The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: "Slouching toward ungovernability"

William Ophuls, from Requiem for Modern Politics (1998):

My principal aim is to show that the Enlightenment, in seeking a cure for civilization’s ills, only succeeded in making them worse. Liberal polity is based on intrinsically self-destructive and potentially dangerous principles. It has already failed in its collectivist form and is now moribund in its individualist form as well.

The exploitative economy intimately associated with liberal polity is fraudulent in its premises and is now approaching bankruptcy in both its market and non-market forms. In addition, the merely purposive rationality that helped to create and sustain a liberal polity and an exploitative economy expresses modern man’s will to power and wreaks increasing havoc both on nature and on man himself. The three main components of modern civilization—liberal polity, exploitative economy, and purposive rationality—are riddled with inner contradictions. That civilization is therefore collapsing. As a result, the latent totalitarianism of modern politics is likely to manifest itself with increasing force in the years to come. Without a major advance in civilization, we confront a political debacle.

Modern politics was erected on a premodern foundation, on the legacy of the Middle Ages, an era governed by a philosophy and way of life radically different from that of modernity. [The premodern society] regarded will and appetite as dangers to be combated rather than passions to be indulged. By contrast, liberal theory and practice are concerned almost solely with the expedient means toward individual self-expression and self-gratification. To use the image of Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, modern civilization is guilty of ‘spiritual parasitism’: it has relied on Christian virtues while scorning the faith which created and nourished them.

Parasites drain the life from their host. Hence the free play of individual selfishness within the liberal polity has steadily vitiated the very society upon which it utterly depends. In effect, just as modern economies consume the ecological capital of all the ages, so liberal polities destroy themselves by devouring the fund of moral capital, the fund of fossil virtue they inherited from the premodern past. Because liberalism tends ever and always toward moral entropy, it is rapidly exhausting the moral legacy upon which its doctrines and practices are grounded.

The moral entropy that is intrinsic to the liberal order has eroded both the moral legacy of the Middle Ages and the moral rectitude of the Protestant ethic. The upshot is that the morality of liberal society (if we can call it that) becomes increasingly egotistical. Everything is evaluated in terms of costs and benefits to ego, even the most intimate personal ties, and there is little left to hold together basic social relationships, much less civil society. A vicious circle of decay in both morals and mores is propelling us toward a social collapse whose details—crime, broken families, drug addiction, and the like—are so well known as not to need documentation.

When all members of a society live to satisfy their appetites, they are thrown not only into a fierce competition with each other for access to the sources of satisfaction, but into a moral wasteland in which that satisfaction is the ultimate and only value. ¹ Living by liberal premises over the long term fosters a vicious circle of antisocial behavior that tends toward the war of all against all.

The family is the primary arena in which ego learns to moderate its narcissistic demands and harmonize itself with some larger social entity: loyalty, integrity, responsibility, self-control, and the like are all learned primarily in the family setting. In other words, the family is where we acquire civility, the ability to live constructively and well in civil society. If the family fails to model and to inculcate civility or to bind the child to the community, then society is no longer a bulwark against selfishness, becoming instead a mere arena for it—a place where fundamentally amoral and asocial beings struggle for personal advantage with little or no regard for the welfare of others, much less for the public good. The decay of the family portends a bleakly Hobbesian future.

The liberal paradigm of politics unleashed human will and appetite but provided no countervailing source of moral principle strong enough to preserve society from their ravages over the long term. Liberal politics has become an increasingly naked struggle for power played out in a media arena before an electronic mob. The suspicion that we may be slouching toward ungovernability, is growing. 

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William Ophuls - Wikipedia

Although Opuls was (and is) an environmental activist, his scathing critique of liberalism anticipated the 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, by conservative academic Patrick Deneen; it also echoed very similar contemporary criticisms from Christopher Lasch. It is simultaneously liberalism’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness that it can be, and has been, attacked from both ideological sides.

¹ Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

What hath liberalism wrought?

Blaming Liberalism

{Full disclosure: I have not read Patrick Deneen’s ‘Why Liberalism Failed’ in its entirety, for reasons that should be clear in what follows.)

“The liberties that liberalism was brought into being to protect are extensively compromised by the expansion of government activity into every area of life.” (Patrick Deneen)

Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is, I confess, something of a disappointment, in that Deneen for the most part merely rehashes the anti-modern laments of Joseph Wood Krutch, Richard Weaver, the Southern Agrarians, et al. He also genuflects to the MacIntyre/Dreher school of conservative cultural resistance, advocating “the patient encouragement of new forms of community that can serve as havens in our depersonalized political and economic order.” Let a hundred Benedict Options bloom! ¹ Like William F. Buckley before him, Deneen stands athwart modernity yelling Stop! Whether modernity will listen to him any more than it did to Buckley is open to question. 

Stop me if you have heard this one before:

In liberalism’s world, gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification: culture, rather than imparting the wisdom and experience of the past so as to cultivate virtues of self-restraint and civility, becomes synonymous with hedonic titillation, visceral crudeness, and distraction, all oriented toward promoting consumption, appetite, and detachment. As a result, superficially self-maximizing, socially destructive behaviors begin to dominate society.

In schools, norms of modesty, deportment, and academic honesty are replaced by widespread lawlessness and cheating (along with increased surveillance of youth), while in the fraught realm of coming-of-age, courtship norms are replaced by ‘hook-ups’ and utilitarian sexual encounters. The norm of stable lifelong marriage is replaced by various arrangements that ensure the autonomy of the individuals, whether married or not. Children are increasingly viewed as a limitation on individual freedom, which contributes to liberalism’s commitment to abortion on demand, while overall birth rates decline across the developed world. ²

It is all drearily familiar. Modernity, say the anti-moderns, is a reckless philosophical wager based on a faulty anthropological assumption, i.e., that people are capable of improvement, individually and collectively; added to which is the political delusion that such capability can be fostered by allowing “experts” to engineer the social and economic environment. Deneen strives mightily to persuade the reader of that wager’s failure, though he offers no evidence that pre-liberal societies produced more felicitous results or that pre-modern people were more virtuous, more self-restrained, and less given to “hedonic titillation” and “visceral crudeness” than their modern counterparts. Instead, Deneen would have us believe that the illiterate, ill-clothed, ill-housed, ill-fed, superstitious, short-lived peasants of early medieval times were better off because they believed they were safely ensconced in some sacramental cosmic order, and that whatever seemingly arbitrary or unjust hierarchies existed on earth had been ordained in heaven, the same heaven where order would eventually be restored, the scales of justice balanced, and all would be well. In the meantime, in this vale of tears, Christian virtue stood fast against a multitude of sins; parents were honored (or at least feared), marriage vows were taken seriously (if not honored), and life was cherished (albeit nasty, brutish, and short).

That is such a pretty picture, one almost wishes it were true.

Why Liberalism Failed puts me in mind of what Stephen Holmes (The Anatomy of Antiliberalism) wrote about anti-liberal writers: “Well-established complaints and arguments are presented as revolutionary insights.” Every generation apparently believes it is criticizing the world anew; lord knows, my generation believed that. As Holmes notes, anti-liberals also seem compelled to “distort the liberal tradition in egregious ways.” Their reductionist interpretations depend upon viewing liberalism without “mention of the concrete circumstances that originally gave rise to liberal thinking: religious civil wars, ecclesiastical persecution and censorship, arbitrary taxation and confiscations, problems of political succession, cruel punishments, nightmarish criminal procedures, and so forth. Instead of seeing liberalism as a real response to real problems, it is viewed doctrinally, as a system of theoretical concepts and propositions.” Anti-liberals “regularly pluck a phrase from a liberal work, composed in response to a concrete situation, and enshrine it as a ponderous metaphysical dogma.” They seem to believe that ideas spring out of thin air and have no relationship to social or political problems; at best, some anti-liberals reluctantly concede the existence of such problems but claim that liberalism makes them worse. Liberals are portrayed either as malevolent nihilists intent on destroying all that is good and decent, or as wooly-headed utopians unfamiliar with the real world, dispensing irresponsible dicta from their ivory tower.

Holmes concedes that liberals can learn from anti-liberal critiques: “Liberalism’s severest critics can make an important contribution to the self-understanding of liberals themselves.” ³ But, he insists, “Despite their Herculean efforts, anti-liberals have failed to prove that liberalism is either debased or debasing. Blaming liberalism for the never-ending ‘contemporary crisis’ is neither realistic nor helpful.” Anyone who finds “liberal modernity” discomfiting must recognize that, whatever liberalism’s political or ideological fate, modernity is here to stay, along with its many discontents.

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Patrick Deneen (author) - Wikipedia Mr. Deneen’s undeniably impressive curricula vitae is even more impressive when one realizes he has accomplished so much despite being subjected to liberal tyranny his entire life.   

¹ Or move to Hungary, as Rod Dreher seems to have done.

² Such sentiments are not exclusively modern.  According to Francis Bacon (1561--1626), "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or of mischief." Similarly, Saint Paul discouraged early Christians from starting families, on the grounds that the world would be ending soon and that believers needed to focus on preparing for the eschaton.

³ Only a liberal, of course, would write such a thing.

Praying for the End of the World

{Long-winded preface: yesterday, I chanced upon Blake Smith’s review of Jerry Muller’s upcoming book, The Professor of the Apocalypse, a biography of the 20^th-century scholar Jacob Taubes (who died in 1987). Taubes was a friend—or at least an acquaintance—of Carl Schmitt, who I mentioned in my recent post “The Meaning of Politics”. Taubes shared Schmitt’s antipathy towards modern liberalism (though not Schmitt’s anti-Semitism or his Nazi background); his final book, The Political Theology of Paul, was written, according to Blake Smith, in response to a discussion with Schmitt about Paul’s role in the formation of Christian anti-Judaism.}

Though they disagreed on much, Jacob Taubes and Carl Schmitt had this much in common: they believed liberals failed to understand what was at stake in politics. Taubes viewed politics as messianic and eschatological, whereas Schmitt leaned more towards mythic “blood and soil,” but both considered liberals and liberal politics to be the enemy. Blake Smith, writing at Tablet, explains:

“Schmitt saw more clearly than other thinkers that politics turned on hatreds, on the identification of friends and foes. In his pre-war writings, Schmitt had argued that liberal regimes, like the Weimar Republic, then tottering under assaults from both extremes of the political spectrum, are premised on the idea that all conflicts can be resolved through rational discussion. Their leaders imagine that politics is merely a kind of debate club in which ideas are exchanged, secured by a framework of universal rights that applies neutrally to all. They are unable to see that some groups cannot be accommodated within this framework, and, demanding more than the mere right to be heard, pose a mortal threat to the regime. Politics, in essence, was about defending the “homogeneity” of the political community and eradicating its internal enemies.” ¹

In his essay, Smith emphasizes the centrality of “Messiah” as a political issue for Taubes: “In a series of lectures to an audience of Protestant scholars in Heidelberg, Germany a few weeks before his death on March 21, 1987, Taubes argued that the most important political question is the question of Messiah. The pattern of our political and religious life together, and the meaning of our individual lives, depend on its answer. The question is not who, among the many candidates put forward by various communities of believers, he is—nor whether he has already come, is still alive, is yet to appear, etc. These questions will appear important only if we have already answered the question of whether, in the first place, we want Messiah. Against such a desire stands all our yearning, often unspoken but constant and strong, for things to remain the same, our complicity with the powers of the present world.”

The basic problem with liberalism, for Taubes, was that it represented a rejection of Messiah: which is to say, liberals do not yearn for an apocalypse, for the eschaton, or for the beginning of a new age. ² Liberals are, one might say, the political equivalent of Anglicans; they want politics done decently and in good order (and kept out of the street, lest it frighten the horses). ³ Writing about Paul, Jacob Taubes sought “an existential confrontation with the question of Messiah—and of his enemies. The latter, Taubes argued, are those who seek to ‘hold back’ the end of the present world, who believe that it can get along for itself without a ‘living God’ who appears unpredictably into history and into our lives. He calls these people, with contempt, ‘liberals.’ Paul, he argued, was ‘more Jewish than all the liberal or reformed rabbis’ who prayed only half-heartedly for Messiah.”

As Blake Smith puts it, “Taubes’ lectures represent one of the most powerful critiques of liberalism, understood not only as a political philosophy, but as a spiritual disposition, or rather a spiritual desiccation, by which liberals neutralize the radical promises of faith. His final lectures, published as The Political Theology of Paul, are a challenge both to those of us who, from whatever vantage, claim to desire Messiah, and those—often the same people—who seek to preserve political liberalism in an increasingly illiberal world.”

Eschatological theology, which invites and welcomes the chaos, tumult, and sufferings of the last days, is at odds with a quotidian politics conceived as “the art of the possible” and, to that extent, as a force for civil order. Smith claims that “Christians, in principle, ought to be eager for the release of the Antichrist, insofar as that event hastens the return of the Messiah.” ⁴ It was on this issue, though, that Taubes and Schmitt parted ways: “Schmitt saw the Antichrist not so much as the terrifying but necessary prelude for the messianic era, but as a principle of disorder, of which Marxism was the preeminent modern instrument. Advocating “counter-revolution,” Schmitt argued that preserving the world meant identifying the ‘katechon’ [the preserver of order] of our times and supporting its struggle against evil.” Taubes would have none of it. Efforts to secure the political and social order were, in effect if not in intent, efforts to keep God out of history. Taubes derisively accused Christians like Schmitt of “praying for the conservation of the state, because if the state is not secured, God forbid, then chaos begins, or, what’s still worse, the Kingdom of God!”

Blake Smith sides with Taubes’ longing for the Kingdom:

Taubes took from Schmitt the lesson that politics, and religion, are founded on our choice for or against God’s coming kingdom. Either we seek to preserve the existing order of things, or we insist that the promises of a better world made to us by the Scriptures are not mere metaphors or visions, but realities to which we must continue to aspire. There is an unavoidable conflict raging, not so much between our regime and its enemies, or between counter-revolution and revolution, but between those who fear Messiah’s coming and those who welcome it. Liberalism, for Taubes, is a misguided attempt to refuse that choice, to resist Schmitt’s dangerous truth that we cannot avoid making the distinction between friends and enemies—and that, more radically, we must declare ourselves friends or enemies of Messiah.

And so, we have a remarkable transvaluation of political values: liberals seek to preserve political (and earthly) order, while religious conservatives fervently pray for disorder and upheaval as a prelude to the eschaton. A messianic Christian (or messianic Jew) must pray without ceasing, “Thy kingdom come!” The rest of us, perhaps, can just add the Augustinian codicil, “But not yet.”

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The Professor of Apocalypse - Tablet Magazine

Jerry Muller’s The Professor of Apocalypse is scheduled to be released in May. In the meantime, for those interested in the subject, Jacob Taubes’ The Political Theology of Paul can be found online, for free, at the Internet Archive.

¹ And yet the same overly accommodating liberals are also accused today of promoting “cancel culture” and of foisting an illiberal “political correctness” onto the body politic: damned if you or if you don’t. I believe Phil Ochs’ classic satire should be retitled, “Hate Me, I’m a Liberal”.

² This view contradicts that of another iconic anti-liberal, Eric Voegelin, who charged liberals with being modern-day Gnostics seeking to “immanentize the eschaton”.      

³ The phrase “decently and in good order” originates in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Its applicability to the Anglican Church has been widely noted, e.g., Henry Jasma’s observation that “the English Restoration bishops pushed for greater precision over diversity within the dioceses of the Church of England so that all things may be done decently and in good order, at least as they saw it.” 

⁴ If Antichrist is here, Christ can’t be far behind; ergo, unleash the Kraken!

 

I would have gotten here sooner, but I misplaced my trumpet.

 

 

Doomed Again, Naturally

{As today's conservatives see it, there is nothing but trouble right here in River City, by which I mean the hellscape that is twenty-first century America: cities on flame with antifa thugs, Marxist feminists enacting Cultural Revolution, campuses awash with the unwashed tenured progeny of Gramsci and Marcuse, and guillotines in every public square for anyone who dares utter a single incorrect pronoun or a single racial epithet. Hard times, to be sure; but when the going gets tough, conservatives get hysterical.}  

C. Bradley Thompson, writing at Redneck Intellectual, opines:

America’s ‘public’ school system is the most immoral and corrupt institution in the United States today, and it should be abolished as soon as possible. It should be broken up for the same reason that chattel slavery was ended in the 19^th century: although obviously different in purpose and in the magnitude of harm to its victims, public education, like slavery, is a form of involuntary servitude.

At long last, a voice of assent to a proposition I made while still in high school back in 1965! Preach it, Brother Thompson:

It is time for Americans to re-examine—radically and comprehensively—the nature and purpose of their disastrously failing (and immoral) public school system, and to launch a new abolitionist movement, a movement to liberate tens of millions of children and their parents from this form of low-grade bondage.

Mr. Thompson goes on at great length and argues his case in detail; to be honest, though, he had me at “involuntary servitude”. Children should not be chained to desks! Grammatical “errors” and misspellings should not be red-penciled! It is entirely appropriate to work on an essay about John C. Calhoun while in trigonometry class! Poetry should not mean but be!

Insisting that “The Education Deep State wants to be the “second mother” to your children,” Thompson closes on an ominous note: “The government wants to control what your children learn and think. Thus it is and ever was.”

Must I add the obvious? Yes, I must: “We don’t need no education / We don’t need no thought control / No dark sarcasm in the classroom / Teacher, leave them kids alone!”

https://cbradleythompson.substack.com/p/the-new-abolitionism-a-manifesto?s=r

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At American Greatness, Christopher Zeeman reviews Paul Gottfried’s Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade. Both Gottfried and Zeeman are less concerned with self-identified “antifa” warriors; in fact, they agree that Antifa is a vapid and juvenile activity rather than a serious political movement.” The real threat, they believe, comes from America’s intellectual Left which conflates “racism” with “fascism” and makes “anti-racist” synonymous with “anti-white”.

Zeeman: 

Gottfried chronicles the evolution of intellectual antifascism. The post-Marxist Left across the West has gone berserk in response to traditional populist movements. Antifascism and its traveling partners have become the religion of the ruling elites. Resistance to elite policy is therefore seen as a direct personal threat to the agenda of transformation. The spastic lashing out at critics, declaring them fascists or white supremacists, is very personal and, interestingly, very feminine. ¹

Communist antifascism after WWII was physically coercive and direct. Contemporary antifascism is more insidious and indirect, a form of psychological terror, rather than physical coercion. Instead of fearing the secret police, ordinary people now fear using the wrong pronoun. ²

Christopher Zeeman cannot condemn too strongly the chilling effects of “contemporary antifascism”:

Punctuality has been declared white supremacy. Black conservatives are labeled as racists and Jewish intellectuals are often called Nazis. Broadly speaking, fascism has become anything that vexes the antifascist. Even inanimate objects can be fascist now.

Antifascism has no positive agenda. It exists only in reaction to something and as a project to negate that thing—a thing that does not exist in the real world. This is why the managerial state is becoming increasingly paranoid and coercive as it reorganizes around this imaginary threat. The lack of actual fascists is not treated as disconfirmation of the core belief, but rather it is manipulated into new conspiracy theories about the invisible dangers. In other words, the lack of proof is confirmation that they must redouble their efforts to thwart the threat. ³ 

In reading Mr. Zeeman's screed, I am reminded of the saying (which I just made up), "Projection is not just something that happens in movie theaters." 

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https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/26/a-movement-that-must-invent-its-enemies-to-exist/

¹ Zeeman does not explain what is so “very feminine” about "spastic lashing out". Perhaps Gottfried explains it, but one would have to read his book to find out, and one has no intention of doing so.

² America’s right-wing stalwarts are easily frightened, are they not? I use wrong pronouns all the time without trepidation, as well as wrong nouns, inappropriate adjectives, and verbs in the wrong tense. I sometimes use prepositions to end my sentences with. Shamefully, I have also been known (when no one is looking) to dangle participles. My point is that “ordinary people” are not as pronoun-phobic as Zeeman suggests.

³ Of course, “the lack of actual fascists” could also be taken as proof that antifascist efforts are working and should be continued. As the garlic salesman said, “You don’t see any vampires around me, do you?”

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Lastly, I am finally getting around to reading Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. I find it curious that Deneen professes to explain the “why” of a phenomenon (failed liberalism) the reality of which he makes no effort to prove. Instead, we get sweeping assertions along the lines of this:

The underpinnings of our inherited civilized order—norms learned in families, in communities, through religion and a supporting culture—inevitably erode under the influence of the liberal social and political state. Liberalism relentlessly replaces traditional cultural norms and practices with statist Band-Aids, even as a growing crisis of legitimacy forces its proponents to impose liberal ideology upon an increasingly recalcitrant populace.

Roll over, Richard Weaver, and tell James Burnham the news! Deneen's indictment of Liberalism is boilerplate that could have been lifted from any of the conservative icons of the Fifties: Weaver, Burnham, Russell Kirk, and (as they used to say at Mad magazine) the usual gang of idiots clustered around National Review and Human Events.

Deneen generously grants the good intentions of liberalism’s founders, who, beginning 500 years ago, “conceived humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life. Opportunities for liberty were best afforded by a limited government devoted to securing rights, along with a free-market economic system that gave space for individual initiative and ambition.” Features of liberalism were to include “limited but effective government, an independent judiciary, responsive public officials, and free and fair elections.”

Alas, according to Deneen, we have instead suffered “decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance,” as a result of which, “Nearly every one of the promises made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered.” Even worse, “The vehicles of our liberation have become iron cages of our captivity.” ¹ No wonder, then, that “Citizens of advanced liberal democracies are in near revolt against their own governments.” ²

Deneen strengthens his case by hitching the cart of liberalism to the horse of capitalism (or vice-versa?), thus making John Stuart Mill responsible for Adam Smith’s creepy “Invisible Hand”: “Liberalism surreptitiously remakes the world in its image. It is more insidious than its crueler competing ideologies; it pretends to neutrality, claiming no preference and denying any intention of shaping the souls under its rule. It ingratiates by invitation to the easy liberties, diversions, and attractions of freedom, pleasure, and wealth. It makes itself invisible, much as a computer’s operating system goes unnoticed—until it crashes. Liberalism has become more visible because its deformations have become too obvious to ignore.” We are, says Deneen, “increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.”

Patrick Deneen has a good deal more to say; Lord willing and my computer stops crashing, I will revisit Why Liberalism Failed in the very near future.

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¹ I believe a nod and a tip of the hat to Max Weber (“iron cage”) are in order.

² Written years before January 6, 2021, when a handful of tourists got out of line in the Capitol.

Books Report

{Really—more books? As my friend Pascal asked me the other day, “Do you even read these books, or do you just check out the cover blurbs and pretend you’ve read them?” I did not dignify the question with a reply. My approach to reading books is the same as my approach to eating a meal: I take what I need, and I leave the rest.}

Stephen Holmes’ The Anatomy of Antiliberalism appeared in 1993, a year or two before the Gingrich “revolution” was launched and just as Bill Clinton began steering the Democratic Party away from the liberal course it had taken for most of the 20^th century. Having abandoned the working class in favor of neoliberal economics and having ditched healthcare reform before it could get off the ground, the Clintons proceeded to enact punitive “welfare reform” and “prison reform”; they barely put up a fight against Gingrich’s right-wing agenda, but they scored a TKO over Sister Souljah. Under the circumstances, the timing of Holmes’ book was serendipitous—or would have been, had anyone in power been paying attention. Holmes tracked anti-liberalism’s philosophical origins to the Counter-Enlightenment and the reaction against the French Revolution; his narrative began with Joseph de Maistre, a Catholic philosopher who praised the purgative powers of war and who asserted that the single most important man in any polity was the executioner. Holmes then examined the works of Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Alasdair Macintyre, modern anti-liberals all, before bringing Christopher Lasch, a heterodox liberal (and one of my favorites), into the conversation.

The point Holmes wanted to establish was that “the disparagement of liberalism” had a long history; it was not “a passing fashion of the late twentieth century.” Twenty-five years later, with liberals still being routinely reviled as Marxists, fascists, and anarchists, Holmes’ point continues to be relevant. The Anatomy of Antiliberalism sought to discover what it is about liberalism that has been so vexing to so many and that has produced such fierce opposition, even from some who could by no means be counted in the “Conservative” camp. Liberalism—which, to be sure, can be smug, condescending, and self-righteous—just seems to get under people’s skin.

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When you’re done with that, you might consider Ted McAllister’s 1997 Revolt Against Modernity, which goes into detail about Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Postliberal Order. McAllister offers a right-side view of the same ideological struggles chronicled by Stephen Holmes. I will not go into detail about the book here, because I plan to devote several posts to it shortly; but I will say it is readable, rewarding, and a reminder that conservatism has an intellectual pedigree, even though no one on today’s Right (except possibly Patrick Deneen, but I’m no longer sure about that) seems the least bit interested in it.

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In my abundant free time, I have been brushing up once again on St. Paul (the apostle, not the city), with books like Satanward, by James Kallas; Paul and His Recent Interpreters, by N.T. Wright; and The Epistle to the Galatians, by Ronald Fung. Paul fascinates me; more accurately, Paulinism fascinates me. How is it that this possibly head-injured and seizure-prone man has been (and still is) taken seriously by so many despite having been demonstrably wrong about his main predictions and despite his belief in a multi-tiered cosmos populated by demonic “powers and principalities” who sometimes (he said) disguised themselves as angels of light? Christianity has had almost two thousand years to scrape this ancient barnacle from its theological hull, but there it remains.   

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I am always reading something about Russia; I am presently (and slowly) working my way through Robert Payne’s The Life and Death of Lenin, in which Payne endorses the thesis that Stalin had Lenin poisoned to hasten his demise. I have also been taking a second look at Walter Schubart’s Russia and the West, about which I blogged extensively a couple of years ago; if I find anything in it that explains Putin’s determination to annex Ukraine, I will let you know.  

Sleight-of-Hand Conservatism?

{"Common-good conservatism" is all the rage. Will it do any better than "compassionate conservatism"? Only time will tell. In the meantime, it provides an opportunity for bickering on the Right, which is always entertaining.} 

In "Conservative Hospice Care," Patrick Deneen, a prominent conservative academic and co-founder of The Postliberal Order (www.postliberalorder.substack.com), takes to task other conservative thought-leaders whom he accuses of functioning as unwitting enablers for a moribund liberalism. What Deneen calls “Conservatism Inc.” is, in his estimate, “a stunning sleight of hand,” an ideological bait-and-switch designed to prevent real debate about the fundamentals of the modern liberal order.

The situation, needless to say, is dire:

We live in a diseased body politic whose traditionalist diagnosticians have been carefully selected from a designated pool of potential “influencers.” They have been identified and promoted not only for their ability to analyze the baleful symptoms of our underlying disease, but for their corresponding inability or unwillingness to identify the underlying cause. Indeed, their real value lies in their willingness to regard the source of our obvious ailments as a condition of health. Most of these diagnosticians don’t realize that this is their job: to continue to attract the loyalty, tractability, and revenue from sick if curable patients who can never be given the right medicine. But the fact they play their roles unwittingly does not discount the possibility that, behind them, there are master puppeteers who are ultimately responsible for the selection and promotion of these diagnosticians, ones who are incapable of offering a cure - who instead are engaged in long term hospice care of a terminal patient - America.

Deneen accuses the overlords at Conservatism Inc. of manufacturing distractions that keep us from noticing the ongoing pillaging and plundering of our society:   

While progressives accelerate the various pathologies of liberalism, conservatives act as the concerned diagnosticians who dispense “cures” that ensure the ongoing decay of the body politic. Their real job is to channel dissatisfactions, foment an acceptable level of discontent, offer palliatives that relieve some of the symptoms, all while leaving intact the underlying disease. Their positions have been established and maintained by corporations and various institutions of the regime, and in their roles they act as the front-line soldiers in the transfer of national wealth from the average and middle to the wealthy and coastal elite.

These “doctors” believe that they are acting as physicians. They have studied the diseases from approved professors;¹ they have learned about the various medicines they sincerely believe are designed to help; and they believe that the recovery of their patient is on the verge of happening - just one more election, one more Supreme Court Justice, one more war in the Middle East. Almost to a person, they are wholly unaware of the role that they play in the maintenance of a system designed to fail. 

What we have here, Deneen informs us, is a systemic issue, one we might characterize as an all-encompassing liberal hegemony:

The internalization of relativistic, individualistic market ideology, and the externalization of a borderless and universalist market system was, in fact, the fondest dream of leftist and “progressive” thinkers from the outset of the Enlightenment. Conservatism Inc. was a stunning sleight of hand, shrouding this revolutionary ideology in the trappings of “tradition.” The people who get selected, promoted, and rewarded within this system are chosen for a reason. They are footsoldiers, not generals, and their purpose is to keep the debate within the approved limits - never permitting any questioning of the liberal order, defining as out of bounds (either too radical, or totally irrelevant) anyone who challenges the wealth-concentrating paradigm. As long as the debate takes place within the confines established by the generals, the war is being won. The generals’ main aim is to distract us from their larger purpose, and hence, their existence.

Deneen exposes and denounces the false consciousness of today’s so-called “conservatives,” who are little more than dupes and useful idiots for the liberal establishment:    

Our sickness is today advanced by one establishment that pretends to offer us a choice. One - “progressives” - explicitly seeks to accelerate our underlying condition, offering ever-more radical forms of internalized and externalized liberalism. The other - “right liberalism” - claims to oppose these efforts, brazenly assuming the label conservative, all the while insisting that our symptoms are separable from the underlying disease. Pay attention especially to the efforts by the latter to undermine and attack those who expose the sham. They have a lot at stake. The transfer hasn’t been completed yet.

Herbert Marcuse could not have said it better. Patrick Deneen’s scathing critique of Conservatism, Inc. calls to mind neo-Marxist critiques of mainstream liberalism, just as the “common-good conservatism” which Deneen and his colleagues espouse at The Postliberal Order resembles nothing so much as Marcuse’s program of “repressive tolerance”. For Deneen as for Marcuse, the political order must be policed against subversive elements; some ideas are simply too dangerous to be tolerated; and socio-political Authority must establish and enforce norms of civic virtue and cultural orthodoxy. Since Deneen's project (like Marcuse's) is for our own good, there is no reason to worry about its implications.

Say hello, then, to the new boss; he looks an awful lot like the old boss.     

___________________

Conservative Hospice Care - The Postliberal Order (substack.com)

Patrick Deneen (author) - Wikipedia

¹ Bob Dylan: “You’ve been with the professors / and they’ve all liked your looks. / With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks. / You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books; / you’re very well read, it’s well known.” 

 

Waiting for the Superbugs

{First it's a pandemic, then it's murder hornets, now it's superbugs; if it's not one thing, it's another. It's always something, is all I'm saying.}

At The Hedgehog Review, Andrew Lynn suggests that current critiques of Liberalism too often miss the point: the problems and “blind spots” associated with modern Liberalism stem from its “opaque understanding of the social order”. Liberals, Lynn writes, “sideline the role of enculturation and customs, instead championing independent reasoning as the source for crucial moral knowledge. This metaphysic of individualism,” he adds, “then gets mistaken as an actual account of how human societies work.”

The “postliberal” account, coming from both the Right and the Left, is that, wanting to set mankind free from its chains, Liberalism unwittingly severed the ties that bind, liberating “individuals fully from surrounding social contexts, authorities, and encroachments on autonomous will.” Lynn cites numerous postliberal critics who insist that “Our social pathologies are a consequence of this Faustian emancipation: social isolation, polarization, economic inequality, consumerism, moral relativism, and many others.” For such critics, evidence of Liberalism’s failure includes “the ‘deaths of despair’ in communities forsaken by postindustrial capitalism, the rise of loneliness in the wake of shrinking household size, the ubiquity of activist CEOs and corporations, the failures of cosmopolitan elites, and the need for policies that protect working-class families.”

All well and good, says Lynn; but where the critics go wrong is in believing that Liberalism achieved its goal and that the fully emancipated individual now exists. Haunted by this figment of the Liberal imagination, fearing anarchy and chaos, and seeing moral relativism and nihilism around every corner, postliberal thinkers incline as a result towards Populist authoritarianism (Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin). With social institutions everywhere in decay or reduced to a state of impotence, only the power of the State can restrain the centrifugal force of individualism. These critics fail to realize, says Lynn, that “The individual purportedly stripped bare of all cultural entrapments by liberalism, now standing naked before the state with only his or her individual rights, is nothing but a fictitious character invented by political theorists enticed by natural philosophy. Indeed, anyone alert to twenty-first-century life could hardly accept the idea that the individual stands naked before the state. Even if more traditional social hierarchies like the family or the church have become attenuated, new forms of power—such as social codes, labor relations, and financial credit—shape the way that people live and work in contemporary society.”

“No individual,” Lynn insists, “achieves independence” from social factors; those factors change, evolve, and assume new forms, but they are always present. The very things that make us human—our “mode of relating to one another, maintaining peace, [and] caring for one another”–involve socialization and enculturation. The corrective to the corrosive effects of Liberalism is not brute force or a retreat to tribalism, but a patient, careful attention to the social fabric, repairing what needs to be repaired and making it strong enough to hold us all.  

Where the Critics of Liberalism Go Wrong | THR Web Features | Web Features | The Hedgehog Review

At Law and Liberty, Daniel Mahoney recommends Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel trilogy, a series of novelizations of the 1917 Russian revolutions. Mahoney praises Solzhenitsyn effusively:

Rarely is such a long work as The Red Wheel so riveting, so exciting. If The Gulag Archipelago remains the book of Solzhenitsyn’s that means the most to me, that speaks with depth and light to my heart and soul, The Red Wheel, on each reading and rereading, grows greatly in my esteem. February, even more than October, conveys the crisis of authority that is coextensive with a certain decayed liberalism common to radical or late modernity in all its forms throughout the world.

In addition, Solzhenitsyn’s art in this work conveys deep truths, and opportunities lost, in a way that academic history, increasingly torn between ideology, abstruse methodology, and soulless reductionism can rarely if ever do. Art, dramatized history, wisdom about statecraft and the art of politics, and a deep, passionate but measured patriotism find elevated expression in the literary art of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Whatever one thinks of his politics, Solzhenitsyn is to be admired for his literary accomplishments, his courage, and his honesty. Unfortunately, Mahoney cannot resist taking a potshot at his own ideological and political foes, none of whom had anything to do with the Russian revolutions of 1917:

The American reader probably cannot imagine Red October, or its equivalent, in our immediate future. But essential aspects of the February Revolution—contempt for all authority and hierarchy, disdain for the past and a desire to repudiate it or negate it altogether, demands to abolish the police, intolerance of anything that smacks of conservatism or tradition—are all around us and are the hallmark of what it means to be “progressive” today. 

Decades ago, Solzhenitsyn was adopted as an unofficial spokesperson by the American Right—until his venomous dislike of liberal democracy and the modern West became an embarrassment. That is not excuse, however, for Mahoney’s attempt to enlist for his own cause either Solzhenitsyn’s literary genius or the historical tragedies about which he wrote. 

The Ideologues of March 1917 – (lawliberty.org)

At Scientific American, Avi Loeb asks “Was Our Universe Created in a Laboratory?” Professor Loeb has become something of a controversial figure, due to his interest in UFOs and his openness to the idea that aliens have already visited our planet. Loeb heads up the Galileo Project, under the aegis of which he plans to install a network of small telescopes around the globe in hopes of detecting evidence of non-terrestrial life. As for his “universe in a lab” hypothesis, he considers it worthwhile to consider, if only as a thought experiment and as a reminder that there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophies. The idea should appeal to readers who are fascinated by questions like “Are we living in a computer simulation?” or “Can you prove the existence of other minds?”

Was Our Universe Created in a Laboratory? - Scientific American

Finally, today's big story: at Statnews (“Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine”), Kevin Outterson warns us that the superbugs are coming and we had best get ready for them. The “superbug storm” is a predicted increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the obvious solution to which is new antibiotics (to which bacteria will then adapt, requiring newer antibiotics, etc.).  Insisting that we are engaged in a bacterial arms race, Outterson advocates for a Congressional bill called the PASTEUR Act, which, he says, has already been introduced in Congress with bipartisan support and which would “establish a Netflix-like subscription system under which the federal government would pay a flat fee to drug companies for pre-paid access to highly innovative antibiotics.”

Setting aside the details and logistics of that proposal, as well as the creepiness of "superbugs" and the questionable relevance of Netflix to the issue, I am struck by this statement from Outterson: “The cost of the PASTEUR Act is less than one latte per American each year.” I find that cost/benefit analysis so persuasive that I hereby suggest that all future legislation—as well as the federal budget, the national debt, the cost of military expenditures and entitlement programs, and the rate of inflation—be explained in terms of “lattes per American per year”. Innumerate as we are, we might not be able to comprehend Uncle Sam's spending billions or trillions of dollars at a time; but lattes we can understand.   

In the calm before the superbug storm, the world needs to prepare - STAT (statnews.com)

Books Report

Edmund Fawcett’s Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, traces modern liberalism in four countries—Britain, France, Germany, and America—from 1830 to the present. Apparently fond of the number four, Fawcett identifies four eras of liberalism (1830 to 1880, 1880 to 1945, 1945 to 1990, and 1990 to the present) and four primary ideas around which liberalism revolves (resistance to power; faith in social progress; respect for individuals and their choices; acceptance that social and political conflicts are unavoidable but manageable). He writes sympathetically but not uncritically, acknowledging that liberalism often promises more than it can deliver and that liberals invoke principles they frequently betray in practice. He considers it mistaken to understand liberalism as being primarily about liberty: “Liberals, it is said, believe in liberty. Indeed, they do. But so do most non-liberals. Standing up for liberty does not distinguish liberals or what they believe in. Just about every modern rival to liberalism has claimed to stand somehow on the side of liberty.” Among such rivals, Fawcett lists conservatism, Marxism, socialism, Fascism, and libertarianism. In fact, says Fawcett, “Liberals themselves have disagreed on what political liberty was and why it mattered.”

In Fawcett's reading, Liberalism arose out of a need to make sense of, and to set limits to, the chaos of modernity: “Liberalism began with a predicament. The first liberals were looking for a new order after the productive turmoil of early industrial capitalism and three late eighteenth-century political revolutions—American, Dutch, and French—had turned society and politics upside down. Their principal challenge was that social order would from now on be dynamic, not static. In searching for an acceptable political order in a destabilized world of ceaseless change,” Fawcett continues, “liberals hoped for ethical order without appeal to divine authority, established tradition, or parochial custom. They hoped for social order without legally fixed hierarchies or privileged classes. They hoped for an economic order free of crown or state interference, monopoly privileges, and local obstacles to national markets. They hoped for an international order where trade prevailed over war and treaty prevailed over force. They hoped last for a political order without absolute authorities or undivided powers that all citizens might understand and accept under lawful arrangements honoring and fostering those other hopes.”

Neither anarchists nor nihilists, though often accused of being both, liberals were advocates for ordered liberty within flexible social and political structures. Fawcett’s book is not so much a defense of liberalism or an in-depth exploration of its key ideas; it is a history which traces the fate of liberalism’s myriad hopes. A believer himself in those hopes, Fawcett insists that “Liberals were not sleepwalkers;” naivete was not among their flaws—impatience and arrogance, yes, and sometimes hypocrisy, but not naivete.

[For what it's worth: Fawcett has since written a history of conservatism (Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition) which has been praised for its objectivity.]

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Given recent talk of civil war and secessionism, Richard Kreitner’s Break It Up seems timely, telling a story of Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. Praised by the likes of Rick Perlstein, Eric Foner, and Jedidiah Purdy, Break It Up presents the claim that “Disunion—the possibility that the nation might go to pieces—is a hidden thread through our entire history, from the colonial era to the early republic and the Civil War and beyond, through the fabled American Century and up to our own volatile moment. The history of the Union,” writes Kreitner, has included “ever-present forces that have conspired to divide it.”

In short, “These United States have never really been united. They have always been riven by race and religion, cleaved by class and culture, sundered by section, and fragmented by geography. Our most powerful myth—that the national fusion was competed, that the many ever melded into one—is just that: a myth. Our refusal to recognize this, like patients who insist, against all evidence, that they are not ill, has been a major cause of our political dysfunction and social strife.”

That is not entirely encouraging, but Kreitner insists that proper diagnosis must precede either treatment or cure. “Seeing the Union through the eyes of those who seek and have sought to divide it allows us to understand the United States as the tentative proposition it always was and still is, as an experiment that might fail at any time. Paradoxically,” he notes, “disunion has been of our only truly national ideas.” Moreover, “The creation of the United States was a means to an end, not an end to itself. There has never been anything inevitable about its survival.”

Well, nothing secedes like secession. As the saying goes, “If at first you don’t secede, try, try again.” Kreitner is not advocating such a step, of course; but his contextualizing of it may serve more to encourage than to discourage our current insurrectionists. Still, history is what it is, and we might as well face ours without illusions. Break It Up is both entertaining and informative, urging us to answer the question Daniel Webster posed in the years before the Civil War: “What is this Union worth?”     

Saturday Lecture: To Redeem, Not To Destroy

“Everywhere one could hear the sound of chisel and hammer, and not even darkness could quell the eagerness of those who were having splendid mansions built for themselves. All along the streets you could see wood being polished, marble being cut. Floors were being raised upon floors, as though to create a rampart against death.” (Unnamed medieval source cited by B. Groethuysen, The Bourgeois)

"The bourgeoisie is the carrier of the chromosome of banality." (Jean Baudrillard)

James Matthew Wilson, from “Conservative Critics of the Bourgeoisie” (2013):

The creative destruction of bourgeois capitalism and the secular individualism of bourgeois liberalism have been the primary causes of the disintegration of traditional communities and customs. And to the extent that the radical Left has at times wreaked even greater destruction, the conservative recognizes that the Left constitutes the exasperation and extension of bourgeois notions rather than a sui generis ideology. To the extent that liberalism is a bourgeois philosophy, the conservative will necessarily appear antibourgeois. And yet [that statement] may seem to conceal a nonetheless stubborn fact: the conservative is almost invariably bourgeois himself and bears as a conscious duty the preservation of the institutions and sensibility by means of which he lives in and understands the world.

I am conscious of the risk the conservative must always run of waxing nostalgic for the preindustrial aristocratic society that nurtured and developed the great intellectual and spiritual achievement of Western civilization. The genius of the West was first conceived within the aristocratic polis of Athens; it in some ways developed in the custody of the gentleman, soldier, farmer of ancient Rome; and it flowered with almost unrepeatable brilliance in the growth of the mystical body in medieval Christendom. Cultural historians have made it a truism that the rise of the first middle classes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sowed the seeds of decay of this tradition. By [the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries], the modern bourgeoisie had become sufficiently powerful and conscious of itself that it could be at once the object of ridicule as small-minded, obtuse, and usurious—and the object of ridicule as the locus of nostalgia for an age before its pragmatic, bustling enterprises came to dominate public and private life in the emerging states of Europe and America.

Many of the most significant modern conservative writers and scholars have cast a critical gaze upon the legacy of the West and its ostensible decay at the hands of a rising tide of acquisitive middlemen—butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers (as W. B. Yeats demeaned them), bankers, merchants, and manufacturers (as we know them). The career of most of these figures spans the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth—that period when antibourgeois feeling was so widespread that it produced myriad alternatives to the bourgeois liberal order, including the formulation of modern Catholic social doctrine, on the one hand, and the ideologies of communism and National Socialism on the other. It would be remarkable were one to read with admiration and awe the work of so many great thinkers and not inherit their distaste for the advent of bourgeois society.

Still, the most severe critics of bourgeois culture have been, with certain major exceptions, members of the bourgeoisie. The most perceptive critics of the American middle class have been, like Russell Kirk, its own members. In some instances, this criticism has amounted to a kind of self-hatred, a death wish, but by and large such critics have faulted the modern middle class for harboring suicidal tendencies of its own. To attack bourgeois liberalism has been, then, part of an effort to save the West not only from decay but from suicide. Presumably, then, it has been a project undertaken out of charity rather than contempt.

For example, Jacques Maritain insisted that the bourgeoisie was decadent not because it was sensible and restrained but because it leveled the ancient edifices of the sacred and the traditional to subject all things to acquisitive appetite and worldly power. For Maritain this moral materialism demanded secularism—endless acquisition and endless progress; and so a return of the monarchy, and with it an aristocratic society, seemed but one possible element in his larger quest to reconvert France to its ancient faith. His 1925 book, Three Reformers, was a work of destructive intellectual history, dissecting the thought of Martin Luther, René Déscartes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the sources of modern egoism, rationalism, and emotionalism. With a curious irony, Rousseau had originated the philosophical critique of the bourgeois order as lukewarm, oppressive, and disenchanting, favoring instead the noble savage born free of the civilization of professions and counting houses. But Maritain had transformed that critique: it was not civilization he opposed, only the secular bourgeoisie that had sought to destroy the church as an obstacle to greed and thoughtlessness.

With the rise of the totalitarian ideologies in the 1930s, Maritain became the first and most influential theorist of Christian democracy. His Integral Humanism (1936) maintained his critique of secular liberalism and of the Left more generally, observing, “Atheist communism is only bourgeois deism turned the other way round.” But he also sought to affirm the bourgeois morality that made modern democracy tenable, calling for a new sanctity or asceticism that would leaven rather than lighten bourgeois self-discipline. Liberal individualism was destructive, he argued, but it contained a potent seed of truth regarding the dignity of the human person. Maritain began to advocate Christian personalism, which held that it was “essential to the temporal common good to respect and serve the supratemporal ends of the human person.” An adaptation of certain corporate theories of the economy and state found in Italian fascism and the craving for justice for the poor supposedly inspiring communism could serve as means of reforming the laissez-faire liberal state so that it would be a place hospitable to the supernatural destiny of every human being. From the beginning, Maritain’s mission was to redeem rather than to destroy the bourgeois order.

conservative_critics_of_the_bourgeoisie_in_ma.pdf (jamesmatthewwilson.com)

Bonus Track: Bourgeois Baby - YouTube

I Can See Real Clearly Now

{The title of today's post is a clever reference to the fact that I have once again mined RealClearPolitics and RealClearPolicy for items of interest.}

You can add Ryszard Legutko to the list of Eastern European intellectuals in vogue on the American Right, a list which already includes Zygmunt Bauman, Leszek Kolakowski, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, among others. The allure of such thinkers is that they have lived under Communist totalitarianism, therefore, their insights about freedom and their warnings about the slippery slopes of liberalism must be taken seriously.

At American Greatness, Emina Melonic reviews Legutko’s The Cunning of Reason: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols. She finds it invigorating, albeit imperfect. Ms. Melonic praises Legutko for teaching us that “Freedom does not exist in a collectivist society, and the only way that it can exist is if we reject collectivism and affirm the idea of community.” If that distinction—between “collectivism” and “community”—proves problematic, we can simply use the Russian term sobornost’ and nod our heads wisely.

Melonic approvingly notes, “Legutko points out that liberalism has enacted tyranny as opposed to freedom.” How so? In part, at least, by advocating for so-called “rights” that in fact impose liberalism’s decadent values on the society. “As Legutko points out: ‘The most notorious examples of the liberties gained in Western societies in recent decades [are] the public use of vulgar language, public media’s public broadcasting of explicit sex and violence, euthanasia, same-sex marriage and the right for homosexuals to adopt children, [and] almost unlimited rights to abortion.’”

That seems a fair assessment of liberalism’s recent “accomplishments”. Legutko could have added other examples of liberalism’s tyranny: e.g., biological men are allowed to pose as “women,” to use women’s bathrooms, and to compete in women’s sports; marijuana has been effectively legalized; all white people are suspect; academia is in thrall to Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory; and Big Tech has dropped its mask and has revealed itself to be Big Brother.

Ms. Melonic concludes, “Ryszard Legutko succeeds in dismantling current ideologies that seek to destroy the order of things. He thoughtfully and elegantly provides a critique of our own society through a prism that is both philosophical and historical and is genuinely calling on the reader to consider both the possibilities and limits of freedom.” 

Does the experience of living under totalitarianism qualify Legutko et al to critique liberalism, or does it predispose them to see tyranny lurking everywhere? That, I suggest, would make for an interesting essay.   

Free and Captive Minds › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

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At RealClearPolitics, Charles Lipson offers a modest suggestion of his own: we should eliminate “women’s sports” and let men and women compete against each other on equal terms, because “separate but equal” arrangements are inherently unjust. Lipson’s real purpose, of course, is to belittle the idea of allowing trans women to compete against cis women: “Put simply, if there are good reasons for holding separate competitions at all, then transgender women should not compete against other women.”

The issue seems very important to Charles Lipson, who probably was up in arms decades ago when the trans woman Rene Richards dominated women’s tennis. ¹ Or perhaps he was traumatized by Billie Jean King's thrashing of tennis legend and "male chauvinist pig" Bobby Riggs. I await Lipson's polemic against the use of "weight classes" in boxing and wrestling, handicaps in bowling and golf, and other attempts to even competitive playing fields. 

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¹ Rene Richards did not dominate women’s tennis, even though conservatives at the time insisted she would.

A Gold Medal Question: Should Women's Sports Even Exist? | RealClearPolitics

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Finally, at Persuasion, Zaid Jilani sees signs that the woke tyrants may be on their way out the door and that Cancel Culture may be coming to an end. “Young Americans may return us to a culture of compassion and forgiveness,” Jilani writes; such a “return” would be quite a trick, given that no such culture ever existed in America (or, likely, anywhere else).

Jilani, mind you, is writing about the same America that has the flimsiest social safety net of any advanced nation, that has more people in prison and keeps them there longer, that has retained the death penalty, and that spends more on its military than its major rivals combined; where, in all that, does Jilani find any hint of “compassion and forgiveness”? We do not pledge allegiance to a flag representing "compassion and forgiveness for all," and any suggestion we do so would be defeated overwhelmingly if put to a national plebiscite.

Regardless, Jilani thinks that Cancel Culture is the modern-day equivalent of the Salem witch trials (also an outstanding example of traditional American compassion and forgiveness), and he welcomes its demise. According to him, “Hypersensitivity may simply be a fad that is starting to burn itself out. Moral panics about such pressing topics as Halloween costumes may have consumed students at America’s most elite campuses during the mid-2010s, but no social or political trend lasts forever.”  Ah yes, the great “Halloween costumes moral panic” of the mid-2010s: it definitely happened, and it was all-consuming! I believe Halloween was cancelled on campuses for several years because of the all-consuming panic.

Jilani continues:

Gen Z, on the other hand, has grown up immersed in the internet and social media. To them, the barrier between what’s personal and what’s public is fluid, and many Americans of this age don’t find it particularly unusual to broadcast everyday life and thoughts to the entire world. A puritanical mindset that seeks to persecute people over the expression of their beliefs is hard to reconcile with a world where so much of what was once private is now public. The teens in this generation have also had to deal with the ever-present reality of their peers being dogpiled for their social media posts. Gen Z has first-hand knowledge of this Panopticon-like environment and how suffocating it can be.

As has always been the case, one’s attitude about all this depends, as they say, on whose ox is being gored; or, in this instance, on whose culture is being canceled. The entire “cancel culture” brouhaha has been cooked up by people who would go to court in a heartbeat to defend the right of private religious schools to fire teachers for “getting” pregnant (but not for “getting someone else” pregnant), for cohabitation, for being gay or lesbian, or for any number of moral “offenses”. They want professional athletes fired for kneeling during the national anthem. They are kindred spirits to the people who mercilessly hounded left-wing professors and screenwriters in the Fifties, prompting Arthur Miller to write The Crucible in response to the prevailing McCarthyite "cancel culture"; and I, for one, have not the slightest sympathy for them.

The End of "Cancel Culture"? - by Zaid Jilani - Persuasion