Sanctimonious ‘Liberal’ Hypocrisy, Death to PC, and the Destruction of Obama’s ‘Legacy’

El Rushbo explains, in his inimitable style, the appeal of Trump to his base.

The (intellectually) attractive Myron Magnet details how Trump spells death to political correctness drawing on recent columns by Peggy Noonan, Shelby Steele, and Andrew Klavan. 

The preternaturally prolific Victor Davis Hanson relates how "Trump is commonsensically undoing, piece by piece, the main components of Obama’s legacy."  Hanson appreciates that Trump hatred has more to do with his style than his policies:


To many progressives and indeed elites of all persuasions, Trump is also the Prince of Anti-culture: mindlessly naïve American boosterism; conspicuous, 1950s-style unapologetic consumption; repetitive and limited vocabulary; fast-food culinary tastes; Queens accent; herky-jerky mannerisms; ostentatious dress; bulging appearance; poorly disguised facial expressions; embracing rather than sneering at middle-class appetites; a lack of subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity.

In short Trump’s very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show. There is not even a smidgeon of a concession that some of Trump’s policies might offer tens of thousands of forgotten inner-city youth good jobs or revitalize a dead and written-off town in the Midwest, or make the petroleum of the war-torn Persian Gulf strategically irrelevant to an oil-rich United States. 

The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

Alain Finkielkraut:

Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith to the fantastic world of human irreality that the Marxists called “superstructure”… thus, precisely through their failure to believe in religion, the representatives of secularism empty laicity of its substance, and swallow, for humanitarian reasons, the demands of its enemies.

I haven't read anything by Finkielkraut except the above and a few other excerpts translated and edited by Ann Sterzinger.  But that won't stop me from explaining what I take to be the  brilliant insight embedded in the above quotation.  

Laicity is French secularity, the absence of religious influence and involvement in government affairs.  It has had the salutary effect of preventing civil strife over religion.  But to appreciate why laicity is important and salutary one must understand that the roots of religion lie deep in human nature.  Religion is even less likely to "wither away" (V. I. Lenin) than the State. Leftists, however, are constitutionally  incapable of understanding that man by nature is homo religiosus and that  the roots of religion in human nature are ineradicable. 

The Radicals don't understand the radicality (deep-going rootedness) of religion. (Radix is Latin for 'root.')  In their superficial way, leftists think that religion is merely "the sigh of the oppressed creature" (Marx) and will vanish when the oppression of man by man is eliminated, which of course will never happen by human effort alone, though they fancy that they can bring it about if only they throw enough people into enough gulags.  Leftists cannot take religion seriously and they don't think anyone else really takes it seriously either, not even Muslims.  They don't believe that most Muslims really do believe in Allah and the divine origin of the Koran and the 72 black-eyed virgins and the obligation to make jihad.  They project their failure to understand religion and its grip into others.  See my Does Anyone Really Believe in the Muslim Paradise in which I report on the Sam Harris vs. Scott Atran debate.

The issue at present is not whether religion is true but whether it answers to deep human needs that cannot be met in any other way.  My point is not that leftists think that religion is false or delusional, although they do think it to be such; my point  that they don't appreciate the depth of the religious need even if it is a need that, in the nature of things, cannot be met.

Not understanding religion, leftists fail to understand how important laicity is to prevent civil strife over religion.  And so they don't properly uphold it. They cave in to the Muslims who reject it.  Why don't they understand the dire existential threat that radical Islam poses to European culture?  I suspect that it is because they think that Muslims don't really believe in all their official claptrap and what Muslims really want are mundane things such as jobs and material security and panem et circenses. They cherish the foolish leftist belief that 'deep down' we are all the same and that Muslims want the same things that decadent Europeans want.

In nuce:  leftists, who are resolutely secular, fail to uphold the secularity that they must uphold if they are to preserve their loose and libertine way of life, and they fail to uphold it  by failing to understand the dangers of religion, dangers they do not understand because they fail to take religion seriously and to appreciate the deep roots it has in human nature.  Here is an even pithier formulation:

Leftists, whose shallow heads cannot grasp religion, are in danger of losing their heads to radical jihadi.  This is cause and effect of the lapse of laicity.

Two quibbles with Finkielkraut.  

First, it is not that leftists "do not believe in religion," but that they do not believe that religion is a powerful and ineradicable force in human affairs.  You don't have to believe in religion to believe facts about it. 

Second, if I remember my Marx, the superstructure (Ueberbau), though a repository of fantastic ideas devoid of truth such as religious ideas and the ideas of bourgeois law and morality, also contains all ideology and therefore the 'liberating' Marxist ideology as well.  It too is a reflection of the Unterbau, the social base and the means of production.  So not everything  in the superstructure is "fantastic," as Finkelkraut implies above.  This Marxian notion that all is ideology leads to relativism, but that's not my problem.

Related:  Alain Finkielkraut vs. the End of Civility

Shakespeare on the Fire Down Below

My favorite Oregonian luthier, Dave Bagwill, sends this for our delectation:

PROSPERO (to FERDINAND) 
 
Look thou be true. Do not give dalliance

Too much the rein. The strongest oaths are straw
To th' fire i' th' blood. Be more abstemious,
Or else, goodnight your vow.
 
The Tempest, Act 4, Sc. 1
Dave's emphasis.

Bob Seger expatiates on the theme in "The Fire Down Below." I shall resist the temptation to link to it.

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

The 'pro-choice' movement, to use the polite euphemism, is fueled by concupiscence.  Not entirely, of course. To what extent, then?

One naturally wants the pleasures of sexual intercourse without any consequences. One seeks cost-free indulgence in the most intense sensuous pleasure known to man. Unrestricted abortion on demand is a convenient remedy to an inconvenient pregnancy should other birth-control methods fail.  Combine the following: a fallen being, a powerful drive, advanced birth-control and abortion technology, the ever-increasing irrelevance of religion and its moral strictures, 24-7 sex-saturation via omni-invasive popular media – combine them, and the arguments against the morality of abortion come too late. As good as they are in themselves, they are impotent against the onslaught of the factors mentioned.

It's always been that reason is reliably suborned by passion; it's just that now the subornation is quicker and easier.

And then there is the feminist angle. Having come into their own in other arenas, which is good, women are eager to throw off the remaining shackles of family and pregnancy. They insist on their rights, including reproductive rights. And isn't the right to an abortion just another reproductive right?  Well, no it isn't; but the sexual itch in synergy with emancipatory zeal is sure to blind people to any arguments to the contrary. (That there are some reproductive rights I take for granted.)

And now for a little paradox. Sexual emancipation 'empowers' women. But in a sex- and power-obsessed society this 'empowerment' also empowers men by increasing the cost-free availability of women to male sexual exploitation. Enter the 'hook-up,' the name of which is a perfect phrase, hydraulic in its resonance, for the substitution of impersonal fluid-exchange for the embodiment of personal love.

It is no surprise that men with money and power who operate in enclaves of like-minded worldings take full advantage of the quarry on offer.  But lust like other vices is hard to control once it is given free rein. And so the depradations of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and a hundred others is the natural upshot. 

Women rightly push back but too many veer to the extreme of #metoo. 

The result is a strange blend of sexual licentiousness-cum-sanctimony.

A lefty will say that I preaching, posturing, moralizing. But for a lefty all moral judgment is moralizing, except when they do it not knowing what they do; and all preaching is hypocritical, except when they do it.

But don't ever expect to get through to benighted people whose will to power has so suppressed their will to truth that they cannot look into the mirror and see themselves. 

Related:

The Role of Concupiscence

Ohne Fleiß Kein Preis

The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

Shakespeare on Lust

Don’t Pathologize Political Differences

This is the excellent advice of Alan Dershowitz (emphasis added):

But psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have no more right to pathologize a president or a candidate because they disagree with his or her political views than do prosecutors or politicians have a right to criminalize political opponents.

I have been writing in opposition to the criminalization of political differences for decades, because it is dangerous to democracy. It is even more dangerous to pathologize or psychiatrize one’s political opponents based on opposition to their politics.

Getting mental health professionals to declare political opponents mentally ill was a common tactic used against political dissidents by the Soviet Union, China, and apartheid South Africa. Perfectly sane people were locked up in psychiatric wards or prisons for years because of phony diagnoses of mental illness.

The American Psychiatric Association took a strong stand against the use of this weapon by tyrants. I was deeply involved in that condemnation, because I understood how dangerous it is to diagnose political opponents instead of responding to the merits of their political views.

It is even more dangerous when a democracy like the U.S. begins to go down the road of pathologizing political differences. It’s one thing to say your opponents are wrong. It’s quite another to say they are crazy.

Questions about President Trump’s mental health arose even before he was elected. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, some of his most extreme critics were not content to say they disagreed with his policies – or thought he was unqualified because of his temperament, background, or skill set. Instead, they questioned his mental health.

I am old enough to remember the last time this happened. The 1964 presidential election was the second in which I voted. President Lyndon Johnson, who had succeeded the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, was running against Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz.

I didn’t like either candidate. Johnson’s personal characteristics were obnoxious, though he had achieved much, especially in the area of civil rights. Goldwater’s personal characteristics seemed fine, but I disapproved of his conservative political views.

I was shocked to read an article in Fact magazine – based on interviews with more than 1,100 psychiatrists – that concluded Goldwater was mentally unstable and psychologically unfit to be president. It was Lyndon Johnson whose personal fitness to hold the highest office I had questioned.

Goldwater seemed to me to be emotionally stable, with excellent personal characteristics, but highly questionable politics. The article was utterly unpersuasive, but in the end, I reluctantly voted for Johnson because Goldwater was too conservative for my political tastes.

Goldwater went back to the Senate, where he served with great distinction and high personal morality. Johnson got us deeply into an unwinnable war in Vietnam that hurt our nation and claimed more than 58,000 American lives. The more than 1,100 psychiatrists, it turned out, were wrong in their diagnosis and predictions.

The misdiagnosis of Goldwater should surprise no one, since none of the psychiatrists had ever examined, or even met, the Arizona senator. They just didn’t like his politics. Indeed, some feared that he would destroy the world if he had access to the nuclear button.

The most powerful TV ad against Goldwater showed an adorable young girl playing with a flower. Then, the viewer hears an ominous voice counting down from 10, the camera zooms into a tight close-up of the little girl’s eye, and you see the horrific mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, implying that electing Goldwater would bring about a nuclear holocaust. It was an effective ad. It influenced me far more than the psychobabble in the Fact article.

Read it all.

I would add that those who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome are in no position to call Trump crazy or mentally unstable.  That would be a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

But haven't I just done what Dershowitz says one ought not do? Have I not just pathologized the views of those who oppose Trump by calling these people deranged?

No. I am not pathologizing their views, I am pathologizing them in respect of their boundless hatred of the man. Robert de Niro is a prime example. In his latest outburst, he calls Trump in public a "fucking idiot" and a "fucking fool" and on and on.  And there is this even worse earlier stream of invective from De Niro.  

I call this phenomenon topical insanity. There are certain topics that will 'trigger' ordinarily sane people and cause them to lose their mental stability.  Guns have quite the triggering effect on many liberals.  They simply cannot maintain their mental balance when the topic comes up. Pointing out well-known truths about race will do it as well.

So we need to distinguish between pathologizing views and pathologizing people.

There are a number of interesting questions here.  One question is whether there are any political or other views which are such that their holding by anybody would be good evidence of mental instability on the part of the one holding the view. 

A related but different question is whether there are any political or other views which are such that their holding by anybody would be good evidence of moral corruption or an evil nature.

Finally, there is the phenomenon of calling one's political opponents stupid. This is obviously different from calling them either insane or evil.  For example, I have heard Ann Coulter called stupid. But stupid is one thing she is obviously not.  Every political view has adherents that are less and more intelligent.  For example, Nancy Pelosi is not very bright as should be obvious. Obama on the other hand, is quite bright and indeed brighter, I would judge, than Joe Biden or  G. W. Bush.  But having a high degree of verbal intelligence is no guarantee that one possesses wisdom or has the right values.

Age Quod Agis

DocHollidayAge quod agis is a well-known saying which is a sort of Latin call to mindfulness: do what you are doing. Be here now in the activity at hand.

Legend has it that Johnny Ringo was an educated man.  (Not so: a story for later.) But so he is depicted over and over. In this scene from Tombstone, the best of the movies about Doc Holliday and the shoot-out at the O. K. Corral, Ringo trades Latinisms with the gun-totin' dentist, who was indeed an educated man and a fearless and deadly gunslinger to boot, his fearlessness a function of his 'consumption.'

I don't mean his consumption of spirits, but his tuberculosis. His was the courage of an embittered man, close to death.

The translations in the video clip leave something to be desired. Age quod agis gets translated as 'do what you do best'; the literal meaning, however, is do what you are doingAge is in the imperative mood; quod is 'what'; agis is the second person singular present tense of agere and means: 'you do' or 'you are doing.'

Curiously, Doc Holliday did not die with his boots on. He died in bed.

Trump’s Real Sin? He Speaks Taboo Truths

Why the bipartisan preening outrage over the President's craphole comment? Roger Kimball:

Everyone, near enough, knows that he was telling a home truth. It was outrageous not because he said something crude that was untrue. Quite the contrary: it was outrageous precisely because it was true but intolerable to progressive sensitivities.

In other words, the potency of taboo is still strong in our superficially rational culture. There are some things—quite a few, actually, and the list keeps growing—about which one cannot speak the truth or, in many cases, even raise as a subject for discussion without violating the unspoken pact of liberal sanctimoniousness.

Andrew Klavan:

Nothing scandalizes a leftist like the truth. Point out that women and men are different, that black Americans commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime, that most terrorist acts are committed by Muslims, and the Left leaps to its collective feet in openmouthed shock, like Margaret Dumont after a Groucho Marx wisecrack. This is racism! This is sexism! This is some sort of phobia! I’m shocked, shocked to find facts being spoken in polite company!

No one is really shocked, of course. This is simply a form of bullying. The Left has co-opted our good manners and our good will in order to silence our opposition to their bad policies. The idea is to make it seem impolite and immoral to mention the obvious.

The bullying is highly effective and very dangerous. In England, in the city of Rotherham, at least 1,400 non-Muslim girls, some as young as 11, were brutally raped by Muslim immigrants over a period of years in the 2000s. Police and other officials worked to keep the facts hidden because, according to multiple reports, they were afraid of being called racist. Think about that: police officers did not want to seem racist, so they stood by and let their city’s children be raped.

[ . . .]

Here in the states, the First Amendment has so far allowed old-fashioned American loudmouths to fight the system whenever they could find ways around our monolithic corporate media. But the Empire of Lies is quick to strike back. Google/YouTube now stands charged by multiple accusers of singling out conservative voices for censorship, “fact-checking,” and demonetization. Hidden-camera videos released by Project Veritas this week show Twitter employees conspiring to “shadow ban” conservatives on their system. On campus, intelligent conservative speakers of good will like Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Cristina Hoff-Somers have faced violent protests meant to shut them up.

No person of importance on the right seeks to silence anyone on the left. The Left, on the other hand, is broadly committed to ostracizing, blacklisting, and even criminalizing right-wing speech.

 

[. . .]

Let’s state the obvious. Some countries are shitholes. To claim that this is racist is racist. They are not shitholes because of the color of the populace but because of bad ideas, corrupt governance, false religion, and broken culture. Further, most of the problems in these countries are generated at the top. Plenty of rank-and-file immigrants from such ruined venues ultimately make good Americans—witness those who came from 1840s potato-famine Ireland, a shithole if ever there was one! It takes caution and skill to separate the good from the bad.

For these very reasons, absurd immigration procedures like chain migration, lotteries, and unvetted entries are deeply destructive. They can lead to the sort of poor choices that create a Rotherham. Trump’s suggestions—to vet immigrants for pro-American ideas and skills that will help our country—are smart and reasonable and would clearly make the system better if implemented.

So, when it comes to the Great Shithole Controversy of 2018, my feeling is: I do not care, not even a little. I’m sorry that it takes someone like Trump to break the spell of silence the Left is forever weaving around us. I wish a man like Ronald Reagan would come along and accomplish the same thing with more wit and grace. But that was another culture. History deals the cards it deals; we just play them. Trump is what we’ve got.

For all the bad language, for all the loose talk, I would rather hear a man speak as a man without fear of the Nurse Ratcheds in the press and the academy than have him neutered and gagged by a system of good manners that has been misused as a form of oppression. Better impoliteness than silence. Better crudeness than lies.

We have seen the effect of uncontrolled immigration on Europe. It is very, very bad. The fact is: some countries are shitholes. I don’t want this to become one of them.

Immigration and the Obstructionist Congressional Crapweasels

Here:

A great deal of the justified anger of the immigration patriot community is that we are told again and again by the media and politicians that we’re not allowed to care that say, the average El Salvadoran immigrant may be three times more likely as the average Norwegian immigrant or four times more likely than the average Indian immigrant to be on welfare, supported by the U.S. taxpayer.

We’re outraged like Donald Trump was when he saw the truly offensive deal conjured up by Senators Graham, Flake and Gardner in conjunction with Democratic leaders that would give mass amnesty (far beyond DACA) in exchange for a pitiful charade of border security. He’s outraged that these senators would betray GOP voters and interests when, even in his weaker moments, he’s always declared (as he tweeted last night) that building a wall, moving to merit-based immigration, and ending the visa lottery and chain migration are mandatory components for the amnesty deal for DACA. The scandal here isn’t Trump’s predictably profane tongue—it’s that Senators Graham, Flake and Gardner would dare to show him this s***hole of an amnesty deal, in blatant defiance of the core issue positions that led the GOP to 100 year-high legislative majorities, and expect him to bless it.

Lindsey, Jeff, and Cory—you’re fired.

Read it all.

‘Diversity’ is Not a Dirty Word

Contrary to what some alt-righties of my acquaintance seem to think, 'diversity' is not a dirty word. To quote from my old entry, Diversity and Divisiveness:

Liberals emphasize the value of diversity, and with some justification. Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive marketplace of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

The Second Coming 

 
Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity. 
 
Surely some revelation is at hand; 
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep 
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 
 
 
Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989) 

Word of the Day: Conurbation

"An extended urban area, typically consisting of several towns merging with the suburbs of one or more cities." See here.

You weren't taught Latin in high school? Then you were cheated by 'progressive' idiots. But if you were taught, then you know that the Latin  for 'city' is urbs, urbis. Knowing this, you are in a position reasonably to guess the meaning of our word of the day. And knowing a little Latin, you will be helped in your understanding of 'suburban' and 'urbane' and 'urbicide.' 

By the mid-1960s, the character of the region was changing rapidly. A carpet of housing subdivisions, shopping malls, parking lots, freeways, and gas stations was being rolled out from LA. Soon the orange groves and bean fields disappeared, and Orange County became one vast undifferentiated conurbation. It was difficult to tell when you left one town and entered another. 

By the way, the author, the philosopher Lee Hardy, is a good writer as witness his "mid-1960s," with no apostrophe. But an apostrophe is needed in the following: 'mid-'60s.' I also invite you to notice that when I am quoting someone I use double quotation marks, but when I am mentioning an expression, or using an expression in an extended sense, I use single quotation marks. I warmly recommend my conventions inasmuch as they are eminently rational. But you are free to disagree without fear of being shot.

Long before I became a Phoenician, I was a Los Angeleno. So I know something about conurbation. Luckily, I live at the far Eastern edge of the Phoenix metropolitan region, right up against the Superstition Wilderness where conubation hereabouts stops, Gott sei dank.

As that great American Henry David Thoreau once said, in the pages of The Atlantic (June 1862) when that magazine was worth reading, in his essay "Walking," 

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Again and again, people who cannot read what is on the page substitute 'wilderness' for 'wildness.' People see what they want to see, or expect to see. Here is an example of double butchery I found recently:

In wilderness is the preservation of Mankind.

(Warren Macdonald, A Test of Will, Greystone Books, 2004, p. 145.)