Month: September 2025

‘Each Other’ and ‘One Another’

“Style is the physiognomy of the mind.” (Arthur Schopenhauer) Depending on your style of mind, you will find the following either tedious and pedantic or a pleasurable exercise in precise analysis and careful thinking.

Ought the title phrases be used interchangeably by good writers, or is there some distinction we need to observe? Compare ‘less’ and ‘fewer.’ Good writers know that ‘less’ is used with mass nouns such as ‘food,’ ‘furniture,’ and ‘snow’ whereas ‘fewer’ is employed with such count nouns as ‘meals,’ ‘tables,’ and ‘snow plows.’ Correct: ‘If you eat less, you consume fewer calories.’ Incorrect: ‘If you eat less, you consume less calories.’ The second sentence should grate against your linguistic sensibilities.

No doubt there are schoolmarm strictures that good writers may violate with impunity. ‘Never split an infinitive’ and ‘Never begin a sentence with a conjunction’ are two examples. But I deny that the fewer-less distinction is in the same grammatical boat: it reflects prima facie logical and ontological distinctions that need to be acknowledged. They are distinctions of the Manifest Image, to borrow a term from Wilfrid Sellars, distinctions that are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Whether these distinctions can survive deeper logical and ontological analysis is a further question.

Bill and Ron are chess players who play each other on Sunday afternoons. But we could just as well say that they play one another on Sunday afternoons. For if each plays the other, then each plays another. And if each one plays another, then each one plays the other given that there are only two players. Now suppose Bill and Ron start a chess club with more than two members. When the members meet they play one another, not each other. Why? Suppose there are four members. Each one plays one of the others; it is not the case that each one plays the other – for the simple reason that there are three others. Since each one plays one of the three others, each one plays another.

The Sage of the Superstitions therefore lays down the following rule. ‘Each other’ and ‘one another’ are stylistic variants of each other, and are to that extent intersubstitutable salva significatione in contexts in which two things stand in some sort of reciprocal relation. In contexts in which more than two things stand in some sort of reciprocal relation, however, ‘one another’ is correct and ‘each other’ incorrect.

How did I arrive at this? Well, I gave an argument that appeals to your reason. I did not invoke any authority – that would be unphilosophical. Nor does actual usage cut any ice with me. Since grammar has a normative component, it cannot merely describe actual usage. For if boneheads prevail, usage degenerates. Describing the details of degeneration may well be a worthwhile socio-linguistic exercise, but conservatives, here as elsewhere, want to impede degeneration rather than merely record it. Grammar must be based in logic, logic in ontology, ontology in what, onto-theology? That is one philosophical project.

Hypatia and Her Lover

An excerpt from the journal of Basile Yanovsky, M.D. reprinted in Michael Rubin, Men Without Masks: Writings from the Journals of Modern Men (Addison-Wesley, 1980), p. 206:

A woman philosopher and religious teacher of the fourth century, Hypatia of Alexandria, had a striking discussion with her lover. To discourage his earthly temptations, she addressed him, at the most passionate moment of their relations, in the following manner: “See what it is you adore, Archytas, this foul matter, this corruption, with its secretions, its excrements and its infections. . . .”

But the tenacious and passionate Archytas gave her this answer: “It is not matter I love, but form.”

How many times, discouraged and depressed in the V. D. clinic, have I repeated these saintly words of Archytas. . . .

In the New York Review of Books, in Veni, Vici, V. D., W. H. Auden reviews Dr. Yanovsky’s The Dark Fields of Venus: From a Doctor’s Logbook.

Bourgeois Anti-Heroism

What follows are excerpts from an article by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit published in the New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIX, Number 1 (2002). They strike me as having more than a little contemporary relevance.  Emphasis added.

Enemies of the West usually aspire to be heroes. As Mussolini exhorted his new Romans: “Never cease to be daring!” Islamism, Nazism, fascism, communism are all heroic creeds. Mao’s ideal of permanent revolution was a blueprint for continually stirring things up, for a society invigorated by constant heroic violence. The common enemy of revolutionary heroes is the settled bourgeois, the city dweller, the petty clerk, the plump stockbroker, going about his business, the kind of person, in short, who might have been working in an office in the World Trade Center. It is a peculiar trait of the bourgeoisie, perhaps the most successful class in history, at least so far, according to Karl Marx, to be hated so intensely by some of its most formidable sons and daughters, including Marx himself. Lack of heroism in the bourgeois ethos, of committing great deeds, has a great deal to do with this peculiarity. The hero courts death. The bourgeois is addicted to personal safety. The hero counts death tolls, the bourgeois counts money. Bin Laden was asked by his interviewer in 1998 whether he ever feared betrayal from within his own entourage. He replied: “These men left worldly affairs, and came here for jihad.”

Intellectuals, themselves only rarely heroic, have often displayed a hatred of the bourgeois and an infatuation with heroism–heroic leaders, heroic creeds. Artists in Mussolini’s Italy celebrated speed, youth, energy, instinct, and death-defying derring-do. German social scientists before World War II were fascinated with the juxtaposition of the hero and the bourgeois: Werner Sombart’s Merchants and Heroes and Bogislav von Selchow’s The Civil and the Heroic Man are but two examples of the genre. Von Selchow was one, among many others, by no means all German, who argued that bourgeois liberal society had become cold, fragmented, decadent, mediocre, lifeless. The bourgeois, he wrote, is forever hiding himself in a life without peril. The bourgeois, he said, is anxious to eliminate “fighting against Life, as he lacks the strength necessary to master it in its very nakedness and hardness in a manly fashion.”

To the likes of von Selchow or Ernst Jünger, World War I showed a different, more heroic side of man. That is why the Battle of Langemarck, a particularly horrific episode in 1914, in which Jünger himself took part, became such a subject for hero worship. Some 145,000 men died in a sequence of utterly futile attacks. But the young heroes, many of them from elite universities like the Japanese kamikaze pilots thirty years later, were supposed to have rushed to their early graves singing the Deutschlandlied. The famous words of Theodor Körner, written a century before, were often evoked in remembrance: “Happiness lies only in sacrificial death.” In the first week of the current war in Afghanistan, a young Afghan warrior was quoted in a British newspaper. “The Americans,” he said, “love Pepsi Cola, but we love death.” The sentiments of the Langemarck cult exactly.

Even those who sympathize with the democratic West, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, have pointed out the lack of grandeur, the intellectual conformity, and the cultural mediocrity that are supposed to be inherent in our systems of government. Democracy, Tocqueville warned, could easily become the tyrrany of the majority. He wrote that there were no great writers in America, or indeed anything that might be described as great. It is a common but somewhat questionable complaint. For it is not at all clear that art and culture in New York is any more mediocre that it is in Damascus or Bejing.

Much in our affluent, market-driven societies is indeed mediocre, and there is nothing admirable about luxury per se, but when contempt for the bourgeois creature comforts becomes contempt for life you know the West is under attack. The contempt can come from many sources, but it appeals to those who feel impotent, marginalized, excluded, or denigrated: the intellectual who feels unrecognized, the talentless art student in a city filled with brilliance, the time-serving everyman who disappears into any crowd, the young man from a third-world country who feels mocked by the indifference of a superior West; the list of possible recruits to a cult of death is potentially endless.

Liberalism, wrote an early Nazi theorist, A. Moeller v.d. Bruck, is the “liberty for everybody to be a mediocre man.” The way out of mediocrity, say the sirens of the death cult, is to submerge one’s petty ego into a mass movement, whose awesome energies will be unleashed to create greatness in the name of the Führer, the Emperor, God, or Allah. The Leader personifies all one’s yearnings for grandeur. What is the mere life of one, two or a thousand men, if higher things are at stake? This is a license for great violence against others: Jews, infidels, bourgeois liberals, Sikhs, Muslims, or whoever must be purged to make way for a greater, grander world.

… Self-sacrifice is the highest honor in the war against the West. It is the absolute opposite of the bourgeois fear for his life. And youth is the most capable of sacrificial acts. Most kamikazes were barely out of high school. As bin Laden has said, “The sector between fifteen and twenty-five is the one with ability for jihad and sacrifice.”

… There is no clash of civilizations. Most religions, especially monotheistic ones, have the capacity to harbor the anti-Western poison. And varieties of secular fascism can occur in all cultures. The current conflict, therefore, is not between East and West, Anglo-America and the rest, or Judeo-Christianity and Islam. The death cult is a deadly virus which now strives, for all manner of historical and political reasons, in extreme forms of Islam.

… Al-Qaeda is making a serious bid to stage an Islamist revolution that would bring down governments from Indonesia to Tunisia… The West, and not just the geographical West, should counter this intelligently with the full force of calculating bourgeois anti-heroism. Accountants mulling over shady bank accounts and undercover agents bribing their way will be more useful in the long-term struggle than special macho units blasting their way into the caves of Afghanistan.

Face it, Kamala: You’re Finished

Here she is in all her cluelessness:

In her new campaign memoir, Kamala Harris wrote that Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary and mayor of South Bend, Indiana, “would have been an ideal [running mate] — if I were a straight white man”. But, Harris wrote, “We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”

I hate to be so harsh, Kamala dear, but the problem with you is that you are a silly goose, a hopeless clown, a know-nothing, an airhead, and a slanderer with no understanding of your political opponents. That is why you were sent packing. When you were asked why, in your capacity as “Border Czar,” you never visited the southern border, you replied that you had never been to Europe either.  Your refusal to answer a serious question with a serious answer shows you are a contemptible joke, unfit to be anywhere near the levers of power.

You either know nothing about conservatives or you are unwilling to speak the truth about us. We have no objection to a female president of any race.  What we object to are the destructive policies of leftists like you.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: September Songs

But first the absolute best version of Dylan’s From a Buick Six just to get your blood up. But now that Gary U. S. Bond is in the house, here is Twist, Twist, Senora with a trio of 1940s dancing girls. New Orleans, live, with Jeff Beck.

…………………..

September ends.  A transitional month leading from hot August to glorious October, Kerouac month in the MavPhil secular ‘liturgy.’

Dinah Washington, September in the Rain

Rod Stewart, Maggie May. “Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you/It’s late September and I really should be back at school.”

Carole King, It Might as Well Rain Until September

George Shearing, September in the Rain

Walter Huston, September Song 

This from a London reader:

Thanks for linking to the George Shearing ‘September’. I had forgotten he grew up in London (in Battersea, just down the road from me). I love the Bird-like flights on the piano. Indeed I think he wrote ‘Lullaby of Birdland’. Another Londoner is Helen Shapiro who does a great version of ‘It might as well rain until September.’ Great alto voice, never made it in the US as far as I know. 

I was first hipped to Shearing by Kerouac who referred to him in On the Road.  I too love the ‘Bird’-like flights on the piano. The allusion is to Charley ‘Bird’ Parker, also beloved of Kerouac.  Helen Shapiro is new to me, thanks. She does a great job with the Carole King composition.  Believe it or not, King’s version is a demo. That’s one hell of a demo. A YouTuber points out that Shapiro was not part of the 1964 ‘British Invasion.’  I wonder why.

UPDATE 

Jim Soriano recommends Try to Remember — which I had forgotten.

Mark Anderson introduces me to Big Star, September Gurls. Nice clangy, jangling guitar work reminiscent of the Byrds and some Beatle cuts.  Wikipedia article.  Which Beatle cuts?

Well, Rain is one, And Your Bird Can Sing is another.  Wow! I forgot how good these songs are.

Assassination as Inadvertent Secular Canonization

Redacted Substack version.

Bear in mind that ‘redact’ (v.t.) has more than one meaning in English.  It can be used correctly, as I just used it, to mean: revise, although these days it is more commonly used to mean: delete or remove (private or sensitive information).

The same goes for ‘retribution.’ Although it can be correctly used to refer to revenge, it can also be correctly used to refer to retributive justice, which has nothing to do with revenge.

Leftists fear Trump’s retribution, as well they might, given what they have done to him. And they are right to fear it in both senses, especially the second sense: the miscreants will be brought to justice for their crimes against him.

Many of us will then succumb to schadenfreude.

Resist Not the Evil-Doer?

Steven Nemes weighs in on Matt. 5:38-42 in his Substack entry, When should Christians not resist an evildoer?

He makes some of  the same points I have made over the years, most recently, here at Substack: Morality Private and Public.

But he also makes good points that didn’t occur to me.

Is Federalism a Way to Reduce Political Violence?

A while back, in a Substack article, I posed the question: Can Federalism Save Us? I suggested that it might. Now I am wondering whether that piece embodies a tension if not a contradiction.  But what is federalism? The term does not wear its meaning on its sleeve. As I wrote in that article:

Federalism is (i) a form of political organization in which governmental power is divided among a central government and various constituent governing entities such as states, counties, and cities; (ii) subject to the proviso that both the central and the constituent governments retain their separate identities and assigned duties. A government that is not a federation would allow for the central government to create and reorganize constituent governments at will and meddle in their affairs.  Federalism is enshrined in the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” 

Now suppose that in some city or jurisdiction ruled by crime-tolerant leftists, rape, carjacking, murder, and so on are out of control. Chicago is a prime example. We right-thinking people despise crime and the policies of those who allow it and in some cases promote it. The agents  of the Trump administration, in conjunction with local law enforcement, could easily clean  up Chicago in the way they restored order to Washington, D. C.  So most of us Trump-supporting conservatives who hate crime and want to see it reduced, support federal intervention, even  when the Feds are uninvited and can be accused of meddling in local affairs. 

The tension, then, is between a commitment to the Constitution with its Tenth Amendment, which implies respect for states rights, and a salutary concern for the welfare of the poor souls who must inhabit a city dominated by benighted leftists.

Of course, we’ve been here before.  I don’t recall anyone in 1962 calling John F. Kennedy a fascist, though. Standards of civility have deteriorated drastically.  The times they have a changed.

Bob Dylan, Oxford Town. Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Born in Chicago.

On the Many Nietzsches

Karl White writes,
I was wondering if I might share a philosophical irritant. I was recently in correspondence with a well-established Nietzsche scholar, a nice guy with a recent book out. Thing is, like all Nietzsche scholars, or so it seems to me, he confidently proclaimed that all other Nietzsche scholars had overlooked the ‘real Nietzsche’ and that his book would ‘surprise them’.
Now obviously the critical enterprise regarding all philosophers should be ongoing, but it strikes me that in regard to certain thinkers, and Nietzsche in particular, there is a never-ending production line of tomes declaring the ‘real thinker’. Now while Nietzsche fans might say this is a validation of Nietzsche’s own ‘perspectivism’ and so on, I am drifting closer to the possible view that on the contrary it may also signal a fundamental incoherence at the heart of Nietzsche’s ‘project’. If there are so many views and with no end in sight to their formulation, then it is not possible that the subject in question is a ‘Sphinx without a secret’?
Curious if you’ve any views.
Good to hear from you, Karl. 
In Beyond Good and Evil, Part One, Section 6, Nietzsche says that every great philosophy is  the personal confession of its author (Selbstbekenntnis ihres Urhebers).  I believe he is right about this, and that the observation applies also to us lesser lights who are unlikely to produce any great philosophy: an ineluctable subjectivity attaches to our quest to know the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. I would add that the observation also applies to the efforts of the commentators to penetrate the Nietzschean corpus. 
They see in Nietzsche what  interests them, and they find what they can exploit for their own projects.  Three Germans from same generation, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Alfred Baeumler read our man in very different ways. My post Nietzsche and National Socialism, which may add to your irritation, sports a link to an excerpt from Baeumler.  Heidegger has two fat volumes on Nietzsche. Have you read them? How about Jaspers’s book? And then there are the analytic Nietzsche enthusiasts. Have you read Laird Addis? He’s “Iowa School” (Gustav Bergmann and associates). I was impressed by the former’s Natural Signs, but I haven’t been able to acquire his Nietzsche book, a review of which is here. If you have a copy I will buy it from you should you want to sell it. Same goes for the book by Jaspers, whether in English or in German. I’m a big fan of Jaspers. In fact, my own philosophical position shares deep affinities with his.
You are right to be irritated by  those who claim to have laid bare the “real Nietzsche.”  A deep thinker, a tormented soul, whose deep entanglement in problems that are lived and felt and not merely thought about, is unlikely to arrive at a nice, neat, pat view with an easily discernible sense.  There is no “real Nietzsche,” or at least no such person accessible to the academics who live from philosophy rather than for it. 
Is the multiplicity of interpretations a validation of Nietzsche’s perspectivism? No. An incoherent doctrine cannot be validated.  I explore the problem in a number of posts, all of which  require re-thinking and revision.
“I am drifting closer to the possible view that on the contrary it may also signal a fundamental incoherence at the heart of Nietzsche’s ‘project’. If there are so many views and with no end in sight to their formulation, then it is not possible that the subject in question is a ‘Sphinx without a secret’?”
I sympathize with your drift, Karl, and thanks for writing.

Is Flag Burning Speech?

In the 1989 case “Texas v. Johnson,” SCOTUS handed down a 5-4 ruling according to which flag burning was a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.  Now if you read the amendment you will find no reference to flag burning.  The subsumption of flag burning under protected speech required interpretation and argument and a vote among the justices.  The 5-4 vote could easily have gone the other way, and arguably should have. 
President Trump’s recent Executive Order has set things right:
Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s rulings on First Amendment protections, the Court has never held that American Flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to “fighting words” is constitutionally protected.  See Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397, 408-10 (1989).
The bit about ‘fighting words’ invites commentary.
Ought flag burning come under the rubric of protected speech?  Logically prior question: Is it speech at all?  What if I make some such rude gesture in your face as ‘giving you the finger.’  Is that speech?  It is a bit of behavior, no doubt, but there is nothing verbal about it. So consider ‘Fuck you!’ which is verbal. If it counts as speech, I would like to know what proposition it expresses. The content of an assertive utterance is a proposition. Propositions are either true or false.   ‘Fuck you!’ is neither true nor false; so it does not express a proposition.  It expresses an attitude of disdain, disgust, hatred, contempt, bellicosity. Likewise for the corresponding gesture with the middle finger.  The same goes for the burning of a flag. If someone burns a flag, I would like to know what proposition the person is expressing. There isn’t one, or at least there isn’t one that transcends the merely biographical.  “I hate the nation this symbol stands for!” Say that and you are merely emoting. 
The Founders were interested in protecting reasoned dissent about matters of common interest; the typical act of flag burning by the typical flag burner does not rise to that level.  To have reasoned dissent there has to be some proposition that one is dissenting from and some counter-proposition that one is advancing, and one’s performance has to make more or less clear what those propositions are.  I think one ought to be skeptical of arguments that try to subsume gestures and physical actions under speech. Actually, I am more than skeptical: I am strongly inclined to deny any such subsumption.  
My point, then, is that since flag burning is not speech, it is not protected speech. Of course, it does not follow that it is not in many cases an illegal act.
Am I suggesting that there should be a flag burning amendment to the U. S. constitution?  No.  Let the states and the localities decide what to do with those who desecrate the flag. Let’s consider some examples.
  • A man buys an American flag and burns it in his fireplace. Nothing illegal here.. He is simply disposing of a piece of private property in a safe manner. That is his right. The symbol is not the symbolized. Destruction of the former does not affect the latter. The spirit of the nation and its laws is not somehow incarnated in the piece of cloth, any more than the Word of God  is incarnated in a copy of the Bible.  (The final clause of the preceding sentence might ‘ignite’ some interesting discussions!)
  • Someone steals or desecrates the flag I am flying on my property. That illegal act comes under local laws.
  • Someone burns a flag in a tinder-dry wilderness area. That too comes under existing local and federal laws.
  • Someone steals or desecrates an American flag on display at a state or federal facility.  That also comes under existing laws.
  • Someone burns a flag in the presence of others in a public place in a manner that is likely to incite imminent violence. Here is where Trump’s EO applies. We must not tolerate the incitement of violence by speech — which I have argued flag burning is not — or by such nonverbal behavior as flag burning.

Political Violence: Issues and Questions, Part II

In Part I, I argued that in the current state of affairs in the USA, our  political opponents are not mere opponents, but enemies. Given that this enmity is a contingent state of affairs, one that could have been otherwise, I am not defining political opposition or the political in terms of enmity.  This distinguishes my position (in progress, and thus tentatively held) from that of Carl Schmitt’s. For Schmitt, the essence of the political (das Politische) consists in the Freund-Feind (friend-enemy) distinction. (See his The Concept of the Political.) By contrast with Schmitt, I am not trying to isolate the essence or nature of the political; I am merely saying that at the moment, as a matter of contingent fact, our opponents, the Democrats, are our enemies. They are our enemies in that they pose a clear and present threat to us and our way of life. And increasingly this threat is being executed, and in the worst way, by assassination, attempted assassination, calls for assassination, celebrations of assassination, and refusals to condemn assassination.  What is the source of this enmity? In Part I a case was made that our political opponents are enemies. In this Part II, I will proffer an explanation of why we are enemies. In a future Part III, I will consider what we can do to ameliorate our nasty and highly dangerous predicament. 

With our (mere) opponents we share common ground; with our enemies we do not. The source, then, is the lack of common ground. We do not share ground sufficient to keep enmity at bay if we don’t agree on many things. For now, I will mention just  three things we need to agree on, but on which we no longer agree, borders, reality, equality.

BORDERS.  Nations need enforceable, and enforced, borders to maintain their cultural identity and their security as sovereign states. There is no right to immigrate. Correlatively, there is no obligation on the part of any state to allow immigration.  The granting of asylum is not obligatory but supererogatory. Illegal immigration cannot be tolerated. What’s more, legal immigration must be to the benefit of the host country. For each nation has the right to look to its own interests first. More that that, a properly functioning government has the duty to look first to the interests of the nation of which it is the government. 

America first is merely a special case of nation first; it does not imply that America ought to dominate other nations. So only those persons can be allowed into the USA  who are likely to assimilate and accept our republican system of government and our culture. This implies that certain groups  ought to  be favored over others, English speakers, for example, over those who do not know our language, other things being equal.  Ought we “welcome the stranger?”  Yes, but not unconditionally: only if they satisfy the conditions I have specified and some others I do not have the time to specify.  There must not be any blanket “Welcome  the stranger.” Squishy Catholic bishops take note.

Immigration without assimilation is a recipe for disaster, leading as it does to Balkanization, ‘no go’ zones, and endless civil contention. Europe and the U. K. are committing cultural suicide by failure to grasp the importance of this principle. Sharia-supporting Muslims must not be allowed to immigrate into the West, and in particular into America, the last hope of the West. If we fall, the West falls. The rest of the Anglosphere has pretty much abdicated. Sharia law is antithetical to our founding values and principles. Only those people from Muslim lands who renounce Sharia are admissible. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

But isn’t diversity good? Diversity of various types is of course good, but diversity as such  is precisely not our strength, as foolish and/or deliberately destructive leftists mindlessly repeat. Full-spectrum diversity would be our undoing, and was in process of undoing us until Donald Trump came along.  If any one thing is ‘our strength,’ it is unity, not diversity. “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”  To call a sane immigration policy that benefits the host country ‘xenophobic’ is a  typically vicious and typically mendacious leftist smear. And the same goes for ‘Islamophobic’ used to dismiss what I wrote one paragraph up. A phobia is an irrational fear, by definition, but there is nothing irrational about fear of full-strength, Sharia-based Islam, which is not merely a religion, but is also an expansionist political ideology, one that poses an existential threat to us.

REALITY. A second thing we need to agree on, but no longer agree on, is that there is a real world out there independent of our thoughts and dreams, wishes and desires. No doubt there are social constructs, but nature herself in her abiotic and biotic strata are not social constructs.  Money, a social construct, does not grow on trees, but leaves do.  Foliage, tectonic plates, and animals, including human animals, are quite obviously not social constructs. The world cannot be social construction all the way down. And so you cannot change your sex. Once a biological male, always a biological male.  It follows that it is morally outrageous to allow biological males to compete against women in sporting events.  Metaphysical nonsense leads to moral nonsense. Nor can you change your race, as I argue rigorously, at Substack.  You can change your political affiliation, and you should if you are a Democrat; but membership in a race is not a political form of belonging. 

EQUALITY and EQUITY.  The transmogrification of the former into the latter is a third bone of contention between us and our political enemies. An old lie of leftists is compressed into one of their more recent abuses of language: ‘equity.’ So-called ‘equity’ is woke-speak for equality of outcome or result. ‘Equity’  in this obfuscatory sense cannot occur and ought not be pursued. It cannot occur because people are not equal either as individuals or as groups. Leftists won’t face this fact, however, because they confuse the world as they would like it to be with the world as it is. The default setting of the leftist  or ‘progressive’ is utopian. Utopia, however, is Nowheresville and he who pursues it is a Nowhere Man. 

‘Equity’ ought not be pursued because its implementation is possible only by the violation of the liberty of the individual by a totalitarian state apparatus precisely unequal in power to those it would equalize. Paradoxically, the pursuit of equality of outcome presupposes an inequality of power as between the equalizers and the equalized, which is to say: equality of outcome cannot be achieved.  The latter is a form of equality only if it is equal for all. But it cannot be equal for all for the reason given.

Again, people are not equal, by any empirical measure, either as individuals or as groups.  That “all men are created equal,” as per the Declaration of Independence, is not to the point.  Jefferson & Co. were obviously not making the manifestly false assertion that human beings  are equal in point of empirically measurable attributes.  As the word ‘created’ indicates, the Founders were maintaining that all human beings are equal in the eyes of God, the Creator. From a God’s eye point of view, all empirical difference vanish and we are equal as persons, as rights-possessors. And so each of us, regardless of race, sex, level of intellectual or physical prowess, etc., has an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  

CONCLUSION. Our political opponents are not mere opponents but enemies: they pose an existential threat to us. The source of that enmity and this threat is lack of common ground. We lack common ground as regards the three issues mentioned above, and for others as well. We are in dire straits and headed for full-on hot civil war.  That is an outcome no sane person could want. How avoid it?