Steven Nemes weighs in on Matt. 5:38-42 in his Substack entry, When should Christians not resist an evildoer?
He makes some of the same points I have made over the years, most recently, here at Substack: Morality Private and Public.
VDH, Ten Iranian Questions:
Trump had warned the Iranians on numerous occasions. They never got the message. They were apparently listening to the American Left’s smears of Trump as a “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”)—a silly slur phrase that just died Saturday night.
And die it did. To hell with the American Left with its Tampon Timmies, its Joyless Behars, its cortically-challenged Cortezes, and its Kamalian clowns. (It should be clear that I am no longer quoting my man Hanson.)
Some fear that Midnight Hammer will lead to a wider war. It might. The world, led by the USA, will then have the opportunity to rid itself once and for all of the current Iranian Islamist theocracy. That would be a good thing, and easy to accomplish: destroy the oil refineries first, and see if that gets them to back off, and "build back better," to coin a phrase. If they remain recalcitrant, destroy their power grid. No more pussy-footing around with these evil-doers. It's not 1979 any more, or the Carter administration.
Their particular brand of Islamist insanity would then be finished forever. Do you doubt that? It would be finished in its concrete exemplification just as Nazi ideology was finished in its concrete exemplification in 1945. By 'concrete exemplification of an ideology' I mean its existence in an actual State. Once the current Iranian Islamist theocracy is concretely at an end, it is not likely to come back. I will fire off two more points and you guys can have at me in the combox.
First. A great power such as the USA cannot be wholly non-interventionist, although it ought to be as non-interventionist as it can be consistent with self-preservation and the defense of its allies. No nation-building! Non-interventionism is good, but it has limits. One limit is reached when anti-civilizational savages pose an existential threat to we us the (more or less) civilized. I call our enemies 'anti-civilizational,' but you ought not call them 'medieval' as some pundits do unless you want to advertise your historical ignorance and slam an entire epoch.
An existential threat is a threat not merely to one's physical existence or biological life, but to one's way of life. The radical Islamist trilemma: conversion, dhimmitude, or death is radically unacceptable — which is why I call it a trilemma: three prongs, each of which is unacceptable. If one has been nuked out of physical existence, then one has been 'nuked' out of cultural existence as well.
This is why Khamenei and the boys cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. We do not yet know the extent or efficacy of Trump's bunker-busting despite Trump's typical boasts and exaggerations. (Trump is a builder, a promoter, and a bit of a carnival barker, but still vastly superior to any of the electable Democrats.) The Iranian nuclear program has, however, surely suffered a major set-back. If they get it going again the IDF and the USAF will kick the mullahs' collective ass one more time.
Second. The Iranian people have a right to any system of government they choose so long as it poses no existential threat to any other State. Who the hell are we to tell them how to live when our Western societies, dripping with decadence, are hanging by a thread? (Leastways, until Trump came along.) If the Iranians want a theocracy, that is their business. Is it objectively certain that our classically liberal system is better than a theocratic system? No, or so say I, even though I firmly believe that our system is better than any theocracy. What if they want an Islamic theocracy? No problem with that either, so long as the Islam in question is moderate and wields no such trident as the one lately described. I wish Zuhdi Jasser the best of luck in his quixotic quest to reform Islam.
Ann Coulter a while back said that we should invade the Muslim lands and convert them to Christianity.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.
Convert Muslims? Sheer madness. Coulter is a very intelligent woman, but sometimes intelligent people say stupid things. Of the Abrahamic religions, Islam is the worst. Schopenhauer describes it as "the saddest and poorest form of theism." It is the religion of terror at the present time. An inferior religion, it gives rise to an inferior culture, downstream of which is a benighted politics. But Islam is their religion and it is better than no religion. Try barging into people's lives to convince them to renounce their parents, their hometown, their region, their religion, their folkways. Try that down in Hillbilly Holler or anywhere.
Convert the benighted Muslims for the sake of their immortal souls because Jesus claimed to be via, veritas, vita? "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." (John 14:6, KJV. I was brought up on Douay-Rheims, but I love that old English.) Why not make it more specific: extra ecclesiam salus non est, where the ecclesia in question is the Roman Catholic Church? That won't sit well with our Protestant or Eastern Orthodox pals, and it shouldn't. I go a step further: paths to salvation are many. I won't argue it out, leastways not now; I'll just refer you to the work of Frithjof Schuon. See, for example, The Transcendent Unity of Religions.
How about converting the Jews? Another form of folly. Here is an instructive short piece by Rabbi Yehiel Poupko.
According to Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 56:
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.
The presidential power of pardon strikes me as an additional example of this secularization process whereby originally theological concepts are brought down to earth and acquire a political and social meaning. (Does Schmitt discuss the pardon power somewhere? He 'must.' Where?)
The U. S Constitution grants a near-plenary power of pardon to the president. Does this extend to convicted mass murderers such as Timothy McVeigh? (McVeigh, of course, was not pardoned, but executed.) It does so extend, if I understand the matter:
The power to pardon is one of the least limited powers granted to the president in the Constitution. [. . .] The only limits mentioned in the Constitution are that pardons are limited to offenses against the United States (i.e., not civil or state cases) and that they cannot affect an impeachment process.
The theological roots of the pardon power seem obvious: what we have in the presidential case is a secular analog of the old theological problem of justice and mercy. This is, however, at best a close analogy, not an identity. The theological problem of how God can be both just and merciful is not identical to the problem of how a head of state, a president, for example, can be both just and merciful when he grants a pardon. That should be obvious. If not, I will explain.
God is absolutely sovereign. In the divine but not the human case, sovereignty implies omnipotence. The absoluteness of divine sovereignty might be taken to imply that God's omnipotence is his ability/power to do anything at all, including what is logically impossible and morally impermissible. If so, divine power would not be limited in any way, and God would be sovereign not only over the natural order, which he obviously is on any account of omnipotence, but also over every order including the logical and moral orders.
Leaving logical order aside, consider the rule of law as it pertains to right and wrong, crime and punishment. The rule of law is not a particular law but a meta-principle pertaining to all laws. The rule of law requires that particular laws be applied equally, and that like cases be judged in a like manner. So if justice demands the death penalty in one case, then likewise in all relevantly similar cases. What room could there then be for an arbitrary (free) exercise of mercy in any given case? To get a fix on the problem, suppose Tom and Tim are morally indiscernible twins: they share every moral attribute. They are both loyal, and to the same degree. They are both courageous and to the same degree. And so on. But they are mafiosi hit men with no qualms about committing murder for money. God consigns Tom to hell for all eternity, but shows mercy to Tim. How could a good God do such a thing? Surely that is offensive to our human sense of justice.
Simply put, the theological problem is: How could a good God be both just and merciful? Justice and mercy are both divine attributes, but they appear to us to be logically incompatible. The theologians have proposed solutions. This is not the place to review them. For present purposes we assume that the problem is soluble in the divine case. In the human case, however, things look very different.
To make the question concrete, compare Bill Clinton's pardoning of Marc Rich with his pardoning of Patty Hearst. Many of us will consider the latter to be a justifiable, and perhaps even an admirable tempering of justice with mercy. (The poor girl, pun intended, was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, etc.) But few will fail to consider the former pardon anything other than a moral outrage. But why an outrage? (If you don't think the Rich pardon an outrage, choose one you think is: the illustrious Joe Biden has given us several to choose from.)
I am assuming that in the divine case, justice and mercy are indissolubly one in such a way as to render impossible any differentiation between justifiable and unjustifiable acts of divine mercy. On this assumption no divine pardon is or could be morally wrong. In the divine case, one could not claim that God was violating the moral law by any act of mercy. It is after all false that "no one is above the law"; God is above both the positive law and the moral law inasmuch as he is the source of both. He is the source of positive law inasmuch as he is the creator of the persons who posit the positive law. He is the source of the moral law inasmuch as he is absolutely sovereign and so cannot be subject to anything external to himself. There is a sense in which God is above the law. But no man is above the law.
Now we come to the problem. When a president pardons a convicted criminal is he not violating the rule of law and putting himself above the law? How can that be justified? Surely not by a secularization process whereby the theological unity of justice and mercy gets transferred from God who truly is the unity of justice and mercy to a mortal man, POTUS say, who is obviously not such a unity.
The point I am making is that the secularization of theological concepts must not be confused with the realization in the State of theological realities. Just as the theory of God is not the same as God, the theory of the state is not the same as the State. So if the concepts ingredient in the theory of God are secularized, which is to say, "transferred from theology to the theory of the state," as Schmitt says above, that is not to say that God is being denied and replaced by the State. It is logically consistent to maintain both of the following: (a) "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts" (Schmitt) and (b) God exists and is not the State.
The question for me, and not only for me, as to what Schmitt believed in the end about these matters remains open. The above is simply a preliminary exercise in understanding what Schmitt is ultimately driving at. He is undoubtedly one of the great political theorists of the 2oth century. His fateful entanglement with the NSDAP from May of 1933 on is no excuse not to study him in detail and in depth. You study Rawls and Nozick but ignore Schmitt? WTF is wrong with you?
But it would have been nice if in retrospect he had accepted and lived by my masthead motto: "Study everything, join nothing."
Why did Schmitt become a Nazi? Reinhard Mehring in his monumental (748 page!) Carl Schmitt: A Biography (Polity Press, 2014, pb 2022, German original 2009, tr. Daniel Steuer, pp. 282-284) lists 47 possible reasons/motives! I schmitt you not.
Another in a Substack series.
Commenter Ben wrote:
Neighbors are familiar, local. This is in direct contrast to the sort of pablum about being a "citizen of the world" and preferring the plight of the universal faceless stranger over what you owe to your own countrymen . . .
That's right. I'll add that while we are enjoined to love our neighbors, we are also commanded to love our enemies (MT 5:44 and Luke 6:27). Are these enemies familiar and local too and not, say, Iranian Islamists? Do the verses mentioned rule out hating foreigners who pose an existential threat to us? Or do they permit it?
Carl Schmitt has something to say on the question in The Concept of the Political (expanded ed., tr. G. Schwab, U. of Chicago Press, 2007, 28-29):
The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship. The enemy is hostis, not inimicus in the broader sense; polemios, not ecthros. As German and other languages do not distinguish between the private and political enemy, many misconceptions and falsifications are possible. The often quoted “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) reads “diligite inimicos vestros,” agapate tous ecthrous, and not diligite hostes vestros.
No mention is made of the political enemy. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, i.e., one’s adversary. The Bible quotation touches the political antithesis even less than it intends to dissolve, for example, the antithesis of good and evil or beautiful and ugly. It certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one’s own people.
What is Schmitt telling us? The criterion of the political sphere is the Freund-Feind, friend-enemy distinction. (26) But who is the enemy? The main point made above, as I understand it, is that the political enemy is a public enemy who may or may not be in addition a private adversary whom one hates. Suppose you are I are Trump supporters who hate each other. That would be a case of political friendship but personal enmity. Or it may be that you and I are on the same side politically and love each other. That would be a case of both political and personal friendship. (I assume that love includes friendship but not conversely.) A third possibility is realized in many marriages: the partners love each other on the personal plane but are on opposite sides of a political divide. (James Carville and Mary Matalin?)
Now consider Luke 6:27: "But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you (KJV)." Who are the enemies referred to in this verse? Not political/public enemies, but private enemies, according to Schmitt. The verse therefore allows the hating, and presumably also the killing, of foreign and domestic enemies who pose an existential threat to us, where an existential threat is one not merely to our biological life, but to our way of life.
Is that right?
With a little help from Carl Schmitt. Top o' the Stack.
Ben wants to talk about Schmitt. This article will serve as an introduction. You say Schmitt was a Nazi? So was Heidegger. Frege, according to Michael Dummett, was an anti-Semite. And Sartre was a Stalinist. You won't read these thinkers because of their distasteful political alignments?
Are you stupid?
"There are currently five major streams of Protestant political outlook and activism."
1) The old Religious Left
2) The old Religious Right
3) The neo-Anabaptist Left
4) MAGA Christianity
5) TheoBro Right
Finally, there is the TheoBro right, which wants a Christian confessional state that legally privileges Christianity as the only remedy for defeating the Left. Some of its leaders openly denounce voting rights for women as a liberal, modern corruption that undermines the family. Its denizens are not very numerous but have a high profile through social media. And its influence exceeds its numbers because it is aligned with much of MAGA Christianity. Its chief literature is Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism. Many of its followers descend from Calvinist entrepreneur Doug Wilson of Moscow, Idaho. The American Reformer is its chief online exponent.
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, Chapter 1, C. J. O'Neill, tr., University of Notre Dame Press, 1975, p. 35, para. 2, emphasis added:
. . . since causes are more noble than their effects, the very first caused things are lower than the First Cause, which is God, and still stand out above their effects. And so it goes until one arrives at the lowest of things. And because in the highest summit of things, God, one finds the most perfect unity — and because everything, the more it is one, is the more powerful and the more worthy – – it follows that the farther one gets from the first principle, the greater is the diversity and variation one one finds in things. The process of emanation from God, must, then be unified in the principle itself, but multiplied in the lower things which are its terms.
Key ideas in and suggested by the above passage:
1) Unity admits of degrees. Some unities are 'tighter' than others.
2) The supreme unity is the divine unity. It is the 'tightest' of all, so tight in fact, that God is devoid of all complexity or internal diversity and is therefore ontologically simple, as I explain in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on divine simplicity. God is pure unity, Unity itself in its highest instance.
3) At the other extreme is pure diversity, a mere collection of items that cannot even be called a collection in that that there is nothing real that collects them, nothing real that they share and that makes them that collection as opposed to some other actual or possible collection. Such a collection is so 'loose' that it does not deserve to be called a collection. We could aptly refer to it as a mere manifold, a mere many-ness. Think of the membership or extension of a mereological sum of utterly disparate items. That would be a pure diversity or mere many-ness.
4) Perfection comes in degrees, and so the divine unity is maximally perfect. A mere many-ness is maximally imperfect.
5) The notion of perfection in Aquinas and thinkers of his stripe blends the ontic with the axiological/normative. To be is to be good. A being is good in the measure that it is, and in the measure that it is, it is good. That, I take it, is the meaning of ens et bonum convertuntur. The terms 'a being' and 'a good thing' are convertible terms, which is to say, in Carnapian material mode: necessarily, for any x, x is or exists if and only if x is good, valuable, pursuit-worthy. (That I reference Carnap in this context should have the old positivist rolling in his grave.)
'In the measure that' conveys the idea that there are degrees of being, an idea anathema to most contemporary analytic philosophers. Divine unity is maximally perfect unity, and thus the unsurpassably best unity and the unsurpassably most real unity. God is really real, ontos on; at the other extreme, non-being, me on, or an approach thereto as in the limit concept (Grenzbegriff), material prima.
6) God's unity is the unity of the transcendent One which does not and cannot form with the Many a super-manifold in which God is just one member among the others. The One and the Many do not, taken together, form a many of which the One is just one more item among the others. Why not? Well, the One is other than or different from the Many both in its nature and in its way of existing. God, for Aquinas, is One to the Many of creatures, but is neither a creature, nor a member of a super-manifold of beings each of which is or exists in the same sense and the same way.
7) Aquinas says above that the more unified a thing, the more powerful it is. So God, the maximally unified being — so unified that this being (ens) is (identically) Being or To Be (esse) itself — is the maximally powerful being.
And so, in conclusion, I say to Canadian pretty boy Justin Trudeau, that diversity is precisely not "our strength," and that you and like-minded State-side fools are to be condemned for your willful self-enstupidation.
My point stands whether or not one accepts Thomism.
The Veep's performance was impressive. The man has excellent public speaking skills, is considerably more articulate than his boss, and displays natural political talent. He will make a fine successor. On the down side, he, unlike Trump, is a professional politician. I don't have to explain what that means. Trump's astonishing effectiveness is in large part due to the fact that the man does not need the job and can't be bought. The same goes for his right-hand man, Elon Musk. Contrary to the filthy slandering of him by our political enemies, he is not in this for the money. (As if to mock these moral and intellectual incompetents, Elon has given new life to the Hitler salute by introducing the chainsaw variant. I call it 'blue-baiting.')
Vance was right to point out the blow Trump has struck for religious liberty for all faiths. He didn't mention Executive Order 14182 of 25 January, but I will. Enforcing the Hyde Amendment is an effective counterpunch against the corrupt and self-serving Joe Biden who, you will recall, reversed himself on his quondam support for the amendment:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1 . Purpose and Policy. For nearly five decades, the Congress has annually enacted the Hyde Amendment and similar laws that prevent Federal funding of elective abortion, reflecting a longstanding consensus that American taxpayers should not be forced to pay for that practice. However, the previous administration disregarded this established, commonsense policy by embedding forced taxpayer funding of elective abortions in a wide variety of Federal programs.
It is the policy of the United States, consistent with the Hyde Amendment, to end the forced use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion.
Now unless you are morally obtuse, or a Democrat (whichever comes first), you should be able to see right away that it is wrong for the federal government to force roughly half the taxpayers to support what they consider to be a moral outrage. It is wrong even if abortion right up to the moment of birth ought to be legal. I am not saying that it ought to be legal. I am saying that, even if it ought to be legal, and becomes legal, it would be wrong to compel taxpayers to pay for it. For that compulsion violates their conscience and moral judgment, a judgment that has the support of a battery of powerful arguments. (That the average Joe and Jane lack the intellectual 'chops' to produce these arguments, arguments which, by the way, needn't rely on any specifically religious premises, is not to the point; some of us can. Do you remember that RINO mediocrity George W. Bush? He would often say, in his flat-footed way, that "Marriage is between a man and a woman." He was right, but that's all he could muster: he lacked the mental equipment to defend his position in an articulate manner. He reminded me of the affable jocks I'd have in my logic classes. In this respect Bush was like too many conservatives. They have sound intuitions but cannot rise to their argumentative defense.)
In roughly the second half of his speech, Vice President Vance became repetitive, and what is worse, 'squishy' in the style of the 'liberal,' in his positive statements about the current pope. It is too bad that the man is dying, and perhaps we should pray for the man. But should we pray that his papacy continue? That is not obvious. I'd say it is the exact opposite of obvious. I don't believe I am very far off if I say that Bergoglio is to the RCC what Biden was to the USA, a disaster.
It follows that if you pray for the man, you should not pray that he continue to live. For if he continues to live, his destructive papacy will continue. His papacy ought to end, which is not to say that the papacy ought to end. You should pray that Bergoglio get his spiritual affairs in order, admit the damage he has done, confess his sins of omission and commission, and ask for forgiveness, lest he end up in hell, or in purgatory for a hell of a long time.
Here is the Veep's speech.
J. D. Vance on becoming Catholic. I wonder if David French has read this.
This just in from Dr. Vito Caiati:
I am wondering if you have been following the ongoing, intense debate on the GOP platform that has taken place on X and in several conservative online journals, which was ignited by Edward Feser and other social conservatives, who are strongly critical of the removal of long-standing planks supporting a national ban on abortion and in favor of the traditional definition of marriage, viewing both as fundamental capitulations to the increasingly hegemonic secular ideology of the Left. (Feser on X: “The Left will force us into the catacombs, while the Right will tell us that going into the catacombs voluntarily is the most politically realistic way to keep the Left from forcing us to go there”).
Yesterday, Feser posted a short piece on his blog, “Now is the time for social conservatives to fight,” that references his tweets on X and several articles on this matter (https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/). I think what we are seeing here is the populist nature of the MAGA movement, headed by Trump, ever more openly differentiating itself from the traditional conservatism of the GOP, and I am curious to know your thoughts about this leftward cultural shift. I myself think that Feser makes some excellent points and see no reason for him and others not to fight for their moral and social ideals within the party, but also that, given the grave crisis of the nation, these do not justify any hesitation about aggressively supporting Trump/Vance.
We've discussed this before, Vito. See, for starters, Abortion and Last Night's GOP Debate (24 August 2023). There I wrote:
The overturning of Roe v. Wade returned the abortion question to the states. That means that each state is empowered to enact its own laws regulating abortion. Some states will permit abortion up to the moment of birth. Others will not. Different states, different laws.
What then are we to make of Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott and their call for a Federal law that bans abortion (apart from the usual exceptions) during the last 15 weeks of pregnancy?
Am I missing something? (When I write about political and legal issues, I write as a concerned citizen and not as an expert in these areas.) It strikes me as obvious that if the abortion issue is for the states to decide, then there cannot be any federal abortion laws.
[. . .]
The precise question is: How is a federal abortion restriction consistent with the states' right to decide the abortion laws? ND Governor Doug Burgum alone seemed to understand the problem, but his fleeting remark failed to set it forth clearly.
The answer to the precise question is that the federal restriction is not consistent with states' rights. It is unconstitutional.
This is not a very satisfying answer given that abortion is a moral abomination. (See my Abortion category for arguments.) But arguments, no matter how good, cut no ice in the teeth of our concupiscence. This is explained in my Substack article, Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained.
In the Comments, you agreed with me:
Vito's comment above is a model of how a good comment is constructed.
Note that he deals directly with the question I raised. He does not go off on a tangent, or change the subject to a topic that interests him but is not germane to my entry. He engages what I said and he lets me know whether he agrees or disagrees. As it is, he agrees.
He then supplements what I said in two ways. He points out the relevance of the Tenth Amendment to the question I posed. That had occurred to me, but I failed to mention it. Governor Burgum alluded to it near the end of that segment of the debate when he whipped out his pocket Constitution.
But what I found most useful in Vito's comment is his explanation of the confusion of Pence and Scott. Vito: >>Specifically, they seem to interpret the phrase “returned to the people and their elected representatives” as one that permits the federal legislature, the Congress, to establish a national ban on abortion during the last 15 weeks of pregnancy, save for unusual cases.<<
So the mistake that Pence and Scott made was to confuse the people of the U.S. with the people of a particular state. Here is 10A again: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Now I don't think one has to be a Constitutional scholar to know what that means. "The people" refers to the people of a given state, such as North Dakota or Massachusetts, not to all the people of the U.S.
This is an important interview. I will add a few comments at the end. Excerpts:
You said something I’ve got to ask you about, that Trump’s a moderate. In what areas is the MAGA movement farther right than Trump?
BANNON: I think farther right on radical cuts of spending, No. 1. I think we’re much more hard-core on things like Ukraine. President Trump is a peacemaker. He wants to go in and negotiate and figure something out as a deal maker. I think 75 percent of our movement would want an immediate, total shutdown — not one more penny in Ukraine, and massive investigations about where the money went. On the southern border and mass deportations, I don’t think President Trump’s close to where we are. They all got to go home.
Also, on artificial intelligence, we’re virulently anti-A.I. I think big regulations have to come.
President Trump is a kindhearted person. He’s a people person, right? On China, I think he admires Xi Jinping. But we’re super-hawks. We want to see an elimination of the Chinese Communist Party.
[. . .]
Would you like to have some role?
No, no, no, no. We run this like a military command post. So I would only be giving up power. I went there before. I wanted out. I’m not a staff guy. I can’t do it. And also that’s not where the center of power is. It’s not how President Trump thinks. A big center of power is just media.
I call Trump a Marshall McLuhanesque figure. McLuhan called it, right? He says this mass thing called media, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said of the noosphere, is going to so overwhelm evolutionary biology that it will be everything. And Trump understands that. That’s why he watches TV.
He understands that to get anything done, you have to make the people understand. And so therefore, constantly, we’re in a battle of narrative. Unrestricted narrative warfare. Everything is narrative. And in that regard, you have to make sure you forget about the noise and focus on the signal.
And remember, our audience is virtually all activists. So even though it may not be the biggest, it doesn’t have to be. It’s the people that are out there in the hinterland that are on the school boards. They now control so many state parties. Our mantra is you must use your agency. It’s a spiritual war. The divine providence works through your agency.
[. . .]
Do you know the demographics of these activists? Education? Race? Income?
First off, I would say 60 percent female. Female and over 40 years old. A lot of that, a third of them brought in by the pandemic, and the Moms for America. A ton of moms, women who didn’t read a lot of books in college. They’re not politically active. They had no interest. It was only later in life, as they became the C.O.O. of the American family, they realized how tough it was to make ends meet.
And then they saw the lack of education, and it was really the pandemic when they walked by the computer and saw what the kids are doing. They’re now at the tip of the spear.
Do you worry that your broader movement will be fatally poisoned by antisemitic elements, the conspiracy crazies?
We’re the most pro-Israel and pro-Jewish group out there. What I say is that not just the future of Israel but the future of American Jews, not just safety but their ability to thrive and prosper as they have in this country, is conditional upon one thing, and that’s a hard weld with Christian nationalism.
If I can make one comparison: Early in my career, I worked for Bill Buckley. His manner at National Review reminds me a little of some of the things you do. He created an intense sense of belonging: We’re the conservative movement. We’re all in this together. Every day we’re marching forward. But he also had a strong sense of who was a wack job, a conspiracist. And he was going to draw a line. Pat Buchanan was on the other side of the line.So what I admire about Buckley is obviously the intense thing of belonging. What I don’t admire is the no fight. It’s very much an intellectual debating society, right?
I use you and George Will as examples of this all the time. Brilliant guys, but this is a street fight. We need to be street fighters. This is going to be determined on social media and getting people out to vote. It’s not going to be debated on the Upper East Side or Upper West Side.
I’ve found that most people are pretty reasonable. You can have a conversation, and you’ll at least see where they’re coming from.
I think you’re dead [expletive] wrong.
That’s where we disagree.
No, it’s 100 percent disagree. What are you talking about? They think you’re an exotic animal. You’re a conservative, but you’re not dangerous. You’re reasonable. We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.
Now, the biggest element that Buckley had that the book “Bowling Alone” had, and you talk about, is the atomization of our society. There’s no civic bonding. There’s no national cohesion. There’s not even the Lions Club things that you used to have before. People tell me all the time: “You changed my life. I ran for the board of supervisors, and now I’m on the board of supervisors.” They have friends that they never had met before, and they’re in a common cause, and it’s changed their life. They’re on social media. Every day, they have action they have to do.
[. . .]
Trump is taking America back to its more constitutional Republic for the third time, and that drives the credentialed left nuts because he’s not just a class traitor, he’s a low-end guy from Queens. He’s not up to their social — it’s too tacky. It’s the gold. It’s the Trump stuff. They hate him. They hate him to a passionate level. They look at the noise around Trump and miss the signal of what’s really happening, and they can’t get past that, and they’re blinded by it.
BV's comments:
1) Bannon appreciates the terrible threat posed by unregulated A. I. Does Trump? I don't think so. The Democrats, in contrast to both Trump and Bannon, reside entirely in Cloud Cuckoo Land, with their overheated hyperventilation over 'climate change' and "boiling oceans" (Al Gore at Davos) as the greatest threat to humanity. That's plainly insane. They also fail to grasp the WW-3 threat, which Trump clearly does grasp, and they are in addition blind to the Balkanization and social unrest and rampant crime which cannot be avoided with wide-open borders. They also show contempt for the rule of law and national sovereignty.
2) Bannon is also right that Trump understands in his inarticulate, gut-level sort of way the messages of Marshall McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin, two enormously influential intellectuals from the seminal 'sixties.
3) Bannon's talk of "unrestricted narrative warfare" leaves me uneasy. I agree with him that we are at war with the Left and thus with the contemporary Dem party, and that it must be defeated if our republic is to survive. I also agree that this cannot be achieved by having 'conversations' with them. It is far too late for that, they are mendacious to the core, as should be blindingly evident from the blatant 'cheap/deep fake' gaslighting the Biden administration has been engaging in, and in any case we and they share no common ground. They are out to overturn the American republic as she was founded to be, while we want her restoration.
What makes me uneasy is that Bannon's talk of "unrestricted narrative warfare" and "everything is narrative" suggest relativism about truth. Is Bannon a relativist about truth? Does he think that no narrative is true, sans phrase, and that every narrative is true only for those who tell it and hold it and are legitimated by it? If that is his view, then I oppose him. Aleksandr Dugin, I take it, is a relativist about truth. How close is Bannon ideologically to Dugin. I don't know but I need to find out.
There are some troublingly deep questions here. Right and Left are at war with each other, and so are their respective narratives. But if relativism reigns, and there is no "grand narrative" (Lyotard) or "meta-narrative" and every first-order narrative is only relatively true, then there is no hope of convincing or converting them: we have to crush them or be crushed by them. We are in the vicinity of Nietzsche's perspectivism according to which there is no truth, only interpretations from power-centers each out to expand its power. Perspectivism is the epistemology corresponding to Nietzsche's fundamental ontological thesis: "The world is the will-to-power and nothing besides." This onto-epistemology is the worldview that results from the death of God in Nietzsche's sense. No God, no truth, to paraphrase a line from The Gay Science.
But then what's with Bannon's talk of a "spiritual war" and "divine providence"? "It’s a spiritual war. The divine providence works through your agency." So God is on our side, but God is irrational absolute power? Sounds like a Muslim conception of God.
I am struggling to formulate the problem, but I am aware that I am not succeeding. I suppose I am not ready to give up on the possibility of reasoned discourse as a way to finding some common ground. But given what hyper-mendacious shytes our political enemies are, how these phucks will do anything to win, I find it hard not to agree with Bannon and see Brooks as just another impotent cuckservative clown along with George Will and the rest of the yap-and-scribble, do-nothing, leftist lapdog, bow-tie brigade. As Bannon said to Brooks,
You’re a conservative, but you’re not dangerous. You’re reasonable. We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.
A reader of this blog recently opined, "And there isn't any "Judeo-Christian" anything: there is just Christian and Jew, and ne'er the twain shall meet." This provocative comment ignited some animated push-back from other commenters. And so it was serendipitous that I should stumble this morning upon Jews and Christians Together by Ian Speir. If my reader seeks to decouple the Christian from the Hebraic, Speir and those he quotes aim to bring them together, but in a way that seems to favor the Hebraic over the Christian. Here is a taste (bolding added):
Those ideas and values—mediated through the Bible, accelerated by the rise of the Christian West, and strained through the filter of the Reformation and the Enlightenment—found good soil in America. They are at the root of some of our country’s most fundamental convictions, like [such as] human dignity and ordered liberty, the necessity of freedom of conscience, and the insistence that the common good is best secured when men and women are free to pursue lives of virtue.
These civilization-shaping ideas do not depend upon the Constitution; they predate it. The Declaration calls them rights—though they are equally responsibilities—that are “endowed by [our] Creator.” They are more than a frame of government or a social contract. They form a civilizational covenant, transcending the ebb and flow of history and the politics of a particular moment.
At times these values have been called “Judeo-Christian.” The better descriptor is “Hebraic,” a term that simultaneously captures their worldview significance and their biblical source.
In his lecture, Cohen insists that the “Hebraic spirit” of America and of the West is now at stake.
I will leave it for you to decide whether the thought in the bolded passage goes too far in the direction opposite to that of my reader.
How should we characterize the spirit of America and the West? Off the top of my head, here are four options that may serve as a menu for further rumination:
a) The spirit of America and the West is not Hebraic but Christian with Christianity decoupled from Judaism. (The extreme view of my reader which is nonetheless useful as a foil against which to contrast more plausible views.)
b) The spirit of America and the West is Hebraic-Christian with primary emphasis on Judaism. (This seems to be the view of Speir and those he cites.)
c) The spirit of America and the West is Hebraic-Christian with primary emphasis on Christianity which, while in continuity with Judaism, supersedes and perfects it.
d) The spirit of America and the West is the spirit expressed in (c), and thus the spirit of Jerusalem but a Jerusalem supplemented and where necessary corrected and held back from fanaticism and 'enthusiasm' (Schwärmerei) by the enlightenment values of Athens (philosophy) both ancient and modern. (This, I want to suggest, comes fairly close to the classically liberal spirit of the Founders who were men of the 18th century Enlightenment.)
This schema does not cover all the options, but may be of some use. Of the four, I prefer (d).
Jesus and the Powers (N. T. Wright & Michael F. Bird, Zondervan, 2024):
Democracies are compelled to tolerate and enfranchise [give the vote to] people who stand in resolute opposition to the very idea of democracy itself. (164)
This sentence implies that a democracy is a system of government in which the will of the majority decides every question. If so, then in such a system the majority may democratically decide that their system of government cease being a democracy and become, say, a theocracy. If so, a democracy may democratically decide to commit political suicide. Democracy taken full strength cancels itself, or al least allows the possibility of self-cancellation. One reasonable inference is that it must not be taken full-strength: it needs support from an extra-democratic source.
Now the authors aim to make a case of "liberal democracy." (p. xvi) But no democracy worth wanting could have the self-destructive feature I have exposed in the preceding paragraph. A democracy worth wanting must rest on principles that are not up for democratic grabs. I mean such principles as are enshrined in our founding documents: that all men are created equal, that they have unalienable rights, and so on. For example, the rights to life, liberty, property, and free speech. These rights do not derive from any collective human decision: they are not up for democratic grabs. The same goes for what I will call political meta-principles such as the rule of law. The rule of law is not itself a law, but a principle that governs the application of laws. It the normative principle that no man is above the law, that all are subject to the same laws, and that everyone is to be treated equally under the law. ABA definition: " no one is above the law, everyone is treated equally under the law, everyone is held accountable to the same laws, there are clear and fair processes for enforcing laws, there is an independent judiciary, and human rights are guaranteed for all." If I understand due process, it is part and parcel of the rule of law: the latter subsumes the former. It should bother you that prominent leftists have questioned due process.
And so I say: no democracy worth wanting can tolerate those who would work to undermine the principles upon which a democracy worth wanting must rest. This is why I wrote two days ago:
Any sane person who does not intend the destruction of our [democratic, constitutionally-based] republic should be able to see that the values of Sharia [Islamic law] are incompatible with American values, and that no Muslims should be allowed to immigrate who are unwilling to accept and honor our values [and Anglo-American system of law, and renounce Islamic law].
The authors, apparently, disagree:
We need a political framework that exhibits . . . a willingness to endure strange and even offensive ways of life. [. . .] Victory in liberal democracy is not vanquishing our opponents, but winning their respect, living in peace with them, and affirming their right to their opinion. That means LGBTQ+ people have the right to be themselves, Muslims can be Muslims, Christians can be Christians, Socialists can be Socialists, Greenies can be Greenies. (172)
If so, then Communists can be Communists and must be tolerated. But surely toleration, the touchstone of classical liberalism, has limits. Communism, which aims at the overthrow of the American system of government, cannot be tolerated. Is that not obvious? But then neither can Sharia-based Islam. For both Communism and Islam are antithetical to our founding principles.
At the very end of Article VI of the Constitution, we read:
. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
But of course Communism is not a religion in any reasonable sense of the term as I have argued elsewhere. What about Islam? Isn't it a religion? Some say it is a Christian heresy (Chesterton). Others say it is a political ideology masquerading as a religion. I say it is a hybrid ideology: both a religion and a political ideology. I would argue that, since its political commitments are antithetical to American principles, values, and presuppositions, Islam does not count as a religion for the purposes of the application of Article VI, paragraph 3.
But it will take another 9/11-type event to convince most people of this. Most people are impervious to reasoning such as I am engaging in here; it strikes these sense-enslaved denizens of Plato's Cave as 'abstract' and 'unreal.' But when they are smashed in the face, they will begin to get the point, as they expire in the rubble.
That event is coming.
By N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird. Subtitle: "Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies." Just out. Available via Amazon. Memo to Brian B: order a copy and we'll discuss it the next time you're in town. It's right up your Calvinist alley and highly relevant to our last discussion.
