The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: "The End of Sanity"

{The late Martin L. Gross wrote ‘The End of Sanity: Social and Cultural Madness in America” in 1997. Like an upscale Archie Bunker, Gross's rose-colored view of the American past could be summarized: “People seemed to be content / fifty dollars paid the rent / freaks were in a circus tent / those were the days.”} *

Martin L. Gross, from The End of Sanity (1997):

Public opinion represents the ‘Majority Culture,’ one made up of the traditional values to which most Americans adhere, even cherish. But in the universe of America’s ‘New Establishment,’ that has less currency than the ‘Dominant Culture,’ one perhaps thirty years in the making, that applauds virtually every infringement on the community’s rights in favor of ‘social individualism,’ a perversion of traditional freedom and individuality.

This new Dominant Culture has abrogated the rights of society and the Majority Culture to define what is reasonable in both thought and action. The two cultures, which exist side by side, are in daily conflict. But the Dominant one, though divorced from the feelings and opinions of most Americans, is winning out in the public arena.

This New Establishment doctrine seeks to remake American culture—and by extrapolation the world’s—in its own image. Unfortunately, it is not isolated in academe or the government but is being brilliantly marketed through every possible outlet, from newspapers to films, from Broadway to television. It bombards our psyches with millions of images that confuse us and that many find hard to resist. This selling of the Dominant Culture, even when its tenets are patently absurd, has been so successful that the New Establishment has cleverly managed to dictate to Americans how they should perceive themselves and their fellow citizens.

The Dominant Culture hopes to generate a mindset that will make it acceptable, even psychologically rewarding, to continue to grant enormous privileges to those people on the fringes of the mainstream, while penalizing the mainstream itself. That mainstream—the great army of the ignored middle class—has in fact become the beast of burden for the new coalition of the elite and the so-called victim class, those who are sensitive to supposed exploitation and those who are supposedly exploited. The middle class who pays for it all, in both money and lost equanimity, are the true victims of this Dominant Culture.

But what exactly is our Dominant Culture?

Basically, it encompasses virtually everything Americans think about, believe in, and discuss publicly. It determines which plays, movies, books, and television shows will be produced and how they will be received by the media. It even decides what is and what is not news, and how it will be presented. It also determines what is chic and what is old-fashioned and boring. It sets styles, fads, and fashions in manners and mores, even in the realm of politics and ideas. It sets up the sense of right and wrong in societal matters, and what actions should be approved or disapproved. Thus, it has enormous power.

Despite a reasonable economy, the nation finds itself in a deep psychological malaise, an ailment that can be traced almost entirely to the Dominant Culture. Some Americans, particularly those who rely on it as a secular substitute for religion, admire and embrace it. But many Americans do not, seeing it as injuring the national psyche and accelerating the decline of the civilization. Others fear it and follow the conformity of thought that it demands, thereby increasing its power.

One daily grinding factor is that the Dominant Culture, unlike any in the past, has little interest in the truth. But the astute among the public are not fooled. They know that the Dominant Culture no longer represents them as the prevalent culture once did thirty years ago. Youngsters can hardly remember that era, but they do hear of a better day from their parents and grandparents. What they glean about the former America from periodicals, old movies, and intergenerational scuttlebutt ¹ rings true. It’s not just that those were simpler times, but that the psychological needs of the community were sounder and were being met. People were not merely a collection of vying, whining, hyphenated, gender-split, litigious groups as they are today.  

In the 1940s, 1950s, and throughout much of the 1960s, the community was the key. Through free speech and social criticism, people expressed their opposition to conformity, which provided a natural balance in a democracy. ² The outsider had to fight for space in the consciousness of the nation. This is as it should be. Today, it is quite the opposite. The outsider-victim is at the helm, in charge of what people are supposed to think and do. In today’s Dominant Culture, it is the everyday American and his spokespeople who have to fight for space in the collective psyche.

This is not as it should be.

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Wikipedia has no entry for Martin L. Gross (1925-2013). This obituary may be informative: Martin L. Gross, famed tax policy critic, dead in Ocala

*Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, “Those Were the Days”

¹ I call dibs on Intergenerational Scuttlebutt as a band name, or maybe as a name for a beer (KettleHouse, are you listening?).

² If someone tells you that the Fifties were a time when Americans “expressed their opposition to conformity,” then that someone is beyond correction or instruction—which, in the case of Martin Gross, is literally true, inasmuch as he is dead.

Wednesday with Pascal: Egalitarianism or Aristocracy?

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has been searching somewhat aimlessly through various archives, hoping to find something to spark his interest. He found an essay based on the premise that the problem with democracy is people—the wrong sort of people, that is—and he decided to have at it. And yes, Pascal knows that today is Thursday; he just refuses to change the standard title of his post.}

Marcia Christoff Reina has (or had, as of 2014, when her essay “Why Democracy Needs Aristocracy” was first published) a bone to pick with most of us:

Today, a corrupted notion of “the Individual” has fundamentally rendered the massive problems of the United States no longer merely political but philosophical. This, in turn, has been the result of two vastly different understandings of democracy of which the country has lost sight: aristocratic democracy, which is what the Founders had intended, and egalitarian democracy, which is what we’ve created, much to our peril.

Ms. Reina begins by defining (one of) her terms: “To be clear: ‘Egalitarian’ does not mean equality; it means the lowest common denominator having the highest possible cultural and political influence, whether elite or popular.”

I’m sure Reina has her sources, but her definition of “egalitarian” is at odds with the prevailing view, as expressed by Wikipedia:

“Egalitarianism, or equalitarianism, is a political philosophy that prioritizes the concept of social equality for all people. Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or moral status. As such, all people should be accorded equal rights and treatment under the law. Egalitarian doctrines have supported many modern social movements, including the Enlightenment, feminism, civil rights, and international human rights. Egalitarianism emphasizes equal opportunities for all individuals, regardless of their background or circumstances; it aims to level the playing field and reduce disparities that result from social inequalities.”

The usual charge leveled by conservatives against egalitarianism is that it demands not just equal opportunities but equal outcomes. Ms. Reina at least avoids that trope; she focuses instead on how modern egalitarianism amounts to a coup against the aristocracy upon whom she believes democracy is dependent. For support, she cites “Thomas Jefferson’s self-admitted search for the “natural aristoi” he wanted to cultivate for public service,” and “his argument that education in a Republic must be “democratic and aristocratic”. ¹ “One is also reminded,” Ms. Reina continues, “of Madison’s and Hamilton’s almost obsessive fear of “mobocracy” and their revulsion towards the idea of direct democracy. ‘When I mention the public, I mean the rational part of it; the ignorant and vulgar [are] unfit to manage its reins,’ wrote Madison.”

The Founders’ antipathy towards direct democracy is well known, which is why Americans have had to be content with representative democracy instead, including such anti-democratic features as the U.S. Senate, the Electoral College, the legislative filibuster, etc. Such existing guardrails have endured for over two hundred years, but they are not enough to suit Ms. Reina, who believes that an egalitarian citizenry, heads stuffed with drivel peddled by mass media, mass culture, and mass education, will inevitably drive our politics into a ditch:

If modern Western democracy is to survive, it must incorporate that which it has long regarded as its diametrical opposite—the aristocratic. If this democracy is to perish, it will continue to promote that which has been falsely regarded as its best element—the egalitarian (the here and now, the mass appetite). If things stay as they currently are, democracy in general will increasingly take on characteristics of the totalitarian, or what Jefferson warned of as an “elective despotism”, in which in the will of a leader will become totally responsible for the helpless whole.

Even if we escape, or at least delay, our political destruction, Reina sees egalitarianism (i.e., everything designed for the lowest common social denominator) as having a pernicious effect on, well, everything. “The egalitarian,” she explains, “is on a path of destruction. He creates for the short-term, because the past is invariably a source of evil, the future is beyond his control or care, and the present is an ordeal to get through. The short-term is the convenient, the instantaneous, the whetting of an appetite. Soon, the short-term becomes not only the economic, but the political, cultural, and social mentality of choice. This becomes the short-term in financial practices, in political expediency, in art, in education standards, the short-term in human relationships and commitments, all of it leading to the current crop of human capital we have today in the West: a population that is not really fit for democracy as it must be maintained.”

When you welcome the mob into the palace, you cannot express surprise when the silverware is stolen, the artwork vandalized, and the draperies and carpets abused. Ms. Reina holds egalitarians responsible for teaching that “The individual—his individual gain, his search for profit, his self-interest, his personal distinction or even ‘glory’—represents something distasteful at best, irretrievably criminal and inherently corrupt at worst. The egalitarian becomes the goal, while the aristocratic—the main driver of standards and of long-term planning—becomes the object of resentment.”

Aristocracy, whatever the Founders thought of it, has never been accepted by Americans. We have had our family dynasties, political and economic—e.g., Adams, Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Bush—but we have pretended to be a society without class structures or divisions, a nation where Jed Clampett could enjoy a pleasant evening with Amy Vanderbilt and where Bo and Luke Duke could date Gabor sisters. Despite that, Ms. Reina does not believe that the American experiment should be entrusted to commoners, rustics, or the lumpen proletariat; she insists that we need nobility and gallantry if we are to survive. “The aristocratic element,” she concludes, “has reverence for the past and it plans for the future. This is the necessary instinct democracy needs anew; in the US, it was the outlook of Madison, Adams and Jefferson, who refer time and again to the need of a ‘gallant citizenry’ to uphold their vast and incredible experiment. Such is the outlook of the kind of individual whom no great force—emperor, soldier, government—can replace.”

Ms. Reina implies that it is only great men who make history. She may be right; the problem, though, as James Joyce explained, is that history is a nightmare from which all of us are trying to awake. As far as I'm concerned, the less history we make, the better.

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Why Democracy Needs Aristocracy - The Imaginative Conservative

About - MARCIA A. CHRISTOFF REINA (marciachristoff.com)

¹ Indeed (as Wikipedia helpfully confirms), Jefferson believed that “the best geniuses must be raked from the rubbish annually” by an education system meant to identify, and nurture, the best and the brightest. The Jeffersonian aristocracy would today be called a “meritocracy”; most people are in favor of such a thing, though they would probably avoid Jefferson’s “rubbish” metaphor.

God save the aristocracy!

Saturday Lecture: A Conservative Credo

{In his youth, John Dos Passos was a man of the Left; as he aged, his political sympathies shifted to the Right. He never stopped championing workers, however, against the ‘boss-men’ who ran the show. The following is taken from Dos Passos’ 1964 essay, “My Conservative Credo”.}

John Dos Passos:

Somewhere in the middle Twenties a Frenchman named Julien Benda wrote a book called The Treason of the Intellectuals. Benda analyzed the state of mind [of modern intellectuals] with pain and amazement. He saw that, for two thousand years, the people we now tend to describe as intellectuals had been on the side of reason and truth. Although helpless to keep the rest of mankind from making history hideous with hatreds and massacres, they did manage to keep men from making a religion of evil. Surveying the racial hatreds, the national hatreds, the class hatreds that rose from the wreck of civilization in the Great War, Benda concluded, “Western civilization is only just beginning to recover from its carnival of unreason.” 

That carnival included the military massacres of the First World War. The creeds of the Marxists and the Nazis and the Fascists of various hues were rooted in the same denial of humane values. The task before us now is somehow to restore these values to primacy in men’s minds and hearts. I believe that there are certain simple realities which are universal to all men, no matter how diverse their backgrounds or their environments or their social customs. The man who humbly seeks out these realities is on the firm path which will lead him to the truthful observation of the world about him. It has been my experience that the plain men and women who do the work of the world and cope with the realities of life respond almost automatically to these values.

Ever since man began, the pursuit of truth has been an activity beset by many occupational hazards. The institutions through which, in almost any society, the boss-men impose their will on the workers, the producers, and the builders are invariably founded on lies. Even a tiny fragment of truth tends to produce an infringement of public order. The automatic reaction of the boss-men who hold the police power is to stamp it out. The tremor runs through the whole hierarchy of timeservers and lickspittles whose lives and careers depend upon the boss-men. In any human society that you care to study you’ll find that the boss-men’s hangers-on have equipped themselves with the most delicate sensibilities to enable them to feel the pain in their own corns when somebody steps on the bossman’s foot. Truth is by its very nature painful to authority. 

It was not until we reached the epoch of mass education and mass communication that we came to the full understanding of the difficulty of discovering the truth in order to tell it. Your uneducated and illiterate man in the old days would hardly have been likely, if you showed him a pig, to have called it a goat. Today, with our minds continually indoctrinated with whatever fallacies the authorities in charge of radio and television feel it to their interest to promulgate, you can’t be too sure.

It is largely when you reach a certain intellectual sophistication that you find minds that have lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. The intellectual’s mind deals in concepts rather than in things. Of course, abstract concepts are useful in the processes of thought, just as poker chips are useful when you play poker, but you have to remember that it is what they represent that counts. The intellectual is always taking the poker chips for real money. This flaw in his way of thinking shuts him into a conceptual universe divorced from life as it is really lived.

In modern bureaucratic societies, intellectuals are becoming a dominant class by furnishing the boss-men with the slogans and delusions by which they control the general public. The twentieth century may possibly end by being known as the century of the intellectual. As they become giddy with power, the usefulness of the intellectuals as a class to the cause of civilization becomes more and more doubtful. In their renunciation of the commonplaces taken for granted by ordinary men, they will find themselves faced with the question that comes resounding through the centuries, Pilate’s anguished question: What is Truth?

The human mind can no more function without the conviction of right and wrong than a mammal can exist without a skeleton. Without firm belief that good is good and evil is evil, where can we find the inner fortitude needed to explain to the masses of men, whose minds have been befogged by endless self-serving propaganda, what we mean by civilization? It sometimes seems as if the only people who have any understanding of liberty are the people who are deprived of it.

I do not believe that the values conservatives want to conserve can be furthered by a static resistance to change. The problem is to find ways of adapting the institutions of modern industrial society so that they will serve the purposes of civilization. The tasks which I would urge on American conservatives are arduous, but success would be rewarding. One of the tasks of conservatives as their influence grows will be to suggest reasonable solutions for social problems. Practical measures that tend to humanize industrial society are in my opinion more important than neat ideological statements or victories at the polls. The trend towards a totalitarian society can only be stemmed little by little by practical measures that change the alignment of institutions. The vocabulary of a new conservatism will come into being gradually out of the workaday struggle to remedy specific abuses. 

One of the weaknesses of conservative theorists has been that their diagnoses of social and political trends have been so pat and plausible that they have tended to stick to them too long. Some of the diagnoses applied marvelously five years ago, but they don’t apply today. It is time to look at social and political phenomena with a fresh eye. The field is certainly open to fresh ideas. The chief strategy of our leaders has been a refusal to face facts, and a strange inability, once the facts were admitted, to take the action the facts demanded. The world is waiting for a renovation of its political and social theories. Conservatives must come up with invigorating new ideas.

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Note: I have mercilessly edited and condensed Dos Passos’ much longer essay. I believe I have captured the gist of his thought, but any infelicities which may have resulted are my responsibility.

My Conservative Credo – Modern Age (modernagejournal.com) (Originally published in 1964)

John Dos Passos - Wikipedia

Art by John Dos Passos

SCOTUS Redux

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling on presidential immunity, Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, has suggested that critics of the ruling “Read Alexander Hamilton's (Federalist essay) No. 70 because there, along with some other essays, in some other essays, he talks about the importance of a vigorous executive.”

Having some time on my hands (it’s a holiday!), I have taken Mr. Roberts’ advice and read Federalist No. 70, and I have confirmed that he is correct on this narrow point: Alexander Hamilton, a leader of the Federalist faction in 1787-88 when our Constitution was written and then ratified, wanted a vigorous executive (President) as head of an active federal government. (He also wanted the President to serve for life, but the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were not disposed to have a king.)

The context of Hamilton’s argument, however, and the reasoning behind it, is a bit more complicated than Kevin Roberts lets on. Federalist No. 70 was written to defend Hamilton’s proposal that the new federal government be led by a single chief executive (President) rather than, as some preferred, an executive council or a dual executive of some kind. Hamilton argued that an individual President could act more boldly and decisively than could a council or a team. Whereas the legislative branches (Congress) were designed to be deliberative, Hamilton wrote, the President should have the power to act quickly when circumstances required—especially, he emphasized, in the area of foreign affairs or military engagements.

Nowhere in Federalist 70, or anywhere else that I know of, did Hamilton argue that a President should be immune from legal consequences for his “bold and decisive” actions. In fact, he stressed that an individual President, rather than a council or a team, could more easily be assigned responsibility and accountability, either in the court of public opinion or elsewhere.  

In Hamilton’s own words:

“One of the weightiest objections to a plurality in the Executive is that it tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility. Responsibility is of two kinds: to censure, and to punishment. The first is the more important of the two, especially in an elective office. Man, in public trust, will much oftener act in such a manner as to render him unworthy of being any longer trusted, than in such a manner as to make him obnoxious to legal punishment. But the multiplication of the Executive adds to the difficulty of detection in either case.”

The existence of plural executive officers would potentially muddy the waters as to who had been at fault. With just one individual as President, Hamilton concluded, the public would have “the opportunity of discovering with facility and clearness the misconduct of the persons they [entrusted], in order either to their removal from office or to their actual punishment in cases which admit of it.” The phrase “actual punishment” is at odds both with Kevin Roberts’ view and with the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity for “official acts”. Given the sensitivity of the Founders to abuses of power, and given their antipathy to monarchical authority, it defies common sense, as well as historical analysis, to believe they intended that a President should have such immunity.

Alexander Hamilton and his ‘big government’ ideas—including a vigorous and energetic presidency--have always been anathema to American conservatives.  Hamilton’s opponents, the Antifederalists, wanted a smaller, weaker federal government, one with drastically limited and strictly delineated powers, so that the thirteen original states would retain, for the most part, their sovereignty (which is to say, for Southern states, the ability to protect the institution of slavery). The Antifederalists also objected to Hamilton’s “vigorous executive” on the grounds that a President with that much power would quickly become a king in all but name. George Washington’s rejection of pomp, ceremony, and more than two terms in office was, among other things, a nod to that Antifederalist concern, a concern widely shared in the populace at large.

Over the years, American conservatives have identified with the Antifederalists. They have showered so-called “activist” Presidents with abuse, from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt, from Wilson to FDR, from LBJ to Biden, all of whom violated conservatives’ understanding of federalism and of the Constitution. Conservatives’ Antifederalist lineage can be difficult to remember, given the existence of right-wing groups like Leonard Leo’s “Federalist Society” and right-wing publications like The Federalist, but American conservatism has never been receptive to the Hamiltonian Federalist perspective.

Until now, and it is not difficult to figure out what has precipitated the shift: you can’t Make America Great Again without perpetrating a few ideological hypocrisies, such as suddenly preferring a “bold, decisive” presidency to one constrained both by tradition and by law). If Kevin Roberts is delighted with the Supreme Court’s grant of near-absolute immunity to the American president, it is not because he hopes that a President Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez will someday impose her Green New Deal with a stroke of her presidential pen, or that a President Elizabeth Warren will vigorously impose a wealth tax on the uber-rich, or that a bold and decisive President Bernie Sanders will make the collected works of Herbert Marcuse mandatory reading in high schools.

Roberts’ approval of this SCOTUS decision is based on one thing and one thing only: he believes Donald Trump is going to win election this fall, which will then pave the way for Roberts’ beloved “Project 2025” to be put in place. The goal of Project 2025 is to begin “dismantling the administrative state” (Steve Bannon’s dream!) and to shrink the size of the federal government until it’s small enough to drown in a bathtub (Grover Norquist’s wet dream!); the operating strategy is to hand as much power as possible to a promethean MAGA President who, unbound, will cooperate with the dismantling.  

Beginning with Barry Goldwater in 1964, conservative Republicans have consistently run against what they see as the federal “behemoth,” paradoxically seeking to be put in charge of the very institutions they wanted to destroy. They are (perhaps) one election away from getting what they have long wanted, i.e., the downsizing of the federal government and the emasculating of federal agencies. Don’t mistake the American Right for Nazis or Fascists; such hyperbole misses the point and puts us on guard against a non-existent threat. The MAGA/Project 2025 vision is dangerous enough as it is, homegrown and as American as apple pie, with a crust of states’ rights and a sprinkling of Christian nationalism on top of a federal government that amounts to little more than a presidential errand boy.

We may be about to witness the unlikely coupling of the Hamiltonian presidency with the Antifederalists’ suspicion of centralized government. I don’t know what rough beast might be born from such a union; quite frankly, I would rather not find out.

Which way to Bethlehem?       

The Imaginary America of Patrick Deneen

Out with the old order and in with the new: that is the essential thrust of Patrick Deneen’s 2023 Regime Change. Deneen, a leading advocate of something called “post-liberalism,” announces liberalism’s demise without a hint of regret:

With the dimming of the bright light of liberalism, and with its seeming historical inevitability now relegated to the dustbin of bad theories of history, both the need and the prospect for liberalism’s true and natural opponent arises: a movement that begins with, and is defined by, a rejection of the ideological pursuit of progress along with the baleful political, economic, social, and psychological costs of that pursuit.

Liberalism having been unceremoniously laid to rest, what does Patrick Deneen intend to put in its place? This:

What is needed—and what most ordinary people instinctively seek—is stability, order, continuity, and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future. What they want, without knowing the right word for it, is a conservatism that conserves: a form of liberty no longer abstracted from our places and people, but embedded within duties and mutual obligations; formative institutions in which all can and are expected to participate as shared “social utilities”; an elite that respects and supports the basic commitments and condition of the populace; and a populace that in turn renders its ruling class responsive and responsible to protection of the common good.

It is not difficult in theory to make the case for a society that values “stability, order, [and] continuity”; such a society might well be more sustainable, and less stressful, than a society that values “progress” and the “pursuit of happiness” (to coin a phrase). Mr. Deneen’s problem, however, is that he is either ignorant of, or deliberately oblivious to, the realities of the country in which he lives and for which he prescribes a new socio-political paradigm, which is to say, he ought to read some American history and familiarize himself with the landscape he wants to transform.

Pace Deneen, Americans have never embraced stability, order, and continuity; instead, we have always been rowdy, disorderly, restless, disdainful of the past, and heedless of the future. Having left behind the Old World and its Old ways, we undertook an errand into the wilderness, clearing land, blazing trails, and disposing of inconvenient native inhabitants. We began our official national existence with a revolution; spent decades subduing (exterminating) various stable and traditional indigenous tribes; conducted a bloody civil war; experienced local rebellions and labor unrest of all kinds; and lit out for the territories at the very thought of getting ourselves “sivilized”. We absorbed immigrants from around the world, all of whom wanted to get in on the action. We looked for wars to fight, frontiers to tame, fortunes to find, and something or someone to conquer. We learned never to look back (Satchel Paige, Bob Dylan), in case someone or something might have been gaining on us.

Americans have eagerly embraced change of all kinds, from political to sociological to technological. Given a choice between old-fashioned and newfangled, we rarely hesitated to choose the latter; though, inevitably, some curmudgeons would complain about it. We are tinkerers, improvisers, gadget-makers, and DIY autodidacts. We invented the telephone, the telegraph, the lightbulb, manned flight, the assembly line, and motion pictures; we took the lead in developing machinery for war as well as for peace. We all but patented automotive culture, suburbia, film noir, pulp fiction, television sitcoms, jazz, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll, among much else. For that matter, the sainted right-wing icon Ronald Reagan spent years shilling for a company whose motto was “Progress is our most important product,” and yet he still called himself a “conservative”.     

“History is bunk,” according to Henry Ford, arguably the single most influential American of the 20^th century. “We don't want tradition,” he added, speaking for an entire nation. “We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.” There is no America that fits Patrick Deneen’s genteel vision, a vision aligned with the English conservatism of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott (and perhaps with the aristocratic Anglophile Russell Kirk), but a vision with no roots at all in this country. Long before Jack Kerouac wrote his hipster saga, Americans have always been on the road, heading down Route 66 and looking for kicks. We are known for, above all else, what Jimmie Rodgers called our "rough and rowdy ways."

Does Patrick Deneen really believe he can get us to settle down?  

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Patrick J. Deneen, Regime Change (Penguin Publishing Group)

19th-century Americans in search of stability, order, and continuity

Saturday Lecture: The Perils of Democracy

{In the late 1990s, the left-wing British historian Perry Anderson published an essay, “The Intransigent Right at the End of the Century,” analyzing the ideas of four seminal 20^th-century conservatives: Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott, Frederick Hayek, and Carl Schmitt. The essay later constituted a chapter in Anderson’s 2005 book, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas. The following are the briefest of excerpts on three of the writers addressed by Anderson’s essay. Of particular interest, to me at least, is the last excerpt, which refers to Carl Schmitt’s politicization of a term (the ‘katechon’) used by St. Paul in explaining why ‘the day of the Lord’ had not yet arrived.}

Perry Anderson:

1. Michael Oakeshott, “The power of the ‘mass man’”

For Oakeshott, inequality was the outcome of a historical differentiation. In the late Middle Ages, a new character emerged on the scene, an autonomous moral individual freed from the shackles of community, capable of choosing his own way of life. The spread of this kind of individuality, the pre-eminent event of European history, gradually gave rise to institutions expressing its freedom. These achieved their climax with the parliamentary government that emerged in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But the salutary dissolution of traditional communities had also released a dangerous multitude of opposite bent, all those left behind in the new conditions because they were unwilling to accept the responsibility of personal independence, a swarm of moral and social failures consumed with ‘envy, jealousy and resentment’. By the late 19th century, this inferior mass had pressed towards a dire change: the gradual transformation of ‘parliamentary’ into ‘popular government’, whose ‘first great enterprise was the establishment of universal adult suffrage’. For ‘the power of the “mass man” lay in his numbers, and this power could be brought to bear upon government by means of the “vote”– that is, a regime based on ‘the authority of mere numbers’. Modern democracy in this sense defied, not the hierarchy of natural gifts, but that of existential choices. For the anti-individual behind universal suffrage ‘is specified by a moral, not an intellectual, inadequacy’.

2. F.A. Hayek, ‘Cosmos’ and ‘Taxis’

‘The predominant model of liberal democratic institutions’ in the Western world ‘necessarily leads to a gradual transformation of the spontaneous order of a free society into a totalitarian system’. To avert this fatal propensity, three truths urgently needed to be understood. The first was the fundamental difference between a spontaneous order and a purposive organization, or what Hayek termed a cosmos and a 'taxis' – the one an unintended yet coherent web of relations within which individual agents pursued their different ends, regulated only by common procedural rules; the other a willed enterprise seeking to realize substantive collective goals. The rule of law could be preserved only so long as the structure of government reflected a principled separation of the two, according an absolute priority to the maintenance of the first, as the condition of a market economy in a free society, and confining the second to strictly delimited, subordinate functions in the public interest. All current democracies confused these requirements, permitting the reckless trespass of ‘taxis’ onto the proper ground of cosmos, with the intrusion of macro-economic steering and the erection of a welfare state, in the name of an imaginary ‘social justice’ – a notion without meaning. For the spontaneous order of the market not only precludes equality, it necessarily ignores merit: success within it is undeniably often a mere matter of chance. The social hierarchy it generates is thus not founded on a cultural gradation in nature. Hayek confessed that this was perhaps too uncomfortable a truth to be widely proclaimed; he concluded that religion might be a necessary dummy to assure social cohesion, against dangers from those who were disappointed in the run of chance.

3. Carl Schmitt, ‘The Katechon’

Carl Schmitt’s later work is haunted by a theological image. Again and again, he alluded to one of the most enigmatic of all apocalyptic texts, the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, without ever quoting it. What does Paul say there? ‘The mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way; and then shall be revealed the lawless one, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of his mouth, and bring to nought with the manifestation of his coming.’ It was the second clause that mattered. Who was the Restrainer – the katechon who holds back the prowl of evil on earth, until the arrival of the Redeemer? Learned speculation has debated the cryptic identity of the katechon (this is its sole Scriptural appearance) since the time of Tertullian. In Schmitt’s own writing, the obscure figure assumes various – typically oblique – historical guises, as political or juridical restrainer in different epochs, constructions designed to hold something back. What they all in the end sought to restrain was the risks of democracy – seen and feared through the prisms of the mystery of lawlessness.

 

Saturday Lecture: Pouring Gasoline on a Runaway Train

{Lest we forget: before “Woke” and “Cancel Culture” there was “Political Correctness,” and before “Cultural Marxism” there was the frightening specter of “Secular Humanism”. American conservatives have felt under siege since FDR, if not before (Woodrow Wilson, income tax, the Federal Reserve, suffragism, etc.); to their credit, they have always come up with clever phrases to caricature and to demonize their opponents. Let us briefly revisit the great Secular Humanism Scare of the Reagan era.}

“Friend, either you're closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of a pool table in your community.” (“Ya Got Trouble,” from The Music Man)

Homer Duncan, from Secular Humanism: The Most Dangerous Religion in America (1979):

The conditions that brought about the fall of the Roman Empire are being reenacted. The goals that the Communists have set for our destruction are being fulfilled. We witness in dismay the decline in moral values. Corruption in politics and business is the order of the day. People are making plans for the coming economic crash. It seems inevitable. We often wonder how much longer our country can hold together under present conditions. Mr. Harry Conn, a noted engineer, has written, “It would appear we are presently witnessing the dissolution of the West. This dissolution is political, but in even more basic terms, it’s moral deterioration.” Harvard law professor Harold J. Berman has written, “Our whole culture seems to be facing the possibility of a kind of nervous breakdown.”

Dr. Francis Schaeffer writes:

“We are on the verge of the largest revolution the world has ever seen—the control and shaping of men through genetic engineering and chemical and psychological conditioning. Will people accept it? I don’t think they would if they had not already been taught to accept the propositions that lead to it, and if they were not already in despair.”

Every thinking person knows that we are losing more and more of our freedom every day. The noose is being tightened around our neck. America is like a runaway train on a downhill grade, and now Secular Humanism is destroying the braking system. We are already on fire; Secular Humanism is pouring gasoline on it.

Humanism is the religion which deifies man and dethrones God. Its avowed aim is to replace theism with humanism. “Humanists do not believe in God and, of course, they do not believe in salvation or damnation. They believe in the theory of evolution, which is often taught as a fact in schools and textbooks. Humanists believe that everyone has a right to full sexual freedom, and a right to determine the values and goals that affect their lives. They do not live by or believe in absolute standards of morality. They believe everyone has a right to maximum individual autonomy, meaning the right of each to do his own thing, whatever it may be.”

Humanists believe in the supremacy of human reason and in the inevitability of progress. However, because man is not progressing as rapidly as the Secular Humanists would desire, many have opted for forced progress and manipulative environmental control. A logical conclusion of Secular Humanism is also the State’s domination of the education system. Totalitarianism, therefore, could very well be the result of Secular Humanism.

Another tenet of Secular Humanism is the belief in science as the guide to progress and the provider of an alternative to both religion and morals. Therefore, science itself assumes a religious character, which can pose an equally frightening threat of totalitarianism. Secular Humanism has developed a ‘scientific theology’ that has evolved from a description of concrete objects and events to a study of relationships observable in complex systems. State technology has become more closely aligned with science and its goals. Many scientists have even suggested that State technology and money be used to genetically manipulate the citizenry.

Secular Humanism promulgates the idea that Man’s future and salvation are in Man’s hands, and that Man, not God, controls the destiny of the human race. If Man is master of his own destiny, he can create his own system of absolutes. Therefore, the Humanist cannot logically criticize the monstrosities perpetrated upon mankind by Hitler and Stalin, because each individual is absolute and the judge of his own actions.

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FYI, Duncan’s book included an introduction from Senator Jesse Helms:

When the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited children from participating in voluntary prayers in public schools, it also established a national religion in the United States—the religion of secular humanism. Since that time, our schools have been increasingly plagued with vandalism, crime, violence, drug abuse, and promiscuity; and academic standards and achievements have been falling sharply year by year. Sadly, our schools have reflected the disruption and discord of our society as a whole. As our nation faces the challenges of the 1980s, it is time to recognize the obvious: America has been ignoring its spiritual and moral heritage, and that is the road to disaster.

Fervid Intensity, Nihilistic Denial, and Moral Obliteration (Oh My!)

Writing at The American Mind (a publication “dedicated to restoring the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life”), Daniel Mahoney seems to have been triggered by, um, something, though he never specifies what:

In our era, truth is under systematic assault from moralistic fanatics who are at the same time thoroughgoing relativists and dyed-in-the wool subjectivists. The fervid intensity of the woke absolutists, their endless anger and excoriation, should not be mistaken for a commitment to truth and truth-seeking. Their indignation, their aim to “cancel”—to morally obliterate—those they cannot abide is a consequence of the fact that they have left the world of objective truth and measured moral judgment behind. Ideological fanaticism is the inevitable consequence of a nihilistic denial of an order of things, of a natural moral order available to human beings through reason and experience. The willful denials of truth and falsehood, good and evil, virtue and vice, understood as fundamental distinctions rooted in the structure of reality, inevitably leads to a comprehensive subversion of all the goods of human life: of liberty, the life of the mind, sound politics, and moral judgment.

Relativism, of course, is a shocking and unprecedented development, if you ignore the fact that it has been around forever. The 4^th-century (BCE) Greek philosopher Pyrrho taught that “all our knowledge is tainted with subjectivity. The real nature of things is wholly unknown to us. Since nothing is certain, a suspension of judgement is the only prudent attitude to adopt.” The historian Myrick Carrere, writing about St. Augustine, who lived nearly a millennium after Pyrrho, informs us that Augustine found himself surrounded by (and distressed by) secular relativists in the fourth century CE. For Augustine, writes Carrere, “Finding a positive basis for knowledge was a matter of anxious moral concern,” an anxiety Daniel Mahoney apparently shares. We can all ignore differences of opinion on trivial matters, but on matters close to our heart and vital to our identity, we become at first defensive and then angry if the disagreement persists.

While Augustine, given the opportunity, had no problem persecuting those who disagreed with him, Mahoney is aghast that today’s heretics are attempting to impose their own brand of orthodoxy. He accuses relativists of being self-contradictory and incoherent; how can relativism be true if there is no such thing as truth? ¹ And if relativism promotes tolerance, he demands, why are woke relativists so intolerant? Mahoney is a member of the Roman Catholic Church, and his essay was originally delivered as a speech to a Catholic gathering (the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars), which is relevant only because Holy Mother Church, as Mahoney might call it, has quite a record of expelling, excommunicating, and otherwise silencing dissidents. “Tolerance” has never been the motto, or even the ideal, of Catholicism; it was, after all, a Catholic pope who proclaimed that “Error has no rights.” ²    

To his credit, and based on his publications and speaking engagements, Daniel Mahoney does not seem to have been morally obliterated by the woke fanatics whose reign of ideological terror he invokes; leaving us to wonder, not for the first time, whether cancel culture exists anywhere other than in the heads of right-wing pundits. Especially in our contemporary communications landscape, the idea that anyone can be silenced short of imprisonment or death seems dubious; I mean, eight-year-olds can (and do) post their performative grievances on TikTok.    

Mahoney’s essay is all polemics and very little argumentation, often little more than an exercise in dropping names beloved to conservative Christians: Roger Scruton, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Michael Polanyi, John Courtney Murray, Dostoevsky, Pierre Manent, Christopher Rufo, and several Popes. ³ Preaching to the converted, Mahoney closes by reminding his audience that “the old verities persist, and they must be artfully articulated and vigorously defended in this age as in any other.”

If “Truth and Politics” is Mahoney’s idea of artful articulation and vigorous defense, the old verities may want to find themselves a better advocate.

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Truth and Politics - The American Mind

¹ Clever 14-year-olds love this gotcha! almost as much as they love the paradox about Cretan liars. (By the way, the correct response to Mahoney's question is, "All truths are relative, including this one.")

² Error has no rights - Wikipedia

³ Putting Christopher Rufo in such august company does not speak well of Daniel Mahoney’s acumen.

Pyrrho: Father of Skepticism, Relativism, Subjectivism, and Nihilism

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