I've been saying it for years: A 'LIBERAL' IS ONE WHO HAS NEVER MET A STANDARD HE DIDN'T WANT TO ERODE. I suppose it is all in pursuit of that beautiful thing they call 'equity,' that is, equality of result or outcome. Mathematics is called 'racist' because blacks as a group are not good at it compared to Asians, Jews, and whites. Could the same motive be operative in this case?
Category: Decline of the West
W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”
Gerontocracy, Paedocracy, Xenocracy
Are the first two, in cahoots, pushing us toward the third? Run with it, bloggers!
Here, Thomas Sowell does a number on our favorite paedocrat.
High Culture under the Joey B Administration
The Joshua Hochschild Affair
The Decline of the West proceeds apace as leftists infiltrate all of our institutions. The universities, for example, have devolved into leftist seminaries in which groupthink reigns and the traditional purposes of the university have been forgotten. Large numbers of contemporary collegians seem to have no appreciation of the classical values of open inquiry and free speech. I now hand off to Jonathan Turley:
There is a campaign to fire Professor Joshua Hochschild who teaches philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University. We have seen a number of these campaigns against faculty but the effort against Hochschild is striking because he is denounced for attending the protest in Washington on January 6th even though he is not accused of participating in the riot at the Capitol. The effort is part of a building narrative that anyone protesting the election was an insurrectionist even though the vast majority was peaceful and did not enter the Capitol. Hochschild denounced the riot in a column “Once Upon a Presidency” for the The American Mind. However, his acknowledgment of being present at the protest was enough to launch an effort to fire him. The only thing missing is a claim that he is “corrupting the youth” with his dissenting views. In this case, it is not hemlock but discharge that is being sought for the teacher.
Read Hochschild's piece at The American Mind and decide for yourself whether his words are the ravings of an 'insurrectionist.'
As the World Grows Dark
The darkening of the world has this advantage: it inspires us to seek for light where it is more likely to be found.
Hospitals and Torture Chambers
We are strangely, insanely, conflicted. We care lovingly, or at least dutifully, for the sick, the injured, and the dying. But we also torture people to death in ways that inspire envy in demons. The belief that humans are inherently good is one of the deepest of human delusions. Paradoxically, those who succumb to it excel in the theory and practice of hell, to borrow a title from Eugen Kogon's unforgettable book.
Limited government and checks and balances across the board help keep power dispersed, the power that goes to the head and makes of the half-way decent moral monsters. Prospects for limited government, however, are themselves limited in a high-tech surveillance society in which soft totalitarianism can be expected to give way to the good old-fashioned hard variety.
The Political Equivalent of Divorce?
You've heard me say that we need to find the political equivalent of divorce if we are to reduce the animosity that threatens to destroy us as a nation. But the marital analogy limps badly. Although I don't think much of Damon Linker, he talks sense here:
Part of me gravitates to a fantasy of divorce. Maybe both sides would be happier if we just separated and went our separate ways, like unhappy spouses who call it quits after a few-too-many wounding arguments and rounds of couples therapy.
But of course that's delusional. A nation isn't like a marriage — certainly not companionate marriage based on individual choice. But it's not even a more traditional arranged marriage where there is a period of youthful independence before the union is announced and formalized. Unless you're an immigrant, your country is where you find ourselves at birth. It's a given — like a family in which you are born and raised before you even come to complete self-awareness. It shapes your outlook on the world in more ways than you can ever fully grasp.
Families can break up, tear themselves asunder, but it usually isn't pretty. Neither are divorces. But at least a divorce takes places within a legal and moral frame that persists outside the marriage. Certain rules abide and apply to both parties, guiding the division of marital assets and looking out for the welfare of any children, with an impartial judge overseeing and enforcing it all. There is no such external structure when an extended family breaks apart into feuding factions.
Linker ends on this encouraging note:
Do we hate each other? And if we do, what are our viable options as a polity? I don't know how to answer those questions.
Me neither. There are options, of course, but I don't see any as particularly viable. Perhaps a long hot civil war that spills an ocean of blood might bring leftists to their senses, but the prospect of a couple of decades of extreme civil disorder is not an appetizing one.
There Have Always Been Crises
My wife just now handed me a book from her library, one that I had read in the '70s, but had forgotten, The Pursuit of Loneliness by Philip Slater. It was published in 1970 by the Beacon Press (Boston). It bears the subtitle, "American Culture at the Breaking Point."
Somehow we didn't break: here we are schlepfussing along 50 years later. Things are arguably worse now, but it's a huge topic and not my present one. I just want to say that there have always been crises. So buck up and fight on. Philosophy is a great consolation. We lesser lights ought to look up to the luminaries, and their example. Boethius wrote in prison, Nicolai Hartmann in Berlin in 1945 in the midst of the Allied assault.
In February 1945, the university building in which Hartmann used to lecture was destroyed in an aerial bombing and all his classes were suspended. He was then living in Berlin, which had been transformed into a real-life inferno. Without teaching obligations, Hartmann decided to write his aesthetics book, completing the first draft in the period from March to September 1945. Perhaps the most fascinating book in his entire opus [corpus], there is no despair in it over war and violence, maimed bodies, and destroyed buildings. As a boy he learned to measure the movement of the stars against the objects on earth, and now he measured the events of the day against the eternal beauty of Bach's music, the portraits of Rembrandt, the dramas of Shakespeare, and the novels of Dostoevsky. He delivers a remarkable message:wherever we are and whatever events pull us into their currents, we should not lose sight [of] and cease to strive toward the highest and most sublime. (Predrag Cicovacki, The Analysis of Wonder: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann, Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 159.)
La Decadenza
Dr. Vito Caiati writes:
Relevant to your post “The ‘Catholic’ ‘Universities’ Have Become Jokes: Fordham,” I call your attention to an interview by Marco Tossati of Archbishop Viganò, defender of the faith, on the evil that permeates the Bergoglian regime and the much of the Church, the “three elements” of which the latter characterizes as “heresy, sodomy, and corruption –[which] are so recurrent that they are almost a trademark of the deep state and of the deep church.”
As the interview, The Pope and the Sodomites, makes clear, here, we are generally dealing not with what you term “the unwitting agents of the demonic” but rather with fully conscious ones, who are bringing one of the greatest institutions and religious traditions of our civilization to ruin. The cycle of decay in the Church and in Western society at large is rapidly accelerating . The moral horrors and violence that we are now witnessing in society, culture, and politics, orchestrated by the Left, were largely unimaginable only a few years ago. This is not going to end well. “Saint Michael, the Archangel, defend us in battle against the wickedness and snares of the devil….”
I too do not see how this can end well. The Left is now drawing from a cesspool of nihilism that is reasonably viewed as literally demonic. The Unholy Spirit of he who "always negates" presides over them. But I still maintain that most of the agents of destruction "know not what they do": they are foolish, pampered youth, products of an affluent and permissive society, brought up with no moral training by materialistic parents . . . in short, useful idiots, or as I say, useless idiots.
Protesters?
BLM and Antifa members are 'protesters' in the same sense in which Rodney King was a 'motorist,' Trayvon Martin was 'a child on the way to the candy store,' Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri was an 'unarmed teenager,' and Adolf Hitler was a 'statesman.'
What Black Lives Matter and Antifa are About
Matt Rowe (Headings added):
Black Lives Matter: Marxist to the Core
The three co-founders of BLM are Marxists to the core. According to the Capital Research Center, all three worked for front groups of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, one of the largest radical Left organizations in the country. Opal Tometi actively promotes Socialism and anti-Western socio-economics, while Patrisse Khan-Cullors has publicly stated that the leaders of BLM are “trained Marxists.” Even so, it is highly likely that most active members and supporters of BLM are not Marxists at all, but simply believe they are fighting for social justice. The various chapters and voices of BLM don’t always share consistent goals, but what they have in common is a general anger toward the government and its most visible arm, the police.
Antifa: Culturally Marxist
In the United States, Antifa is an anarchist group of mostly young people dissatisfied with various political and economic issues. Like BLM, they have espoused a wide array of objectives across the country and through time. They nominally believe that the country is heading toward Fascism and tout the election of President Trump and his “America First” platform as an example of that. Their initial radical anti-globalism and anti-capitalist rhetoric in the 1980’s, however, only got them so far into the public’s awareness. In joining the anti-racist cause, they greatly legitimized their movement and expanded their opportunities for activism. Antifa is not shy about its Marxist roots either; they have merely modified the traditional conflict of workers versus the owners of capital to “identity conflicts” based upon race, gender, sexual orientation, and the like.
The cynical manipulation of "useful idiots" by people whose concern is not black lives but socialist revolution
The organizers who manipulate these groups are without a doubt dedicated to their Socialist movement. They are sustained by people who may or may not support—or even know—their true objectives. It doesn’t matter what the masses believe, as long as they can be worked into a frenzy as needed. The leaders don’t really care whether the police are targeting black Americans—it’s only important that their supporters believe it.
In essence, the vast majority of BLM and Antifa members, as well as vocal celebrities, college and high school activists, and, yes, Bishop Doherty, make up what are commonly known as the “useful idiots.” That is, they are propagandizing for a cause without really understanding the cause’s objectives. They are cynically used by shrewd leaders to achieve an end state that they may have never intended. This is especially dangerous as we get closer to our national elections. The goal is to keep these people blind to the truth for as long as possible, or better yet, to eventually indoctrinate them into the cause as true Socialists. They are evil, and they are doing exactly what Father Rothrock stated in his message.
Democrat-Run Cities: The Case for Letting them Burn to the Ground
Marc Thiessen presents, without endorsing, the case for allowing the social experiment in lawlessness to proceed:
Trump declared that enough is enough and that he and Attorney General William P. Barr will soon unveil a plan to “to straighten things out.” But maybe he shouldn’t. The genius of our federal system is that states and localities serve as what the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called laboratories of democracy that can “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Right now, many of America’s cities are conducting social experiments in lawlessness, showing the rest of the country what happens when local leaders join calls to “defund the police” and cower in the face of violence.
There is an argument for just letting those experiments play out. After all, we are told elections have consequences. Well, the people in those cities voted for weak Democratic mayors and city council members. Maybe if they experience the consequences of incompetent Democratic leadership, they’ll do what New Yorkers did in the 1990s and vote in tough-on-crime Republicans to restore law and order.
Or they can move. As Milton Friedman explained in “Capitalism and Freedom,” the beauty of our system of dispersed power is that, “if I do not like what my local community does … I can move to another local community. … If I do not like what my state does, I can move to another. [But] if I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations.” In recent years, growing numbers of Americans quit high-tax blue states such as California for low-tax red states like Texas. If disastrous fiscal policies can spark this kind of migration, maybe disastrous policing policies will do the same.
Of course, the counterargument is: What about the people in Portland, Seattle and other cities where violence is out of hand who did not vote for feckless Democrats? Why should they be subjected to violence? Moreover, although wealthier residents may be able to pick up and leave, the poorer citizens of these cities who depend on social assistance and public housing don’t have the resources to do so. And what about small business owners who have poured their life savings into enterprises that have been looted and vandalized? If they pick up and leave, they lose everything.
It’s unfair to leave these Americans defenseless. And it’s arguably the president’s responsibility to do something about it.
When I consult my inner Black Shirt, I am inclined to favor a massive and merciless Federal crackdown on the enemies of civilization. Criminals are emboldened when they get away with their crimes. Priceless artifacts of our cultural heritage are being destroyed before our eyes, and it will only get worse if the miscreants aren't stopped with whatever brutality is necessary. But then I remind myself of the articles I have written favoring federalism. Let the fools in blue states and leftist-dominated cities run their social experiments! Amendment X of the U. S. Constitution:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People.
It's a nice little political aporia we've got going here. States rights? Or Big Daddy applying the rod of discipline to the likes of morons such as Lori 'I need a haircut' Lightfoot (Chicago), Jenny 'Summer of Love' Durkan (Seattle), and Comrade Bozo de Blasio (New Dork City), to mention just three.
But in the end we must look to our own health, well-being, and virtue. The Founders understood that it is the virtue of the people that is the ultimate support of the Republic. What can an individual do? Speak out, if you can muster the civil courage to do so in the teeth of the vicious anti-free-speech cancel-cultural Left. Vote, but never for any Democrat. And don't throw away your vote on unelectable third-party losertarian jokers. Defund or rather don't fund the Left, including the Roman Catholic Church and almost all universities. Vote with your feet and with your wallet. Lay in a righteous supply of tools of survival. Home-school your children. Build vast hard-copy libraries to keep high culture safe from the barbarians. Buy gold and that other precious metal, Pb.
Look to the future, both here below, and beyond time's horizon. Hope for the best; prepare for the worst. Be of good cheer and keep yourself in shape in mind and body. Long live the Republic!
Christianity and Politics
The Christian who sees politics with worldly eyes must support Donald J. Trump. The Christian who doesn't must withdraw from the fight and turn the other cheek even if it means getting slaughtered, just as Jesus allowed himself to be slaughtered. But the apolitical Christians won't be slaughtered right away. They will first have to endure the destruction of Christian culture, a process that is proceeding apace right before our eyes. Statues are being toppled, and churches destroyed, some of them ancient and of great historical significance. Ever hear of Junipero Serra and the San Gabriel Mission? After they have demolished monuments and memorials and desecrated churches, destructive leftists will begin changing place names. Ever hear of a town called 'Santa Barbara'? I am just scratching the surface. Fill in the details for yourself. Is anything safe from the raging nihilists of the Left? Cemeteries? It's happening, and more is coming. Or are you in denial?
To Christians such as David French who oppose Trump, I pose a simple question:
What do you propose that we do politically to put a stop to this destruction of Christian and indeed Western, heritage and civilization?
I don't doubt the sincerity and good intentions of French, and Mona Charen, and any number of other Never Trumpers, but they clearly don't have a practical plan. Starting up yet another 'conservative' publication such The Bulwark is just more yap-and-scribble. The Democrats are now a hard-Left party and their 'leader,' that 'good Catholic' Joe Biden, is but a puppet. (He is all in on abortion on demand and, horribile dictu, he reversed himself on the Hyde Amendment!) Do the Never Trumpers have an electable candidate to rival Trump? Not by a long shot.
So what is the plan ladies and gentlemen? Do you propose that we wait for for the 'true conservative' to come along? If he ever shows up it will be too late. A practical man deals with the situation at hand as best he can with what he's got. He does not let the best become the enemy of the good. He does not seek perfection in an imperfect world. Trump is all we've got. Show me I'm wrong.
I would guess that David and Mona and the other boys and girls of the yap-and-scribble brigade are not keen on hot civil war. But that could be in the cards: guns and ammo are flying off the shelves. The patience of the people has an expiration date. A lot of us don't approve of the erasure of history and heritage by leftist scum. And we don't cotton to the abdication of those to whom we entrust the preservation of civil order.
I grew up just a few miles from the 249-year-old San Gabriel Mission:
What We are Up Against
It helps to know the enemy and not be as naive as a Mona Charen. Despite her manifold lovelinesses and virtues, Charen is a useful idiot for the Left and a useless idiot for us. (She is what I call a 'topical idiot'; she is obviously not a total idiot. And while I am abusing her to some extent, my abuse is for her own good, grounded as it is in fact and in a concern for her mental clarity.)
Never-Trumpers, who are mostly journalists and lawyers, and have never built anything, allow themselves to become unhinged and distracted by Trump the inarticulate builder and political interloper, by his foibles and fatuities, his ungrammatical tweets, his exaggerations, sexual peccadillos, and what all else. And so they cannot see who the real enemy is. They cannot see the threat to their own way of life and to the set of values which they espouse but are impotent to conserve.
At the same time, these yap-and-scribble quislings and quibblers, these cruise-ship 'conservatives' who succeed in conserving nothing except their status and salaries, propose no candidate who could do better than Trump. They are impotent nay-sayers and obstructionists. A pox be upon them, and their dwellings and cruise ships and seminar rooms and all their works and days, and their progeny, intellectual and loin-driven, unto the seventh generation.
Please study the following from Powerline.