“Every great cause,” Tyrrell quotes Eric Hoffer in After the Hangover, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” The conservative movement underwent this transmogrification with blazing speed. Maybe it had been something admirable when Buckley, Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, and others, informed by such minds as Friedrich Hayek and Richard Weaver, were formulating a much needed response to the Great Society liberalism of the 1960s. But by the late 1970s, the organizations formed to translate this critique into politics were being hijacked by a posse of faux populists with only the most passing interest in the more humane, attractive, and civilizing features of conservatism.
…
As different as they might be, Pat Robertson, Charles Krauthammer, Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Newt Gingrich, and even our old friends Bob Tyrrell and Bill Kristol agree: America’s “survival” always hangs by a thread, and our “interests” are forever threatened. there is no war these chicken hawks are not eager to fight, as long as somebody else’s sons and daughters do the dying.
(Alan Pell Crawford, Twilight of the Right, American Conservative January-February 2014) Here endeth the reading on conventional Chickenhawkery and beginneth something new. I think Crawford is the first to identify a new breed of chickenhawk:
There are always the usual chicken hawks, of course, but I have also noticed, as some of the veterans of these events get up in years, something comparable to chicken hawks on the domestic side. There are the people who don’t go to church themselves but think religion is necessary for others. There are serial monogamists like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich who express deep-felt concerns about the institution of marriage. There’s the divorced and childless old roué who worries that other white people aren’t reproducing in suffcient quantities to maintain their positions of privilege and influence.
The New York Times has a story on a trend I had only vaguely heard about: Evangelicalism tilting toward Calvinism.
The story opens with a silly question about “Tulip theology,” TULIP being an acrostic for 5 distinctives of Calvinism.
When I became a Calvinist, I referred to Evangelicals, my former compadres, as “one-point Calvinists.” They all believed in “eternal security” also known as “once saved, always saved,” and known almost exclusively among Calvinists by it’s somewhat more bracing proper name: “Perserverance of the Saints.” “Perseverance” sounds like something that might actually require a little effort (in Calvinism, it may not, but you’d better be ready for sore trials and tribulations, not taking for granted that you’re in like Flynn) and Evangelicals were a little to happy-go-lucky for anything so un-cheering as that — even though “Perseverance of the Saints” makes little or no sense without the preceding 4 points of “5 Point Calvinism,” then my proud tradition.
I’ve said in more recent years, tongue in cheek, that Calvinism is the finest heresy I could imagine. I mean that, though a bit less than I used to. For one thing, Calvinism is markedly more sober, markedly less giddy, than typical Evangelicalism. For another, it connects the modern Calvinist with a tradition that’s roughly twice as old as Evangelicalism, dating back to the actual Reformation, when Reformers weren’t yet mere Protestants. The Reformation has much solider historical legs under under it than does Protestantism, which has little raison d’être beyond protest.
For me, Calvinism was a sincere if misinformed effort to be in communion with primitive Christianity, and I have never regretted leaving Evangelical novelty for it. Had I not stumbled onto Orthodoxy, and set about to fortify myself by figuring out how it was wrong, I’d almost certainly be a Calvinist still.
So, overall, I’d say that Evangelicals tilting toward Calvinism likely is a good thing – but with the caveat that the good can sometimes be a most insidious alternative to the best.
Moscow appears to understand better than Washington that the driving foreign-policy requirement of the 21st century is the preservation of the state in the face of Fourth Generation war waged by non-state entities, such as those fighting on the rebels’ side in Syria. Russia has rightly upbraided Washington for destroying states, including Iraq and Libya.
(William Lind, Russia’s Right Turn, American Conservative January-February 2014)
One of my Categories in this blog is “Abortion distortion factor,” coined by I can’t remember who to refer to the all-too-real phenomenon that no body of law, however settled it might have appeared to be, being safe from ad hoc nullification if it impedes abortion on demand.
Hill v. Colorado is a 2000 case where settled free speech law got nullified by rabidly anti-religious Justice John Paul Stevens and four or more co-conspirators in “what may well be its most indefensible First Amendment ruling so far this century.” (Floyd Abrams) It got nullified because people wanted to speak about the sanctity of life to women approaching abortuaries. When you’re nullifying a settled body of law, you’ve got to have a rationale. Hill’s rationale was an “unwilling listener’s interest in avoiding unwanted communication,” one aspect of a broader “right to be let alone.” This is not The Onion.
Abrams and Jonathan Adler – neither of them a pro-life activist – perceive a chance of resurrecting free speech, even within 100 feet of an abortuary door, on this year’s SCOTUS docket. Unfortunately, the ACLU has proven itself cravenly hypocritical, succumbing to the abortion distortion factor to oppose free speech in this case!
It there’s an overruling of Hill v. Colorado, as there should be, the rebuke to the ACLU will be one of the sweeter aspects.
There’s an amusing Facebook page, Things Jesus Never Said. (See item 2.) Less amusingly, some people – well, humanoids like Piers Morgan anyway – seem to think that what Jesus didn’t say is a highly reliable proof that he really didn’t care about the fashionable vice du jour.
I don’t know that I’d ever mentioned it before: that is an unbelievably stupid, nay obnoxious, argument.
Things Jesus never publicly condemned:
- War
- Genocide
- Rape
- Child molesting
- Wife beating
- Spice
- Methamphetamine
- Any and every modern novelty you can name
Put a sock in it, Piers. (Fat chance.)
UPDATE:
What profiteth it a man if he gain the world but lose his soul?
[T]his is one of the saddest things I’ve read in a long time. The guy is brilliant and lonely and miserable, and doesn’t know what to do. Would you trade places with him? Would you want to have three houses (including that L.A. mansion), all that money, and all that access to power, if it amounted to that?
(Rod Dreher) I can’t add a thing to that.
Tip for the Newish Year:
- Visit the Culver’s website
- Set the default to your local Culvers
- Return regularly
- Mark your calendar for any date when the Flavor of the Day is to be Cappucino Almond Fudge
- On the appointed day, go to the ATM and withdraw your life savings (or at least the daily withdrawal limit)
- Go to Culvers.
- Buy as much Cappucino Almond Fudge as you can with the money in your pocket.
You are welcome.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 