hillsdale College online, 20^th-century Liberalism followed in the wake of Progressivism and exacerbated the damage already done by its predecessor (e.g., popular election of U.S. Senators, federal income tax, women’s suffrage, World War I, anarchist bombings, Palmer raids, etc.). The failures of Progressivism were to be corrected by Liberalism, which was simply Progressivism on steroids and with even less respect for democracy. Concocted by the likes of Walter Lippmann, Woodrow Wilson, and John Dewey, modern Liberalism, like ancient Gaul, was divided into three parts, which Slack identifies as Intellectual Liberalism, Quantitative Liberalism, and Qualitative Liberalism.

Intellectually, Liberalism rejected the Western philosophical tradition, abandoning the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, replacing them with the Useful, the Popular, and the Expedient. Denying the existence of “essences” and “absolutes,” Liberalism opened the door to relativism; it also doubled down on philosophical nominalism, claiming that abstractions like “Justice” and “Freedom” were merely words that signified human ideas rather than divinely crafted Platonic forms. Finally, it dismissed the wisdom of the past on the grounds that new circumstances presented new difficulties which in turn required new solutions.

Quantitative Liberalism entered the picture with the New Deal. Its adherents claimed that the new solutions needed would be provided by Experts gathered in councils, commissions, and committees through which they would structure and guide the Liberal project—that is, the aggrandizement of the central State and the corresponding diminution of the private economic sector. Bean counters uber alles! With a federal Brain Trust in charge, and with the creation of an unelected Bureaucracy which soon evolved into the Deep State, free enterprise could be dispensed with. Beginning with the New Deal, Liberalism won popular favor (and purchased votes) with housing subsidies and jobs programs; it regulated everything from prices and wages to the size of strippers’ tassels; it redistributed wealth via Social Security; it established minimum wage laws and workplace safety rules. In all, Roosevelt’s tyranny was so oppressive that hundreds of thousands of Americans chose to enlist in the military and go to war against Japan and Germany rather than submit further to New Deal totalitarianism.

After John Wayne defeated the Axis powers and Ronald Reagan liberated the German concentration camps, America could have turned from Liberalism back to the verities of Coolidge and Hoover. Instead, it handed the government over to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and his Liberal cronies (e.g., Robert Oppenheimer, Dalton Trumbo, and Alan Ginsberg). Schlesinger’s The Vital Center became the blueprint for reshaping American politics; his “horseshoe theory” held that ideologies of the Right and the Left tended to meet at the extreme, with sensible Liberals holding down the ideological center. Liberalism reigned unchallenged; even President Eisenhower conceded its inevitability, thereby inventing the American RINO. Ike's idea of Conservatism was to conserve FDR's New Deal legacy, and even to extend it; for example, he had the interstate highway system built to win support from suburban voters.

Such was the heyday of Quantitative Liberalism, according to Professor Slack; from the Thirties through the Fifties, the emphasis was on expanding the reach of government and boosting the economy. The ephemeral joys of consumerism replaced the durable satisfactions of personal virtue and ordered liberty. Americans were bought off, transformed from citizens into consumers, and then lulled to sleep in front of their television sets. The movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers was not so much a preview as it was a documentary.

In the Sixties, unwilling to rest on its laurels and having nothing better to do, Liberalism decided to undermine its own accomplishments. Having invented consumerism, Liberalism turned against it, criticizing the “affluent society” it had created; having invented the “welfare-warfare” State, Liberalism turned against the warfare aspect, denouncing the war in Vietnam. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was replaced by John Kenneth Galbraith, who invented Keynesian economics; Michael Harrington (a Socialist) made middle-class Americans apologize for their prosperity; John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me) invented white guilt. President Lyndon Johnson, who was insecure because he was so tall and so Texan, agreed to all of Liberalism’s demands: guns and butter, civil rights, Peace Corps, Job Corps, Community Action Organizations, Medicare, Public Broadcasting, immigration reform, housing subsidies, student loans, gunboat diplomacy, etc.

And then things got bad—really, really bad. In the mid-Sixties, a new generation of Leftist radicals emerged; American college campuses, previously known for panty raids, goldfish swallowing, and other harmless hijinks, became war zones. The Marxist New Left of the Sixties will be the subject of Professor Kevin Slack’s next lecture, and of Pascal the existential Russian blue cat’s next report. My breath is bated for sure.

{Note: since I did not attend Professor Slack’s lecture and have had to work from Pascal’s notes, my report may not be entirely accurate. However, I believe it captures the tenor of the lecture; in any case, any inaccuracies are my fault and not Pascal’s.}