Politics – Page 37 – Maverick Philosopher

Paul Johnson on Political Correctness and Donald Trump

Article here. I reproduce it in toto so that you can read it in peace without being assaulted by advertising. Bolding added.

The problem with Johnson's article is that he does not define 'political correctness' and seems dangerously close to conflating politically incorrect speech with "vigorous, outspoken, raw and raucous speech" and politically incorrect behavior with "vulgar, abusive, nasty, rude, boorish and outrageous" behavior. See below. But this would be to ignore the important point I made the other day, namely, that to be politically incorrect is not to engage in offensive speech or behavior but to oppose the Left.

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THE MENTAL INFECTION known as “political correctness” is one of the most dangerous intellectual afflictions ever to attack mankind. The fact that we began by laughing at it–and to some extent, still do–doesn’t diminish its venom one bit.

PC has an enormous appeal to the semieducated, one reason that it’s struck roots among overseas students at minor colleges. But it also appeals to pseudo-intellectuals everywhere, since it evokes the strong streak of cowardice notable among those wielding academic authority nowadays. Any empty-headed student with a powerful voice can claim someone (never specified) will be “hurt” by a hitherto harmless term, object or activity and be reasonably assured that the dons and professors in charge will show a white feather and do as the student demands. Thus, there isn’t a university campus on either side of the Atlantic that’s not in danger of censorship. The brutal young don’t even need to impose it themselves; their trembling elders will do it for them.

The insidious thing about PC is that it wasn’t–and isn’t–the creation of anyone in particular. It’s usually the anonymous work of such Kafkaesque figures as civil servants, municipal librarians, post office sorters and employees at similar levels. It penetrates the interstices of society, especially those where the hierarchies of privilege and property are growing. To a great extent PC is the revenge of the resentful underdog.

Nowhere has PC been more triumphant than in the U.S. This is remarkable, because America has traditionally been the home of vigorous, outspoken, raw and raucous speech. From the early 17th century, when the clerical discipline the Pilgrim Fathers sought to impose broke down and those who had things to say struck out westward or southward for the freedom to say them, America has been a land of unrestricted comment on anything–until recently. Now the U.S. has been inundated with PC inquisitors, and PC poison is spreading worldwide in the Anglo zone.

For these reasons it’s good news that Donald Trump is doing so well in the American political primaries. He is vulgar, abusive, nasty, rude, boorish and outrageous. He is also saying what he thinks and, more important, teaching Americans how to think for themselves again.

No one could be a bigger contrast to the spineless, pusillanimous and underdeserving Barack Obama, who has never done a thing for himself and is entirely the creation of reverse discrimination. The fact that he was elected President–not once, but twice–shows how deep-set the rot is and how far along the road to national impotence the country has traveled.

Under Obama the U.S.–by far the richest and most productive nation on earth–has been outsmarted, outmaneuvered and made to appear a second-class power by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. America has presented itself as a victim of political and economic Alzheimer’s disease, a case of national debility and geopolitical collapse.

TIME FOR A SCARE

None of the Republican candidates trailing Trump has the character to reverse this deplorable declension. The Democratic nomination seems likely to go to the relic of the Clinton era, herself a patiently assembled model of political correctness, who is carefully instructing America’s most powerful pressure groups in what they want to hear and whose strongest card is the simplistic notion that the U.S. has never had a woman President and ought to have one now, merit being a secondary consideration.

The world is disorderly and needs its leading nation to take charge and scare it back into decency. Donald Trump fits the bill. Other formidable figures, including Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, have performed a similar service in the past. But each President is unique and cast in his own mold. Trump is a man of excess–and today a man of excess is what’s needed.

Obama as Precursor of Trump

Trump perpetuates the post-modern politics perfected by Obama and inaugurated by the first PoMo Prez, Bill Clinton, who was also the first black president. You know you're in PoMo Land when a honkie from Hope, Arkansas gets to be black. Well, why not? Race is just a social construct, isn't it? And what can be constructed can be deconstructed.

Fred Siegel in Andrew Sullivan's Blind Spot:

What Sullivan misses is that Trump wasn’t possible without Obama. You didn’t have to be a white, male, working-class voter to be stunned by Obama’s unprecedented assertion of executive power. Obama’s argument time and again was that he had to bypass Congress because he was in a hurry. When he claimed that things needed to be done quickly, he promised to govern with his telephone and a pen. He not only refused to enforce America’s border laws; he also claimed the right to legalize undocumented workers by executive action. He forged an international agreement with the Iranian mullahs by winning approval for the deal with the U.N.—bypassing constitutionally required support from the Senate. Obama unilaterally revised Obamacare’s rules without any pretense of seeking legislative approval.

It was Obama who showed that ignorance was no obstacle, and sheer demagoguery worked. When Obama spoke of the Austrians speaking Austrian, talked of 57 states, and referred to a naval translator as a “corpsemen,” it produced barely a murmur. When he met at the White House with the “activists” who incited those who laid waste to a section of Ferguson, Missouri, he instructed them “to stay the course.” That produced but a faint rustling.

Our postmodern president, a good friend of mine points out, has proved that facts don’t matter. The weakest economic recovery in post-World War II history has been sold as a rousing success. We increased our troop levels in Iraq, but miraculously we still don’t have any “boots on the ground.” The man who told his supporters, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” was sold to America by the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the networks as a post-partisan—one who somehow found a way to blame Republicans for all the country’s ills. Obama also showed that bullying the Supreme Court—calling them out for their Citizens United decision in a State of the Union address—could pay dividends down the road. An intimidated Chief Justice John Roberts used pretzel-like logic to redefine the Obamacare mandate as a tax, though the administration had insisted that it was nothing of the kind.

Most of the maladies Sullivan attributes to Trump were incorporated into American politics by the man he deeply admires, the man whose face alone, Sullivan suggested, proved his worth—Barack Obama. Sullivan rightly sees the danger of “democracy willingly, even impetuously,” repealing itself. That repeal began under the man sitting in the Oval Office today.

Can We Live Together in Peace Despite Deep Differences?

A large part of the appeal of Donald Trump even to those of us who oppose much of his style and substance is that he and he alone appears prepared to fight the Left and fight to win, which of course means using all their dirty tactics against them. He alone seems to grasp that we are in a war, and that civility has no place in a war, except for a mock civility deployed when it is advantageous to do so. The politics of personal destruction has been a trademark feature of the Left since at least V. I. Lenin, and Trump has shown that he is skilled in this nasty art. Case in point: his swift elimination of the gentlemanly but effete Jeb Bush. Poor Jeb went from Jeb! to Jeb in no time despite all the money behind him. One hopes that Trump can destroy the despicable Hillary in the same way.

But surely the politics of personal destruction is a sub-optimal form of politics, to put it in the form of an understatement.

Given that we agree on very little in this age of rage and polarization, are there any prospects for peaceful coexistence? Peter Wehner:

There’s no easy or quick way out of this. It will require some large number of Americans to re-think how we are to engage in politics in this era of rage and polarization. Toward that end John Inazu, an associate professor of law and political science at Washington University in St. Louis, has written Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference.

Professor Inazu’s book explores, in an honest and realistic way, how we can live together peaceably despite our deep differences. He concedes we lack agreement about the purpose of our country, the nature of the common good, and the meaning of human flourishing. But this is hardly the first time. (To take just one example, America in 1860 was far more riven than it is today.)

What is needed is to reclaim what Inazu calls three “civic aspirations” – tolerance, humility and patience. The goal here isn’t to pretend our deep differences don’t exist; rather, it’s to approach politics in ways that takes [sic] into account our constitutional commitments (including allowing individuals to form and gather in groups of their choosing) and civic practices. It is to give people space to live their lives and think about things in different ways. It means accepting our disagreements without degrading and imbruting those with whom we disagree. It obligates us, in other words, to understand what pluralism requires of others and of us. (The requirements we place on others is the easy part; the requirements we place on ourselves is the more challenging part.)

This all may sound hopelessly high-minded to you, eliciting a dismissive roll of the eyes. It’s so unfashionable, so unrealistic, so out of touch. It’s chic to be cynical. Except for this: Disagreeing with others, even passionately disagreeing with others, without rhetorically vaporizing them is actually part of what it means to live as citizens in a republic. (Once upon a time this was part of civics education.) The choice is co-existence with some degree of mutual respect — or the politics of resentment and disaffection, the politics of hate and de-humanization.

Right now, it appears an awful lot of people are embracing the politics of hate and de-humanization.

I am not as sanguine as Wehner or Inazu. We are told that the goal is "to approach politics in ways that takes [sic] into account our constitutional commitments (including allowing individuals to form and gather in groups of their choosing) and civic practices. It is to give people space to live their lives and think about things in different ways."

But precisely here is the problem. The Left will not allow it! They don't give a rat's ass about the Constitution or its commitments. There are leftist scum who now argue against free speech. There are university administrators who either have no understanding of the traditional values of the university, including open inquiry and free debate, or else are too cowed to enforce them. Not to mention the leftist termites among them out to undermine the West and its institutions. There is nothing liberal about these so-called 'liberals.' Furthermore, leftists have no qualms about using the power of the state to erode the institutions of civil society. Disaster looms if the Left gets its way and manages to eliminate the buffering elements of civil society lying between the naked individual and the state. The state can wear the monstrous aspect of Leviathan or that of the benevolent nanny whose multiple tits are so many spigots supplying panem et circenses to the increasingly less self-reliant masses. Whichever face it wears, it is the enemy of that traditional American value, liberty. To cite just one example, the Obama administration promotes ever-increasing food stamp dependency to citizens and illegal aliens alike under the mendacious SNAP acronym thereby disincentivizing relief and charitable efforts at the local level while further straining an already strapped Federal treasury. A trifecta of stupidity and corruption, if you will: the infantilizing of the populace who now needs federal help in feeding itself; the fiscal irresponsibilty of adding to the national debt; the assault on the institutions of civil society out of naked lust for ever more centralized power in the hands of the Dems, the left wing party. (Not that the Republicans are conservative.)

Wehner fails to grasp that the Left is fundamentally destructive of the spaces in which people "live their lives and think about things in different ways." This is why there can be no peace with them.

It is hopelessly naive to think that we can have comity without commonality. There are certain things we cannot be expected to agree on. We will never agree on the purpose of human life or the nature of human flourishing. This is why the Declaration of Independence speaks not of an unalienable right to happiness, but of an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness which includes a pursuit of the question as to what it would be to be happy. But we have to agree on the purpose of government and a small set of core American values. One of them is liberty, which entails a commitment to limited government. A second is e pluribus unum which expresses the value of assimilation. A third is that rights are not granted by government but have a status antecedent to government and the conventional. Does the Left accept these as values? Of course not. The Left is totalitarian from top to bottom. It is anti-liberty. The Left promotes a mindless and destructive diversity. The Left, being totalitarian, cannot brook any competitors, not the private sphere, not private property which is the foundation of individual liberty, not the family, not religion with its reference to Transcendence, not any realm of values beyond the say-so of rulers.

I am not expressing cynicism, but realism. Inazu and Wehner are engaged in a vaporous feel-good sort of preaching lacking any connection with reality. They fail to grasp that we have reached the point where we agree on almost nothing and that the way forward will be more like war than like civil debate on a common ground of shared principles.

Maybe the alternative is this: we either defeat the Left or we balkanize. To put it oxymoronically I have toyed quite seriously with the idea that what we need is the political analog of divorce, not that this is an optimal solution. See my A Case for Voluntary Segregation. I am speaking, of course, of political segregation, not racial segregation. I have to point out the obvious because some stupid race-baiting liberal may be reading this.

Plato on Trump

Channeled through Andrew Sullivan.

Conrad Black on Donald Trump

Conrad Black has written well and with insight about Donald Trump. Here is his latest. Excerpt:

. . . his major foreign-policy statement on April 27 is a cogent outline of a clear definition of the U.S. national interest. It is neither impetuous as George W. Bush nor as defeatist and contra-historical as Obama. Trump is almost unstoppable as the Republican nominee now, and is already shifting fire to Hillary Clinton. In their only direct clash to date, when Senator Clinton called him a sexist, he shut her down easily by remarking that her husband, to whom she owes her prominence, was the greatest sexist in American political history and that she facilitated his behavior. Senator Clinton’s many untruths, even on absurd issues such as being fired on by snipers in Bosnia, and her lack of a serious record of public achievement, as well as the spirit of change and the unpopularity of the Obama administration to which she must affect some fealty, make her very vulnerable.

The election of Donald Trump as president is now a very reasonable possibility. Among its effects would be a salutary house-cleaning of the federal government, a process of renewal that would doubtless have lapses of taste and judgment, but that would revitalize American public life. The Bush dynasty was an accident of continuity following the very successful Reagan presidency, and it came to have a stifling influence on the Republican Party. The premature defeat of George H. W. Bush by Bill Clinton led to the even more precarious myth of the Bush-Clinton co-dynasty, as there was no excuse for Clinton winning the 1992 election. Barack Obama interrupted the Bush-Clinton alternation by seizing the moment for an admirable and nationally heartfelt gesture of tolerance and broad-mindedness, but he has been a disastrous president.

George Will has a different view. His latest concludes:

If Trump is nominated, Republicans working to purge him and his manner from public life will reap the considerable satisfaction of preserving the identity of their 162-year-old party while working to see that they forgo only four years of the enjoyment of executive power. Six times since 1945 a party has tried, and five times failed, to secure a third consecutive presidential term. The one success — the Republicans’ 1988 election of George H.W. Bush — produced a one-term president. If Clinton gives her party its first 12 consecutive White House years, Republicans can help Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, or someone else who has honorably recoiled from Trump, confine her to a single term.

Mr. Will ignores the fact that even one Hillary term will do irreparable damage to the country because of her Supreme Court nominations. Irreparable.

Post-Consensus Politics: A Poetic Epigraph

Here is the first stanza of "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), a fitting epigraph to our entry into the twilight. But for the philosopher there is consolation: "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk." (Hegel).

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

The Western elites have lost all conviction and are sitting ducks for the passionate intensity of radical Muslims.

Trump, the Board Game

But if you are thinking of not voting for Trump should he get the Republican nomination, by not voting at all or voting for Hillary, Mark Levin has some choice words for you, words with which I heartily agree:

. . . I can understand ‘stop Trump’ in a primary process. But stop Trump or you’ll vote for Hillary? Stop Trump or you won’t vote at all? These people are not conservatives. They’re not constitutionalists. They’re frauds. They’re fakes. They’re not brave. They’re asinine. They’re buffoons . . .

Levin is right. Trump is bad; Hillary is worse, much worse. I shall resist the temptation to add to the list of epithets.

Dennis Prager Agrees with Me on Trump vs. Hillary

Perhaps it would be better to say that the view that Mr. Prager expresses coincides exactly with the view I have been developing over a number of posts. His piece therefore earns for him the coveted plenary MavPhil STOA (stamp of approval).

There is a profoundly fascist element to the American left and the political party that it controls (the Democrats) — from the fascist students and faculty who violently take over college presidents’ and deans’ offices and shout down non-Left speakers to the left-wing thugs who disrupt Trump events by screaming obscenities, carrying obscenity-laden posters, and extending their middle fingers to, and in some cases, spitting on the overwhelmingly peaceful attendees, etc. Having said that, whenever I begin to hope that Trump, even if he continues to act indecently, will at least begin to act intelligently as the possibility of his being nominated approaches reality, he does something so stupid that my heart sinks again.

My sentiments exactly. Read it all.

Brussels, Hillary, Trump: Once Again Against Abstention

According to Roger Kimball,

Both are utterly unfit to be president of the United States. They are equally bad, though in different ways. Trump, not yet having access to the levers of power, has so far shown himself to be personally and professionally disreputable. Hillary, first as the appendage, latterly as the prop of her once-charismatic husband, has been a boil on the countenance of the public for decades. Either would be a disaster for the country.

I grant that Trump and Hillary are bad in different ways, but how does Kimball know that they are equally bad? By what process of calculation or reasoning did he arrive at this assertion? As it stands, Kimball's claim is a gratuitous assertion and the Latin maxim applies: Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. A bare assertion is adequately met with a bare counter-assertion. But I will do better and give seven reasons why Hillary is worse. I conclude that if one is a conservative, and if Trump and Hillary are the nominees of their respective parties, then one ought to vote for Trump. This is obviously consistent with holding, as I do hold, that the nominations of Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders would offer the voters a better choice, and in a two-fold sense: a starker choice ideologically speaking, and a choice between two basically decent people. By the way, it is astonishes me that there are blind partisans who think that the moral character of a candidate is irrelevant to his fitness for office. But I suppose that is what makes blind partisans blind.

A. Trump might appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court. But we KNOW that Hillary won't. This reason by itself ought to incline one to take a stand against the leftist candidate. I don't need to explain to my astute readers how important the composition of SCOTUS is. The composition of SCOTUS 'trumps' in long-term importance the identity of POTUS, if you will excuse the pun (and even if you won't.)

B. It is a very good bet that Trump will put a severe dent in the influx of illegal aliens across the southern border. But we KNOW that Hillary will do nothing to stem the illegal tide. If anything she'll encourage it because in her cynical eyes they are 'undocumented Democrats.' The strategy of the Left is to alter the demographics of the USA in such a way that conservatives are permanently rendered politically ineffective.

You will have noticed by now how liberals routinely suppress the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants by speaking of immigrants or 'migrants' without qualification. Michael Dukakis — remember him? — recently went on about how Trump's ancestors came from Germany. Right, but they immigrated legally. So how is that relevant to the topic of illegal immigration? Here again we see another example of liberal mendacity. Dukakis, De Blasio, and the usual suspects misrepresent their opponents as wanting a stoppage of all immigration. They are lying.

C. A third thing Trump might very well do is stop the outrage of sanctuary cities. But we KNOW Hillary won't. By the way, what do sanctuary cities provide sanctuary from? The rule of law.

D. A fourth thing Trump can be expected to do is enforce civil order and free speech rights in the face of such disorderly elements as the members of Black Lives Matter. These liars and thugs have targeted the police and are actively working to undermine the rule of law. They disrupt speakers. One even disrupted a speech by Bernie Sanders! Hillary is in bed with them. She repeats all the leftist lies about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, 'mass incarceration,' 'white privilege,' and so on. And what is most despicable is that she does it cynically for her own personal advantage.

When I floated this reason earlier, a reader objected:

If there is one thing that Trump is not doing and not showing any interest in whatsoever, it’s enforcing civil order, and he isn’t much for free speech either. (Except, obviously, when he is the beneficiary.) On the first point, Trump talks about the good old days when protesters would get roughed up, talked about wishing he could punch someone in the face, ever so slyly suggests that his followers will riot if the GOP denies him the nomination at the convention, has offered to pay the legal bills of a follower who cold-cocked a protester, and his conduct in the dispute between Michelle Fields and his chief of staff is rather poor as well. As for free speech, he’s a well-chronicled disaster.

I disagree thoroughly with my reader's first point. The single most important issue respecting the question of civil order is control of the nation's borders. Hillary will do nothing on this issue except lie about it. Trump may do something about it. See (B) above. This clinches the matter for me. My reader strains at a gnat while swallowing a camel when he brings up Trump's threatening remarks. Ask yourself: which is worse, Trump's words or the repeated and well-orchestrated leftist disruptions of conservative events? Words or actual physical violence?

As for my reader's second point, here he is on solid ground.

E. A fifth thing Trump might do is defend religious liberties. We KNOW that Hillary won't. Never forget that the Left is anti-religion and has been since 1789. Part of the reason for this is that the Left is totalitarian: it can brook no competitors to State power. This is why it must destroy belief in God and in the family. The god of the leftist is the State, the apparatchiki of the latter being the State's 'priesthood.'

F. A sixth thing Trump might do is defend Second Amendment rights. We KNOW that Hillary won't. She is a mendacious 'stealth ideologue' who won't admit that she is for Aussie-style confiscation, but that is what the liberty-basher and Constitution-trasher is for. She realizes that guns in the hands of citizens are a check on her leftist totalitarianism.

G. And then came Brussells. A seventh thing Trump might do is take serious and 'meaningful' steps against Islamic terrorism. We KNOW that Hillary won't.

Add these reasons together and you have a strong cumulative-case argument for the preferrability of Trump over Hillary should it come to such a contest.

David Brooks on Donald Trump

I have on occasion praised Ross Douthat and David Brooks as worth reading among the contributors to the reliably piss-poor Op Ed pages of The New York Times. But my estimation of Brooks has dropped a notch after reading his No, Not Trump, Not Ever.

Donald Trump is a deeply flawed candidate as any half-way objective observer would have to admit, and most of what Brooks says against him is on target. But Brooks does not understand the factors responsible for Trump's spectacular rise. (The explanandum is not that Trump is in the race, but that he is still in the race with a very good shot at the nomination.)

Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation.

This is only part of the explanation. Brooks ignores both the role of the ultra-divisive Obama with his project of a "fundamental transformation of America" and the role of the do-nothing, go-along-to-get-along 'establishment' Republicans who refused to oppose the pernicious and often extra-legal Obama initiatives. These factors are at least equal in explanatory relevance to the rage of the dispossessed and alienated. In a cute slogan of mine:

Trump's traction is mainly due to Obaminable action and conservative inaction.

Think of all those who support Trump who are not dispossessed or alienated. I am neither and I support Trump in the following weak sense: Should he get the Republican nod, I will vote for him. For Hillary is worse, for reasons I have sketched elsewhere.

Brooks comes across as a blind anti-Trump partisan. He writes,

Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.

That is true, but it is also true of Obama and Hillary as every half-way objective observer of the passing scene knows. Trump exaggerates, bullshits, lies, refuses to admit his lies when they are exposed, and so on. Not a pretty sight. In no way presidential. But the Obama-Hillary tag team is just as bad if not worse. Why does Brooks omit to point out the obvious? What's he going to do? Sit out the election? Vote for Hillary?

So I say Brooks is as bad as the blind pro-Trump partisans who would refuse to admit any of Brooks' positive points about Trump's negatives.

UPDATE:

Jonathan V. Last understands and documents Obama's role in begetting Trump. Excerpts:

When no one on the left was asking for it, Obama pursued the narrowest-possible reading of religious liberty, resulting in Supreme Court showdowns with a Lutheran school, which wanted to be free to hire its own ministers without government interference, and with the Little Sisters of the Poor, who didn't want to be forced to pay for abortifacients. There was no reason for Obama to pursue these policies except as an exercise in premeditated divisiveness. On the question of religious liberty, Obama has sought to undo a national consensus and foment conflict. In doing so, he set in motion a slow-rolling constitutional and cultural collision that is likely to end badly. The only reason this chaos isn't apparent to the general public is because Lutherans and nuns don't riot.

[. . .]

Then came Obama's penchant for wading into every racial police controversy that reached the front page of the New York Times. He took sides against the Cambridge cops in their arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. The police in this case were almost certainly in the wrong; but no one needed the president of the United States preening about it. He did the same with the death of Trayvon Martin, showing up unscheduled at a press availability to talk about the case the week after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting. Did Obama come before the cameras to reassure the public and vouch for the rule of law? No. He stoked the fires, telling America, "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago." This was a ridiculous exaggeration. Martin was (to put it charitably) a troubled teen with a history of problematic behavior; 35 years before, Barack Obama had been a promising student at an elite private school. By likening himself to Martin, Obama was viewing the episode through the most reductive and demagogic lens possible.

When the Michael Brown shooting turned Ferguson into a powder keg, Obama was ready for the cameras, calling it "heartbreaking" and sending his Justice Department in to ferret out wrongdoing. (They found none.) In a world full of real police abuses — such as the killing of Eric Garner in New York and the shooting of Walter Scott in Charleston — Obama seems to have a knack for tying himself to the cases where the police were actually in the right. It's enough to make one wonder if Obama can't tell the difference between proper and improper police conduct — or if he just doesn't care.

All of which lead to Obama's semi-embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement. As Heather Mac Donald has documented, Black Lives Matter is not an innocent college protest movement. It is an ugly strain of anarchic racialism that has led not just to the defense of looting but to the killing of police officers. Obama does not merely refuse to condemn Black Lives Matter — he attempts to rationalize it, explaining, "There is a specific problem that is happening in the African-American community that's not happening in other communities."

Is There a Duty to Stay Politically Informed?

Seldom Seen Slim offers:

I see you're paying attention to current affairs. Very hard on the nerves. I can't do it. I tried to watch one Rep "debate": the most vulgar public display I've ever seen. Do you remember the saying "he who slings mud loses ground"? I think the "contestants" dug themselves mineshaft-deep holes that night. Shameful. Didn't try to watch the Dems, but I can imagine. I'll ask you a question: as citizens do you think people deeply offended by the mudslinging nevertheless have a duty to attend to the political debate and eventually try to make an educated choice (even if it's another egregiously malum minus choice)? Unlike some countries which legally mandate voting (Australia), US citizens have no statutory obligation to vote, but I'll guess you don't see that as exhausting the duties of a citizen.

That is a wonderful saying, "He who slings mud loses ground." I had never heard it before. I shall remember it. A variant occurs to me, "He who digs up dirt loses ground."

An interesting logico-linguistic point that should interest Slim: Constructions of the form He who Fs Gs, while featuring what is grammatically the third-person singular masculine pronoun, are not logically pronominal at all. The use of 'he' in such constructions is quantificational. Thus "he who slings mud loses ground" is replaceable both salva veritate and salva significatione by

For any x, if x slings mud, then x loses ground.

Now on to to Slim's question:

As citizens do you think people deeply offended by the mudslinging nevertheless have a duty to attend to the political debate and eventually try to make an educated choice (even if it's another egregiously malum minus choice)?

After Trump referred to his phallus, praising its size and efficacy, I turned off the TV. So there is no duty to listen to all the mud slung from side to side. But yes, one does have a civic duty to "attend to the debate" in the sense of informing oneself of both (i) what the candidates represent and (ii) their character as individuals. Why? Well, since we have benefited from civil order, we have a moral responsibility to help maintain it and pass it on. It is a question of gratitude, a good conservative virtue.

One ought to attend to both (i) and (ii). I am puzzled but also appalled at the number of Trump supporters who are blind partisans who are either unaware of or dismissive of the man's obvious negatives. They are so enamored of his populism that they are willing to ignore the man's character as if that has no bearing on his fitness for high office.

Mandatory Voting?

There is a reason not to go the way of the Aussies and make voting mandatory. As it is here in the USA, roughly only half of the eligible voters actually vote. This is arguably good inasmuch as voters filter themselves. If I were a liberal, I would say that eligible voters who stay home 'disenfranchise' themselves, and often to the benefit of the rest of us. (But of course I am not a liberal and I don't misuse words like 'disenfranchise.')

What I mean is that, generally speaking, the people who can vote but do not are precisely the people one would not want voting in the first place. To vote takes time, energy, and a bit of commitment. Careless, lazy, and uninformed people are not likely to do it. And that is good. I don't want my thoughtful vote neutralized by the vote of some dolt who is merely at the polling place to avoid a fine. And if you force a man to vote, he may rebel and vote randomly or in other ways that subvert the process.

Of course, many refuse to vote out of disgust at their choices. My advice for them would be to hold their noses and vote for the least or the lesser of the evils. Politics is always about choosing the least or the lesser of evils. The very fact that we need government at all shows that we live in an imperfect world, one in which a perfect candidate is not to be found. Government itself is a necessary evil: it would be better if we didn't need it, but we do need it.

I support the right of those who think the system irremediably corrupt to protest by refusing to vote. Government is coercive by its very nature, and mandatory voting is a form of coercion that belongs in a police state rather than in a free republic.

If you think that a higher voter turnout is a good thing, that is happening anyway as divisions deepen and our politics become more polarized. The nastier our politics, the higher the turnout. And it will get nastier still. So why do we need mandatory voting?

Fact is, we are awash in unnecessary laws. We don't need more laws and more government interference in our lives. And will a mandatory voting law be enforced? How? At what expense? Isn't it perfectly obvious to everyone with commonsense that we need to move toward less government rather than more, toward more liberty rather than less? (You may infer from this that Hillary and Bernie lack common sense.)

If you think about it, 'One man, one vote' is a very dubious principle. I think about it here. Voluntary voting is one way of balancing the ill effects of 'One man, one vote.' But isn't voting a civic duty? I would say that it is. But not every duty should be legally mandated.

Seldom Seen Slim has correctly guessed my position: the duties of a citizen are not exhausted by what is legally mandated. One has a moral obligation to stay politically informed, to do one's best to form correct political opinions, and to vote.

Is it Rational to be Politically Ignorant?

There are those who love to expose and mock the astonishing political ignorance of Americans. According to a 2006 survey, only 42% of Americans could name the three branches of government. But here is an interesting question worth exploring:

Is it not entirely rational to ignore events over which one has no control and withdraw into one's private life where one does exercise control and can do some good?

I can vote, but my thoughtful vote counts for next-to-nothing in most elections, especially when it is cancelled out by the vote of some thoughtless and uninformed idiot. I can blog, but on a good day I will reach only a couple thousand readers worldwide and none of them are policy makers. (I did have some influence once on a Delta airline pilot who made a run for a seat in the House of Representatives.) I can attend meetings, make monetary contributions, write letters to senators and representatives, but is this a good use of precious time and resources? It may be that Ilya Somin has it right:

. . . political ignorance is actually rational for most of the public, including most smart people. If your only reason to follow politics is to be a better voter, that turns out not be much of a reason at all. That is because there is very little chance that your vote will actually make a difference to the outcome of an election (about 1 in 60 million in a presidential race, for example). For most of us, it is rational to devote very little time to learning about politics, and instead focus on other activities that are more interesting or more likely to be useful.

Is it rational for me to stay informed? Yes, because of my intellectual eros, my strong desire to understand the world and what goes on in it. The philosopher is out to understand the world; if he is smart he will have no illusions about changing it, pace Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach.

Another reason for people like me to stay informed is to be able to anticipate what is coming down the pike and prepare so as to protect myself and my stoa, my citadel, and the tools of my trade. For example, my awareness of Obama's fiscal irresponsibility is necessary if I am to make wise decisions as to how much of my money I should invest in precious metals and other hard assets. Being able to anticipate Obaminations re: 'gun control' will allow me to buy what I need while it is still to be had. 'Lead' can prove to be useful for the protection of gold, not to mention the defense of such sentient beings as oneself and one's family.

In brief, a reason to stay apprised of current events is not so that I can influence or change them, but to be in a position so that they don't influence or change me.

A third reason to keep an eye on the passing scene, and one mentioned by Somin, is that one might follow politics the way some follow sports. Getting hot and bothered over the minutiae of baseball and the performance of your favorite team won't affect the outcome of any games, but it is a source of great pleasure to the sports enthusiast. I myself don't give a damn about spectator sports. Politics are my sports. So that is a third reason for me to stay on top of what's happening. It's intellectually stimulating and a source of conversational matter and blog fodder.

All this having been said and properly appreciated, one must nevertheless keep things in perspective by bearing in mind Henry David Thoreau's beautiful admonition:

Read not The Times; read the eternities!

For this world is a vanishing quantity whose pomps, inanities, Obaminations and what-not will soon pass into the bosom of non-being.

And you with it.

Hillary Apologizes for Using ‘Illegal Immigrants’

Here. The problem is not that Hillary is too stupid to grasp the distinction between legal and illegal immigration; the problem is that she is a corrupt leftist out for her own personal gain at the expense of her country.

Chris Hedges over at Truth Dig is worried about the rise of American fascism. But first things first. First we crush Hillary and the Dems. There will be plenty of time to keep an eye on Der Trumpster should he make it to the White House.

I am not worried about American fascism. We Americans are not a bunch of Germans about to start goose-stepping behind some dictator. Our traditions of liberty and self-reliance are long-standing and deep-running. A sizeable contingent of Trump supporters are gun rights activists who would be open to an extra-political remedy should anyone seek to instantiate the role of Der Fuehrer or Il Duce. True, Trump appeals to those having an authoritarian personality structure. But his supporters are also cussedly individualistic and liberty-loving. I expect the latter characteristic to mitigate the former.

There is also the following interesting question wanting our attention: why is it better to have the personality structure of the typical leftist? Why is it better to be a rebellious, adolescent, alienated, destructive, irreverent, tradition-despising, anti-authoritarian, ungrateful, utopian, dweller in Cloud Cuckoo Land?

Someone told me today that Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is dedicated to Lucifer. Lucifer, not Lucifer Schwarz of Poughkeepsie. Makes perfect sense.

Trump versus Hillary: Abstain or Take a Stand?

Robert Royal, writing in The Catholic Thing:

Democrats advance a woman, a serial liar, a self-proclaimed feminist who trashed multiple women for political gain, an ideological ambulance chaser who will follow votes anywhere, who compromised state secrets and amassed a fortune while serving in the Cabinet, partly through suspect dealings with donors in foreign nations.

Republicans, fed up with their flaccid leaders, advance a man whose whole life speaks: no fixed principles, crony capitalism, megalomania, religious hypocrisy, authoritarianism, bullying, innocence of the Constitution and the simplest functioning of our government (he thinks judges signs bills) – and no political experience.

[. . .]

I won’t indulge in a categorical judgment for now: that would be to give in to the very passions of the moment that I find mortally dangerous. But if things continue as they are . . . I’m thinking it’s best if I simply don’t vote for president. Or write in someone sane, and not wholly on the make.

While I respect Royal's position, I say one must take a stand. Granted, both candidates are very bad, and for the reasons Royal cites in addition to others. But Hillary is worse. For conservatives to abstain because of Trump's manifest negatives is folly. But why is Hillary worse than Trump?

Hillary is Obama in a pant suit. She will continue his "fundamental transformation of America." Like Obama, she is a destructive leftist. She must be stopped. Therefore, conservatives must vote for the Republican nominee whoever it is.

To spell it out a bit:

A. Trump might appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court. But we KNOW that Hillary won't. This reason by itself ought to incline you to take a stand against the leftist candidate. I don't need to explain to my astute readers how important the composition of SCOTUS is. The composition of SCOTUS 'trumps' in long-term importance the identity of POTUS, if you will excuse the pun (and even if you won't.)

B. It is a very good bet that Trump will put a severe dent in the influx of illegal aliens across the southern border. (Forget his bluster about making Mexico pay for the wall.) But we KNOW that Hillary will do nothing to stem the illegal tide. If anything she'll encourage it because in her cynical eyes they are 'undocumented Democrats.' The strategy of the Left is to alter the demographics of the USA in such a way that conservatives are permanently rendered politically ineffective.

C. A third thing Trump might very well do is stop the outrage of sanctuary cities. But we KNOW Hillary won't. By the way, what do sanctuary cities provide sanctuary from? The rule of law.

D. A fourth thing Trump can be expected to do is enforce civil order and free speech rights in the face of such disorderly elements as the members of Black Lives Matter. These liars have targeted the police and are actively working to undermine the rule of law. They disrupt speakers. One even disrupted a speech by Bernie Sanders! Hillary is in bed with them. She repeats all the leftist lies about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, 'mass incarceration,' 'white privilege,' and so on. And what is most despicable is that she does it cynically for her own personal advantage.

Add these reasons together and you have a strong cumulative-case argument for the preferrability of Trump over Hillary. There are other reasons I haven't mentioned.

Here is the situation. If it comes down to Trump versus Hillary, then you face a lousy choice between two awful candidates. So you must vote for the least awful of the two. And that is Trump. Alles klar?

"But why not vote for neither?"

The short answer is that the Left is totalitarian. You can't withdraw from politics, because they won't let you. And again, we know that Hillary is a leftist who will try to extend the reach of government into every aspect of our lives. You must take a stand.

You must realize that politics is a practical business. It always involves concrete choices among or between sub-optimal candidates. If you refuse to vote, you willy-nilly lend support to Hillary and her ilk and her agenda. You are a fool if you let the best become the enemy of the good, or in the present situation, the good become the enemy of the least bad.

Is There Any Place for Gentlemen in Post-Consensus Politics?

We are in the age of post-consensus politics. We Americans don't agree on much of anything any more. As our politics comes more and more to resemble warfare, the warrior comes more and more to replace the gentleman.

Here is the best description of a gentleman I have encountered:

The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe. -– John Walter Wayland

By this definition, Trump is no gentleman; he is rather the anti-gentleman. But a gentleman among thugs is a loser. You cannot appeal to the higher nature of a thug; he has none. So you need someone who can repay the leftist in his own Alinskyite coin. You need a man who will get into the gutter and fight the leftist with his own weapons. You need a man who will not shrink from the politics of personal destruction preached by V. I. Lenin and used so effectively by his successors in the Democrat Party.

Herein an argument for Trump. I am beginning to think that he alone can defeat the evil Hillary. Ted Cruz is a brilliant man compared to whom Trump is a know-nothing when it comes to the law, the Constitution, and the affairs of state, and Cruz is a better man than Trump; but the Texan is a senator and thus part of the Republican establishment against which there is justified rebellion.

Personality-wise, too, Cruz is not that attractive to the average disgruntled voter. He is not enough of a regular guy. And being a better man than Trump he probably won't descend deep enough into the gutter to really annihilate Hillary as she so richly deserves. Trump can mobilize Joe Sixpack and Jane Lipstick. These types don't watch C-SPAN or read The Weekly Standard. They can't relate to the bow-tie brigade over at National Review. They are heartily sick and tired of the empty talk of the crapweasels* of the Republican establishment. They want action.

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*I borrow this delightful bit of invective from the fiery Michelle Malkin.