Conservatism – Page 7 – Maverick Philosopher

Justice Thomas: “. . . so politically incorrect that he may not even be black.”

Edward J. Erler, Last Chance to Defeat Political Correctness? Excerpt (exphasis added):

. . . Progressive Liberals have viciously criticized Justice Clarence Thomas for refusing to represent his racial class on the Supreme Court. He sees his duty, instead, as following the rule of law and the Constitution. When the law classifies on the basis of race or attempts to promote racial class interests, he has written many times, it undermines the rule of law by violating the crucial principal that all persons are equal before the law. Progressive Liberals despise Thomas for arguing that “benign” racial classifications to benefit racial classes or groups are morally equivalent to invidious racial classifications designed to harm or disadvantage racial or ethnic groups. Race, an arbitrary, inessential feature of the human persona, has no role to play in the rule of law. Since rights belong to individuals, Thomas correctly insists, they are not conditioned by the racial class an individual happens to occupy.

Justice Thomas is so politically incorrect that he may not even be black. (We “cannot tell every story,” says the Smithsonian Institution about Thomas’s absence from the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.) If race is as much a political fact as a biological one, then the failure or refusal to promote a group’s interests and identity nullifies membership in that group. Conversely, Bill Clinton was acclaimed America’s first black president.

The vicious insanity of contemporary liberals is truly mind-boggling. But that's nothing new. What may be worth pointing out, however, is that the bolded passage, with which I fully agree, is contested not only by leftists but also by alt-rightists and neo-reactionaries.

Both groups, while otherwise at each other's throats, jump into the same bed when it comes to the importance of 'blood.' Both groups favor an identity politics in which race is an essential determinant of one's very identity. I have a post (56 comments) in which I lament the tribal identification of so many blacks and in which I recommend getting beyond tribal identifications. But certain 'alties' or NRs would have none of it: they think that the right response to black tribalism is white tribalism.

In another post I cited the Declaration's "all men are created equal," which elicited from an NR the riposte that it is false! The response displayed a failure to grasp that the famous declaration in the Declaration is not an empirical claim about the properties and powers of human animals whether as individuals or as groups, but a normative claim about persons as rights-possessors.

Some good points are made by some on the Alternative Right. But their response to the insane extremism of the Left is — wait for it — a reaction that is also extreme, though not insane. Trads and the alties share some common ground, so dialogue is possible; but self-enstupidated leftists are beyond the pale of dialogue. They are enemies that have to be defeated, not fellow rational beings with whom it would make sense to have a conversation. One hopes that their defeat can be achieved politically; but extrapolitical means remain 'on the table.'

A lot rides on the concept of person when it comes to differentiating a tenable conservatism from the reactionary particularism of the Alt Right. A separate post will sketch a personalist conservatism.

Why Women are Under-Represented in Philosophy: A Politically Incorrect View

TRIGGER WARNING! Clear, critical, and independent thinking up ahead. All girly-girls, pajama boys, and crybullies out of the room and to their safe spaces and sandboxes. If you play nice, Uncle Bill may serve milk and cookies.

The following is excerpted from a much longer discussion with some alt-rightists/neo-reactionaries. I am not one of them. I am more of a traditional conservative. But the alties and the trads agree in their opposition to the effete and epicene, spineless and supine, go-a-long-to-get-along, yap-and-scribble, do-nothing, milque-toast 'conservatives.'

……………………..

Differences in social role as between the sexes are grounded in hard biological facts. The biological differences between men and women are not 'social constructs.' The male sex hormone testosterone is not a 'social construct' although the words 'hormone' and 'testosterone' and the theory in which which they figure are. That women are better at nurturing than men is grounded in their biological constitution, which lies deeper than the social. This is not to say that all women are good at raising and nurturing children. 'Woman are nurturers' is a generic statement, not a universal statement. It is like the statement, 'Men are taller than women.' It does not mean that every man is taller than every woman.

Does it follow from the obvious biologically-grounded difference between men and women that women should be discouraged from pursuing careers outside the home and entering the professions? Here I begin to diverge from my alt-right interlocutors. They don't like talk of equal rights though I cannot see why a woman should not have the same right to pursue a career in medicine or engineering or mathematics or philosophy as a man if she has the aptitude for it. (But of course there must be no erosion of standards.) How do our alt-rightist/NRs, who do not like talk of equality, protect women from men who would so dominate them as to prevent them from developing their talents? On the other hand, men as a group are very different from women as a group. So we should not expect equal outcomes. It should come as no surprise that women are 'under-represented' in STEM fields, or in philosophy.

Why are women 'under-represented' in philosophy? Because women as a group are not as good at it as men as a group, because women as a group are not as interested in it as men as a group, and because the feminine nature is conciliatory and averse to what they perceive as the aggressive, combative, and hostile aspects of philosophical dialectic. This is surely a large part, if not the whole, of the explanation, especially given the Affirmative Action advantage women have enjoyed over the past half a century.

The hostility often felt by women reflects something about the nature of philosophy, namely, that its very lifeblood is dialectic and argument. Argument can be conducted civilly, often is, and of course ought to be. But it still looks to the female nature as a sort of 'fighting,' a sublimated form of the physical combat that men are wont to engage in, even when dialectic at its best is no such thing. So there is something in the nature of philosophy and something about females that explains their 'under-representation.' Those are sneer quotes, by the way. Anyone with an ounce of philosophical intelligence can see that the word I am sneering at conflates the factual and the normative. Therefore it shouldn't be used without sneer quotes.

You cannot refute my point about women by citing women who like the blood-sport aspect of philosophy. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. Harriet Baber, for example, who is Jewish and exemplifies the Jewish love of dialectic, writes:

I *LIKE* the blood-sport aspect of philosophy. To me, entering my first philosophy class, freshman year (1967) and discovering that you were not only allowed to fight but that the teacher actually encouraged it was liberating. As a girl, I was constantly squeezed and suppressed into being "nice" and non-confrontational. I was under chronic stress holding back, trying to fudge, not to be too clear or direct. But, mirabile dictu: I got into the Profession and through my undergrad, and, oh with a vengeance in grad school at Johns Hopkins, everything I had been pushed throughout my childhood to suppress, and which I failed to suppress adequately to be regarded as "normal," was positively encouraged.

Anecdote. I once roomed with an analytic philosopher at a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute. I recall a remark he made about philosophical discussion: "If you are not willing to become a bit of an asshole about it, you are not taking it seriously." The guy was obnoxious, but he was right. In a serious discussion, things can get a little tense. The feminine nature shies away from contention and dispute.

If you deny that, then you have no knowledge of human nature and no experience of life. Ever wonder why women are 'over-represented' among realtors? It is because they excel men when it comes to conciliation and mediation. I don't mean this as a snarky put-down of the distaff contingent. I mean it as praise. And if females do not take it as praise are they not assuming the superiority of male virtues?

It is a non sequitur to think that if the Xs are 'under-represented' among the Ys, then the Xs must have been the victims of some unjust discrimination. Men are 'under-represented' among massage therapists, but the explanation is obvious and harmless: men like to have their naked bodies rubbed by women in dark rooms, but women feel uncomfortable having their naked bodies rubbed by men in dark rooms. It is not as if there is some sort of sexism, 'institutional' or individual, that keeps men out of massage therapy.

Blacks are 'over-represented' in the NFL and the NBA. Is that because of some racism 'institutional' or individual, that keeps whitey out? Of course not. Blacks are better than whites at football and basketball. Jews are just terrible. Chess is their athletics. Jews dominate in the chess world. Is that because the goyim have been suppressed?

Does my talk of blacks and Jews make me a racist and an anti-Semite ? To a liberal-left dumb-ass, yes. For they are incapable of distinguishing between a statement whose content is race and a racist statement.

As it seems to me, I am treading a via media between the excesses of the neo-reactionaries and the even worse excesses of the leftists. My challenge to the NRs: How can you fail to see the importance of equal treatment of men and women? One of the NRs claimed that the notion of equality of opportunity is vacuous. Why? To require that applicants for a job not be discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, or creed, is not vacuous. It has a definite content. That it could use some spelling out is not to the point. What I mean is this. Some creeds are such that people who hold them must be discriminated against. Suppose you are an orthodox Muslim: you subscribe to Sharia and hold that it takes precedence over the U. S. Constitution. You ought to be discriminated against. You ought not be allowed to immigrate. The U. S. Constitution is not a suicide pact. This is a point that Dr. Ben Carson made a while back in connection with eligibility to become POTUS. But the scumbags of the Left willfully misrepresented him.

For more on this exciting topic, I send you to Rightly Considered where a brief entry by Criticus Ferox has ignited a lively discussion.

Did the United States Defeat the Soviet Union Only to Become Another Soviet Union?

I have posed this question in several forms over the past few years. In his latest, Publius Decius Mus offers an excellent exposition and answer:

Comprehensive Conservative Failure

If I may address professional conservatives directly: It seems to me undeniable that you have already failed. Don’t take it personally. I can rephrase that as “we” if you like, even though I was never much of an operative within Conservatism, Inc. But I was a fellow traveler and supporter, so if you want to lay part of the blame on me, fine.

We failed. We didn’t do what we set out to do. We lost the political and culture wars decisively. Our economic victory turned out to be fruitless: all the gains have accrued to those we nominally “defeated,” as evidenced by the fact that the Democrats are now the party of the super-rich. Our victory in the Cold War also turned to ashes, as we lost our heads pursuing unrealizable foreign ambitions while fighting in ways that preclude the possibility of victory. Not that we know what victory entails or have any idea what to do with it if we achieve it—but that doesn’t matter, because since 1991, we never have. Worse, we were crushed in the war of ideas:

It would not be the first time that a nation, defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived the conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.

You don’t have to be alt-right to see that this is a perfect description of the USSR’s posthumous intellectual victory in the form of “Cultural Marxism.” Climb down from the egghead mountaintops and the defeat becomes even clearer. A principal Soviet export was crude anti-Americanism—grounded in high theory, to be sure, but simplified to be understandable by even the meanest capacities. We “won” the Cold War, but that export nonetheless spread like a virus—so much so that anti-Americanism is now and has been for at least 20 years the civil religion not just of all Third World populations, not just of Western allies, but of American elites and their foot soldiers.

We failed to preserve a true understanding the principles of the Declaration of Independence. We failed to preserve the proper working order of the Constitution. We failed to protect and nurture that virtue in the people necessary to sustain the Constitution. We failed to defend the family from relentless assault. We failed to maintain any semblance of a shared public morality. We allowed—through a combination of active cheering and ineffective opposition—demographic and cultural replacement. We lent a great deal of our talent to serve rapacious interests in the name of “economic freedom.” All the things we were supposed to conserve—the nation, its people, its way of life, its governing structure—we have not conserved.

This is exactly right. It also helps explain the rise of Donald Trump — and why you ought to vote for him despite his manifest negatives. He is our only hope to stop, or at least impede, America's leftward slide into oblivion.

Conservatism, Inc. Wants Trump to Lose

The latest from Publius Decius Mus.

Scholars and Writers for Trump

How could any decent person vote for the obnoxious, self-absorbed, truth-indifferent jackass Donald Trump?

Here are reasons you ought to consider.

Further Questions About the ‘Alternative Right’

Jacques, in a debate in an earlier thread with Bob the Ape (sic!) writes:

[. . .] The mere fact that conservatism, or western civilization more generally, is the product of a specific group does not _imply_ that "it must remain the exclusive property of that group, or that that group is essential for its existence". On the other hand, there is no particular reason to believe that these things are _not_ the exclusive property of western peoples or that white Europeans are _not_ essential to the conservation and functioning of our western civilization. What evidence could anyone have for thinking that western civilization encodes principles or ways of being that are "true for everyone" or, more to the point, feasible for everyone? Obviously a healthy western society can do just fine with small numbers of foreigners, including even Australian Aborigines. But the question is whether our societies can thrive (or even exist) when non-whites, non-westerners, non-Christians are introduced in numbers so huge as to reduce white western Christians to minorities. I can't think of any reason for optimism about this scenario. And there's lots of evidence for the view that western civilization could only have been created and sustained by the specific racial-cultural groups that in fact created and sustained it. Certainly it seems far-fetched to imagine that groups such as the Aborigines have the capacity to produce anything like the civilization of Italy or England or France or Holland. These are groups who have never left the stone age. [. . .]

One claim Jacques seems to be making is that

C1. There is no reason to believe that Western civilization includes principles true for everyone.

Now (C1) strikes me as plainly false. Suppose we mean by a principle a true proposition fundamental to some body of knowledge. Accordingly, the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) is a principle of logic. It is true and it is foundational. This principle, along with all the rest of the principles of logic, is not just true, but necessarily true. So they are true not only for every actual person but for every possible person. Is Jacques a relativist who thinks that the truths of logic vary from tribe to tribe, that LNC is true for whites but not for blacks, for Europeans but not for Australian aborigines? I hope not.

Obviously the same holds for the principles of mathematics and all the propositions derivable from these principles. They are necessarily true for all actual and possible persons.

All of these truths of logical and mathematics are true for everyone, not in the sense that they are accepted or believed by everyone, but in the sense that they are binding on everyone.

The principles of natural science, though presumably not necessarily true, being contingently true, are nonetheless true for all if true for any. Consider the principle of the additivity of velocities at pre-relativistic speeds. If a Zulu on a train fires a gun in the direction of train travel, the velocity of the projectile will be governed by this principle just as it will be if it were an Englshman doing the firing.

Further examples could be given, but the foregoing suffices to refute (C1). Another claim Jacques seems to be making is

C2. There is no reason to believe that the principles included in Western civilization are not the exclusive property of Western peoples.

Jacques is suggesting that the these principles are the exclusive property of Western peoples. The suggestion is absurd. No one has proprietary rights in truth. Truths cannot be owned. Pythagoras discovered the theorem of Pythagoras, but he did not thereby come to own it. If a German or an African uses the theorem to calculate the length of the hypotenuse on a right triangle is he violating Pythagoras' property rights, or those of his descendants?

Had Pythagoras invented the theorem bearing his name, then perhaps one could say that he owned it. But he didn't invent it; he discovered it. To latch onto a truth is to latch onto something absolute: the truth of a proposition is not subject to the whim of arbitrary creativity. A truth of mathematics is not like an advertising logo or a song. A song can be copyrighted, but not a truth.

Suppose I write a post in which I state some well-known truths in my own classy way. Impressed by my inimitable style, you decide to plagiarize my post. All you succeed in doing is plagiarizing my classy, or perhaps quirky, formulations: you cannot plagiarize the truths the formulations express. Plagiarism is literary theft. You can steal my formulations by copying without quoting and attributing the sentences I have constructed, but you cannot steal the truths, if any, that I have expressed via those formulations. I own the formulations, but not the truths they express. Truth is too noble a thing to be owned by the likes of me — or you. And what one cannot steal, one cannot own. Or to put the point with precision: if x cannot be stolen, then there cannot be any y such that y owns x. (Please run that proposition through your counterexample detector.)

The Egyptians measured land and so were involved in geo-metry, but it was the ancient Greeks, Euclid and the boys, who made of geometry an axiomatic deductive science. Those Greek geniuses discovered axiomatics. Did they own it? Is an Italian or a German who axiomatizes set theory guilty of theft, or 'cultural appropriation'?

And now we notice something very interesting. These alt-rightists are the mirror image of crazy leftists. This is no surprise inasmuch as they are reactionaries. He who reacts is defined by that against which he reacts. He has decided to dance with the pig and get dirty instead of eschewing the dance altogether. Thus to the identity politics of the Left, they oppose an identity politics of the Right, when what they ought to be doing is getting beyond identity politics altogether.

And if they maintain that the cultural goods we have in the West (logic, philosophy, science, law, engineering, architecture, music, art, Judeo-Christian ethics) are owned by Western peoples, then they will have to endorse some notion of illicit 'cultural appropriation' when non-Western peoples make use of them. But notice: if it is wrong for the Koreans, say, to appropriate the engineering know-how of Germans and Americans in their auto manufacturing and elsewhere, then why wasn't it wrong for the French and Italian mathematicians to 'culturally appropriate' the fruits of Greek mathematics?

The point here is that there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as Greek mathematics; there is mathematics and the Greeks were uncommonly gifted at getting at its truths. Do you alt-rightists think that there is Jewish physics and Aryan physics? Physics is physics. Race, ethnicity, class, and 'gender' are irrelevant when it comes to the contents of physics.

Are men as a group better than women as a group when it comes to contributing to math and phsyics? Yes. But it doesn't follow that there is male math and female math.

One of the alt-right fallacies, then, is to think that Western culture is somehow tied necessarily to Western peoples either by being true or normatively binding only for Western peoples, or by being owned by Western peoples. The fact that Western peoples originated this culture is irrelevant. What is Western in origin, and thus in this sense particular, is yet universal in validity.

More defensible than (C1) and (C2) is

C3. There is little or no reason to think that Western civilization includes ways of comportment that are feasible for everyone.

This is a large topic. I agree that our recent foreign policy has been irresponsibly interventionist.

But consider that the barbarian bastards from the North, the Goths and Visigoths and others who sacked Rome more than once and laid waste to the civilization of the Mediteranean — didn't those Teutonic and other bad asses end up getting civilized by the great Graeco-Roman, Judeo-Christian culture to the extent that, in the fullness of time, they could produce a Goethe and a Kant and a Beethoven?

I am not opposed to everything Jacques says above. I agree with, or at least find very plausible, these further claims:

C4. There is good reason to think that white Europeans are essential to the preservation of our Western civilization.

C5. Our civilization is at risk if Western Christians become a minority.

C6. "Western civilization could only have been created and sustained by the specific racial-cultural groups that in fact created and sustained it."

More on the Alternative Right

What exactly is the alternative right (alt-right), and how does it differ from other views on the right?

Yesterday I argued that John Derbyshire's definition is useless because too broad. Jacques by e-mail contributes the following:

If the alt-right is simply the (or a) right-wing alternative to the mainstream or dominant kind of conservatism, you count as alt-right if and only if you reject at least some of the central ideas of the mainstream dominant kind of conservatism and your general orientation is right-wing. The definition does imply that the alt-right differs from some other forms of conservatism or rightism, and we can specify these kinds of differences by specifying the central tenets of mainstream conservatism. You might well be alt-right under this definition.

For example, it's a tenet of mainstream conservatism that there are no important natural racial differences; if you disagree, you're in the alt-right. You might not think so, because you don't agree with tribalists and anti-semites who also oppose mainstream conservatism for different reasons, and with different right-wing agendas. But my definition is appropriately broad and vague: the alt-right is a big tent, since there are so many things wrong with mainstream conservatism that otherwise right-wing people can object to for many different and incompatible reasons. This is how the term is being used, anyway. Lots of people who call themselves 'alt-right' and get called 'alt-right' by others are not anti-semites, for example; some of them are even (non-anti-semitic) Jews. You can be 'alt-right' under my definition even though you disagree with lots of others in the 'alt-right' about lots of important things. Just like a Calvinist and an Anglican can both be Protestants. What do you think?

I take Jacques to be saying that if I disagree with even one tenet of mainstream conservatism, then that makes me a 'big tent' alt-rightist. He brings up the question whether there are important natural racial differences, and maintains that it is a "tenet of mainstream conservatism" that there are none. I think this is correct if we take the mainstream conservative to be maintaining, not that there are no natural (as opposed to socially constructed) racial differences, but that such differences are not important. The idea is that 'blood' does not, or rather ought not matter, when it comes to questions of public policy. Consider immigration policy. Should U. S. immigration policy favor Englishmen over Zulus? If race doesn't matter, why should Englishmen be preferred? If race doesn't matter, both groups should assimilate just as well and be beneficial to the host population in the same measure.

So one question concerns what a mainstream conservative is:

Q1. Do mainstream conservatives hold that there are natural racial differences but that they don't matter, or that that there are no such natural differences to matter?

The answer depends on who best represents mainstream conservatism. What do you say, Jacques?

Suppose the mainstream conservative holds that there are natural racial differences, but that they don't matter. If I hold that they do matter, then I am not a mainstream conservative, and my position is some sort of alternative to mainstream conservatism. But I don't think that this difference alone would justify calling me an alt-rightist since 'alt-right' picks out a rather more specific constellation of theses.

So What is Alt-Right Anyway?

John Derbyshire gives the following answer (HT: Malcolm Pollack):

So what, in my opinion, makes the Alt-Right a distinct thing — not by any means a party, a faction, or a movement, but a collection of souls with something in common?

Here's my answer: We don't like flagrant nonsense in the discussion of human affairs. We don't like being lied to. We especially don't like being lied to by credentialed academics like Jerry Coyne.

The lies are so flagrant, so outrageously obvious, you'd have to laugh at them, if not for the fact that laughing at them is close to being a criminal offense. "There is no such thing as race!" What a preposterous thing to say! What a multiply preposterous thing for an academic in the human sciences to say. Yet look! — they say it!

As Ann Coulter has quipped: It's like saying "there are no such things as mountains." When, after all, is a mountain just a hill? Similarly with "there are no such things as colors," since, after all, no-one can tell you how many colors there are, or the precise wavelength at which turquoise is more blue-ish than green-ish. How many neighborhoods are there in New York City? Beats me; so are there no such things as neighborhoods? This is infantile.

Much more to the point, it's like saying "there are no such things as families." When do you stop being a member of my family? Fourth cousin? Ninth cousin by marriage? So are there no such things as families?

But of course there are such things as families. And that's all races are: big old extended families of mostly-common deep ancestry.

This acquiescence in obvious lies — even by academics, who should be the guardians of truth — is characteristic of totalitarian societies. The money quote here is from Tony Daniels, a/k/a "Theodore Dalrymple." Quote:

>>In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is … in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.<<

Tony himself, I should say, lines up with Goodwhites in the Cold Civil War, not with us Badwhites of the Alt-Right. I very seriously doubt he'd consider himself a member of the Alt-Right. His insight there, however, is very penetrating, and could be inscribed on an Alt-Right banner, if we ever get around to brandishing banners.

And so it is with the NYU Student Council ninnies and the Student Diversity Initiative bedwetters, not one of whom is fit to shine James Watson's shoes.

They don't want to shine his shoes. They don't want to persuade or convince him. They want to humiliate him. They, midgets and mites, want to humiliate a giant, one of the world's greatest living scientists. And the cringing administrators at New York University want to help them!

That's what the Alt-Right is about; that's what unites us; disgust with, and resistance to, these liars and weasels and commissars.

While I agree with everything Derbyshire says above, though not with everything he says, the above is useless as a definition of Alt-Right. Suppose I 'define' an airplane as a vehicle. This fails as a definition, not because it is false, but because it specifies only a necessary condition for a thing's being an airplane. Every airplane is a vehicle, but not every vehicle is an airplane. An adequate definition lays down individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the application of a concept. An adequate definition of 'airplane' must list those features that make airplanes different from other vehicles.

Similarly, an adequate definition of 'alternative Right' must list those features that make alt-rightists different from other sorts of conservatives. On Derb's definition, I count as alt-right, when I am no such thing.

I hate leftist liars and crapweasels. I have contempt for Jerry Coyne, or rather his attitudes and views. (See here.) I hold that the silencing of James Watson is an outrage and a betrayal of the values and purposes of the university. I find absurd the notion that race is a social construct. No doubt racial theories are social constructs, but the notion that race and racial differences are is preposterous. I agree with Dalrymple as quoted above. And I share Derb's "disgust with, and resistance to, these liars and weasels and commissars."

So I have some serious conservative 'cred' in the sense of both credentials and credibility, not to mention the civil courage to speak the truth as I sincerely see it under my real name publicly as I have been doing since 2004.

But none of these attitudes or commitments or virtues make me alt-right.

I am not exactly sure what 'alt-right' refers to, and apparently those who fly this flag don't either, as witness Derbyshire above, but I get the impression that the position includes some very specific theses that differentiate it from other types of conservatism. I hope to go into this in more detail later, but for now I'll mention the following: white tribalism, anti-semitism, rejection of classically liberal notions such as the value of toleration, rejection of the formal (as opposed to empirical) equality of persons and with it key elements in the documents of the American founding as well as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and a rejection of the normative universality of truth and value.

Immigration, Nationalism, and Xenophobia

R. R. Reno talks sense over at First Things:

Trump insists that anyone residing in the United States illegally is subject to deportation. Many commentators regard such comments as inflammatory. I am baffled by their outrage. What, exactly, is meant by “illegal” if the lawbreaker is immune from consequences?

I am baffled too. No reasonable person could consider it inflammatory or hateful to enforce just and reasonable laws. Nor could any reasonable person refer to Trump's Phoenix immigration speech as 'hateful,' yet many liberal commentators did exactly that.

On the O'Reilly show recently, a seemingly intelligent liberal referred to a wall such as the one Trump proposes as "hateful." This illustrates what I call the topical insanity of liberals. On some topics they suffer cognitive melt-down. Suppose our liberal pal has security doors installed on his house to protect his wife and children. Would he consider that 'hateful'? Presumably not. But then why can't he see that drug trafficking, human trafficking, and the invasion by criminals and terrorists is something that cannot be tolerated? Why can't he see that the rule of law must be upheld even in the case of the majority of illegal immigrants who simply seek a better life? Why can't he appreciate how precious the rule of law is, and how important a role it plays in making ours a great and prosperous country that half the world wants to come to? What blinds him to the necessity of disease control via border control? What we have here on the part of liberals is either topical insanity or willful stupidity which, because willful, ought to be morally condemned.

[. . .]

The very notion of limiting immigration—building a wall—gets Trump described as “anti-immigrant.” But isn’t job number one for our political leaders to protect the interests of Americans, which surely entails restricting the number of people who can immigrate?

Of course. Note also the verbal obfuscation that contemporary liberals routinely engage in by eliding the obvious distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. Trump is not anti-immigrant, he is anti-illegal-immigrant, as we all should be.

[. . .]

Something strange is going on here, something I don’t fully understand.

It may be that Reno does not understand, or want to understand, how destructive and vicious leftists are. I suppose most of us would like to believe that most of our fellow citizens are basically decent people, morally speaking. But the evidence is against it in the case of leftists. Morally decent people, for example, don't slander their opponents. But leftists (and this includes contemporary liberals) routinely slander and disrespect their opponents in lieu of engaging their point of view. For example, if you point out the clear and present danger of radical Islam, they say or imply that you are in the grip of a phobia. Now a phobia is an irrational fear, whereas concern about the threat of radical Islam is eminently rational.

A decent person does not impugn the rationality of his interlocutor by dismissing his arguments unexamined and ascribing to him groundless fears and phobias. A decent person does not behave as Hillary Clinton recently did when she dumped 50% of Trump supporters into a "basket of deplorables."

Liberals like Bill and Hillary Clinton regularly smear their opponents and then issue hypocritical calls for 'civility.' What passes for argument among liberals is the hurling of SIXHRB epithets: sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, bigoted. (I borrow the acronym from Dennis Prager) For example, if you oppose illegal immigration then you are a xenophobe; if you carefully argue against Obamacare then you a racist; if you give reasons why marriage is between a man a woman you are dismissed as a bigot. If you oppose that slaughter of innocent human beings which is abortion you are waging war against women and interfering with their 'health' and 'reproductive rights.' If you point out the very real threat of radical Islam, then you are dismissed as an 'Islamophobe' with a mental illness.

How is it possible to resist the conclusion that Hillary and her ilk are moral scum?

[. . .]

A recent essay in Foreign Affairs by Kishore Mahbubani and Lawrence Summers, “The Fusion of Civilizations: The Case for Global Optimism,” outlines a vision for a more globalized, peaceful, and prosperous future—in which nations become less significant. Today’s emphasis on multiculturalism and “diversity” participates in this vision of the future, one in which differences are overcome and borders are irrelevant. It’s species of utopianism, to be sure, but it has a powerful grip on the moral imagination of the West.

In this view, national interest is an impediment to progress. Concerns about identity are, by definition, forms of ethnocentrism bordering on xenophobia. This is why the upsurge of populist concern about immigration . . . are so vigorously denounced by mainstream politicians, journalists, and political commentators.

The above is not only utopian, but incoherent. On the one hand we are told that "diversity" promotes the overcoming of differences and the making irrelevant of borders. But what is "diversity" if not a celebration of differences? An emphasis on "diversity" leads to identity politics which is supposedly what the above authors oppose. There can be no comity without commonality.

Liberals falsely imagine that we are all the same and that we all have the same values. That is manifestly not the case. Most Muslims do not share our Enlightenment values. This is why there can be peace with them only if they stay in their own lands. You may not like borders, but they reflect unbridgeable differences and make peaceful coexistence possible. The conservative, unlike the liberal, has a reality-based, sober understanding of how different and how limited we human beings are.

Why Conservatives Should Vote for Trump, II

James Cambell, a professor of political science, writes,

Thinking Republicans should NOT SUPPORT Donald Trump, but they should reluctantly VOTE for him. On what matters most, and that is public policy, Trump is not nearly as bad as Clinton. Shout that Donald Trump is an idiot from the roof tops and into any microphone thrown in front of you–but then declare a vote for him.

The distinction between supporting and voting for a candidate is not a gimmick. There is a real difference. Support implies a positive assessment. A vote is a choice.

This is close to the view I have been maintaining over a series of posts. But I don't think Campbell gets it exactly right. Here is the way I see it.

Hillary must be stopped. She is utterly corrupt as a person, as is becoming increasingly evident with every passing day, and she is in bad health to boot. And her foreign and domestic policies are disastrous. I cannot in good conscience abstain thereby aiding her. So I must vote for Trump. In doing so, I don't merely mark a ballot; I 'make a statement' and 'issue a recommendation.' The 'statement' is not that Trump is a good candidate, but that he is better than Hillary, all things considered. The 'recommendation' is that you ought to do as I do if you are a conservative.

As I have already argued ad nauseam, politics is almost always about better and worse, not about Good and Bad. Vide Political Action and the Principle of le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

So in one sense of 'support,' I do not support Trump by voting for him: I do not unreservedly endorse him. I agree with Campbell that there is a real distinction we need to make. The words in which we couch the distinction don't matter. You don't like 'support'? Fine. Wise men do not quibble over words. The distinction can be put like this: to vote for a candidate is not unreservedly to endorse said candidate.

A vote is of course a choice, asCampbell says, but it is not merely a choice inasmuch as it has a certain 'content' as I have already indicated. Marking my ballot for Trump, I express my belief that he is better than his opponent, and not merely better for me, but for the country. I am also tacitly recommending that others do the same.

Trump's recent speeches have been outstanding. The Phoenix immigration speech was just perfect, exactly what a conservative ought to maintain (and not all that different from what Bill Clinton maintained in '95!). So it not as if "Trump is not nearly as bad as Clinton" on policy. He is vastly superior. The trouble with Trump is his self-absorbed and mercurial character. But as events are showing, it is becoming less and less clear that Trump is as bad as Hillary character-wise. He is shaping up, and she is being exposed for what she is.

Why a Conservative Should Vote for Trump

Dennis Prager makes the case. He concludes (emphasis added):

Therefore, with another four years of Democrat-left rule — meaning a nearly permanent left-wing Supreme Court and left-wing-controlled lower courts; the further erosion of federalism; an exponential growth in the power of the federal government; further leftist control of education; and the de-Americanization of America in part by effectively eliminating its borders, in part by substituting multiculturalism for American identity and in part by giving millions of illegal immigrants citizenship — America will not be America.

We conservatives who will vote for Trump understand that he is the only vehicle we have to prevent this. We recognize that though there are some fine individuals who hold left-wing views, leftism is a terminal cancer in the American bloodstream and soul. So our first and greatest principle is to destroy this cancer before it destroys us. We therefore see voting for Donald Trump as political chemotherapy needed to prevent our demise.

How might a NeverTrump conservative counter this line of argument?

A. One might argue that 4-8 years of Hillary & Co. won't make the country much worse than it is now and won't appreciably strengthen the leftist grip on our institutions.

B. One might argue that 4-8 years of Hillary & Co. will make the country worse, but that all the damage can be undone by a succeeding Republican administration.

C. One might argue that Trump is just too dangerous and mercurial to be trusted with the presidency. He might, for example, start a nuclear war. Better red than dead!

D. One might argue that Trump and Hillary are both evil and that one must never vote for an evil candidate. To vote for either would be like voting for Caligula or Nero, or for Stalin or Hitler.

E. One might argue that (i) Trump cannot be trusted to do anything he promises to do, so that policy-wise there will be no real difference between a Trump and a Hillary administration, and that (ii) Trump is character-wise worse than Clinton. Therefore one ought to either vote for Hillary or abstain. Someone who takes this line might urge that the much-touted Great Wall of Trump is just so much hot air: there never will be any such wall. Trump will back off from that in the way he has backed off (quite reasonably!) from talk of the deportation of the supposed 11 million illegal aliens in our midst. NeverTrumper David French a while back referred to Trump's wall as a "pipe dream."

At the moment I can't think of any other counterarguments. The only one that has any merit is (E). But it too is pretty lame. My response is that while we KNOW what Hillary will do, and that what she will do will be disastrous, there is some chance that Trump will accomplish some of what he proposes. There is zero chance that Hillary will do anything good for the country by conservative lights, while there is, say, a 30% chance that Trump will do 30% of what he proposes. So I reject (i). I also reject (ii). Both candidates are awful, but I don't see how you could say that Trump is morally worse than Hillary.

Trump is all we've got. Conservatives must vote for him. (I warmly recommend that liberals vote for Jill Stein.)

Crime as Politics

'Contemporary Liberals'

The Decline of the Culture of Free Discussion and Debate

The Left's Biggest Lie?

Civil Courage

The Democrats Have Moved Farther to the Left than the Republicans to the Right

Leftists Call Angel Moms a Hate Group

Trump and the Conservative Cause

A very rich and perceptive essay by Charles Kesler.

The following passage illustrates what Keith Burgess-Jackson calls 'academentia':

It’s no coincidence that the two loudest, most consequential socio-political forces in America right now are Political Correctness and Donald Trump. One is at home on college campuses, the other in the world of working people. Yet they are already beginning to collide. At Emory University recently, someone scrawled “Trump 2016” in chalk on steps and sidewalks around the campus. About 50 students swiftly assembled to protest the outrage, shouting, “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” Aghast at “the chalkings,” the university president complied.

At Scripps College, just a few weeks ago, a Mexican-American student awoke to find “#trump2016” written on the whiteboard on her door. The student body president, in a mass email, quickly condemned the “racist incident” and denounced Trump’s hashtag as a symbol of violence and a “testament that racism continues to be an undeniable problem and alarming threat on our campuses.” The student body’s response, apparently, was underwhelming. Shortly the dean of students weighed in with an email of her own, upbraiding students who thought the student body president’s email had been, oh, an overreaction. The dean noted that although Scripps of course respects its students’ First Amendment rights, in this case the “circumstances here are unique.” Note to dean: the circumstances are always unique.

I say: death to political correctness. We need more free speech, and more denunciations of liberal-left evil-doers, not only the termites undermining our institutions, but also the thugs on the streets. Not to mention more of that which backs up free speech.

Will the ‘True Conservative’ Please Stand Up?

Every morning I find a new batch of anti-Trump articles by so-called conservatives. These anti-Trumpsters clearly see the man's many negatives, but most of them refuse to come clean on the question: "Do you advocate not voting for Trump thereby aiding and abetting a Clinton victory? Yes or no?"

Add to the list Michael Gerson who ends his 17 May Conservatives' Deal with the Devil as follows:

Conservatives latched on to the GOP as an instrument to express their ideals. Now loyalty to party is causing many to abandon their ideals. Conservatism is not misogyny. Conservatism is not nativism and protectionism. Conservatism is not religious bigotry and conspiracy theories. Conservatism is not anti-intellectual and anti-science. For the sake of partisanship — for a mess of pottage — some conservatives are surrendering their identity.

Here is a little fair and balanced commentary on Gerson's outburst.

True, conservatism is not misogyny. And it is true that Trump has stupidly made misogynistic statements. By alienating the distaff half of the electorate, it is is a good bet that the foolish man has sealed his fate. We shall see. But whether he is fairly described as a misogynist is not clear given his appointment of women to high positions in his organization.

'Nativism' and 'protectionism,' like 'isolationism' are not neutral words. They are pejoratives. Suppose someone sees the failures and false assumptions of U. S. foreign policy and appreciates that some U. S. interventions make things worse instead of better. If you wanted to describe such a person fairly and neutrally you would call him a non-interventionist, not an isolationist. There are paleo-cons and neo-cons. A paleo-conservative non-interventionism, which need not exclude judicious and well-thought-out interventions, has arguably a better claim on the honorific 'conservative' than neo-conservative interventionism.

The same goes for 'protectionist' and 'nativist.' They are pejoratives. People interested in a serious discussion ought to use neutral terminology.

Suppose you are neither a libertarian nor a leftist. You appreciate that the U. S. is neither a shopping mall nor a job market. It is a nation with a culture, a long tradition, and a commitment to a set of values including liberty, self-reliance, self-determination, and constitutionally-based limited government. You appreciate that a nation has a right to preserve and protect its culture and resist its dilution let alone its "fundamental transformation." Having this right, a nation has the right to protect itself from illegal immigration and a right to select those groups which it will allow to immigrate. A nation has no obligation to allow immigration at all, let alone immigration of groups of people whose values are antithetical to the nation's values. True, immigration can enrich a nation if the immigrants are willing to assimilate and embrace the values and traditions of the host country. Ask yourself: are sharia-supporting Muslims immigrants of this kind? The answer is obviously in the negative.

There is no net benefit to Muslim immigation. Of course there are are wonderful individual Muslims. See my high praise for Zuhdi Jasser. But policies cannot cater to individuals.

'Nativism,' like 'racism,' is a term used by leftists and other destructive types to slander their opponents and pre-empt rational debate.

When people like Gerson employ the 'nativism' epithet they play the same filthy game as leftists. So how conservative are people like him? A conservative is not a leftist. Nor is a conservative a libertarian.

Is it "religious bigotry" to insist that subversive, sharia-supporting Muslims with no intention of assimilating and every intention of "fundamentally transforming America" not be allowed to immigrate? Of course not. It is just common sense.

So who is the real conservative here?

Conservatives in Academia

Virginia Postrel:

A few days after the 2004 election, Gabriel Rossman went for a job interview with the UCLA sociology department. Rossman was finishing a doctorate at Princeton, and his research on how ownership affects mass-media content was a good fit for a school in the entertainment capital. He got the job as an assistant professor.

But he also got a warning about academic culture. At a dinner following his day on campus, two of his future colleagues started ranting about George W. Bush’s re-election. One called it “a referendum against the Enlightenment.” Rossman smiled and nodded, never letting on that he’d cast his ballot for Bush.

Rossman’s story appears anonymously in "Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University," just published by Oxford University Press. He agreed to break cover because, he said, “I have tenure.” In an interview, he noted that staying in the intellectual closet doesn’t require actively lying, merely letting colleagues assume that everyone shares the same political views.

Can Evil be Eradicated?

To be precise, my question is this:

Is there one root of all evil such that this root is (i) empirically identifiable, and (ii) eliminable by human effort alone? Can we humans locate and remove the one source of all evil?

My claim is that an affirmative answer is at once both false and extremely dangerous. ‘Root’ in Latin is radix, whence ‘eradicate,’ to uproot, and ‘radical.’ A radical is one who goes to the root of the matter. But some of our dear radicals make the mistake of thinking that there is one empirically identifiable root of all evils, one root the eradication of which will solve all our problems. Thinking that there is such a root, they are liable to ignore the real root, the one that cannot be empirically identified, and cannot be eradicated, the one that is operative in them. Here are my theses:

1. There is no one root of all evil that is empirically identifiable or isolable in experience. Thus one cannot locate the root of all evil in the Jews, or in the bourgeoisie, or in capitalism, or in corporations, or in ‘globalization,’ or in the infidel, or in the ‘Zionist entity’ or in 'racism,' or in religion, or in 'white privilege.' I’ll even concede that it cannot be located in liberals and socialists and hate-America leftists.

2. The attempt to eradicate evil by eliminating some empirically identifiable entity or group of people must fail given the truth of (1), and must lead to greater evil since genocide, forced collectivization, jihad, suicide bombing of innocents, etc. violate moral laws. Nazis, Commies and Islamists become ever more evil in their attempt to locate and eradicate evil.

3. There is a root of all moral evil, namely, the human misuse of free will. Not free will itself, of course; the misuse thereof. We misuse our free will when we fail to subordinate its use to transcendent standards.

4. Free will, grounded as it is in our spiritual being, is not empirically identifiable: it cannot show up as an object among objects. This is a reason why materialists deny it. And this is why (3) does not contradict (1). Since moral evil cannot exist without free will, to deny free will is to deny moral evil.

5. Free will is not subject to our freedom. I am not free to become unfree. I cannot freely decide to become a deterministic system, though there are times when I would definitely like to! I am ‘condemned to be free’ to use a Sartrean phrase. Being part of our nature, free will cannot be eradicated without eradicating us. It follows (though the inference needs more defense than I can give it here) that the root of all moral evil – the human misuse of free will – cannot be uprooted. Not even God can uproot it. For if God eliminated the human misuse of free will, he would thereby eliminate human free will itself, and us with it. This is because he could not prevent us from freely doing evil (in thought, word, or deed) without removing free will from us, which is the main respect in which we are god-like, imago dei.

6. The upshot is that we must learn to live with evil and not try to eliminate it. Of course, we must do what we can to limit the spread of evil in the world. We do well to start with ourselves by opposing our own evil thoughts and desires, words and actions. After we have made some headway with this, we can then worry about others and ‘society.’ What we cannot do, and must not try to do, is to locate evil outside ourselves so as to eradicate it. Its root, the human misuse of free will, cannot be eradicated, and we are all more or less evil. Although people are not equally good or evil, we all possess elements of both.

7. We cannot by our own efforts eliminate the evil that is in us. And we cannot eliminate the evil that is outside us and is outside us because it was first in us. (Evil thoughts and words are the seeds of evil deeds.) Homo homini lupus is never so true as when man tries to redeem himself. The Communists murdered 100 million in the 20th century in an attempt to eliminate the evils of class conflict, war, and economic catastrophe. They broke a lot of eggs for a nonexistent omelet. There is either no redeemer or the redeemer is divine. Nietzsche’s “Will is the great redeemer” is nonsense. But that’s a topic for another occasion.

8. 'Progressives' as they like to call themselves mistakenly think, as John Gray points out, that "evil can be vanquished." They are meliorists who, if they believe in evil at all, believe that it "is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved."

That is a great illusion, a murderous illusion.

"Man is neither an angel nor a beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer tr., p. 242)