The Little Red Blog

Friday Fragments

{Here and there on the WorldWideWeb...for once in my life, I will refrain, for the most part, from snarky comments.}

At Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson makes a sensible point: laws should apply equally to everyone, with no loopholes for anyone whose personal Lord and Savior says otherwise.  Or, as Robinson phrases it, “If a law should apply, it should apply regardless of how people feel about following it. If the law infringes on liberty, it should be repealed. All a religious exemption is at the end of the day is a rule that some people are allowed to violate laws because they believe they ought to be allowed to. Or rather, because they believe God told them they shouldn’t have to follow the law and should get to discriminate against people.” 

There Should Not Be “Religious Exemptions” To Laws ❧ Current Affairs

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Kerry McDonald, on the other hand, leader of the Foundation for Economic Education, would like to get rid of laws forcing kids to go to school. Yay, Kerry McDonald! Where were you when I needed you in 1965? Ms. McDonald argues as follows:

Compulsory school attendance laws terrorize parents and weaken families. Last week, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a state law that allows parents of children who regularly miss school to be jailed. The case focused on two single mothers in Missouri who were given jail sentences when their children, who were in kindergarten and first grade, were each absent from school for roughly 15 days during the 2021/2022 academic year. 

We may see this criminalization of parents accelerate in the coming months as states and school districts try to find the allegedly “missing” children who have left district schools since the pandemic response began in 2020. It is likely to be low-income parents and those from historically marginalized groups who will be targeted for truancy.

Compulsory schooling is incompatible with freedom, as Thomas Jefferson himself recognized. While promoting broad educational offerings, free to the poor, and noting that a society could not be both free and ignorant, Jefferson opposed forced education. “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father,” Jefferson wrote in 1817.

Instead of criminalizing parents whose children miss school, sometimes for heartbreaking reasons such as bullying, we should seek instead to eliminate compulsory schooling statutes and free families from the government’s coercive clutches. In the absence of these laws, a robust, diverse, and decentralized education ecosystem would emerge that would be grounded in consent over coercion and defined by variety over monopoly.

Compulsory Schooling Laws Have Got To Go - Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org)

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Lastly, educator Daniel Buck is very excited about a new college admissions test that, he says, will challenge the SAT and the ACT for prominence: it’s the CLT (Classical Learning Test), and it requires students to read Plato and Teresa of Avila!

Created in 2015, the CLT hopes to revive what we consider an education of old — logic, grammar, Shakespeare, Tolstoy. In format, it resembles its competitors, featuring passages with multiple choice questions. Yet students instead read the likes of Plato on tyrannical man or St. Teresa of Avila on the virtues of a humble life.

Hundreds of private colleges and universities now accept its scores. Last spring, Florida began funding its administration at the K-12 level, and high scores can even earn students Bright Futures Scholarships.

Especially as the classical education movement more broadly gains national momentum, there is both room and need for a challenger to incentivize the kind of education that cultivates wisdom, fosters virtue, inspires wonder, and crafts the soul.

A test to challenge the SAT | The Hill

We Have Met the Enemy, and It Is Teachers and Democracy

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The President of Hillsdale College and the Governor of Tennessee walk into a private reception being held in their honor. Larry Arnn looks at Bill Lee and says,

“Teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country, and they are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids. My wife is English, and she’s a gardener, and she doesn’t talk about what she is going to do to these plants. She talks about what they need, because if you give them what they need, they will grow. It’s not a manufacturing operation.”

Funny stuff, amirite? Kudos to the alert fan who recorded the hilarious exchange!

Now the usual snowflakes suspects (e.g., Nashville’s News Channel 5) are up in arms about Larry Arnn and his impolitic remarks, even though Joy Pullmann, writing at The Federalist, insists that “Teachers and research agree: educations schools are garbage.” Ms. Pullman is not just talking out of her, um, well, she knows what she’s talking about:

In 2006, 62 percent of teachers told researchers their training didn’t prepare them well for their jobs. In general, education colleges not only do not prepare teachers to succeed in the classroom; the teachers have been so thoroughly corrupted by cultural Marxism that what they learn in the typical preparation program actually degrades their skills. 

These are well-reinforced, longstanding empirical findings bolstered by many forms of evidence. As I wrote 10 years ago, “Teachers tend to have below-average SAT, ACT, LSAT, and GRE scores, and statistics show their college coursework is among the least challenging available. Education majors must take more remedial college coursework than their counterparts in humanities and social sciences. Traditional teacher preparation programs emphasize education and social theories, which research has demonstrated are ineffective teaching methods.”

No wonder Johnny and Janey can’t read! No wonder our kids is not learning! No wonder Hillsdale’s President Larry Arnn is lobbying Governor Lee to use (for free!) Hillsdale’s patented (and free!) “high-quality curricula” in Tennessee public schools. What part of “high-quality curricula” does Nashville’s News Channel 5 not understand?

Joy Pullmann concludes her report with the thoughtful, reasoned rhetoric for which The Federalist is famous: “Very powerful interests,” Pullman writes, “want to keep truth away from Americans, thereby keeping Tennessee’s children and teachers at their mental and institutional mercy. Liars like these can’t be trusted to watch your laptop when you go to the bathroom, not to mention to educate your child. Their hold on power must be broken.”

Such sophisticated argumentation is irresistible, especially coming from a woman who calls herself a “grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs,” a distinction Ms. Pullmann modestly chooses not to mention in her article.

Hillsdale President Tells Truth About Teacher Training, Media Goes Nuts (thefederalist.com)

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At In These Times, Hamilton Nolan ¹ explains that “when the world is burning,” pragmatism, caution, and prudence are for losers. “On a normal day,” writes Nolan, “you wouldn’t dive out of a fifth-floor window into the river below — but if your building was on fire, that would become the most reasonable choice.  Diving from that window into the river below sure seems terrifying, but not as terrifying as staying put and burning to death.” 

Scolding the political moderates, centrists, and “realists” among us, Nolan continues, “The failure to understand that solutions must match the scale and severity of our problems leaves us, inevitably, with problems that never get solved. Problems that never get solved, in these cases, translate to the mass immiseration of millions of people for generation after generation.”

Is that what you want, America? I should hope not, especially when the solution is so obvious: The obvious solution is to change the structures that are constricting our ability to build a functioning democracy. Obviously! Yet ​“structural reform” is perceived by the majority of people in power as a step too far. We can’t even get the filibuster out of the way with a Democratic Congress. Joe Biden has already proclaimed that he doesn’t favor expanding the Supreme Court. Despite the elections of both Bush and Trump, who lost the popular vote, there has not been any sustained push to scrap the Electoral College. And ​‘abolish the Senate’ is not even discussed enough to enter the pantheon of fringe positions. Recognition of the fact that our entire system was designed by humans and can be changed by humans and, furthermore, must be changed by humans remains mystifyingly absent from mainstream discourse. ² We are like the drivers of a car accelerating towards a brick wall, unwilling to take our foot off the gas pedal and hit the brakes, because we don’t want to disturb the passengers in the back seat.    

What a perfect description of our plight: trapped in a burning building, we are driving headlong towards a brick wall, trying not to disturb our passengers as we prepare to dive out the fifth-floor window into the river below.

Michael Anton himself (“The Flight 93 Election”) could not have said it better, or even Admiral David Farragut: Damn the backseat passengers, ditch the cumbersome ballast of democracy, and full speed ahead!  

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¹ Full disclosure: Hamilton Nolan describes the American founding thusly: “Nearly a quarter of a millennium ago, a small group of wealthy white men in a fledgling colonial nation wrote a constitution that seemed, to them, the best they could do, with their accumulated wisdom at the time, and in light of all of the necessary political compromises.” Nolan is clearly an unpatriotic fellow and not to be trusted.

² Re “our entire system was designed by humans”: please see footnote above for Nolan’s estimate of the humans who did the designing.

Radical Is Now Rational - In These Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America hungers. Who will feed it?

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The Church of the New American Awakening - American Reformer

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

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

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

Which Laws? Whose Liberty?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tocqueville’s Worst Fears – (lawliberty.org)

 

Are We Great Again Yet?

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

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

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

Infinite abundance.

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

Next stop, Utopia!

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

In fairness, Edward Ring acknowledges a fundamental difficulty:

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

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

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

Toward Infinite Abundance › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)   

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Rufo's Ideological Siege Warfare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, information warfare, and then what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________________________ 

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

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

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

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

Wednesday with Pascal: Have Mercy on Us All

• Pascal the existential Russian blue cat had a column prepared for today, but, in the wake of yesterday's school shooting in Texas (not to be confused with the recent supermarket shooting in Buffalo), Pascal has instructed me to line his litter box with what he had written. "What good are words in a world filled with bullets?" he complained. I had no answer, so today Pascal has no column.
• To paraphrase the Nobel Laureate of a generation: How many deaths will it take 'til we know that too many children have died?  
• I have pondered and pondered and even cogitated on this, and I can only say, what the hell is wrong with us? That is not a rhetorical question; I would like an answer, please. The best description of mankind would be "God's favorite mistake". The deity has a lot of godsplaining to do.
• To paraphrase Jack Nicholson's "Joker," what this country needs is an enema.
• Pascal has just interrupted me to ask that I also use the endless and useless "thoughts and prayers" to line his litter box. 
• Another paraphrase: Nihilism is a warm gun. 
• At least Swiss army knives, baseball bats, and tire irons have other uses; they were not specifically designed to kill. Explain to me how guns serve any other purpose. They are killing machines, plain and simple, and they should be labeled as such.

Words ring hollow. They make me sick. The rest is silence. Have a great day, America, you murderous beast, you nation of accomplices. May God have mercy on us all.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

 

  

Waking from Wokeness?

Is our long national nightmare finally coming to an end?

I don’t know which I find more annoying: the Right’s constant cultural catastrophizing, its incessant claims of being victimized, or its occasional moments of smug triumphalism in which it boasts that the Children of Light have overcome, or are in the process of overcoming, the Children of Darkness.

Roger Kimball (The New Criterion) is as fond as anyone of complaining about our neo-Marxist Overlords and their nefarious tyrannical schemes, but in “Signs and Portents,” a brief essay about “Elon Musk’s Growing Political Maturity,” Kimball is in a celebratory mood. Good things are happening in America! “A few weeks ago,” Kimball begins, “Exxon announced that it was banning the display of Pride and BLM flags at its headquarters in Houston. There was a ripple of unhappiness, but nothing was burned down, the media attention was muted, and the world went about its business as before.”

“Nothing was burned down”? Is there a shortage of matches as well as baby formula? How did Antifa miss this opportunity?

Kimball offers further evidence that the tide of cultural decay is being rolled back: 

Across the country, school board elections are tossing out woke ideologues and partisans of critical race theory and replacing what amounts to gay pornography in the curriculum with more wholesome fare. The Biden Administration keeps running into roadblocks, most recently a judicial order halting its efforts to rescind Title 42, a Trump-era emergency order that turned away would-be immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. A few days ago, Biden’s absurd Disinformation Governance Board was shuttered and its pathetic director, Nina Jankowicz, sucked back into the memory hole whence she came. 

The icing on this cake—a cake of which Masterpiece Cakeshop would be proud—is the conversion of Mr. Elon Musk to the side of the angels. As tech billionaires go, so goes the country, or so Kimball seems to think:

Musk has just announced that he had moved from being a moderate Democrat to being a moderate Republican. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God: did you hear that, Mabel?” ¹

“I’ve just switched from moderate D to moderate R,” Musk tweeted, “as I think many independent voters have done.” Salt-in-the-wound time: “We will know the magnitude of this trend in November. I think it’s big.” Me too. 

Or perhaps I should say #MeToo. Musk predicted that attacks against him would escalate once his changed political feelings were made public. “In the past I voted Democrat,” he wrote on May 18, “because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.” I liked that this was followed by a popcorn emoji. And indeed the dirty tricks are flowing in from all sides, the latest being an allegation by a flight attendant that Musk acted inappropriately back in 2016. The charge will not go anywhere—Musk is robust in fighting false charges—but perhaps it will fulfill one longstanding wish. “If there’s ever a scandal about me,” he tweeted in March 2021, “*please* call it Elongate.” Let’s do it!

Whatever your opinion of Elon Musk, Roger Kimball knows a trend when he sees it:

The story of Elon Musk’s growing political maturity is not a one-off or an individual data point. It is part of a process, a gathering sea change. What we are seeing is not so much a pendulum swinging back from the extremism of identity politics as the eruption throughout society of contrary fires. Elon Musk’s coming of age is a sign or portent of a larger shift in the sensibility of our time. The shift won’t happen all at once, and there will be hold-outs and reversals, but what we are witnessing is a sort of spiritual reveille, an awakening from wokeness. The extent of that awakening will not, as Musk said, be evident until the November election. Indeed, I predict that it won’t be fully evident until the 2024 election when (further prediction) Donald Trump wins yet again, this time beyond the margin of fraud and dissimulation. Let’s see if I am right.

Time will tell. While we wait for events to unfold, we can ponder the irony of the Great Populist Revolt being led by two billionaires, one of whom is known for his eccentricity and the other of whom is a narcissistic buffoon of world-historic proportions who has already attempted to undermine and overthrow America’s democratic process, and who will certainly do so again if given a chance.

Signs and Portents: Elon Musk’s Growing Political Maturity › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

¹ Credit where credit is due: Kimball has offered us a pitch-perfect imitation of the Left's typical response to anything that deviates from their agenda. Mabel's reply would be something along the lines of "Fetch me my smelling salts, Wilfred, and prepare the fainting couch!"

Mabel the woke cat upon learning that Elon Musk will now vote "moderate Republican"            

 

Tuesday Miscellany

Randomly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday Roundup

Cancel culture strikes again! Someone named Amber Athey, who has suffered mightily for years because of her conservative views, has now lost her job because of a joking tweet she made about Vice-President Kamala Harris. Ms. Athey details her nightmare in an article at The Spectator World; unless you have a heart of stone, it will leave you in tears. Though the employer who fired her was in fact a right-wing radio outlet, Ms. Athey nonetheless concludes, "I am sick and tired of conservatives apologizing to the left, staying quiet because they’re afraid of burning bridges, or complaining incessantly without taking action. We will only defeat the left’s bad faith attempts at censorship if we fight back.”

I was fired for a joke about Kamala Harris’s outfit - The Spectator World

At Claremont Review of Books, Nate Hochman reminds conservatives that “academic freedom” is in fact a left-wing slippery slope to political correctness: “The American university’s decline did not begin with our departure from liberal academic freedom; it began with our embrace of it.” In a lengthy essay that cites a wide range of conservative icons—e.g., William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, M. Stanton Evans—Hochman argues that, while differences of opinion are all well and good, lines must be drawn and someone must draw them, on behalf of Truth.

A true education is an intellectual adventure, occurring against the backdrop of a vast range and variety of voices that collectively illuminate the possibilities of the human condition. But no seasoned explorer enters the wilderness without his compass. Insofar as there is a “conservative” alternative to the predominant liberal understanding of academic freedom, it is as cognizant of its limitations as it is of its liberties. This kind of academic freedom is organized around a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles—and bound by an unapologetic commitment to truth.

What Academic Freedom Is For - Claremont Review of Books

Speaking of truth: what even is it? Nicholas Tampio (at Aeon) advocates “Skepticism as a way of life,” an antidote, he claims, to our plague of dueling truth claims and endless bickering over what news is real and what news is fake. Tampio believes we would benefit from the wisdom of an ancient physician named Sextus Empiricus, who wrote a book (Outlines of Pyrrhonism) distilling the thought of the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, a contemporary of Aristotle.  

Pyrrho’s skepticism was so extreme it made Bishop Berkeley look credulous: “Pyrrho needed his friends to help him avoid wagons, dogs and cliffs because he would not commit to the knowledge of his senses. Diogenes Laertius also said Pyrrho would not help a friend who had fallen into a pond, suggesting that sceptics doubt our moral commitments.” If your friend falls into a pond but no one is around to confirm it, will your friend make a sound as he sinks beneath the surface? This is why we need philosophers.

Scepticism is a way of life that allows democracy to flourish | Aeon Essays

Are we still interested in Ukraine, even after “the slap”? Apparently we are: Sarah Jones (Intelligencer) interviews Greg Yudin about Russian political apathy (Sociologist Greg Yudin: How Russia Learned to Deny Reality (nymag.com), while Timothy Snyder offers Ukrainian history for dummies like me (Kyiv's ancient normality (redux) - by Timothy Snyder (substack.com). In a separate article, Snyder also provides insight into the mind of Vladimir Putin: How Putin Makes His Enemies Do All the Work - The Atlantic

Finally, I found this inspiring: The wisdom of children - Vox Any parent worth his or her salt will tell you that no experience on earth matches the joys of parenting, and that no experience on earth could be more humbling, more uplifting, or more rewarding. Children are, quite simply, magic; I have been blessed with four of them, so I know whereof I speak. And don't even get me started on the magic of grandchildren...