Conservatism – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

An Admiring but Critical Note on an Edmund Burke Quotation

A quotation and a question:

Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to [of] justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Edmund Burke, letter to François-Louis-Thibaut de Menonville, 1791, bolding added.

A fine statement to which I largely agree, but I have one reservation. An external check upon the wills and appetites of individuals who will not check themselves is necessary if there is to be civil order. But the administrators of the external check are cut from the same crooked timber as the rest of us. Our trust in them must therefore be cautious and as limited as the power we grant them. The conservative assessment of human nature is sober and realistic: every true conservative knows that power goes to the heads of its possessors, and this regardless of how paltry the power may be.

Who checks the checkers? Who keeps them in check? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The checkers cannot be expected to check themselves any more that the Roman Catholic hierarchy can be expected to check the concupiscence of its clerics and punish priestly paedophiles and ephebophiles with sufficient severity. They will protect their own first, setting the interests of the institution above the interests of those they are supposed to serve. The same goes for government which can degenerate into a self-serving hustle like any hustle. So-called civil servants too often serve themselves first and those they are supposed to serve second if at all.

A sound conservatism must advocate checks and balances across the board with every individual and group kept in check and keeping in check. For one example, armed civilians are needed to keep both the criminal element and government in check, just as government is need to keep armed civilians in check via the enactment and enforcement of reasonable gun laws.

A sound conservatism will not succumb to the authoritarian temptation; it must take on board as much of classical liberalism as is necessary to stymy the drift toward the totalitarian. The true conservative treads the via media between knee-pad Toryism and anything-goes libertarianism.

Good Relations and Deep Relations

Given the limitations of our postlapsarian predicament, good relations with others must needs be limited relations. Familiarity breeds contempt. Propinquity militates against politeness. Conservatives understand that a certain formality in our relations with others, both within and without the family, helps maintain respect. Formality helps keep in check the incivility bred of familiarity. Reserve has a preservative effect. Saying less more often accrues to our benefit than saying more. How often have you brought trouble upon your head by simply keeping your mouth shut?

So much for good relations. Deep relations are another story. In them we court danger. We go deep, we probe, we 'let it all hang out' after midnight of the work-a-day round. You should run the risk from time to time. Risk rejection and worse. Otherwise, when it comes time to die, you won't be able to say that you really squeezed the fruit of the lemon tree.

A Groundless Stereotype about Stereotypes

Not all stereotypes are negative; some are positive. And not all stereotypes lack a fundamentum in re; some are based in reality. I just made two distinctions.

It is a stereotype both negative and without a foundation in reality that all stereotypes lack a foundation in reality.

Political Observations

The short statements below are from my Facebook page. It is important to explain to the open-minded and politically uncommitted, in a pithy and non-polemical way, what American conservatives stand for. The American conservative, as I use the term, is neither a throne-and-altar neo-reactionary, nor is he an alt-Right tribalist. His conservatism takes on board the best of classical liberalism. You could call him a paleo-liberal. And of course he is far from the yap-and-scribble, do-nothing 'cruise ship' pseudo-conservatives who are willing to accept political dhimmitude so long as their perquisites and privileges and invitations to the tonier Beltway salons remain intact.

My 'voice' over at Facebook is usually polemical, unlike the shorts below. I tread the razor's edge between saying what needs to be said about incendiary topics and getting de-platformed. Polemical discourse, including invective, mockery, and the rest are justified by the fact we are engaged in a war with the destructive Left over the soul of America. You are welcome to join me, but just be sure to read the pinned post at the top of the page.

THE FIRST OBLIGATION OF GOVERNMENT

The main obligation of a government is to protect and serve the citizens of the country of which it is the government. It is a further question whether it has obligations to protect and benefit the citizens of other countries. That is debatable. But if it does, those obligations are trumped by the main obligation just mentioned. I should think that a great nation such as the USA does well to engage in purely humanitarian efforts such as famine relief. Such efforts are arguably supererogatory and not obligatory.

NATIONALISM AND 'FAMILIALISM'

America First is as sound an idea as that each family has the right to prefer its interests over the interests of other families. If my wife becomes ill, then my obligation is to care for her and expend such financial resources as are necessary to see to her welfare. If this means reducing my charitable contributions to the local food bank, then so be it. Whatever obligations I have to help others 'ripple out' from myself as center, losing claim to my attention the farther out they go, much like the amplitude of waves caused by a rock's falling into a pond diminishes the farther from the point of impact. Spouse and/or children first, then other family members, then old friends, then new friends, then neighbors, and so on.

The details are reasonably disputable, but not the general principle. The general principle is that we are justified in looking to our own first.

ENLIGHTENED NATIONALISM

AMERICA FIRST does not mean that that the USA ought to be first over other countries, dominating them. It means that every country has the right to prefer itself and its own interests over the interests of other countries. We say 'America first' because we are Americans; the Czechs say or ought to say 'Czech Republic first.' The general principle is that every country has a right to grant preference to itself and its interests over the interests of other countries while respecting their interests and right to self-determination. America First is but an instance of the general principle. The principle, then, is Country First.

ENLIGHTENED NATIONALISM AND CHAUVINISM

America First has nothing to do with chauvinism which could be characterized as a blind and intemperate patriotism, a belligerent and unjustified belief in the superiority of one's own country. America First expresses an enlightened nationalism which is obviously compatible with a sober recognition of national failings. Germany has a rather sordid history; but Germany First is compatible with a recognition of the wrong turn that great nation took during a well-known twelve-year period (1933-1945) in her history.

NATIONALISM, NATIVISM, ISOLATIONISM

An enlightened nationalism is distinct from nativism inasmuch as the former does not rule out immigration. By definition, an immigrant is not a native; but an enlightened American nationalism accepts immigrants who accept American values, which of course are not the values of the Left or of political Islam.

An enlightened nationalism is not isolationist. What it eschews is a fruitless meddling and over-eager interventionism. It does not rule out certain necessary interventions when they are in our interests and in the interests of our allies.

So America First is not to be confused with chauvinism or nativism or isolationism.

Is Patriotism a Good Thing? What is a Country?

The following goes deeper into the issues involved in my Substack article Patriotism and Jingoism. I respond to comments from 'Jacques' from November 2015. My responses are in blue.

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I read your blog every day. Quite apart from the high level philosophizing, it's a rare bit of political sanity and rationality and decency. Academic philosophy is now thoroughly controlled by the most evil and insane factions of the Left. It's good to know that real philosophy, and real political philosophy in particular, is still alive in the hearts and minds of some individual people, even though the philosophical institutions are dead or hopelessly corrupt. Thank you!

BV: You're very welcome. I am happy to have you as a reader and correspondent. While academic philosophy is not thoroughly controlled by the Left, not yet anyway, you are not far from the truth.

But I do have a quibble about your recent post on patriotism, where you write:

"… As Socrates explains in Plato's Crito, we are what we are because of the laws. Our country and its laws have overseen our nurturance, our education, and the forming of our characters. We owe a debt of gratitude to our country, its laws, those who have worked to maintain and defend it, and especially those who have died in its defense."

This argument (if it's valid) must have a suppressed premise. The premise must be something like the following: "It is good that we are what we are", or "Some of the features of our characters that are due to our country and its laws are features for which we should be grateful".

BV: Right, my argument is an enthymeme and those tacit assumptions are in play; without them the argument is invalid.

Of course, the inference would only be valid given some further assumptions, e.g., that our country and its laws have not also caused us to have other features that are so bad or regrettable that, all things considered, it would be reasonable to wish that our characters hadn't been shaped by our country and its laws in any way.

BV: I agree.

But in any case, I don't think that these suppressed premises are true. Not if they are meant to support the conclusion that, in general, patriotism is good–let alone that, in general, it is a virtue.

If my character was shaped by my experiences growing up in Maoist China, say, then it seems entirely possible that most or all of the features of myself that I came to have as a result of those experiences are bad. Or they might be features that just have no particular value or disvalue. At any rate there seems to be no reason to expect that, for any arbitrary person whose character was formed by any arbitrary country or legal system, the relevant features will be such that, on balance, this person ought to be grateful for whatever it was that caused him to have these features. To be sure, those who were lucky to have been formed within good countries or good legal institutions should probably be patriotic, for the kind of reason that Socrates gave; but this is not to say that patriotism in general is a duty or a virtue or even a good thing in any respect.

BV: Your critique up to this point is a good one and I accept it. I take you to be saying that I have not given a good argument for the thesis that in general patriotism is a good thing. For whether it is good or not will depend on the particular patria, the particular country, and its laws, institutions, and traditions. Presumably, citizens of North Korea, Cuba, Nazi Germany, and the USSR ought not be or ought not have been patriotic. But much depends on what the object of patriotism is. What exactly is that which one loves and is loyal to when one is patriotic? More on this below.

I would suggest that there is no basis for healthy patriotism beyond the fact that my country is MY country. The reason why I should have some loyalty to my country, or love for it, is just that it is mine. Not that, in being mine, it has shaped my character. Not that its laws are better than others, or that they encode certain 'propositions' which a rational being should believe, or anything like that. But if this is right, the proper object of healthy patriotism is not a country in the sense that you seem to have in mind, i.e., a government or set of political or legal arrangements or traditions. Because that kind of thing is not really mine, in any deep sense, and because that kind of thing is not something I can love or feel loyalty towards. So if this suggestion is right, the proper object is my 'country' in the sense of the concrete land and people, not the state or its laws. [emphasis added by BV.] (And this distinction seems especially important nowadays. You would not want to confuse the real America that Americans may properly love with the weird, sick, soft-totalitarian state that now occupies America.)

BV: You rightly appreciate that a proper discussion of this topic requires a careful specification of the object of patriotic love/loyalty. You say it is "the concrete land and people, not the state and its laws." Suppose I grant that for the nonce. Why should I love/be loyal to my country just because it is mine? That is not obvious, indeed it strikes me as false. I take you to be making two separate claims. The first is that one should display some patriotism toward one's country. This first claim is a presupposition of "The reason why I should have some loyalty to my country, or love for it, is just that it is mine." The second claim is that the only reason for so doing is that the country is one's own.

But do you really want to endorse the first claim? Even if country = "concrete land and people," there are possible and perhaps also actual countries such that you wouldn't want to endorse the first claim. As for the second, if you endorse it, will you also say that the only reason you should be loyal to your spouse, your parents, your siblings, your children, your friends, your clan, your neighborhood, your gang, and so on is because they are yours? Should you be true to your school only because it is the one you attend?

The above doesn't sound right. That a friend is my friend is not the only possible legitimate reason for my being loyal to him, assuming it is a legitimate reason at all. A second legitimate reason is that when I was in trouble he helped me. (And so on.) That my country (concrete land and people) is my country is not the only possible reason for my loving it and being loyal to it; other legitimate reasons are that the land is beautiful – "purple mountain majesties from sea to shining sea" — and that the people are self-reliant, hard-working, frugal, liberty-loving, etc., although how many of these people does one encounter theses days?

You write, "The reason why I should have some loyalty to my country, or love for it, is just that it is mine." Do you intend the 'just' to express a biconditional relation? Are you proposing

1. One should have some loyalty for one's country or love for it if and only if it is one's own country

2. If one should have some loyalty for one's own country or love for it, then it is one's own country?

Is my country's being mine a necessary and sufficient condition of my legitimate patriotism, or only a necessary condition thereof? On a charitable reading, you are affirming (2).

What is a Country?

If patriotism is love of and loyalty to one's country, then we need to know what a country is. First of all, a country will involve

a. A geographical area, a land mass, with more or less definite boundaries or borders.

But this is not sufficient since presumably a country without people is no country in the sense of 'country' relevant to a definition of 'patriotism.' A backpacker may love the unpopulated backcountry of a wilderness area but such love of a chunk of the earth and its flora and (non-human) fauna is not patriotic love. So we add

b. Having a (human) population.

Are (a) and (b) jointly sufficient? I don't think so. Suppose you have a land mass upon which are dumped all sorts of different people of different races and religions, speaking hundreds of different languages, with wildly different habits and values and mores. That would not be a country in a sense relevant to a definition of 'patriotism.' It seems we must add

c. Sharing a common culture which will involve such elements as a common language, religion, tradition, history, 'national narrative,' heritage, a basic common understanding of what is right and wrong, a codification of this basic common understanding in law, and what all else.

I should think that each of (a), (b), and (c) are necessary to have a country. 'Jacques' apparently disagrees. He seems to be saying above that (a) and (b) are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. I say they are individually necessary but not jointly sufficient. I say further that the three conditions just specified are not jointly sufficient either, or not obviously jointly sufficient. For if the basic common understanding of right and wrong naturally evolves toward a codification and detailed articulation in written laws, then we are well on the way to 'the political.'

And isn't it obvious, or at least plausible, that if a country cannot exist without geographical borders, that these borders cannot be merely geographical in nature, but must also be political as well?

Take the Rio Grande. It is obviously not a social construct. It is a natural feature of the earth. But the southern border of the USA, its border with Mexico, is a social or socio-political construct. It is 'conventional' not 'natural.' The southern border might not have been the Rio Grande. But as things are, a river serves as the southern border.

My point is that, while a border must be naturally or physically realized by a river, or a coastline, or the crest of a mountain range, or by a wall or a fence (an electronic 'fence' would do) or whatever, borders are also political entities. Thus the Rio Grande is both a natural feature of the earth but also a political entity. And so what I want to say is that nothing can count as a country in the sense of 'country' relevant to a definition of 'patriotism' if it is not a political entity. Two countries bordering on each other cannot border on each other unless both are political entities.

Can I argue this out rigorously? I don't know. Let me take a stab at it.

A country is a continuant: it remains numerically the same over the period of time, however short, during which it exists. And while a country can gain or lose territory without prejudice to its diachronic numerical identity, it will cease to exist if it loses all its territory, or lets itself be invaded by foreigners to such an extent that its characteristic culture is destroyed (see point (c) above). So a country must defend its border if it wishes to stay in existence. But for the USA to defend its southern border is not for it to defend a river. It is to prevent non-citizens from crossing illegally into a country of which they are not a citizen. Am I begging the question? Perhaps. I'll have to think about it some more.

In any case it seems intuitively obvious to me that we need

d. Under the jurisdiction of a government.

But it is important to distinguish between a government and a particular administration of a government such as the Reagan administration or the Obama administration (regime?). Consider the bumper sticker:

What does 'government' mean here? It means either the current administration or some administrations, but presumably not every administration. It cannot mean the institutional structure, with its enabling documents such as the Constitution, which structure outlasts particular administrations. That is shown by the American flag above. What does it signify? Not the Nixon admin or the Obama admin. It signifies the ideals and values of America and the people who uphold them. Which values? Liberty and justice are named in the Pledge of Allegiance. But not social justice, or material equality (equality of outcome or result).

The person who would display a bumper sticker like the above does not fear the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or the institutional structure of the USA or the values and ideals it enshrines. Take a gander at this sticker:

Someone who displays this supports the U. S. Constitution and the Second Amendment thereto in particular. What he fears is not the U. S. government in its institutional structure; what he fears are gun-grabbing administrations. What he fears are lawless, hate-America, gun-grabbing, liberty-infringing, race-baiting leftists like Barack Obama and Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton.

In sum, I suggest that an adequate definition of 'country' must involve all of (a)-(d) supra. But this is a very difficult topic and I am no expert in political philosophy.

I Didn’t Start Out Conservative

Like many conservatives, I didn't start out as one. My background is working class, my parents were Democrats, and so was I until the age of 41. I came of age in the '60s. One of my heroes was John F. Kennedy, "the intrepid skipper of the PT 109" as I described him in a school essay written in the fifth grade. I was all for the Civil Rights movement. Musically my heroes were Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. I thrilled to his Blowin' in the Wind and his other civil rights anthems.

As I see it, those civil rights battles were fought and they were won. But then the rot set in as the party of JFK liberals became the extremists and the destructive leftists that they are today. For example, Affirmative Action in its original sense gave way to reverse discrimination, race-norming, minority set-asides, identity politics and the betrayal of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that people be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." To judge people by the content of their character is to judge them as individuals which is precisely the opposite of what tribalists and identity politicians do.

As liberals have become extremists, people with moderate views such as myself have become conservatives.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, a good day to read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail and reflect on how the race-delusional totalitarians who now infest the Democrat Party have strayed from King's ideas and vision.

To Be Human

To be human is to be flawed; to be conservative is to know this.

You Want Anti-Government? I’ll Give You Anti-Government!

Contrary to the willful misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government. To oppose big government is not to oppose government. The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851), conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that is the opposite of the one contemporary Democrats are aiming to impose upon us. The following passage is surprisingly prescient now that Sino-surveillance is upon us and will only get worse. Needless to say, I do not hold that government must of necessity fit Proudhon's description: there is such a thing as limited government.

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so…. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Of course, I don't accept that property is theft. On the contrary! Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. The problem with private property is not that it is private, but that too few own too little and in a way that is protected from criminal and governmental seizure. That is why firearms are the most important private property. You can't eat, wear (though you can bear), or live in a gun, but guns are the means for the maintenance of ownership of the aforementioned.

The New Right: More Combative, Less Conservative

Culturally, the Left won; so what's to conserve? The Old Right, bow-tied and bespectacled, gentlemanly and erudite, has proven impotent to slow down, let alone stop, the Left's long march through the institutions and their subversion of them. Assembled in their well-appointed 'cucksheds,' the likes of George F. Will fiddle with ideas while the Republic burns. Enter the New Right which, as David Azzerad puts it,

. . . is anchored in the realization that the conservative project in America today is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary one. We lost. They won. Painful as it is to admit, we no longer feel at home in our own country. In this progressive theocracy in which all must worship at the altar of Wokeness, conservatism, if one can still even call it that, is more about overthrowing than conserving. Burke’s edifying exhortation—“Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna”—must be altered to suit the times: Sparta was your inheritance, now reclaim her.

As such, this new Right has a decidedly unconservative temperament. It is spirited, manly, and combative. We fight with the same intensity, resolve, and clarity of purpose with which the Left fights. And we fight not to stem our losses, but to win. As Pat Buchanan once wrote, we “want to engage the Left on every front; to defund it; to drive it back into the redoubts whence it emerged decades ago. We want to return to their places of honor the republican beliefs, cultural norms and moral values we were raised with.”

This new Right understands not just ideas, but power. The Left’s ideological hegemony is not principally the result of better ideas, but of its long march through the institutions. We understand the need to build new institutions—in particular those with the power to shape public opinion—and to reconquer lost ones or, at the very least, defund them. The universities, in particular, must be brought to heel.

Absolutely. Defunding the leftist seminaries is a job each of us can do right now. Every day brings news of a new outrage and an additional reason to divest the institutions of the Higher Enstupidation. For example, the cancellation of Mike Adams, and that of Flannery O'Connor by Loyola University Maryland.

The Catholic Universities are among the worst of the leftist seminaries. They are neither Catholic nor universities.

Addendum (7/31): "Every day brings news of a new outrage . . . ." A bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Just this morning I learned that a dean at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell was fired for stating in an e-mail that "black lives matter, but also, everyone's life matters."

On Transcending Tribalism

Jonathan Haidt:

Humans are tribal, but tribalism can be transcended. It exists in tension with our extraordinary ability to develop bonds with other human beings. Romeo and Juliet fell in love. French, British and German soldiers came out of their trenches in World War I to exchange food, cigarettes and Christmas greetings.

The key, as Cicero observed, is proximity, and a great deal of modern research backs him up. Students are more likely to become friends with the student whose dorm room is one door away than with the student whose room is four doors away. People who have at least one friend from the other political party are less likely to hate the supporters of that party.

But tragically, Americans are losing their proximity to those on the other side and are spending more time in politically purified settings. [. . .]

Haidt is right that tribalism can be transcended, at least to some extent, and that proximity and interaction can facilitate the transcending. But he is far more optimistic that I am.

What Haidt ignores is that there is no comity without commonality, as I like to put it. You and I can live and work together in harmony only within a common space of shared values and assumptions and recognized facts. But that common space is shrinking.

Take any 'hot button' issue, Second Amendment rights, for example. What do I have in common with the anti-gunner who favors confiscation of all civilian firearms, or only slightly less radically, wants to ban all hand guns or semi-automatic weapons? To me it is evident that my right to life grounds a right to self-defense, and with it a right to acquire the appropriate means of self-defense. If you deny this, then we have no common ground, at least not on this topic. On this topic, we would then be at loggerheads. If you then work politically or extra-politically to violate what here in the States are called Second Amendment rights, then you become my enemy. And the consequences of enmity can become unpleasant in the extreme. Push can come to shove, and shove to shoot.

In a situation like this, proximity and interaction only exacerbate the problem. Even the calm interaction of scholarly argument and counter-argument does no good. No matter how carefully and rigorously I argue my position, I will not succeed in convincing the opponent, with only a few exceptions. This is a fact of experience over a wide range of controversial topics, and not just in politics. The only good thing that comes of the dialectical interaction is a clarification and deeper understanding of one's position and what it entails. If you think, say, that semi-automatic weapons ought to be banned for civilian use, then you and I will never find common ground. But I will perfect my understanding of my position and its presuppositions and better understand what I reject in yours.

After we have clarified, but not resolved, our differences, anger at the intransigence of the other is the likely upshot if we continue to interact in close proximity whether in the same academic department, the same church, the same club, the same neighborhood, the same family . . . . This is why there are schisms and splits and factions and wars and all manner of contention.

Anger at the intransigence of the other can then lead on to the thought that there must be something morally defective, and perhaps also intellectually defective, about the opponent if he holds, say, that a pre-natal human is just a clump of cells. One advances — if that is the word — to the view that the opponent is morally censurable for holding the position he holds, that he is being willfully morally obtuse and deserves moral condemnation. And then the word 'evil' may slip in and the word 'lie': "The bastard is not just wrong; he is an evil son-of-a-bitch for promoting the lie that an unborn child is just a clump of cells, or a disposable part of woman's body like a wart." The arguably false statements of the other get treated as lies and therefore as statements at the back of which in an intent to deceive. And from there it ramps up to 'Hillary is Satan' and 'Trump is Hitler.'

One possible cure for this unproductive warfare is mutual, voluntary, segregation via a return to federalism. I develop the thought in A Case for Voluntary Segregation. I say 'possible' because I am not sure the federalist route is sufficient. Secession and partition are other options, not to mention the one no sane person could want: full-on hot civil war. We are already beyond cold civil war, what with the Left's violent Stalinist erasure of monuments and memorials (and not just that).

So while Haidt is right that proximity and interaction can promote mutual understanding and mitigate hostility, that is true only up to a point and works only within a common space of shared assumptions, values, and recognized facts. (His examples, by the way, were poorly chosen: Romeo and Juliet were young Italians; the French, German, and British soldiers were Europeans.) Absent the common space, the opposite is true: proximity and interaction are precisely what must be avoided to preserve peace.

The Problem and Three Main Solutions

The problem is how to transcend tribalism. I count three main solutions, the Liberal, the Alt Right, and the Sane (which is of course my view!)

There is first what I take to be Haidt's rather silly liberal solution, namely, that what will bring us together is proximity and interaction. He assumes that if we all come together and get to know each other we will overcome tribalism. This borders on utopian nonsense. It is precisely because of proximity and interaction that many decide to self-segregate. The more I know about certain individuals and groups the less I want to have to do with them. The Marxist thugs of Black Lives Matter, for example. By the way, 'thug' is not code for 'nigger.' 'Thug' means thug. Look it up. The Antifa fascists are another example. The anti-white White Fragility racists. I could go on.

At the other extreme we find the 'alties' and neo-reactionaries. They have a sound insight, namely, that there are unassimilable elements and that they must be kept out. For example, Sharia-supporting Muslims are unassimilable into the U. S. because their values are antithetical to ours, perhaps not all of their values, but enough to make for huge problems.

The success of e pluribus unum depends on the nature of the pluribus. A viable and vibrant One cannot be made out of just any Many. (Cute formulation, eh?) The members of the manifold must be unifiable under some umbrella of common values, assumptions, and recognized facts. One proposition nation cannot be made out of many tribes of immigrants unless the many tribes of immigrants accept OUR values, American values, and our propositions. The tribalism is overcome or at least mitigated by acceptance of a unifying set of American values and ideas.

The alt-rightists, however, do not really offer a solution to the problem of transcending tribalism since their 'solution' is to embrace an opposing tribalism. They are right about the reality of race, as against the foolish notion that race is a social construct, but they push this realism in an ugly and extreme direction when they construe American identity as white identity, where this excludes Jews. American identity is rooted in a set of ideas and values. It must be granted, however, that not all racial and ethnic groups are equally able to assimilate and implement these ideas and values. Immigration policy must favor those that are.

The sane way is the middle way. To liberals we ought to concede that diversity is a value, but at the same time insist that it is a value that has to be kept in check by the opposing value of unity. Muslims who refuse to accept our values must not be allowed to immigrate. They have no right to immigrate, but we have every right to select those who will benefit us. That is just common sense. The good sort of diversity is not enhanced by the presence of terror-prone fanatics. Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country.

What we need, then, to mitigate tribal hostility is not more proximity and interaction, but less; fewer 'conversations' not more; less government, more toleration, voluntary segregation, a return to federalism, a total stoppage of illegal immigration, and a reform of current immigration law.

Will any of this happen? Trump has taken steps in the right direction. Flawed as he is, he is all we have, and best we have who is ready, willing, able, and electable. You know what you have to do come November.

President Trump’s Mount Rushmore Speech

Roger Kimball appreciates its magnificence and writes about it brilliantly:

The president was especially strong in challenging what is perhaps the most obnoxious manifestation of our petulant antinomianism—that species of politically correct intolerance that has come to be called “cancel culture.” In essence, cancel culture is the malignant inversion of liberalism’s defining virtues, openness and tolerance. It is born of historical ignorance and a stunning lack of empathy—an ironic fact, since one of the chief premises of cancel culture is its own supposed superior sensitivity.

In fact, the emotional payload of cancel culture is not more sensitive than its accommodating alternative, just more narcissistic. It operates by proxy, filing claims for redress on behalf of a ghostly population of abstractions: “indigenous peoples,” slaves of yesteryear, and on and on in an endless litany of complaint.

What is not at all abstract, however, are the effects of cancel culture. As the president noted, it is wielded as a weapon, “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.” In a word, cancel culture is “the very definition of totalitarianism” and is “completely alien to our culture and our values.” It should have “absolutely no place in the United States of America.” And here is where his speech took on a steely seriousness. “This attack on our liberty must be stopped,” he said, “and it will be stopped.”

In short, the president has promised to cancel cancel culture. Is that a contradiction, a violation of the spirit of tolerance he has promised to uphold? No.

The enemies of civilization routinely use and abuse its freedoms in order to destroy it. Candid men understand this and act to prevent it. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.”

[. . .]

We know that all of our most pathological cities have been run as Democratic monopolies for decades. Donald Trump had the temerity to point this out. We know that our public schools are increasingly factories of left-wing, anti-American indoctrination. The president had the temerity to point that out as well. The narrative is that Trump is a crude and bumbling ignoramus, but can you imagine Joe Biden or any other Democrat in office today having the moral courage and clarity of mind to say this:

The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities run by liberals, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism and other cultural institutions. Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country—and to believe that the men and women who built it, were not heroes, but villains. The radicals’ view of American History is a web of lies—all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.

The Conservative

A conservative is one who harbors no illusions about human nature. His is an unblinking view into the depths of human depravity, and especially the depravity let loose by those in the grip of utopian, world-transforming schemes.

A Note on Feminism and My Conservatism

Although I am a conservative, I am not a 'throne and altar' conservative. Nor am I the sort of conservative who thinks that everything traditional trumps everything newfangled. (The conservative's presumption in favor of the traditional is defeasible.) And of course it is silly to think that conservatives oppose change; it is just that we don't confuse change with change for the better.

Traditionally, women were wives and mothers whose place was said to be the home. (Either that, or they lived with their parents or entered a nunnery.) Now the traditional wife and mother role is a noble one, and difficult to fill properly, and I have nothing but contempt for the feminazis who denigrate it and denigrate those who instantiate it. May a crapload of obloquy be dumped upon their shrill and febrile pates. But surely women have a right to actualize and employ their talents to the full in whichever fields they are suited to enter, however male-dominated those fields have been hitherto. They must, however, be suited to enter those fields: no differential standards, no gender-norming, no reverse discrimination.

Simone Weil, Edith Stein, and Elizabeth Anscombe are wonderfully good philosophers, and much better than most male philosophers. I know their works well and consider them to be my superiors both intellectually and morally. (And I don't think anyone would accuse me of a lack of self-esteem.) It would have been a loss to all of us had these admirable lights been prevented from developing their talents and publishing their thoughts.

This makes me something of a liberal in an old and defensible sense. But I don't use 'liberal' to describe my views. 'Liberal' has suffered linguistic hijacking and now is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable in sense from 'leftist.' Anyone who reads this site soon learns that one of my self-appointed tasks is to debunk the pernicious buncombe of the Left. As someone who maintains a balanced and reasonable position — does that sound a tad self-serving? — I am open to attack from the PC-whipped leftists and from the reactionary, ueber-traditionalist, 'throne and altar' conservatives. To my amusement, I have been attacked from the latter side as a 'raving liberal.' (I respond in the appropriately appellated Am I a Raving Liberal?)

So much for a brief indication of where I stand with respect to feminism.

Addendum

Having stuck up for the distaff contingent I must now express a certain distaste for their tendency toward tribalism, group-think, and identity-fetishization. Herewith, a congressional depiction thereof. I cannot recall whether this was SOTU 2020 or 2019: