Does “Constantinius” rhyme with “Obama”?

Caveat: I’m not sure this is even half-baked yet.

Rod Dreher invoked in a Polish context and I’m extending to our American context a possibly instructive historic type, involving the epochal replacement of one dominant religion by another:

Constantine died in 337, and civil conflict followed. Roman leaders faced pressure from more radical Christians to step up the de-paganization, and tried to walk a balance between their demands and not upsetting the still large pagan population. In 356, Constantius stepped up the anti-pagan laws.

Interestingly, the pagan elites didn’t take all this too seriously …

Towards the end of his reign, Constantius’s anti-pagan laws grew even stronger, but paganism was still such a vivid and powerful presence in daily life that the pagan elites felt confident that the danger would pass when the emperor did …

Constantius was succeeded in the 360s by Julian the Apostate, so called because he had been raised a Christian, but left the faith and sought to re-establish paganism. He rolled back some of his predecessor’s pro-Christian laws, and most controversially, promulgated a law that would have prevented Christians from teaching in schools. Watts points out that these laws were strange, in part because Julian involved the state in regulating pagan belief in ways that it had not been before, even when the Empire was pagan. The laws didn’t survive Julian. According to Watts, the reality of the Empire, at least among the elites of that time, was such that pagans and Christians were already knitted together in a social fabric that could not effectively be sundered by imperial decree. That is, pagans didn’t want to see Christians thrown out of their jobs, or punished.

…

One of the young conservative Catholics I met in Warsaw expressed his deep anxiety over what he sees as essentially a “Julian the Apostate” move by the current populist conservative government (for which he voted!) to reinstate the Catholic faith as the source of political and social norms. This man told me that he agrees with those norms, but what older Catholic conservatives don’t understand is how thin those norms, and the faith on which they are based, are within his generation. This was the guy who told me that he believes that Catholic Poland will go the way of Catholic Ireland within a decade or two.

Rod Dreher (emphasis added)

Now imagine orthodox Christians as the passing pagan order, Progressives as the ascendant faith (and remember: history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes):

Was Obama our (effectively pagan) Constantinius, conducting the funeral of orthodox Christendom on behalf of Progressivism in its liberal Christian manifestation?
Is Trump making a Julian the Apostate move, trying to suppress Progressivism and to revive Christendom as imagined by his Evangelical base and “historian” David Barton)?

The rhyme is imperfect, of course. For instance, some people on the Left do want to see Christians thrown out of their jobs, or punished, merely for refusing to offer their pinch of incense (e.g., bake the custom cake). That complicates things.

And there’s a third America for whom the new religion combines NASCAR and NFL (Ivan Illich wrote of such things), with overlap between them and the other two constellations of rites. There dwell some people — some very prominent people — who want heretics (those who won’t stand when the standard hymn is sung at the preliminary patriotic orgy) cast our of their jobs.

But I think I’m onto something even if counter-narratives can be spun and even if our left coasts and our flyover land in this grand empire have competing religions.

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Our faves

It is quite likely that some of our faves are implicated ….

Christine Pelosi, about the indictment of billionaire glitterati ephebophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, on Twitter.

“Some of our [Pelosi family] faves.” I. Can’t. Wait.

Some day soon, I’m pretty sure, opposition to child molesting will be labeled some kind of phobia.

Yes, I mean that. Our putative concern for children is a fig leaf. Our overarching concern is the sexual gratification of adults, who thus are distracted from grim temporal and sublime eternal realities, alternating between orgasm and shopping on credit.

We will probably justify destigmatizing ephebophila and pedophilia as removing the taboos that keep children from the sexual pleasures they could be having. That will be the fig leaf.

Caveat: I have no idea how many Levis will get rises in them from the thought of kiddie sex. I’ve got to think it’s relatively few, but the fewness of the beneficiaries hasn’t stopped other aspects of the ongoing sexual revolution.

Caveat 2: And I can’t rule out a powerful backlash from normal people. The pendulum can only swing so far, but I’m not sure how much further in the current direction that is.

UPDATE: “I wonder what brought on this outburst?”, you might be asking (because I did).

It may, now that I think of it, be a delayed reaction to some late-night reading last night:

I received a call from a Scientific American reporter to talk about robots and our future. During that conversation, he accused me of harboring sentiments that would put me squarely in the camp of those who have for so long stood in the way of marriage for homosexual couples. I was stunned, first because I harbor no such sentiments, but also because his accusation was prompted not by any objection I had made to the mating or marriage of people. The reporter was bothered because I had objected to the mating and marriage of people to robots.

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together, pp. 4-5. She finished writing this book in 2010. This call came around 2006. If we think that “marriage” to a robot could ever be a real thing, and we think that at the elite level of Scientific American, surely we have lost our way quite badly.

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The Antifa Spirit in America

Three related items deserve memorialization:

First, the beating-with-impunity of journalist Andy Ngo by antifa thugs in Portland. Portland police are AWOL; most or all left-of-center condemnations blame the victim, too:

[T]o insist that we call antifa ‘fascists’ only plays into antifa’s own infantile game of seeing fascism everywhere. We can say antifa is censorious, authoritarian and intolerant without having to call them fascists.

But the main problem with singling out antifa idiots for particular opprobrium is that it overlooks the utterly mainstream role antifa plays these days. These people are best seen as the violent enforcers of political orthodoxy, the masked footsoldiers of an elite wounded and dizzied by the votes for Trump and Brexit. It is not remotely coincidental that antifa in its modern incarnation came into its own in the aftermath of these two electoral earthquakes — it is because it embodies … the fury of a bourgeoisie that has found itself rejected by voters.

Brendan O’Neill, Andy Ngo and the Violence of Political Correctness (emphasis added).

Second, Amazon, which got its start in books, has begun retrospective woke corporate book-burning. I will be less inclined now to buy Kindle books and strongly more inclined to buy paper books from other sources.

If you say “Joseph Nicolosi was a crackpot and his quack theories have harmed people,” Rod Dreher has a few words and phrases for you:

Third, Brett Stephens musters still more damning evidence:

According to last year’s “Hidden Tribes” report on U.S. political polarization, “Around two in three Americans feel that there is a pressure to think a certain way about Islam and Muslims, as well as about race and racism.” Similarly, a 2017 poll by the Cato Institute found that 58 percent of Americans, most of them conservative-leaning, “believe the political climate prevents them from sharing their own political beliefs.”

The data confirm what one hears and experiences anecdotally all the time: In the proverbial land of the free, people live in mortal fear of a moral faux pas. Opinions that were considered reasonable and normal a few years ago are increasingly delivered in whispers. Professors fear their students. Publishers drop books at the slightest whiff of social-media controversy. Twitter and other similar platforms have delivered the tools of reputational annihilation (without means of petition or redress) into the hands of millions, so that no comment except the most private is entirely safe from the possibility of instantaneous mass denunciation.

…

If the House of York had fallen to the Lancastrians as quickly as corporate and academic America has capitulated to Woke culture, the War of the Roses would have been over in a week.

I’m writing this column on the eve of July 4. But the country I’m describing each year seems to feel the spirit of 1776 less and the spirit of 1789 more. “Armed with the ‘truth,’ Jacobins could brand any individuals who dared to disagree with them traitors or fanatics,” historian Susan Dunn wrote of the French Revolution. “Any distinction between their own political adversaries and the people’s ‘enemies’ was obliterated.”

Today’s Jacobins don’t have the means, but they do have the will. Look at what happened to gadfly journalist Andy Ngo when he tried to report on radical counter-protests in Portland and ended up being violently assaulted by Antifa protesters. Antifa is not typical, but the “yes, but” excuses progressives have offered for Ngo’s assault hint at how readily those progressives would embrace violence if circumstances allowed.

Brett Stephens, Robespierre’s America (emphasis added).

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Omitted legacy

This is, though certainly not by premeditated design, a supplement to yesterday’s blog.

“The alt-right is a combination of ideology and tactics,” [David] French said Friday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. “Ideologically, the alt-right is white nationalist. It is post-constitutionalist. And it is often quite pagan … Nobody knows how big it is … if it numbers in the thousands or the tens of thousands … It’s not a huge number of people.”

But tactically, he continued, “they punch way above their weight. So how are they doing it? Well, in 2015 and 2016 … they did it as a wave of targeted harassment directed primarily against Trump critics.” …

As he sees it, the alt-right’s core tactic is inflicting pain for political ends, “often in the way that is the most personal.” Is the Republican Party influenced by the alt-right? “Yes,” French said. “Cruelty as a tactic is now a part of the playbook on the right.”

For anyone who doubts that Trump, the Republican Party’s leader, has a cruel streak, read up on his past. If you doubt that Trumpism has that same streak, read Adam Serwer’s “The Cruelty Is the Point” …

Conor Friedersdorf, The Alt-Right’s Tactical Cruelty. I did read up on it, and even read Adam Serwer (who’s not my cup of tea in most regards).

People disagree about the ideal traits to have in a leader. But almost no one wants a president who has proven himself an addict to being cruel, mean-spirited, and spiteful. For decades, Trump has been deliberately cruel to others, often in the most public ways. He behaves this way flagrantly, showing no sign of shame or reflection.

What kind of person still acts that way at 70? A bad person.

It is that simple.

Conor Friedersdorf, The Senseless Cruelty of Donald J. Trump. This concludes a long and convincing set of examples.

At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.

…

Even those who believe that [Christine Blasey] Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point. True to form, Adam Serwer frequently disappointed, but his introductory material about grinning lynch mobs was powerful and on point, and this block quote is true and revealing.

If you wonder about my agenda in writing these things, I’ll try to summarize as truthfully as I can:

They are deathworks and I’m loathe to call out only deathworks from the left. Ephesians 5:11, if that helps.
I’m anticipating another horrid Presidential electoral choice next year, and I “think out loud” about such things. Policy aside, the cultural legacy Trump is leaving is deeply, deeply evil.
I’m calling to repentance professing fellow-Christians who not merely considered Trump the lesser evil in 2016, but have become his enthusiasts. That is incomprehensible to me and legitimately scandalous to the sentient non-Christian world.

That’s what comes to mind.

Though I may belabor some topics, I haven’t repeated this often enough: The 2016 Presidential election foreshadows major partisan re-alignments I’m still having trouble projecting. My alienation from the Republican Party grows ever deeper, but the Democrats, for new reasons as well as the same old same-old, are not attracting me at all.

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Enduring legacy

I am among those who appreciate Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, his defense of religious liberty (at least for compliant Christians; Muslims’ and Unitarian Universalists’ mileage may vary) and increasingly his immigration policy at its highest level of generality — especially after all 20 Democrat debaters advocated for effectively open borders and lavish benefits for all who cross them.

But I am indicted by his base for morally culpable ingratitude, electoral stupidity, and worst of all, stylistic snobbery when I lament

his his sexual predations,
his vulgarity (which needs no adjective),
his racist-suffused rhetoric,
his reality-distorting narcissism,
his reflexive, unsurpassed and transparent lying,
his abysmal civic ignorance,

and I know not how much longer I could extend this litany.

Why can’t I take a moderately convincing “Yes, I’m on your side” for an answer?

Because of my conviction that the deficiencies, sub specie aeternis, matter more more.

Why that is so is not easy to articulate with clarity that satisfies even me, but Greg Weiner today helped me out:

Constitutions depend on habits and traditions, not the momentary outcomes they produce. Mr. Trump’s upending of these customs, not his transient policies, will form the legacy that endures.

…

Edmund Burke would recognize the error Mr. Trump’s base makes. He noted similarly flawed logic in the French Revolution. By destroying all political institutions, Burke wrote, the French revolutionaries had doubtless done away with some bad ones. By starting everything anew, they had inevitably done some good. But to credit their successes or excuse their crimes, it was necessary to show “that the same things could not have been accomplished without producing such a revolution.”

Mr. Trump’s defenders are in largely the same position: To excuse his trampling of norms, they must demonstrate that he could not have achieved his policy agenda without doing so. Yet there is no obvious connection between serial dissembling and the success of a policy agenda. Mr. Trump need not behave uncivilly to nominate originalist judges. He can advocate a reassessment of the nation’s foreign commitments without sacrificing the dignity of his office.

In fact, Mr. Trump would be better positioned to accomplish these things if he observed rather than overran norms, which would curb his most self-destructive impulses …

There are already indications that Mr. Trump’s bombast will not leave the political scene when he does. At their debates last Wednesday and Thursday, many Democrats pledged to prosecute Mr. Trump if they are elected, which is hard to distinguish from his politicization of law enforcement.

… [T]here is a point at which style overwhelms substance …

[M]any of the same supporters claim to seek a constitutional revival. In particular, they believe that the judges he has named atone for every other presidential sin. It is true that these judges will shape constitutional interpretation for decades. But constitutions depend far more on traditions of voluntary adherence than on judicial decree.

If constitutionalism teaches anything, it is to trust laws over individuals and processes over outcomes. One reason is that power placed in an ally’s hands will inevitably be available to an adversary. Another is the fleeting nature of policy as opposed to the lasting need for constitutional traditions. Judges come and go, even if life tenure places them on a long clock. Taxes rise and fall even more quickly. In Mr. Trump’s case, the legacy of bulldozed norms will outlast the policies.

If self-proclaimed constitutionalists are actually willing to exchange enduring habits for transient policies, they should at least be sure the means are necessary to the ends. There is nothing Mr. Trump has achieved to which his incivility has been indispensable or even useful.

Greg Weiner, The Trump Fallacy.

This appeared in the New York Times opinion pages, by the way. I wish I could believe that the Times would entertain such opinions if the Democrats take over in 2021 and make good on promises that amount to destroying political institutions and civil society’s mediating structures, starting everything anew.

UPDATE: I can’t believe I omitted “constant, reflexive, arguably sociopathic cruelty” from my list of laments.

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Meta-morality

Democrats aren’t making the most compelling moral case against Donald Trump. They are good at pointing to Trump’s cruelties, especially toward immigrants. They are good at describing the ways he is homophobic and racist. But the rest of the moral case against Trump means hitting him from the right as well as the left.

A decent society rests on a bed of manners, habits, traditions and institutions. Trump is a disrupter. He rips to shreds the codes of politeness, decency, honesty and fidelity, and so renders society a savage world of dog eat dog. Democrats spend very little time making this case because defending tradition, manners and civility sometimes cuts against the modern progressive temper.

David Brooks, Dems, Please Don’t Drive Me Away

I could have quoted a lot more of Brooks excellent Friday column, but I don’t want to push “fair use” too far, and this seemed the most compelling and overlooked part of the case against Trump.

Brooks “outs himself” as a moderate in this column (I think he has been positioned as a quirky conservative until now), but these are conservative values he’s invoking, and the modern progressive temper is implacably (not “sometimes”) opposed to them.

But Evangelicals, ever tending to get lost among the trees and thus to lose the woods, are quite indifferent to Trump’s disruption of such things — things more fundamental than Supreme Court justices. Or perhaps they think nothing is more fundamental than SCOTUS, and that a savage world of dog eat dog is just fine as long as the Big Dog is their friend.

Fortunately, I think Brooks is right that moderates, and liberals who haven’t drunk the progressive Kool-Aid, know better, and the Dems are blowing it by not sticking it to Trump on these meta-moral issues.

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A soft answer?

We’ve reached a juncture where, I think, most people (even in my part of “flyover land”) know and have friendly relations with gays and lesbians who are remarkably normal. Involved in music and arts, I certainly do, and it has not, I think, “softened” my stance on the morality of same-sex erotic relationships.

At the same time, if you’re paying attention, you see at Pride Parades, on the left coasts at least, displays of extreme sexual perversity; and every “all we want is X” is followed by “all we want is Y” when the sexual revolutionaries get their X.

What is going on?

Rod Dreher has a generally conservative, very perceptive, same-sex-married reader who comments (not just in thin pseudonym, but anonymously to protect himself from feared professional consequences) as “Matt in VA.” Matt’s take seems very plausible to me:

I am not trying to say or claim that all or most gay men are peddlers of this suicidal and murderous sexual “ethic” — I am only saying that the most vocal and most committed and most will-to-power gays are. One of the drums I bang on constantly is that it doesn’t really matter so much what a “majority” believes or values deep in their hearts — the public square is shaped by those who are most committed to seeing their vision of society realized and made hegemonic. And of course the gay men with the most poisonous and toxic sexual priorities are the most committed and vocal — these are people who value their sexual practices and choices more, much more, than they value their own lives or the lives of their sexual partners.

If you read the well-documented accounts of Gaetan Dugas in And the Band Played On, or the stories about Foucault — this type of gay man may not be the majority, but it is not an exceedingly uncommon type, and it is the type that is committed to seeing its vision of what homosexuality means or should look like realized and affirmed (think of Foucault’s influence.) If others say it is false to declare these kinds of people murderers, that we are talking about consensual choices, then I would say at best they are the equivalent of heroin or fentanyl dealers, and gay male sexual communities are the equivalents of urban communities where hard-drug dealers and their “values” are aggressively and relentlessly normalized. These are failed communities.

… I am not talking about all nor even most gay men, here; but at the same time, I am talking about many of the most committed and loud and determined gay men, the ones who put great effort into normalizing and promoting their priorities and making the community into something that satisfies their desires as much as possible …

… to say “only within consenting adults” is to put up no guardrail whatsoever. Consenting adults are capable of “consenting” in the heat of the moment, or at certain points* over a lifetime of degraded and relentless mental and cultural grooming, to raping and being raped, to risking death to oneself or one’s sexual partners, to deliberately infecting others and/or deliberately, even fetishistically, exposing oneself to infection with anything and everything; to mutilating one’s body or somebody else’s body — to anything.

Matt in VA, via Rod Dreher.

I don’t know what to do about this. Smugly waiting for the backlash is a non-starter, but I’ve seen a possible model.

May 17 has somehow been designated the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. The Republic of Georgia, in which I was traveling this May 17 past, is too tolerant to repress its observance, but too Orthodox Christian not to respond.

So the Orthodox Patriarch of Georgia declared (or persuaded the authorities to declare) May 17 “Family Sanctity Day“, an official holiday it appeared, which was celebrated with a parade, erection of a temporary massive stage at the open end of Sameba Cathedral Plaza, and displays of patriotism, traditional song and dance, and so forth.

I liked that tone and that substance.

[* This has obvious relevance to heterosexual “consenting adults” as well, as in Harvey Weinstein’s not entirely improbable claim that he never had non-“consensual” sex with {any aspiring starlet who he had the power to make or break}.]

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When the word loses its dignity

Among a handful of classic books I try to re-read ever few years is Josef Pieper’s Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power.

Today was my first re-reading post-Trump. It’s not a perfect fit because Donald Trump, whatever he is, is not a skilled sophist. He’s more a purveyor of word salads and transparent, self-contradictory lies.

But it’s still worth pondering a few nuggets from Pieper’s discussion.

All the evil deeds in this world since Adam and eve have been justified with good reasons. (Hegel)
Word and language form the medium that sustains the common existence of the human spirit as such.
Can a lie be taken as communication? I tend to deny it. A lie is the opposite of communication. It means specifically to withhold the other’s share and portion of reality, to prevent his participation in reality.
Because you are not interested in reality, you are unable to converse. You can give fine speeches, but you simply cannot join in a conversation; you are incapable of dialogue!
Mundus vult decipi.
The degradation of man through man, alarmingly evident in the acts of physical violence committed by all tyrannies (concentration camps, torture), has its beginning, certainly much less alarmingly, at that almost imperceptible moment when the word loses its dignity.

Abuse of language is a deathwork (“But, hey!: Gorsuch and Kavanaugh!”); Pieper’s unmasking of it a lifework.

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The assault on truth

The estate of George Orwell owes a debt of gratitude to our Very Stable Genius.

When dealing with a political figure who faces allegations of sexual assault, financial misdeeds and obstruction of justice, it is difficult to sort out the greatest damage to our public life. But a strong case can be made that it is the assault on truth.

…

Not long ago, I sat on a plane next to a knowledgeable and articulate Trump supporter. The talk turned to the Mueller report, and I mentioned that Robert Mueller was awarded the Bronze Star for his bravery in Vietnam. “How do you know that?” snapped my conversation partner. I sputtered something about reading it in multiple, reliable sources. She remained unconvinced.

How is any political conversation or policy discussion possible when citizens inhabit separate universes of truth and meaning? This is Trump’s most dangerous innovation: epistemology as cult of personality.

Michael Gerson, beginning and concluding a must-read column.

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Joe Biden and the Crackers

I had vaguely registered some backlash against Joe Biden’s comments about James Eastland and Herman Talmadge, and I couldn’t help but wonder (1) was there some malapropism in Biden’s comments that wasn’t being reported and (2) is there anything at all to commend in the backlash?

The answer to both my questions appears to be “no.” This is not just an instance where the younger generation has apprehended some truth my generation has trouble seeing. It is an instance where my generation is right and young progressive pearl-clutchers are out of their right minds.*

I base this opinion on Bret Stephens’ Saturday OpEd in the New York Times, which completely vindicates my antecedent bias.

I cheerfully admit that I haven’t read Biden’s critics on this point, and I cheerfully admit it because life is too short to explore every rabbit trail, or, as my late father once said, “you don’t have to dig through garbage to find food in this country.”

Here is the key passage in Stephens, in my estimation:

All of this is evidence of what psychologist Pamela Paresky calls the “apocalyptic” approach to politics that increasingly typifies today’s progressivism. “It is an apocalyptic view, not a liberal one, that rejects redemption and forgiveness in favor of condemnation and excommunication,” she writes in Psychology Today. “It is an apocalyptic perspective, not a liberal one, that sees the world as needing to be destroyed and replaced rather than improved and perfected.”

Paresky contrasts that to what’s been called the “prophetic culture” in American politics, which takes human nature as it is and gladly goes to work with its crooked timber. Abraham Lincoln was a part of this prophetic culture, as was Martin Luther King Jr. John Brown was part of the apocalyptic one — as is, in its way, the new “cancel culture” of the left.

The irony here is that the left’s apocalyptic tendencies have everything in common with the behavior of the Trumpian right: the smash-mouth partisanship; the loathing for moderates on its own side; the conviction that its opponents are unbelievably stupid as well as irredeemably evil; the belief that the only political victories worth gaining are total ones.

The apocalyptic view (remember “The Flight 93 Election”?) does not bode well for political peace any time soon. I can only hope that the press has amplified it a hundredfold for commercial reasons, and that its prevalence in the electorate at large is negligible.

* Update: Okay, okay, okay. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son’” was a malapropism, and since Biden never is Mr. Malaprope, he must have meant something totally toxic and un-American by it.