With surprising candor, Heather MacDonald (at The New Criterion) gets to the heart of our current politics: The White House has characterized many of its current efforts as eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. That is partly true but also misleading. Something more profound is going on. Even if government employees and nonprofit recipients of federal aid operated with maximum efficiency, many would still have to go. It is their worldview that is the problem, not their management.
Trump 2.0, following the blueprint of Project 2025, has embarked on an ideological purge—not just in the federal government, but in our schools, universities, media, and more. MAGA’s goal is to abolish what it sees as preferential treatment in our society; DEI policies, MAGA claims, have given all the plum positions, all the power, and all the money to racial minorities and to women, but that stops now.
Heather MacDonald could not be happier:
The scandal of the present moment is that someone with outsize visibility has said: No more. The race hustle is over; the gender hustle is over. The denigration of traditional values and American history is over. The demonization of law enforcement: over. Being black or female will no longer be treated as an accomplishment. The only thing that matters in employment is excellence. And to realize that principle, the White House on April 23 banned the greatest enemy of meritocracy: disparate-impact analysis.
Based on the career trajectories of the likes of Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, et al, meritocracy in MAGA world is apparently defined as “staunch opposition to DEI programs and unwavering loyalty to Donald Trump”. There may also be a system of "merit points" for working at and/or appearing on Fox News.
You can read about the long and controversial history of “disparate impact” here: Disparate impact - Wikipedia Or you can simply recall the scathing comment of French author Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread,” or William Blake’s “One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.”
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“The clash within civilizations,” by Heather Mac Donald
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“If Christianity is to reassert itself in the West,” says Daniel Whyte IV, “there must be symmetry between clear doctrine and the holy haze of mystery.” Whyte thinks that a new paganism might be just what Christianity needs. “The rise of contemporary paganism,” he writes, “is a cry for connection to something more than what’s offered by both wonder-starved religion and an increasingly naturalistic, machine world that reduces humans to augments of technology. The modern world yearns to be reminded that the supernatural invades the natural all the time, and the natural is the aesthetic of the supernatural. Buried beneath our current pagan ponderings is an impulse to see these elements reconnected.”
Quoting sources such as G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and Ross Douthat, Whyte lays out a defense of the pagan impulse, if not of paganism per se. Essentially, the new paganism is a reaction to what Max Weber famously called the “disenchantment” of the world which accompanied the modern scientific, technological, and industrial revolutions. Re-enchantment is the goal of the new pagans, including a restoration of “the sense of awe, wonder and magic.”
Whyte sees contemporary Christianity’s chalice as being half full rather than half empty. Paganism, he says, need not be a threat to Christian faith. He emphasizes paganism’s imprint on early Christianity, citing French philosopher Chantal Delsol’s view that “the Christianity we know today would not be what it is without paganism.” Moreover, Whyte believes that an exhausted Christianity needs an infusion of spirit that paganism might well provide:
The rebirth of paganism has been feared ever since Christianity gained normative status in the Roman Empire in 313 AD and state church status a few decades later. But paganism’s rise today might not be pushing us into a permanently post-Christian age. My argument is that it’s pointing us backwards, at least aesthetically, to a pre-Christian era and providing an opportunity for recovery of elements that have fallen to the wayside in Western Christian culture. For an imperiled Church, this might not be so bad as it seems.
Daniel Whyte deserves credit for not joining the ranks of Christian catastrophists whose despair over the state of the Church indicates, among other things, a lack of faith in the Spirit which is said to protect it. If Christians believe that the gates of hell cannot prevail against the Church, I seriously doubt they need to worry about New Age spirituality, “TikTok witches,” or other signs of a pagan revival.
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