The Little Red Blog

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.}  

 

Wednesday with Pascal: Hillsdale Explains It All!

{An exciting development: Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has enrolled in a free online course offered by Hillsdale College! The course, titled “The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism,” is based on Professor Kevin Slack’s upcoming book, War on the American Republic; it consists of ten recorded lectures by Professor Slack, along with a brief introductory address by Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College. Although no college credits are awarded for completing the course, nonetheless, there will be quizzes! And grades! Pascal’s classwork will preclude him from posting on other subjects for a while, but he promises to keep us informed of his progress, should he make any.}

We are awash today in woke madness. A few examples will suffice:

• Did you know that, in California, gerbils are allowed to vote?
• Did you know that there is a university in Oregon where courses in “History,” having been previously retitled “Herstory,” are now listed as courses in “theirstories”?
• Did you know that in Germany, (and I have this on good authority) women are now allowed to swim topless in public pools—and so are men!
• Did you know that adolescents in River City are allowed to play pool in the local billiards parlor?

Such things are but the tip of the iceberg toward which the Titanic that is the United States of America is inexorably headed, which is the point made by President Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College in his video introductory to Professor Kevin Slack’s online course, “The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism”. What we will learn in the course, promises President Arnn, is the history, nature, and purpose of “Post-Sixties Liberalism,” and (of course) the reasons to be afraid of it. We will learn too that the contemporary madness stems from our abandonment of Nature and Nature’s God, our insatiable lust for Power, and our ridiculous (if not Diabolical) belief in Progress.

Moreover, we will learn that postmodern Liberals have redefined Progress even as they worship it. “Progress” no longer means advancing toward a chosen destination; instead, it now means “a journey that changes us as it happens,” as if we are Huck Finn lazily drifting down the Mississippi on a raft! Or something. The point is, says President Arnn, Progress now happens to us, and we—that is, ordinary Americans—no longer have much to say about it.¹  

Is there a text in this class? Technically, no; but non-technically, students are encouraged to consult Kevin Slack’s soon-to-be-published The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism. According to the publisher’s blurb, Slack’s book will explain how “Teddy Roosevelt’s Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers battled trusts and curbed immigration; Franklin Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s secular liberals forged a government-business partnership and promoted a civil rights agenda; and the 1960s radicals protested corporate influence in the Great Society, liberal hypocrisy on race and gender, and the war in Vietnam.”

Each iteration of the Left went further, seeking “to overturn what came before.” Bad people filled with bad ideas did bad things. After the Sixties, “Radicals ensconced themselves in bureaucracy and academia to advance their vision of social justice for women and minorities, while neoliberal elites promoted monopoly finance, open borders, and the outsourcing of jobs to benefit consumers.” Eventually, “The neoliberals’ economic and military failures precipitated a crisis of legitimacy.”

Professor Slack’s book—and, I assume, his course—wends its way to a tragic finale.

“In the ‘great awokening’ that began under Barack Obama, neoliberal elites, including establishment conservatives, openly broke with the populist base of the Republican Party, embraced identity politics, and used COVID-19 and a myth of insurrection to strip away the rights of American citizens. Today, an incompetent kleptocracy is draining the wealthiest and most powerful people in history, thus eroding the foundations of its own empire.”

If today’s America exemplifies what it means to be “woke,” well, this existential Russian blue cat would prefer to go back to sleep. I will, however, wake up in time for Lecture #1, by Kevin Slack himself: “Liberalism’s Rejection of Progressivism”. That should be an eye-opener!

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Professor Kevin Slack’s CV: Kevin Slack - Hillsdale College

I should note that, on the popular website “Rate My Professors,” Professor Slack is unanimously praised; of his twelve reviews, eleven rate him as “Awesome” and one rates him as “Great”. The reviews are so fulsome, one might suspect Professor Slack of having written them himself (but he didn’t).

¹ One cannot help but think of Richard Weaver’s remark, which (because I cannot locate the quotation) I will paraphrase as: just because the river is at full flood and the current is carrying us downstream, we are not thereby obliged to sing hymns of praise to the river gods as we are swept away. Or something.

The Great Refusal: T.S. Eliot vs. the Mob

{Please note: ‘the mob’ to which Eliot refers in ‘The Idea of a Christian Society’ is not to be confused with Organized Crime, the Syndicate, the Machine, or anything similar. It refers instead to ordinary people who did not have the good fortune to be T.S. Eliot or anyone in whom he might have taken the slightest interest. Its use is snobbish and condescending, but then, so was Eliot.}

Few people would deny that Christianity enjoyed, for centuries, a hegemonic position in western Europe, or that it no longer does so. Matthew Arnold’s 19^th-century poem “Dover Beach” was the classic elegy for “the Sea of Faith,” set against that sea’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” In the 20^th century, English historian Christopher Dawson did his best to preserve the memory, at least, of Christian Europe in all its medieval splendor.

Not to be outdone, the poet T.S. Eliot, an American who transplanted himself to England, joined the chorus of lament. ¹ Writing in the late 1930s, he asserted that the modern West was increasingly a pagan domain, or at least a decidedly non-Christian one; in his estimate, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, lip service was as far as most people would go towards ‘Christianizing’ their lives or the society they inhabited. Eliot’s 1940 essay “The Idea of a Christian Society” was his attempt to clarify what a restored Christian hegemony would entail.

First, however, Eliot had to point out the failings of the modern pagan order, which he laid primarily (though not entirely) and predictably at the feet of Liberalism:  

By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.

Eliot’s assertion that political, social, and cultural Liberalism lead, as if by some sort of historical dialectic, to tyranny and to totalitarianism, was hardly original. That familiar claim, however, has proven much easier to make than to substantiate, in that neither the Bolshevik, Fascist, Nazi, or Red Chinese regimes emerged from societies with Liberal roots; while, on the other hand, postwar Liberal states (Britain, America, France, Germany, etc.) have not succumbed to tyranny. ²

Eliot continued:

In religion, Liberalism may be characterized as a progressive discarding of elements in historical Christianity which appear superfluous or obsolete, confounded with practices and abuses which are legitimate objects of attack. But as its movement is controlled rather by its origin than by any goal, it loses force after a series of rejections, and with nothing to destroy is left with nothing to uphold and with nowhere to go.

Liberal Christianity, whatever its intentions, was all deconstruction and no construction. Once you remove miracles, metaphysics, biblical inerrancy, and ritual, all you have left are platitudes. It is hard to know whether such observations constitute a criticism of Liberalism or of Christianity.

In any case, according to Eliot, Liberalism was pulling the rug out from under itself:

The attitudes and beliefs of Liberalism are destined to disappear, are already disappearing. They belong to an age of free exploitation which has passed; and our danger now is, that the term may come to signify for us only Liberalism’s disorder.  Out of Liberalism itself come philosophies which deny it. We do not proceed, from Liberalism to its apparent end of authoritarian democracy, at a uniform pace in every respect. ³ There are so many centers of it — Britain, France, America and the Dominions — that the development of western society must proceed more slowly than that of a compact body like Germany, and its tendencies are less apparent.

Western Liberalism was bound to end up just like Nazi Germany, not to say Bolshevik Russia:

Furthermore, those who are the most convinced of the necessity of ‘Statism’ as a control of some activities of life, can be the loudest professors of libertarianism in others, and insist upon the preserves of ‘private life’ in which each man may obey his own convictions or follow his own whim: while imperceptibly this domain of ‘private life’ becomes smaller and smaller, and may eventually disappear altogether. It is possible [for instance] that a wave of terror of the consequences of depopulation might lead to legislation having the effect of compulsory breeding. ⁴

Having thoroughly studied both history and the pernicious effects of modernity, Eliot knew, as surely as Karl Marx had known, what was in store for the West:

The more highly industrialized the country, the more easily a materialistic philosophy will flourish in it, and the more deadly that philosophy will be. Britain has been highly industrialized longer than any other country. And the tendency of unlimited industrialism is to create bodies of men and women, of all classes, detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined. ⁵

As of 1940, Eliot could read the writing on the wall:

The Liberal notion that religion was a matter of private belief and of conduct in private life, and that there is no reason why Christians should not be able to accommodate themselves to any world which treats them good-naturedly, is becoming less and less tenable. The reason why members of different [Christian] communions have been able to [get] along together, is that in the greater part of the ordinary business of life they have shared the same assumptions about behavior. When they have been wrong, they have been wrong together.

The problem of leading a Christian life in a non-Christian society is now very present to us, and it is a very different problem from that of the accommodation between an Established Church and dissenters. It is not merely the problem of a minority in a society of individuals holding an alien belief. It is the problem constituted by our implication in a network of institutions from which we cannot dissociate ourselves: institutions the operation of which appears no longer neutral, but non-Christian. And as for the Christian who is not conscious of his dilemma (and he is in the majority), he is becoming more and more de-Christianized by all sorts of unconscious pressure: paganism holds all the most valuable advertising space.

Hegemonies come and hegemonies go, and woe be to those who question the current hegemon. Christendom endured for over a millennium; now that it has been displaced, its remaining adherents (“revanchists,” that is, who are not to be confused with ordinary Christians) can do little but pine for its restoration.  

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¹ For those who don’t know, Thomas Stearns Eliot was an influential 20^th-century poet. He was best known for fighting with Ezra Pound in the Captain’s Tower, a popular London tea room; the quarrel was allegedly over how many coffee spoons it would take to measure out a life.

² Unless you count the Obamacare insurance mandate, or the COVID lockdowns and mask mandates. In any case, don’t think it won’t happen just because it hasn’t happened yet.

³ Isn’t “authoritarian democracy” an oxymoron? Not according to conservatives like Eliot, for whom uncontrolled majoritarian democracy posed a threat to liberty, a threat more insidious because of its democratic (“of the people”) disguise. Democracy, after all, explicitly empowers the mob, and the mob, as Eliot would note, is always susceptible to demagogues.

⁴ “Compulsory breeding” is rarely on the list of conservative complaints about modernity; perhaps Eliot, whose two marriages were childless, was not fond of children. He once wrote to Conrad Aiken, "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls.” Eliot, an advocate of decorous Christian virtue, separated from his first wife, Vivienne, after seventeen years of marriage; long afflicted with mental disorders, she spent the last decade of her life in a British asylum, without a single visit from Eliot, to whom she was still legally married. Consoling himself in the years after Vivienne’s death with various female confidantes, Eliot finally remarried, at the age of 68, to his 30-year-old secretary.

Saturday Lecture: Culture or Politics?

Claes Ryn, from “How Conservatives Failed the Culture” (1996):

Many self-described American intellectual conservatives have a thinly veiled disdain for philosophy and the arts. Even among academics, indifference to what lies beyond broad ideas and popular culture is common. The ruling assumption of the now dominant strains of intellectual conservatism seems to be that the crux of social well-being is politics: bad politicians ruin society; good politicians set it right. Nothing fascinates conservatives more than presidential politics. For social problems to be effectively remedied and for worthy objectives to be achieved, "our" candidate must win the next election, our people man the government. 

Many supposedly intellectual conservatives seem to consider ideas and culture from afar, as it were, feeling no deep personal need for or intimate connection with them. Some are in a way attracted to the arts or even to philosophical speculation but see no significant and immediate connection between these and the life of practice. Ideas and the arts are mainly pleasant diversions. Many others have only slight interest in philosophy and culture for their own sake. More or less consciously, they tend to assess either thought or imagination from the point of view of whether it advances or undermines the political cause that they assume to be incontestable. Does the book, lecture, play, movie, or song help or hinder the cause? Although such works may enlighten or entertain, they do not strike these individuals as having intrinsic and independent authority. Works of thought and imagination are for them not intriguing and potentially unsettling forces that might trigger painful self-examination and unpredictably reconstitute one's own accustomed views; making sense of them is not so much a matter of soul-searching as of locating them on the political spectrum. 

Much of the present conservative interest in "the culture" is due to a growing awareness of the political impact and propaganda potential of the mind and the imagination. It has also become politically opportune to bemoan cultural sleaze. Although it can certainly be salutary for well-educated and aesthetically discerning politicians and other public figures to comment on a harmful cultural and academic situation, the fact that such a task has fallen to, or been seized by, politicians and political intellectuals is a sign of the failure of intellectuals and artists. Criticisms of cultural, intellectual, and moral decadence that politicians address to large audiences are likely to be simplistic and heavy-handed. They may also feed the spurious and dangerous notion that the key to social health is political action. 

The Speaker of the House, a person with some credentials as an intellectual, has complained, on good grounds, about a lack of shame in American society. ¹ Public discussion of the Speaker’s concern showed wide support for promoting shame by having political and civic leaders set moral and other standards and start campaigns to elicit the desired reaction. It seemed out of place to point out that shame of the kind that formed part of an older Western morality is not so easily manufactured. It had origins deep within the personality of Western man, as shaped by the long moral, religious, aesthetical, and intellectual history of his society. Shame of that type could not be replaced through civic boosterism.

Does it need to be said that the views about culture, truth, and morality that are put forth by intellectuals who live and breathe political strategy and tactics are no real alternative to the thinking now dominant in academia and beyond? Only an authentic revitalization of will, imagination and reason would deepen and enrich human existence as an end in itself, not serve a particular political agenda. A characteristic of a creative civilization is that you cannot fully predict where it might lead in thought, art, ethics, and politics. Many purported conservative intellectuals currently concerned about "the culture" seem to know exactly what will be the political-ideological consequences of "improving" it: more "capitalism," "democracy," and "equality." Perhaps in some future Washington administration there will be appointed a "culture czar." A more appropriate title might be "commissar." 

Rather than submit to a reign of conservative political correctness, a cultural and intellectual movement worthy of the name would take its chances with poets, artists, philosophers, and men and women of conscience. 

How Conservatives Failed the Culture (nhinet.org)

About the author: Claes G. Ryn - Department of Politics - Catholic University of America 

¹ At the time of Ryn’s essay, the Speaker of the House who was concerned over our “lack of shame” was Newt Gingrich, whose picture you will find in the dictionary under the word “shameless”. I will not speak to Ryn’s assertion that Gingrich possessed “some credentials as an intellectual,” other than to say that intellectual credentials are not always what they appear to be and that oftentimes on closer inspection such credentials turn out to have been forged. I’m just saying.

Two Views from the Right

{Both Walter McDougall and Claes Ryn are conservative scholars with impressive resumes. For that reason, I find the following excerpts from their work to be of interest—McDougall’s, because his assessment of the American character, of 'American Exceptionalism,' and of the ‘American Civil Religion’ is unflattering in the extreme, unlike typical right-wing 'America First' boosterism; and Ryn’s, because his description of America's declining, decaying, and disintegrating civilization was written (in 1991) in the wake of decades of Republican political ascendancy (eight years of Nixon, eight years of Reagan, four years of Bush I, with only Jimmy Carter managing a brief interregnum). Apparently, both Nixon’s law-and-order pugnacity and Reagan’s avuncular charm had been in vain, as America succumbed, on their watch, to ever more debauchery, crime, and irresponsibility—or so Claes Ryn insisted.  Anyway, the following are both period pieces, but instructive, and entertaining, regardless.}

Walter McDougall (2009, in The Imaginative Conservative):

Ameri­cans have always been hustlers both in the positive and pejora­tive senses; that they have almost always justified their ambition, avarice, expectations, and contempt for constraints by selective, self-serving appeals to Providence; that they are expert at the self-deception, pretense, amnesia, and procrastination that help a vast, diverse democracy to cohere; that their sacred lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness amount to feeling good about doing well; that they perfected the worship of both God and Mammon through a chiliastic American Civil Religion conflating material plenty with spiritual grace, and have thereby managed to dispense with trag­edy, irony, limits, and original sin; that they respond ferociously to any person, institution, law, ideology, or foreign power that dares interfere with their headlong flight into a future; that they make it an article of faith that change is good; hence that the only acceptable conservatism—at least since the Civil War—is one that conserves all the above against those who critique it from the Left or the Mugwump Right.

That is not to say the American Civil Reli­gion is inflexible. On the contrary, like the imperial cult of the Ro­man Empire it devours all new gods and cults in the name of toler­ance so long as they burn incense to the overarching civil faith that guarantees free exercise of sectarian faiths. In their Enlightenment-scientific-technological-engineering-business-consumer mode, Americans are a vast Masonic Lodge, with every citizen a master builder helping to finish that unfinished pyramid under the All-Seeing Eye that appears on our dollar bill and Great Seal. In their Reformation-theological-teleological-mystical-magical-missionary mode, Americans are the New Israel marching together into a New Promised Land that someday will unite the whole human race.

Now, a faith that one’s nation is “under God” and possessed of a Providential mission can be a mighty force multiplier in time of war, and source of patience, forbearance, and charity in time of domestic travail. But the belief that one’s nation is under divine protection can also breed a dangerous complacency that encour­ages national procrastination and in fact tempts the Lord thy God, over and over again. And the belief that one’s nation has a mission can breed hubris of the sort that causes one’s legions to be dis­patched “a bridge too far” over and over again.

Claes Ryn, from The New Jacobins (1991):

Evidence is accumulating that Western democracy is in continuous and serious decline. Many commentators still hold up today’s Western society as a model for all humanity, but they do so in the face of glaring symptoms of social decay. The following brief list is merely suggestive:

Political opportunism, demagoguery, irresponsibility, self-indulgence and short-sightedness, the decline of the family, rampant crime and dishonesty, drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, academic shoddiness and ideologizing, religious superficiality and sentimentalism, crudity and debauchery in arts and entertainment—in their pervasiveness and virulence these and other phenomena indicate a disintegration of civilization.

Democracy is suffering the consequences of an evasion of individual moral responsibility. The concrete and specific personal obligations of the here and now that were central to an older Western morality are being replaced by allegedly superior moral goals that are more abstract and distant, and that concern generalized efforts on behalf of large aggregates of people.  As the imagination is shaped by the needs of impersonal collectives, attention is distracted from the tasks directly facing the individual. Personal and concrete responsibilities begin to appear insignificant and trivial in comparison with great tasks to be performed by others far away.

For a genuine recovery of American society to be possible, the addictive habits of moral escapism and conceit will have to be broken. The heart of the matter is the urgent need for a reawakened awareness of personal character and responsibility as the basis of the civilized society. The individual must be encouraged to face the hard and primary obligations of the here and now, chief of which is improvement of self and doing right by ‘neighbor’. Social and political arrangements can assume humane and constructive forms only if they evolve from individual lives that are soundly ordered. From a new moral realism of this kind and from a corresponding strengthening of character can emerge a reconstituted sense of proportion and priorities and a more sober assessment of what can be achieved through politics.

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Walter A. McDougall - Wikipedia

Claes G. Ryn - Wikipedia

Claes Ryn's America