Month: July 2019

Dennis Prager’s Rohrschalk Test

A Dennis Prager column opens with a very broad-brush premise:

Every non-liberal leftist — that is, nearly every Democrat running for president, New York Times and Washington Post columnist, CNN and MSNBC host, and your left-wing brother-in-law — labels every Trump supporter and, of course, President Donald Trump, a “racist.”

And they don’t stop there. Leftists don’t only label the half of the country that supports the president “racist,” they label all whites and America itself “racist.”

Prager offers a three-question limus test to prove conservative non-racism:

  1. Do you have more in common with, and are you personally more comfortable in the company of, a white leftist or a black conservative?
  2. Would you rather have nine white leftists or nine black conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court?
  3. Would you rather your child marry a black Christian conservative or a white non-Christian liberal?

Granting for sake of argument that those questions effectively screen for the most virulent form of racism, explicit hatred of darker-skinned people, I doubt their effectiveness as screens for all varieties of the racism that lingers from America’s original sin.

But that’s not the prey I’m after: they expose something else worrisome. (Note that I did not say “far more worrisome.”)

A quick “the black conservative” in response to question 1 would betray an unhealthy ideological obsession, would it not? Why should there be any preference? Would a white, college-educated suburban conservative really have “more in common” with a random black conservative than with a white, college-educated suburban liberal? Has it come to that: ideology über alles?

So I cannot answer Prager’s question 1. I really cannot. It would depend too much on other variables. The test, as worded, is more a rohrschalk test for unhealthy ideology than a litmus test against racism.

I have no trouble with question 2 (a guy can dream, can’t he? But two white leftists might be good to keep the conservatives honest.).

Question 3 is rohrschalk in a different way.

I would prefer the “black Christian conservative” because I’m Christian and believe Christians should marry within the faith. But not all conservatives are Christian.

Why would a Jewish conservative categorically and reflexively prefer a “black Christian conservative” child-in-law to a “white non-Christian liberal,” since “non-Christian” includes “Jewish”? (You don’t need a Venn diagram, do you?) Does Prager, himself a Jew, think marrying within conservative ideology is more important than marrying within the faith?

Prager probably knows that his supposed test against racism is sophistry, but he created a pretty good test for visceral, tribal, toxic and all-consuming “conservative” ideology.

(Note: This blog has been edited several times within the first few hours after posting to clarity or intensify my meaning.)

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Who is Cultural Proximate to the U.S.?

There is a genuine rift in conservative thought on immigration, illustrated by contrasting takes on the National Conservatism Conference speech of Amy Wax.

Much of the commentary on Wax’s comments have been reactive in the bad sense, accusing her of racism. I’ve looked at the most controversial parts (I’m having trouble finding a transcript or, now, even the video on the Conference’s YouTube channel) and I summarize it thus:

We should have an policy bias toward immigrants who are culturally proximate to us rather than culturally distant. That means a bias in favor of  Western European immigrants. And that — let’s face it — will mean a disproportionately white batch of immigrants, though race is not our real criterion.

My three representative conservative takes are those of Rod Dreher, David French and Mark Bauerlein.

Dreher came out first:

I can see some problems with Wax’s proposal. What does it mean to be “Western”? Russia is a European country, and a Christian country, and a country of white people … but it’s not really Western. Should we limit Russian immigration? Ghana is an African nation that is vastly more Christian than, say, Sweden, but it’s certainly not Western, and it’s in the Third World. Would America be better off with a policy that favored atheist Swedes over Christian Ghanaians? Asians — South Asians and East Asians — are not Western, obviously, not Christian, and many of them do not live in what we consider the First World. Yet they tend to be “model migrants,” in that their children obey the laws, study hard, and achieve professional success disproportionately. Is an immigration system that puts them at a disadvantage over Europeans better for America?

It’s certainly debatable, but one of Wax’s points is that we can’t even talk about it, because it is widely assumed that any immigration system that results in disproportionate racial impact is racist and therefore bad.

French came close behind. For him, Amy Wax’s speech wasn’t racist, but it was wrong:

  1. Western Europeans are not necessarily more culturally proximate because there’s “quite a bit of evidence that nonwhite immigrants (including nonwhite immigrants from developing countries) do very well in a key measure of American assimilation — economic industry.”
  2. Western Europeans are decidedly less culturally proximate insofar as “American culture and European culture have been drifting apart for decades on a key metric — religiosity. Secular nationalists may not care about this, but European-biased immigration is secular-biased immigration, and that will alter American culture in appreciable ways.”
  3. “[O]ne of the core, virtuous objectives of the new conservative nationalism [is] social cohesion [but] the most polarized population in America is the white population.”

Bauerlein just appeared in print on Wax, and he clearly implies that she’s right about Western European cultural proximity:

A cardinal premise of leftist thought is that cultural traits run deep. They reach down, past behavior, to unconscious values and concepts, shaping how we think. I went to graduate school in the 1980s, when critical race theorists and postcolonialists talked about “Western ways of knowing.” …

This is why we must take the outrage over Amy Wax’s remarks at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington earlier this month with a grain of salt …

What her detractors haven’t addressed, however, is Ms. Wax’s assertion of the deep acculturation that makes people who they are. This must be respected. The great divide Ms. Wax identifies is between peoples that have passed through the Enlightenment and peoples that haven’t. Immigrants from countries that don’t have a tradition of individual rights, free markets and fair elections must undergo a firm and steady induction if those mores are to sink into their souls. Social conservatives and identity-politics leftists agree on this: People can’t easily drop their heritage and adopt another one.

It is liberals and libertarians who think that migration is a smooth process. They imagine a world of free and flexible people who pick and choose the elements that will form their characters. Neither conservatives nor progressives trust this cosmopolitan faith. They know that culture molds character.

Ms. Wax’s great sin in the eyes of the left wasn’t her recognition of cultural differences and incompatibilities. It was, instead, her frank declaration of the West’s cultural superiority …

This outspoken praise for the West is anathema to the left, but not because the left hates the idea of cultural superiority. Far from it. The left most definitely believes in cultural superiority—but the kind that runs the other way. To them, the West isn’t a story of the advancement of rights and scientific knowledge, as Ms. Wax believes. It is a record of exploitation, enslavement, colonialism, environmental devastation and imperialism against suffering and benign non-Western peoples. When we speak of the West, the U.S. and whites, we must confess guilt.

This is a dogma in academia, advocacy groups and the Democratic Party. No, it’s a taboo. It has extraordinary force, too, having intimidated Republicans for decades. Amy Wax violated it. She’s not afraid. The left knows it, and if she isn’t punished, she may inspire others.

This debate doesn’t neatly fit the other rift, that between procedural liberalism (David French) and “virtue conservatism” or “substantive good conservatism” (Sohrab Amahri). Which group has which preference? I think Bauerlein and Amahri are converging in general, but would Amahri join French in prefering the black and brown Pentecostals?

For the time being, though, Amy Wax wins: we conservatives are talking, and disagreeing, about ideas that were taboo very, very recently.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

The GOP deathworks

What conservatives like [George] Will and I believe, and what we think Trump supporters either don’t understand or deny, is the destructive revolution in manners and mores that Donald Trump is ushering in, the enormous cultural and social blast radius of his presidency. Through his promiscuous lying and assault on demonstrable truths, his cruelty and crudity, his coarseness, bullying and dehumanization of his opponents, and his lawlessness and conspiracy-mongering—the whole corrupt, packaged deal—he has brought us into dark new realms.

There was a time when Republicans and conservatives more generally insisted that culture was upstream of politics and in many respects more important than politics; that leaders needed to take great care in cultivating and validating standards of decency, honor and integrity; and that a president who destroyed rather than defended cultural norms and high standards would do grave injury to America. But now Republicans are willing to sacrifice soul and culture for the sake of promised policy victories.

Peter Wehner, George Will Changes His Mind—But Stays True to His Convictions

That, I thought, is the most representative quote I can find on this, probably the most important and thoughtful thing I’ll read all day. It articulates far better than I’ve been able to do:

  • Why people like me leave the GOP because we’re conservative, not because we’ve become liberal.
  • How populism and representative government differ, and that populism isn’t “conservative.”
  • “Political leaders today seem to feel that their vocation is to arouse passions, not to temper and deflect and moderate them.”

I highly, highly, recommend it.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Blue-Collar Lifeworks

  1. Keep Craft Alive
  2. SkillsUSA

H/T Kevin D. Williamson (possible paywall). See also Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft.

That is all.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

On not freeloading

I’m at a point in life where I don’t have to be a freeloader, and I don’t want to be. Someone must pay for good writing or the only good writers left will be compulsives like me — those poor souls who write because they can’t not write.

And since I tend unduly to fixate on matters political, most of the great writers I can think of are commentators. I realized this morning that National Review, much of which is bleak and tired conservative hawkishness (and even a little trolling), and which I was considering dropping as a result, actually hosts some mighty fine writers, or at least some interesting thinkers who write well enough. Some of them are prominent enough to find at the website readily — David French, for instance — but others are more obscure.

But get this: National Review provides RSS feeds for its regular writers. That means I can get them in Feedly without having to rummage through the detritus of hacks on the website! I signed up for five or six of them.

So I guess I’ll continue my paid subscription, provided I don’t have to actually read the darn thing. (It kind of brings to mind the joke about the contest where first prize was a week in Philadelphia, second prize two weeks.)

Now give yourself a two-minute treat by reading Kevin Williamson’s White Cats and Black Swans, which isn’t political at all.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Whither immigration policy?

I’m very happy to learn that the National Conservatism Conference immigration comments of law professor Amy Wax were, in context, not racist.*

I first read some of them through Rod Dreher who had gotten only excerpts that sounded pretty damning. I gratefully got the broader context this morning from David French.

Wax’s point was that cultural closeness matters in immigration policy because it eases assimilation, and that if we restrict immigration from backward, culturally-distant places, we are ipso facto favoring disproportionately white immigration.

French plausibly thinks that means, and that Wax intended it to mean, favoring immigration from Europe. If she said that, I missed it, but it’s a fair interpretation anyway.

I’m even happier, though, that French argues against Europhile immigration leanings, in three interesting points, the first of which is obvious almost to the point of being banal:

  1. “[N]onwhite immigrants (including nonwhite immigrants from developing countries) do very well in a key measure of American assimilation — economic industry … The bottom line is that skilled immigrants do well in the United States no matter where they’re from.”
  2. “[S]he wildly overestimates the extent to which European society represents some sort of cultural match with the United States. American culture and European culture have been drifting apart for decades on a key metric — religiosity. Secular nationalists may not care about this, but European-biased immigration is secular-biased immigration, and that will alter American culture in appreciable ways.” He’s right that I had no idea how non-religious Europe has become, and he illustrates it vividly: Poland (!) would rank 48th, near the religiosity bottom, were it an American state. All other European nations are off our national scale.
  3. “My final objection relates to one of the core, virtuous objectives of the new conservative nationalism — social cohesion. Perversely enough, the most polarized population in America is the white population … America’s black and brown populations are more moderate and more religious than white liberals.”

I’m grateful for this because I had been thinking along the same line Wax was thinking along, and was also troubled by the racial implications of disproportionately European immigration.

I like French’s summary of his own immigration views, but I’ve borrowed enough and will let you ferret them out on your own.

Enjoy.

[* Her comments will almost certainly continue being treated as racist by those who, exactly as she describes, think any immigration philosophy that focuses on culture is ipso facto racist because of correlations between race and culture. Suffice that I’m more concerned with intent than with effect when I say “racist.”]

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Why teach poetry?

Most Westerners today are freer, safer, and more prosperous than at any previous point in history. What we aren’t is more thoughtful.

This is the age of superficiality.

…

Consider Time Magazine and the online archive of its covers. In 1967, Robert Lowell was the last poet to appear on the cover of Time. He had been preceded by Robinson Jeffers, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, and Evgeny Evtushenko. Here are some people who have appeared on the cover since they last featured a poet: Leonardo DiCaprio (twice), Kanye West (twice), BB8, Darth Vader (four times, if you count young Anakin), Yoda, Spiderman, Adele, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Angelina Jolie, Tom Hanks, Keanu Reeves, Russell Crowe, Bono (thrice), Tom Cruise (twice: with and without Nicole Kidman), Julia Roberts, Pikachu, Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Carey, David Letterman, Jodie Foster, Bart Simpson, Kevin Costner, Superman, Mickey Mouse, Bette Midler, Molly Ringwald, the Alien from Alien and Aliens, Madonna, Crockett and Tubbs, Shirley MacLaine, Cheryl Tiegs (twice), Sylvester Stallone, Brooke Shields, Burt Reynolds, John Travolta, Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, King Kong, Charlie’s Angels, Cher, Elton John, Jaws, and Raquel Welch …

Everyone knows that the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. What might be more surprising is that the great Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman appeared on the same episode. Rock musicians continue to appear on late-night television, of course, but how many violinists do you see on screen with Jimmy Fallon, Seth Myers, or Carson Daily these days? Our public fare is pure sugar. We are a nation with a mental junk-food problem.

Our morning network news programs give us about fifteen minutes of actual news followed by an hour or more of celebrity gossip and fluff. The most popular cable television shows offer little more than the pornography of violence and the violence of pornography. The once-lordly major networks have been given over almost entirely to the vapid wasteland of The Bachelor and Big Brother, vast stretches of nothingness that the average American can sit in front of for hours with no fear that our own empty lives will be made to seem cheap in light of some greater thoughtfulness or beauty …

[T]he pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful is, at best, tolerated. As the Marxist theorist Theodor Adorno puts it in “The Schema of Mass Culture,”

from our earliest youth all of this [everything that is beautiful and good] is only admitted on the condition that it is not after all to be taken seriously. With every gesture the pupil is given to understand that what is most important is understanding the demands of ‘real life’ and fitting oneself properly for the competitive realm, and that the ideals themselves were either to be taken as confirmation of this life or were to be immediately placed in its service.

It’s fine to offer music classes or read a poem, as long as you can demonstrate how these things make students better at the “real” subjects we call STEM. But let’s be sure to wink and sneer about their little choral groups or poetry clubs.

Benjamin Myers

I can’t think of any of my hot buttons that Myers didn’t hit (in an essay much longer than my excerpt), though I’m mildly skeptical about “uniquely” in this key paragraph:

The teaching of poetry matters greatly in the age of superficiality, because poetry uniquely and especially calls us back to tradition and to traditional use of symbol. It calls us out of the shallows into the deeper water of human experience. It draws us toward transcendence.

I suspect that great classical choral music does much of that and adds something that poetry lacks: literal music.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

The Left Coasts’ answer to the Electoral College

Because of the forces first unleashed by [the] liberal project vested in the nation, we can’t simply rely on laissez-faire as a secret recipe for strengthening our families and communities.

I mean, do we really think today that leaving the field more open to Google and Facebook and Amazon and Pornhub is going to lead to a revival of the homely virtues portrayed in a Normal Rockwell painting?

I live in the state of Indiana, and I can tell you: our government tried to protect our religious liberty, and it was the corporations that came in and threatened our economic destruction. And that should be fought ….

Patrick Deneen at the National Conservatism Conference (starting at 15:34).

It occurred to me  few days ago, before I listened to Deneen’s talk, that preening progressive corporate bullies are the Left Coasts’ answer to the Electoral College.

Granted: flyover country has, by the Founders’ design, disproportionate political power, via the Electoral College and the United States Senate.

But the coasts have disproportionate economic power by draining young brains from the rest of the country.

And what sorts of things do they do with their disproportionate economic power, including the opinion-molding power of Hollywood?

They build single-party states like California (with the nation’s highest poverty rate despite huge economic output) and cities like San Francisco, “‘entertainment machines’ for the young, rich, and mostly childless,” designed (in effect) by Richard Florida, where normal families can’t afford to live (“the median home value is at least six times the national average”), procreation has largely ceased, and homeless addicts litter the sidewalks with their paraphernalia, their bodily wastes, and themselves — collateral damage of our economic hubris.

Not that there’s no collateral damage elsewhere, of course. A lesson of 2016, I think, is that there’s lots of it, and it’s electorally consequential. If Donald Trump is the answer, we’re asking the wrong question, but he’s at least partly a consequence of collateral damage in the economy, which almost no other candidate in either party even noticed.

They also sell cultural fads that, to borrow a tired liberal trope, are “on the wrong side of history” because they’re the fruits of insane ideologies that humanity will not long endure.

For instance, transexual “girls” shattering athletic records, walking away with gold medals, and at least in microcosm making mockery of the goals of Title IX.

Or take “from ‘Bake my cake! to ‘Wax my balls!‘” Yeah, it’s British Columbia, but the legal regime down here is all ready to accommodate a monster like “Jessica,” thanks to creative re-purposing of laws against sex discrimination, sold to courts and regulators by the best lawyers and lobbyists money can buy.

In this light, I’m particularly disinclined to apologize for the Electoral College and Senate to progressives who want all the power, economic and electoral.

Indeed, I’m flat-out grateful that we prole breeders can keep the progressives from undue dominion, forcing the nation to think a bit longer before rushing over a cliff, by going to the polls.

I can even, for a moment, understand the “paybacks are hell” thrill of “owning the libs.”

Somebody, though, really, really needs to come up with a better approach than tit-for-tat.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).