Our “mainstream conservative” is a pathetic hostage to the Left. He somehow hasn’t yet realized that the Left is hell-bent on branding everything “racist” regardless of whether the label has any basis whatsoever in either reason or reality. Things are so bad that a progressive merely has to threaten to play the “you’re a racist” card, and our “mainstream conservative” will do anything, including betray his own staff, to save face with a crowd that has already decided that he is irredeemable: nothing more than the political and moral equivalent of white supremacists and neo-Nazi fascists. He hasn’t developed sufficient contempt for this judgment, I suppose, or perhaps he really believes that he can change it by engaging with them in good faith. He cannot.
Indeed. Conservatives need to realize that leftists are enemies, not co-inhabitants of the plane of reasoned dialog. They will do anything to win. An indication of this is the ever more prevalent use of 'white supremacist' to smear conservatives. Traditional conservative values prevent too many of us from replying in kind and giving the scumbags a taste of their own medicine.
But the times they are are a'changing. A good indication thereof is the election of Donald J. Trump. He knows how to punch back, and decorum be damned. Civility is for the civil. There comes a time for incivility assuming you care to preserve a space in which such values as civility can flourish.
………………………
Reader RP writes,
Solzhenitsyn wrote in November 1916, "By his own experience, Colonel Vorotyntsev comes to realize that 'educated people were more cowardly when confronted by left-wing loudmouths than in face of machine guns.'”
For all their shortcomings, conservatives at least have a limiting principle for politics. Most of them believe, for example, in the principles enshrined in the Constitution and maintain that no matter how bad things are, the Bill of Rights is a necessary bulwark, sometimes the only bulwark, against tyranny and violence. In contrast, here’s Timothy Egan of The New York Timesarguing unabashedly for the repeal of the Second and Fifth Amendments.
The rapid radicalization of Democrats along these lines follows a ruthless logic about the entire premise of the American constitutional order. If you believe, as progressives increasingly do, that America was founded under false pretenses and built on racial oppression, then why bother conserving it? And why bother trying to compromise with those on the other side, especially if they reject progressives’ unifying theory that America is forever cursed by its original sin of slavery, which nothing can expiate?
Before you scoff, understand that this view of race and America is increasingly mainstream on the American Left. To read someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose recent article in The Atlantic is a manifesto of racial identity politics that argues Trump’s presidency is based on white supremacy, is to realize that progressive elites no longer believe they can share a republic with conservatives, or really anyone with whom they disagree.
Coates has attained near god-like status among progressives with his oracular writings on race and politics, which take for granted the immutability of race and racial animus. So it’s deeply disturbing when he writes, as he does in a new collection of essays, that “should white supremacy fall, the means by which that happens might be unthinkable to those of us bound by present realities and politics.”
What does Coates mean by that? It isn’t hard to guess, and lately Coates isn’t trying too hard to disguise it. In a recent interview with Ezra Klein of Vox, Coates expanded on this idea. Writes Klein:
When he tries to describe the events that would erase America’s wealth gap, that would see the end of white supremacy, his thoughts flicker to the French Revolution, to the executions and the terror. ‘It’s very easy for me to see myself being contemporary with processes that might make for an equal world, more equality, and maybe the complete abolition of race as a construct, and being horrified by the process, maybe even attacking the process. I think these things don’t tend to happen peacefully.’
This is the circuitous, stumbling language of man who knows precisely what he wants to say but isn’t sure if he should come right out and say it. Coates isn’t alone in feinting toward violence as a means—perhaps the only means, if Coates is to be taken at his word—of achieving social justice. On college campuses, progressive activists increasingly don’t even bother mincing words, they just forcibly silence anyone who disagrees with them, as a Black Lives Matter group did recently during an event featuring the American Civil Liberties Union at the College of William and Mary. (Ironically, the talk was supposed to be about students and the First Amendment.)
For a sincere progressive, almost everything that happened in the past is a crime against the present, and the only greatness America can attain is by repudiating its past and shaming—or silencing, if possible—all those who believe preserving our constitutional order is the best way for all of us to get along.
Seen in that light, the radicalization of Democrats is something qualitatively different, and much more dangerous, than the radicalization of Republicans. It means, among other things, that the culture war is now going to encompass everything, and that it will never end.
My man Hanson has too much class to be so blunt. Here is part of what he has to say in a very astute article from which you can infer my title:
In sum, the NeverTrump lament seems to be that whatever good Trump has done is more than outweighed by his “character is destiny” flaws. Neil Gorsuch and scores of conservative circuit court judges; Nikki Haley at the United Nations, James Mattis at Defense, H.R. McMaster at the National Security Council, Mike Pompeo at the CIA, and Rex Tillerson at the State Department, all restoring deterrence; rollbacks of Obama-era executive orders; green-lighting pipeline construction and increased fossil fuel production; protections of Second Amendment rights; restoring national borders; and genuine efforts to reform Obamacare and the tax code—all of that for them is not worth the spectacle of Trump on the national stage.
A Note to VDH
Dear Professor Hanson,
When I see you on Tucker Carlson you look all beat to hell. You're working too hard. Please take care of yourself. Get plenty of rest, exercise, and eat well. Write less. We need you for decades to come.
Your loyal reader,
BV
UPDATE (5:50 AM)
Mark Anderson writes,
Buongiorno, Bill,
Hanson worked with me on my Classics M.A. thesis, which I wrote under the supervision of Robert Drews, a well known historian of the Bronze Age whose work Hanson admires. My article "Socrates as Hoplite" is a distillation of that work. It is also, by the way, relevant to the relation between philosophy, ethics, and self-defense (even aggression). In any case, I share your dismay about Hanson's appearance (and speaking style/tone, and slovenly oversized suits) on Tucker Carlson (one of the very few serious, knowledgeable, and intellectually honest journalist-commentators on TV). He (Hanson) really does seem beat. But I suspect that's just his style.
Buona giornata,
Mark
Mark Anderson Chair, Department of Philosophy Director of Classics Belmont University Nashville, TN 37212
Ciao Marco,
I share your high opinion of Tucker Carlson. But I wish he would stop inviting lefties. He probably thinks he needs to do this to be "fair and balanced," but what typically happens is that Carlson asks some reasonable question of the leftist guest, which the latter evades in order let loose with his reliably incoherent canned spiel, about, say, all those thousands of people roaming around without photo ID who are 'disenfranchised' — sneer quotes! — by reasonable ID requirements at polling places. Tucker tries without success to bring the knucklehead back to the topic, voices are raised, they talk over each other, and I surf away to a Seinfeld re-run. These shouting matches are totally unproductive. Besides, they elevate my blood pressure. But when I return from Seinfeld to hear the brilliant and consummately witty analysis of Mark Steyn, or the less brilliant, but solid, contribution of my favorite gun-totin' lesbian, the charming Tammy Bruce, then it is all worthwhile and the old B.P. returns to 'within range.'
Of course, there are people who like to watch unproductive shouting matches. They like to see people fight. So it may well be that ratings would decline if my suggestion were followed.
Tucker needs to realize that the age of productive dialog with political opponents is over in American politics. Destructive leftists don't need talk, they need defeat. Let's hope it can be achieved politically without resort to, God forbid, the 2A solution. But as every patriot knows, the 2A ain't about hunting.
Do you have a right to life? Yes. If you have a right to life, do you have a right to defend your life? Yes. If you have a right to defend your life, do you have the right to acquire the means to self-defense? Yes. Do you understand that this implies that the citizen has a right to keep and bear arms? Yes.
My right-wing identitarian sparring partner makes a good response to my attempt, earlier today, to locate a common root of both right-and left-wing identitarianism. My responses are in blue.
……………..
Wouldn't you agree, on reflection, that the bolded passage [from a NYT article] is a straw man?
"Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice.Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural."
A typical 'alt-right' identitarian in Europe or America believes things like this:
(a) race is real,
(b) race is an important part of human identity, and a natural basis for organizing society,
(c) racial differences have important political consequences,
(d) whites have the right to act in their own interest, e.g., by stopping immigration or defending the dominance of white European culture and norms in white European societies . . .
I accept, with qualifications, all four of these propositions. Much depends, of course, on what exactly they are taken to mean.
As for the first proposition, I accept it as it stands if it is the negation of the claim that racial differences are wholly a matter of social construction. Racial theories and classifications are of course social constructs; but these theories and classifications are attempts to understand an underlying biological reality. That there are biological differences between the races is as obvious as that there are such differences between men and women. These biological realities make it impossible for a person to change his race. See my response to Rebecca Tuvel's "In Defense of Transracialism."
As for the second proposition, I can accept it, but only with serious qualifications. I hold that a human being is a spiritual animal, and therefore not just an animal. My opponent will probably not accept this; my impression is that he is a naturalist. My theistic personalism is a version of anti-naturalism. As a personalist I maintain that race bears only upon my animal identity, WHAT I am as a bit of the world's fauna; not upon WHO I am as a person. Furthermore, my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup. For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person. See Is There a Defensible Sense in which Human Beings are Equal?
Of course, I don't expect my interlocutor to accept any of this if he is a naturalist. But then the discussion shifts to naturalism which comprises a set of questions logically prior to the present set.
With respect to the first half of (b), I would say that race is not an important part of my identity as a person, because it is not any part of my identity as a person, even though it is essential to my identity as an animal: I am not accidentally Caucasian any more than I am accidentally male. (Thus even if I pulled a Bruce Jenner and donned 'superdrag' apparel complete with surgically fabricated vagina, mammaries, etc, I would still remain biologically male. I would just be parading around in 'superdrag.' ) My opponent, if he is a naturalist who sees himself as identical to a living human animal, is committed not only to saying that race is an important part of human identity, but is essential to human identity.
The second half of (b) also requires qualification. First of all it is not clear what it means to say that race is a natural basis for organizing society. Is this supposed to rule out a 'proposition nation'? And what exactly is a 'proposition nation'? The Alt-Right seems adamantly opposed to such a thing. But the unity of the USA is not the unity of a tribe but the unity of a set of ideas. Those who accept these ideas are Americans regardless of whether they come from England or Germany or Italy, or Greece — or China. I grant, of course that certain ethnic groups are better equipped to implement American values and ideals than others. But that is consistent with the USA being a 'proposition nation.'
As for the third and fourth propositions, I agree. Racial differences do have political consequences, and immigration policy must be to the benefit of the host country and its culture. It would therefore be national suicide to allow the immigration into Western nations of sharia-supporting Muslims. But what about educated secular Turks who are religiously Muslim to about the same extent as a Boston Unitarian is Christian and bear some of the innocuous cultural marks of Muslims such as the valuing of modesty in women and an aversion to the consumption of alcohol? What could justify excluding them from immigrating?
While Trump and Corker took potshots at each other, Vice President Mike Pence engaged in an intentionally polarizing stunt by showing up at an Indianapolis Colts football game only to depart in a huff when players from the San Francisco 49ers (predictably) knelt in protest during the national anthem. It was an utterly gratuitous effort to sow race-based dissension and animosity in the country — the diametric opposite of the kind of behavior we normally label "presidential."
Polarizing? We are already polarized. There is no need for any polarizing. VP Pence was merely taking a stand at one of the poles, the pole of patriotism and decency and respect, and protesting the antipodean ingratitude and disrespect of the louts who protest an imaginary 'systemic racism.'
Intentionally polarizing? How does Linker know what Pence's intentions were?
Stunt? Pence was courageously pushing back against destructive leftist scum.
Predictably? So the louts lack free will and must be expected to engage in bad behavior?
Gratuitous? Not at all. It was a warranted response to the loutish behavior of know-nothings.
Effort to sow race-based dissension? Again, how does Linker know what Pence's intentions were? And again, the dissension already exists. There's no need for any sowing.
Race-based? What does race have to do with this? Pence was standing up against unpatriotic behavior at a NATIONAL Football League event.
Unpresidential? Not at all. Pence courageously took a patriotic stand. He did his job. Had he not done what he did he would have been unpresidential.
As for Trump, it is eminently presidential of him to call for the elimination of NFL subsidies.
It looks like we have a bit of a disagreement here.
And a pox on both houses, say I. What strikes me is what they have in common. Here is something from the NYT that makes sense (emphasis added):
In the most memorable sentence in “The First White President,” Mr. Coates declares, “Whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.” I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish.
This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice.Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring
I am not so sure the febrile, destructive bullshit of millionaire celebrity Coates is morally superior to white supremacism, but the bolded passage gets at the truth of the matter.
By the way, the bums at the NYT have made it difficult to copy from their articles, but here are two work-arounds. I just now employed the first and it is not too much of a pain.
Not believing in abortion, like not believing in gay marriage, is now, unquestionably, a thought crime. It was hardly surprising that the Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg recently said he did not believe in abortion, because he is a man of conviction as well as a Roman Catholic, and this is the teaching of his Church. Yet his view was treated with incredulity and disdain by everyone from trolls and women's groups to the higher echelons of the political Establishment.
Catholics need to to realize that it is utterly foolish to invoke the teachings of their church in justification of their beliefs when countering leftists. If that is what the Tory MP did, then he needs to wise up. In the eyes of a leftist, he may as well have 'defended' his opposition to abortion on the ground that his mum/mommy taught him that it is very bad.
Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises? Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept? The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative, although few seem to understand this. Yet another reason why you need my blog.
Che Guevara has the most effective public relations department on earth. The Argentine guerrilla and modern Cuba’s co-founding father has been fashioned into a hipster icon, a counter-cultural hero, an anti-establishment rebel, and a champion of the poor. As James Callaghan once put it, “A lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”
The truth about Che now has its boots on. He helped free Cubans from the repressive Batista regime, only to enslave them in a totalitarian police state worst than the last. He was Fidel Castro’s chief executioner, a mass-murderer who in theory could have commanded any number of Latin American death squads, from Peru’s Shining Path on the political left to Guatemala’s White Hand on the right.
You know-nothing liberals need to read the whole thing.
This passage from Schopenhauer illustrates one of my favorite German words, Unbegriff, for which we have no simple equivalent in standard English.
"An impersonal God is no God at all, but only a word misused, an unconcept, a contradictio in adjecto, a philosophy professor's shibboleth, a word with which he tries to weasel his way after having had to give up the thing." (my trans.)
I read Schopenhauer as attacking those who want to have it both ways at once: they want to continue talking about God after having abandoned the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So they speak of an impersonal God, a construction in which the adjective 'contradicts' the noun. (The Ostrich of London may perhaps fruitfully reflect on the deliberate use-mention fudge in my last sentence.)
God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. Lucifer as the father of all perversity.
God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom. He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?
We are not mere objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right. How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will and autonomy and the power of self-determination even unto rebellion?
This is a mystery of divine creation. It is is above my pay grade. And yours too.
God can do it but we can't. We can't even understand how God could do it. A double infirmity. An infirmity that sires a doubt: Perhaps it can't be done, even by God. Perhaps the whole notion is incoherent and God does not exist. Perhaps it is not a mystery but an impossibility. Perhaps Christian creation is an Unbegriff.
Joseph Ratzinger accurately explains the Christian metaphysical position, and in so doing approaches what I am calling the ultimate paradox of divine creation, but he fails to confront, let alone solve, the problem:
The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions [materialism and idealism]. To be sure, it, too, will say, being is being-thought. Matter itself points beyond itself to thinking as the earlier and more original factor. But in opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God will say: Being is being-thought — yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks more closely.
On the contrary, Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence. In this it goes beyond any mere idealism. While the latter , as we have just established, explains everything real as the content of a single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other hand, is true being itself. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, German original 1968, latest English version Ignatius Press, 2004, p. 157)
And that is where the good Cardinal (later Pope Benedict the XVI) leaves it. He then glides off onto another topic. Not satisfactory! What's the solution to the paradox?
If you tell me that God creates other minds, and then somehow releases them into ontological independence, my reply will be that makes hash of the doctrine of creatio continuans, moment-by-moment conservation. The Christian God is no mere cosmic starter-upper of what exists; his creating is ongoing. In fact, if the universe always existed, then all creation would be creatio continuans, and there would be no starting-up at all.
On Christian metaphysics, "The world is objective mind . . . ." (155) This is what makes it intelligible. This intelligibility has its source in subjective mind: "Credo in Deum expresses the conviction that objective mind is the oproduct of subjective mind . . . ." (Ibid.) So what I call onto-theological idealism gets the nod. You don't understand classical theism unless you understand it to be a form of idealism. But creatures, and in particular other minds, exist on their own, in themselves, and their Being cannot be reduced to their Being-for-God. Therein lies the difficulty.
Divorce, broken homes, bankruptcy, generations of children raised by a single parent, sexually-transmitted diseases, addiction, AIDs, early death, loneliness, despair, guilt, spiritual ruin, and 58 million innocent children butchered in the one place they should be safest, in their own mother’s womb.
Read it all. I am not clear, however, how the libertarian opening coheres with the sequel.
When the '60s ended my musical interests shifted to jazz and classical, so my acquaintance with rock from the '70s on is pretty spotty. But I sat up and took notice when, in the late '80s, Petty teamed up with his elders Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne to form the supergroup, The Traveling Wilburys. With Petty's death, Dylan and Lynne are the sole remaining Wilburys.
And as we all approach The End of the Line, the Traveling Wilburys have some words of wisdom:
Maybe somewhere down the road a ways You'll think of me and wonder where I am these days Maybe somewhere down the road when someone plays Purple Haze
[. . .]
Well it's all right, even if you're old and gray Well it's all right, you still have something to say Well it's all right, remember to live and let live Well it's all right, best you can do is forgive.
