Category: Religious freedom

Saturday, 11/22/25

Postliberalism

Post-liberalism usefully refers to two distinct but overlapping tendencies: First, the rejection of the liberal consensus of the post-Cold War era, usually described as “neoliberalism” (another highly contested term), in favor of a more right-wing or left-wing politics that still probably belongs inside the liberal tradition. Second, a more root-and-branch rejection of the entire liberal order — often reaching back for inspiration to liberalism’s religious and reactionary critics, sometimes repurposing Marxist thought, sometimes looking ahead to a future that’s post-liberal because it’s post-human as well.

It makes sense to group these different ideas together under the rubric of post-liberalism for two reasons. First, they have gained ground collectively as a response to liberalism’s perceived crisis and amid a shared experience of destabilizing technological and cultural change. Second, thinkers and writers often move back and forth between “soft” and “hard” forms of post-liberalism, making definitions slippery even in individual cases.

…

Political post-liberalism, however, does not begin with post-liberal ideas. It begins with the inchoate populist revolts of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, which precious few intellectuals anticipated, and it has taken various ad hoc and unstable forms since then.

Ross Douthat, What Is Post-Liberalism, Anyway? (shared link)

Of the travails at the Heritage Foundation

For those of you who don’t live your lives online, I perhaps should set this stage. Marcionite heretic Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago conducted a “softball interview” with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Then

the Heritage Foundation’s (of Project 2025 fame) president, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson and took a swipe at Carlson’s “globalist” critics.

Cathy Young, The Alt-Right to Heritage Foundation Pipeline: a 10-Year Journey. Controversy ensued, and members of Heritage’s Board have resigned.

Stage now is set.

Sadly, the problem here goes beyond the bigotry of a few “influencers” or the flaws of specific leaders at Heritage and some other conservative institutions. Rather, as Kim Holmes put it, this is the predictable consequence of “replacing conservatism with nationalism.” A conservative movement that increasingly defines itself in ethno-nationalist terms as a protector of the supposed interests of America’s white Christian majority against immigrants and minority groups cannot readily avoid descending into anti-Semitism, as well.

Ilya Somin

I ❤️ Becket Fund

Colorado has repeatedly been rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court for its religious hostility …

Colorado officials have taken the position that Catholic preschools cannot ask families who want to enroll to support the Catholic Church’s teachings, including on issues related to sexuality and marriage. … But secular schools require similar alignment all the time: Many Montessori schools, for example, require parents who enroll to sign a statement agreeing to the school’s fundamental principles …

With the help of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the archdiocese and its parish preschools have been fighting against this religious bigotry in court.

Nicholas Reaves, Colorado Needs Another Schooling on Religious Freedom.

I’d give Becket a 90% chance of winning this. The key is that Colorado apparently has no problem with the cited practice of Montessori schools—a toleration that destroys it’s claim of neutrality when it forbids Catholic Preschools to do the same.

(The 10% chance of a loss comes from the possibility of courts reversing course.)

I didn’t intend to write about Jeffrey Epstein …

… but Peggy Noonan has brought a whiff of clarity into the miasma:

What the Epstein story is really about is unloved girls. It’s about the children in this country who aren’t taken care of, who are left to the mercy of the world. It’s about teenagers who come from a place where no one cared enough, was capable enough, was responsible and watched out for them. That’s how most of those girls wound up in a room with Jeffrey Epstein.

Here is what sexual abusers of children know: Nobody has this kid’s back. Mom’s distracted or does drugs, dad isn’t on the scene or doesn’t care. The kids are on their own. Predators can smell this, the undefended nature of their prey.

It’s what the Epstein indictment meant when it called the children “particularly vulnerable.”

It’s what Virginia Giuffre reports in her posthumously published memoir, “Nobody’s Girl.” She says she was sexually abused by her father starting at age 7, that she was later molested by a friend of her parents. She was a runaway at 14, lived on the streets and with foster families.

I think the Jeffrey Epstein obsession long ago ceased being good for anything and now has descended into something conspiratorial and a bit kinky. If I never see anything more about it, that would be good.

Somali thumb on the scale

Great news about autism: Looks like that spike in autism might just be Somali fraudsters gaming the system to siphon money to the al-Shabaab terrorist group back home.

At this point, I thought the author was insane, but then this:

Yes, today I bring you a City Journal article headlined: “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer.” A ton of Somali immigrants to Minnesota are gaming the autism diagnosis system and setting up fake treatment centers to get taxpayer cash. And a lot of it. From the article: “Autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota have skyrocketed in recent years—from $3 million in 2018 to. . . $399 million in 2023.” Honestly, I’m not a taxpayer in Minnesota so this seems like a them problem. But I’m a worried mom, and I love hearing that autism rates are being inflated by scammers. We’re healthier than we thought. That’s great news.

Nellie Bowles

Faith and politics

[A] naked public square is a morally ignorant public square. American public debate was healthier and the conversation more profound when religious leaders like Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fulton Sheen brought their faith to bear on public questions. Today morality has been privatized and left up to the individual. The shared moral order is shredded, and many people, morally alone, have come to feel that their lives are meaningless.

…

My problem with the Kirk memorial service and all the conversation about his assassination generally is that many people seem to have no coherent idea about the proper relationship between faith and politics. In their minds, the two spheres seem all mixed together higgledy-piggledy.

One faith leader told my Times colleague Elizabeth Dias about a conversation she had had with Charlie Kirk, who told her, “I want to talk about spiritual things, and in order to do that, I have to enter the political arena.”

Why on earth would Kirk believe that?

As people eulogized Kirk, it was rarely clear if they were talking about the man who was trying to evangelize for Jesus or the one trying to elect Republicans. A spokesperson at Turning Point declared, “He confronted evil and proclaimed the truth and called us to repent and be saved.” Is that what Kirk was doing when arguing with college kids about tariffs?

…

What happens when people operate without any coherent theory of how religion should relate to politics?

First, people treat electoral politics as if it were a form of spiritual warfare …

Second, the process of moral formation is perverted …

Third, people develop an addiction to rapture …

The problem is that politics is prosaic. Deliberation and negotiation work best in a mood of moderation and equipoise. If you want to practice politics in the mood best suited for the altar call, you’re going to practice politics in a way that sends prudence out the window.

Fourth, a destructive kind of syncretism prevails. Syncretism is an ancient religious problem. It occurs when believers try to merge different kinds of faith. These days, it’s faith in Jesus and the faith in MAGA all cocktailed together. Syncretism politicizes and degrades faith and totalizes politics.

Fifth, it kicks up a lot of hypocrisy …

Finally, it causes people to underestimate the power of sin. The civil rights movement had a well-crafted theory of the relationship between religion and politics. The movement’s theology taught its members that they were themselves sinful and that they had to put restraints on their political action in order to guard against the sins of hatred, self-righteousness and the love of power. Without any such theory, MAGA imposes no restraints, and sin roams free.

David Brooks (gift link)

Shorts

  • “When you select for ‘fighters’ in your leadership, you’ll get leaders who treat politics as performance art.” Nick Catoggio
  • “Like ‘cancel culture’ not so long ago, post-liberalism has become a crucial signifier in our debates without anyone agreeing on what it actually describes.” Ross Douthat
  • “A solid gold toilet sold at Sotheby’s last night for $12.1 million—the winner narrowly outbidding the decorators at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” The Morning Dispatch
  • “[A] decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes ….” (If you don’t know the source of this, you might not be able to pass the current citizenship test.) Is it just me, or does our nation no longer have any respect for the opinions of mankind?
  • “The revolution always winds up eating its own, as Robespierre and Trotsky found out. Trump was the guy who let the lunatics out of the conservative asylum, Greene foremost among them. And now, no surprise, she’s turned on him.” (Bret Stephens)
  • “[I]t is now quite possible that the Republican Party could lose control of the House in part because the Trump administration was too incompetent to rig the [Texas] districts properly.” David French
  • The Guardian: January 6 Rioter Who Was Pardoned by Trump Arrested for Child Sexual Abuse

Elsewhere in the Tipsysphere

Two things I love

Why I need the NOAA

I don’t recall mentioning this before. There is a very interesting web page that compiles and fascinatingly presents weather data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). I won’t tell you how to use it, but merely point out:

  • the menu in the lower left for your exploration
  • the possibility of customizing the bookmark in your browser so the page comes up centered on your own latitude and longitude (I don’t recall how I figured that out).

I was worried that NOAA would become a victim of DOGE vandalism so that we couldn’t get this kind of information readily.

Becket

Fully 23 years ago, I jetted off to Maui, all expenses paid, stayed in a Ritz-Carlton hotel at Kapalua, and spent my days learning to be a religious freedom lawyer. Or so I thought.

ADF (then “Alliance Defense Fund”, now “Alliance Defending Freedom”) had wealthy friends that made the (literally) ritzy accommodations possible. (For what it’s worth, I preferred the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem — a separate trip on my own nickel — to Ritz Carlton Kapalua. Here endeth my luxury travel porn.)

I felt a bit out of place, surrounded mostly by evangelicals whereas I had been Orthodox for five years by then. And though I returned with a promise to ADF to do a lot of pro bono work, I never got a piece of a really juicy religious freedom case. This was, I think, because ADF was starting to realize that they needed a stable of specialist lawyers, almost all in-house, to do their work well, starting with strategic case selection. I could, but won’t, tell a story about poor case selection.

I have no dirt to deal on ADF. They were advancing an important mission and learning as they went on how best to advance it. But from early on, I cringed at their strident fundraising letters, with lots of culture-war red meat of the sort that opened wallets.* And I became uncomfortable at what I saw as mission creep, classifying more and more culture-war issues as part of their mission under their four rubrics of religious freedom, free speech, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.

Again: this isn’t dishing dirt; ADF’s changes were readily apparent to anyone with eyes, and I had and have no inside information (beyond that there were wealthy friends; it wasn’t all grass-roots).

I was reminded of this discomfiting evolution by a new lawsuit they’ve filed. I wish them well in this lawsuit, with the gist of which I agree. But for a long time I’ve been leery of “Christian” positions that map too readily onto GOP platforms (not that the GOP always bothers with platforms these days). “Christian” support for Trump has deepened my distrust. It would be very difficult to get me to send money if there were any alternative.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. I have now disregarded fundraising letters from ADF for long enough that they seem to have dried up. My commitment to religious freedom remains, but I now express it through support of Becket Fund, a remarkably quiet, self-effacing but successful advocate about which I have no qualms. I commend Becket to you if you share my concerns.

(* “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Flannery O’Connor)

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Wednesday, 3/12/25

Trump-related

As is my wavering intent, I have moved my more vitriolic criticisms of Trump 2.0 to another blog. What remains is relatively temperate.

As the twig is bent …

“Dennis Burnham, who lived next door, was a toddler when his mother briefly put him in a playpen in their garden. She returned a few minutes later to find the current U.S. president, then aged five or six, standing at his fence throwing rocks at the little boy. Another neighbor, Steven Nachtigall, now a 66-year-old doctor, said he never forgot Trump … once jumping off his bike and beating up another boy: ‘It was so unusual and terrifying at that age,’” – Trump Revealed.

“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” – Donald J Trump.

Andrew Sullivan

Tripping over a very low bar

It doesn’t take much to persuade me that some new development in this Administration is really bad. But it takes more than this:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s appointment today of his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps reflects not just the norm-breaking approach that Hegseth is bringing to the job, but an odious philosophy of warfare. Like his new boss at the Pentagon, Parlatore has a pattern of providing support to soldiers accused of grave misconduct, even war crimes. He notably represented Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL court-martialed on charges including the murder of a captured fighter (though he was found guilty only of one, lesser charge), along with a second SEAL accused of serious sexual offenses. Elevating a lawyer with this record does not bode well for the armed services Hegseth hopes to build.

Jason Dempsey at the Atlantic.

If we really believe that every criminal defendant deserves competent legal counsel, we must stop insinuating that lawyers who have represented criminals are complicit in their crime and therefore evil. But we’ve done so (albeit selectively, sorted by tribe) all my adult life, and it has always bugged me — even before I was a lawyer.

Dare I think this nasty habit reflects what we really believe:

  1. We should have kangaroo courts or even summary executions without trial — except for members of our respective tribes.
  2. Anyone who facilitates real courts and frustrates summary executions is a money-grubbing lowlife.

For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law

For all of Trump’s talk about rooting out “anti-Christian bias” from the United States, one of his administration’s first executive actions violated the free speech and religious freedom rights of several Christian congregations. It turns out that Trump wants to protect only his Christian allies from government reprisals. Dissenting believers will face his wrath, and the wrath of the state.

David French, who has the receipts.

This is one of the reasons I don’t buy Aaron Renn’s positive world/neutral world/negative world chronology of Christianity’s status in the US. True and consistent Christianity has never been viewed positively, and the negativity has come from the right as well as the left, albeit for different reasons.

The Plight of the Never-Trump Pundit

I woke up excited to write about the day’s most important political news—before remembering that I said most of what I wanted to say on the subject a few weeks ago.

Never Trumpers who work in media will face that problem every day for the next four years. Good luck finding something new and interesting to say as the president vindicates your arguments against him again and again and again.

Nick Catoggio

The Trumposcene is a great time not to be a professional pundit. Yes, I opine, but I don’t have to do it on a schedule, whether or not I’m feelin’ it.

And I mostly borrow.

Not Trump-related

Resurrecting de Gaulle

[T]he American right should consciously support a stronger France. It should encourage a special relationship between the two republics, support French primacy on the continent, treat Paris rather than Brussels as the European capital and the French military as the keystone of Europe’s security.

In effect, we should revisit Charles de Gaulle’s bid to maintain more French independence within the Western alliance, which made him a thorn in the American side during the Cold War, and recognize that he was right. It was not actually in America’s long-term interests to make Europe our full dependent, because vassaldom encourages weakness, and weakness reduces the value of the alliance in a world that America can no longer simply bestride alone.

…

The French military is limited but still “indisputably the most capable in Western Europe,” as Michael Shurkin noted in a 2023 analysis for War on the Rocks, with a resilient capacity for expeditionary action. Its nuclear-energy strategy has granted it a degree of energy independence that contrasts sharply with the reckless folly of German “green” de-industralization. Its pro-natal policies have given it a sustained demographic advantage; it is aging, but its fertility isn’t collapsing in the style of Italy, Spain or now Poland.

Then, psychologically, France lacks the crippling sense of historical guilt that still pervades Germany, and the junior-partner complex that has made Britain an unsuccessful adjunct of recent American foreign policy mistakes. It embodies two distinct forms of universalism, Roman Catholic and republican, that have more historical appeal across Europe than the Anglo-American style of empire. And the rapid renovation of Notre-Dame de Paris joined to the recent “gentle revival” of Catholic practice amid secularized conditions suggest stronger possibilities for spiritual renewal as well.

This last point is crucial for American conservatives. The current European establishment, secular and socially liberal even in its “conservative” forms, often feels like a natural ally not of the United States in full but of American progressivism alone. So the American right should wish to see a more substantial European conservatism re-emerge — more ambitious than today’s populist factions, and capable, as the right-wing Frenchman Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry put it this week, of affirming Europe’s “Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian” roots in contrast to Anglo-American progressivism.

Ross Douthat

ACB

After Justice Amy Coney Barrett voted against the Administration on one of the many Trump 2.0 “Emergency Docket” cases, she has been attacked I’m told, by the kinds of trolls who trot out canards like “DEI hire” in place of “treacherous bitch.” (I’m not referring to Prof. Josh Blackman, who criticizes the decision on more defensible grounds.)

Kevin D. Williamson is having none of it:

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined with the chief justice to rule against Trump in the matter of his attempt to unilaterally freeze certain federal spending, is a great loyalist—but not the kind of loyalist Donald Trump’s ghastly little sycophants demand that she be. Justice Barrett is loyal to her oath of office, to the law, to the Constitution, to certain principles governing her view of the judge’s role in American life—all of which amounts to approximately squat in the Trumpist mind, which demands only—exclusively—that she be loyal to Trump, and that she practice that loyalty by giving him what he wants in court, the statute books—and the Constitution—be damned. 

The usual dopes demand that she give Trump what he wants because he is “the man who put her on the Supreme Court.” Mike Davis of the Article III Project (not the author of Late Victorian Holocausts; his organization works to recruit Trump-friendly judges) sneers that the justice is “weak and timid” and, because he is a right-wing public intellectual in 2025, that “she is a rattled law professor with her head up her ass.” Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch, presumably is not as titanically stupid as he sounds, but there is a reason Justice Barrett is on the Supreme Court and he is a right-wing media gadfly who describes his job as “punching back at the left’s attacks.”

There is a word for men such as Davis et al.: subjects.

Kevin D. Williamson

Debasing education

Even though I am certainly angry at those students who choose to cheat, the fact is that I also care about them and feel a certain degree of compassion for them. I don’t want them to miss out on the opportunity to become educated, not even as the result of their own poor choices. It’s a bit of a Catch-22. How can we expect them to make good choices, about their studies or anything else, if they have not yet been given the tools to think critically? How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more? Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?

Troy Jollimore via Alan Jacobs

Moral clarity

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is In The Air, 1/13/2021

I don’t think Rod’s vision is as clear now as it was then.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Wednesday, 7/31/24

Weird candidates, glass houses

“Weird” is the new “deplorables”

For a few days this last week I started to believe that Kamala Harris and the Democrats could come from behind and beat Donald Trump. But then I started to hear Democrats patting themselves on the back for coming up with a great new label for Trump Republicans. They are “weird.”

I cannot think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish and more counterproductive political taunt for Democrats to seize on than calling Trump and his supporters “weird.”

But weird seems to be the word of the week. As this newspaper reported, in a potential audition to be Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said over the weekend of Trump and his vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio: “The fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.” Just to make sure he got the point across, Walz added: “The nation found out what we’ve all known in Minnesota: These guys are just weird.”

As The Times reported, Harris, speaking at a weekend campaign event at a theater in the Berkshires, “leaned into a new Democratic attack on the former president and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, saying that some of the swipes the men had taken against her were ‘just plain weird.’” The Times added: “Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, said Mr. Trump was getting ‘older and stranger’ while Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, called Mr. Vance ‘weird’ and ‘erratic.’”

It is now a truism that if Democrats have any hope of carrying key swing states and overcoming Trump’s advantages in the Electoral College, they have to break through to white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women, who, if they have one thing in common, feel denigrated and humiliated by Democratic, liberal, college-educated elites. They hate the people who hate Trump more than they care about any Trump policies. Therefore, the dumbest message Democrats could seize on right now is to further humiliate them as “weird.”

“It is not only a flight from substance,” noted Prof. Michael J. Sandel of Harvard, author of “The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?” “It allows Trump to tell his supporters that establishment elites look down on them, marginalize them and view them as ‘outsiders’ — people who are ‘weird.’ It plays right into Trump’s appeal to his followers that he is taking the slings and arrows of elites for them. It is a distraction from the big argument that Democrats should be running on: How we can renew the dignity of work and the dignity of working men and women.”

I don’t know what is sufficient for Harris to win, but I sure know what is necessary: a message that is dignity-affirming for working-class Americans, not dignity-destroying. If this campaign is descending into name-calling, no one beats Trump in that arena.

Thomas L. Friedman

Too busy to look in a mirror?

I’m not sure that calling Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance “weird” when you’re the party of gender fluidity will connect with voters.

Oliver Wiseman at the Free Press (cartoon from a separate source)

(N.B. Be it remembered that everyone reading this is probably WEIRD)

Self-sabotage

Decades ago, the lesbian cultural critic Camille Paglia warned her fellow homosexuals against reckless attacks on religion. Homosexuality only flourishes under conditions of advanced culture, she said—and like it or not, the church is a pillar of culture. Therefore, said Paglia, when gays “attack the institutions of culture (including religion), they are sabotaging their own future.”

In 2016, Paglia spoke at an ideas festival in Britain, saying that the West’s obsession with androgyny and transgenderism is a sign that “civilization is starting to unravel. You find it again and again and again in history.” 

“People who live in such times feel that they’re very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan,” Paglia said. In truth, she goes on, they give evidence of a culture that no longer believes in itself. This, in turn, calls forth “people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity”—in other words, barbarians.

Nobody will resist contemporary “barbarians” to defend a civilizational order that places the sexually disordered at its symbolic pinnacle. Ordinary Frenchmen might fight for the Blessed Virgin Mary, or for Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, or at least for Brigitte Bardot. But for Barbara Butch? Please.

Rod Dreher, A Civilizational Suicide Note on the Seine. Apropos of the barbarians called forth by our queered culture, see ‌Toxic Masculinity rightly so called in Monday’s blog.

America’s unacknowledged social credit system

“Vague and subjective policies pervade the financial industry,” Jeremy Tedesco told the Federalist Society group. He is the general counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, which has itself been labeled an “extremist group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (ADF once was the institutional home of famously intolerant extremist David French.) “They’ll never tell the customer the real reason they are being debanked. Companies hide behind vague standards, just like government would do if it were regulating speech.”

Tedesco sees the issue as being essentially one of collusion: heavily regulated industries doing the dirty work of government officials who cannot engage in censorship themselves but who can lean on banks and insurance companies and make their lives miserable if they choose.

Kevin D. Williamson, Debanking is Just a Tax on Dissent

Schedule F

How many civil servants could a future President Trump try to fire using a reimplemented Schedule F? Estimates run to somewhere around 50,000. Fukuyama is worth quoting at length on the implications:

It is hard to describe the damage that will be done to American government if these plans are carried out. While there is a good case to be made for great flexibility in the hiring and firing of federal officials, the wholesale replacement of thousands of public servants with political cronies would take the nation back to the spoils system of the 19th century. Republicans think that they will be undermining the deep state, but they will simply be politicizing functions that should be carried out in an impartial way, and will destroy the ethic of neutral public service that animates much of the government. When they lose power, as they necessarily will, the other party will simply get rid of their partisans and replace them with Democratic loyalists in a way that undermines any continuity in government. Who will want a career in public service under these conditions? Only political hacks, opportunists, and those who see openings for personal enrichment in the bureaucracy.

Damon Linker, The Part of “Project 2025” We’re Sure to See

The low stakes in Election 2024

I figure whoever walks away with Pennsylvania wins the deal; so come first Tuesday in November, I plan on staying up no later than the calling of that state. Either way, it will be a new regime, sending rats like Sullivan and Blinken and Kirby scurrying off to think tanks to plot their return to power. Meanwhile, nothing much will change, despite the label at the top; for weapons of death and destruction have to be shipped, genocide has to be upheld, and money has to be printed, no matter the administration.

Terry Cowan

Lame-Duck Quackery

Biden’s three-pronged proposal to reform the Supreme Court isn’t serious.

  • He didn’t consult with Congress before announcing it, as he would have if he were serious.
  • He proposed no language for the constitutional amendments that would be required were he serious.
  • A constitutional amendment to the effect that Presidents have no (little?) immunity isn’t a matter of Supreme Court reform at all — and will prove deucedly difficult to write if someone tries.

Biden probably is past the point of being able to achieve seriousness; all he’s got left is petulance.

(BTW: Term limits and a binding ethics code are not crazy ideas, but the devil’s in the details on how to “bind” SCOTUS.)

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

July already! Sheesh!

Steve Bannon

Last month, I shared Ross Douthat’s long interview with J.D. Vance. July 1, the Times published a long interview of Steve Bannon by David Brooks. I’m going out on a limb here with a wager that this is one of the ten most shareworthy I’ll read this month in the Times.

For my response, let’s just say I have a presumption against all revolutions; they seldom elevate, frequently immiserate. But they’ll happen when enough people think it couldn’t get any worse.

Bring back frank established religions?

Thoughts as we close out “Pride Month:”

(In my house, we believe the Nicene Creed)

Instead of a naked public square, we see one festooned today with every imaginable image of the rainbow and associated symbology: from flags to backlighting, from crosswalks to entire murals on the sides of buildings. The public square went briefly from being a space where one might once have found images of the Ten Commandments or, during the holidays, a Christmas crèche, to one where the White House might be lit up by the rainbow celebrating a judicial fiat declaring a right to marriage of homosexuals in a constitution written in the 1780s, to public libraries where praise of cross-dressing, transexuality, and gay sex would become run-of-the-mill children’s programming.

…

When religion in any traditional or recognizable form is excluded from the public square, it does not mean that the public square is in fact naked. When recognizable religion is excluded, the vacuum will be filled by ersatz religion, by religion bootlegged into public space under other names.

…

The high priests of the new religion insist upon enthusiastic public expressions of support—especially during the holy month of June—lest one’s relative lack of fervency be taken as an indication of disbelief and grounds for being purged from the ranks of the elect. In nearly every respect, expressions of Pride are deployed in identical ways to traditional religious symbols and belief, in the eyes of many constituting a replacement religion. The inescapable, even overbearing presence of Pride symbology thus today bears all the unmistakable features of a “comprehensive doctrine,” the prevention of which earnest liberals of yesteryear insisted was their sole, modest aim.

…

Any war of “comprehensive doctrines” also brings attendant dangers. However, only someone not paying attention could believe that those dangers have been absent in recent years. My hope is that forthrightness about the terms of the debate may lead not to renewed “wars of religion,” but to a new settlement. A more pacific settlement might arise from acknowledgment that the actual “fact of pluralism” may require increased acceptance and acknowledgement of various state establishments. Such a settlement would return us to the original arrangement of the constitutional order, in which various religious traditions could coexist with robust internal unity amid relative proximate concord. California might thus retain its de facto established religion of Pride, and Alabama would establish some form of broadly nondenominational Protestant Christianity.

Patrick Deneen, inluding a prophetic insight of Richard John Neuhaus.

Comments:

  1. I think Deneen is correct that “Pride” has become a Rawlsian comprehensive doctrine — i.e., a de facto religion. (That doesn’t mean I think it will endure.)
  2. Deneen’s suggestion of permitted state establishments of religion is America’s original pattern (for what it’s worth). The First Amendment’s prohibition of Congress making any “law respecting an establishment of religion” was indeed a restriction on Congress, not the states. Massachusetts (of all places) had a state establishment until the 1830s and abandoned it voluntarily, not because some court declared it unconstitutional.
  3. I suspect I could formulate an argument that a state establishment of religion, unlike a limit on free exercise of religion, ought not be barred by the 14th Amendment “incorporation.” So long as a citizen is not coerced, I question whether their 14th Amendment “rights” are violated by an establishment.
  4. I’m under no illusion that I will like the religion established by any state: While I differ from him in details, I concur with Ross Douthat’s daring book title Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, and the best state establishment I could realistically hope for is mainstream Protestant (i.e., moralistic therapeutic deism).

Progressives verus liberals

You know you’ve touched a nerve with progressive activists when they tell you not just that you’re wrong but that you’re on the other side.

Such is the fate of any old-school liberal or mainstream Democrat who deviates from progressive dogma …

If this was just about our feelings, these denunciations could be easily brushed aside. But the goal and the effect is to narrow the focus of acceptable discourse by Democrats and their allies. If liberals are denounced for “punching left” when they express a reasonable difference of opinion, potentially winning ideas are banished.

…

In the run-up to a tight election with a weak Democratic candidate and a terrifying Republican opponent, pushing liberals and centrists out of the conversation not only exacerbates polarization, it’s also spectacularly counterproductive.

…

Those on the left who’ve been dumbstruck as Donald Trump has intimidated his most vociferous Republican critics (see: Chris Sununu, Nikki Haley) into falling in line might exert a little more self-awareness of similar moves by the left.

The goal of progressives may be solidarity, but their means of achieving it are by shutting alternative ideas down rather than modeling tolerance.

Pamela Paul, Who You Calling Conservative?

Note that I am not denying a similar Trumpist lock-step on the Right, nor does Ms. Paul.

Understanding the 2024 Roberts Court

If you really want to understand the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, it’s important to realize that all the Republican nominees who sit on it formed their legal philosophy and forged their legal reputations long before Donald Trump was elected president. This is no less true of Trump’s three nominees than of the three justices who were nominated by previous Republican presidents. Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett all possessed a robust legal identity and a considerable body of work before their selection to the high court. In fact, each has his or her own maverick streak, with Gorsuch perhaps most notable in his steadfast defense of Native Americans and the rights of criminal defendants.

When you understand this reality, what can seem to be a confounding, surprising Supreme Court term is actually predictable. The Trumpist right is lobbing a number of novel cases presenting aggressive legal theories to justices with pre-Trump legal philosophies, and the pre-Trump justices are rejecting them, repeatedly.

David French (emphasis added).

The Trumpist right is especially getting aggressive in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, part of the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. The 5th Circuit has become where conservatives play out their fantasies to an obliging court as the 9th Circuit used to be the playground for progressives. You could say the 5th is the new 9th.

Republicans Pounce

A politically inconvenient rape and murder: Two migrants who’d crossed the border illegally have been charged with the rape and murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston. The Associated Press managed to not once mention the status of the killers. The NYT eventually covered it, only in the context of how darned politically inconvenient it is: “The killing of Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston has become the latest crime seized on by Republicans to attack President Biden over his immigration policies.” Right. That 12-year-old, so rude of her to be murdered by the wrong type and letting Republicans “seize on” it. 

Nellie Bowles.

I’ll give the New York Times credit for disguising the usual formulation wherein the real story is “Republicans pounce” instead of what detestable thing they pounce on.

Tradition

Most of the things in our lives are not of our own making – they were given to us. Our language, our culture, the whole of our biology and the very gift of life itself is something that has been “handed down” to us. In that sense, we are all creatures of “tradition” (traditio=“to hand down”). Of course, these things that are not of our own making and are the least controllable are also those things that we take most for granted. We may hate our culture and our biology, but will still have to use our traditioned language (or someone’s traditioned language) to say so. Tradition is simply the most foundational, inescapable aspect of human existence.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Things You Can’t Invent

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Screed-free!

Comparative Free Speech Law

While every liberal democracy in the world claims to guarantee free expression in some form, the United States is essentially the only country where the government may not “take sides” on contentious issues by censoring expression based on the speaker’s viewpoint. As the post-October 7 examples show, many European countries have indeed taken a side in the public discourse over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—in a way that might surprise many American observers: calls for a ceasefire and an end to what they see as an Israel-perpetrated genocide are criminally prohibited hate speech, while support for continued attacks is constitutionally protected. This strange result illustrates the unintended consequences of allowing governments to pick and choose which beliefs are unlawful “hate speech” and which are fair criticism.

The notion—dominant the in most of the world—that hateful speech is not “free speech” dates at least to the global post-World War II reckoning with Nazism …

[H]ate speech is notoriously hard to define, and these systems often give wide latitude to officials to decide what these terms even mean and who should be prosecuted, discretion which officials often use in inconsistent and unpredictable ways.

…

How governments are responding to Israel-Gaza protests illustrates these radically diverging constitutional commitments to viewpoint neutrality. European national officials defended some of these pro-Palestinian restrictions primarily on public-order grounds more than stifling hate. But even so, the double standard implies that they view much of anti-Israeli speech as inherently anti-Semitic, and therefore, beyond the pale. This leads to a paradox, in which criticizing Muslims or Arabs as a group can constitute unlawful hate speech, but many expressions of support for Islamic-Arab groups are also prohibited, because of the threat that the government thinks those groups pose.

…

These examples offer a cautionary tale: When empowering the government to decide which beliefs are illegitimate, future policymakers may not use that power in ways you like or anticipate. They may even decide that your own viewpoints are the illegitimate ones—as with the song of South African anti-apartheid activists, “Shoot the Boer (i.e., white farmer)”; gender-critical feminists’ insistence that natal sex is critical to sexual orientation; and more recently, Palestinian advocates’ calls for a ceasefire and a “free Palestine.”

Scholars and activists celebrating new and stronger hate-speech laws might therefore consider Justice Hugo Black’s 1952 reaction to a (now largely discredited) decision upholding a conviction for disparaging Black Americans: “If there be minority groups who hail this [development] as their victory,” he wrote, they should contemplate Pyrrhus of Epirus’s observation: “Another such victory and I am undone.”

Kevin Cope, The Global Hate-Speech Conundrum via Eugene Volokh (bold added)

Too rich

We live in comforts that the richest of aristocrats not very long ago could never have dreamed of, and yet we claim that we are too poor to have more than a child or two. The truth is the reverse: we are too rich to have more than a child or two, too committed to work for work’s sake and to the purchase of prestige, mansions, the “best” schools, and toys for grown-ups.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Out with the old, in with … ummmm …indifference

In 1963, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act. Its order to close the state psychiatric hospitals was followed, and hundreds were shuttered; the community mental health centers that were meant to replace them were never built …

In 1975, the Supreme Court’s O’Connor v. Donaldson decision established a national standard that the mentally ill could only be involuntarily treated if they represented an immediate threat to themselves or others. This completely removed actual medical necessity from the equation, and the standard directly incentivized hospitals to discharge very ill patients, many of whom leave these useless emergency room visits and immediately abuse drugs, self-harm, commit crimes, attack others, or commit suicide …

There are desperately ill, utterly impoverished, terribly vulnerable people living on the street right now. They are exactly the kind of people the left should fight for. But because we have become such a caricature of ourselves, we are incapable of acknowledging that some people really are fucked up, that some people really are dangerous, that some people really aren’t just different but are sick, ugly sick, violent sick, no-silver-lining sick. Not beautiful and poetic madness but drug addicted, horrifically paranoid, caked-in-shit sick. And what people like that need is to be forced into treatment to save their lives. But sunny, false notions that everyone muttering to themselves on the subway hides a sweet little self-actualized busy bee inside of them, and an impossibly myopic fixation on the abstract rights of people whose brains have hijacked their minds, has left us unable to provide the actual help the severely mentally ill need. I have found no way to penetrate the liberal consciousness on this issue. Because it’s conservatives, I guess, who complain about violence and disorder on the streets.

Freddie deBoer, We Closed the Institutions That Housed the Severely Mentally Ill and We Made It Dramatically Harder to Compel Them to Receive Car

Abortion politics

Even if I were still a single-issue (abortion) voter (I’m not; I’ve seen too many insane and/or phoney “pro-life” candidates), the GOP no longer make a compelling case on that issue.

Hamas Hyperbole, Media Credulity

In a May 6 report, the UN stated the death toll was 34,735, including 9,500 women and 14,500 children, or at least 24,000 civilians. 

But two days later, the UN quietly revised its figures, stating that 50 percent fewer civilians had died. The total number of deaths is about the same at 34,844, but that number includes 4,959 women and 7,797 children—a total of 12,756 civilians. (And this from the United Nations, whose General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions on Israel in 2023, compared to seven for the rest of the world combined.) 

This revision is the clearest sign yet that Hamas’s statistics cannot be trusted. As David Adesnik, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, says: “The UN should state clearly that it has lost confidence in sources whose credibility it has affirmed for months.”

…

Spencer says that even the revised UN figures probably overstate the death toll, because the numbers aren’t limited to people who were killed in the war. “The UN numbers include every death in Palestine no matter what the cause was,” Spencer told The Free Press. “Every natural death, missing person, anyone killed by Hamas.”

And yet, so far not a single major media platform, save Fox News, has reported on the new UN numbers.

Oliver Wiseman, Truth Should Not Be a Casualty of War

China bogeyman

On a Newsweek article skewering Viktor Orbán for his friendliness toward China:

China doesn’t give a damn what Hungary does with its borders, or with LGBT policy. That’s not to say that China doesn’t have and pursue its own interests. The Chinese are not altruists. It’s just that dealing with them, countries can preserve sovereignty in ways the West makes harder and harder to do.

Talk to African diplomats and lawmakers, and you’ll hear from them deep exasperation with the way Western countries constantly push feminist and LGBT ideology on them, as a condition of foreign aid. I invite you to spend just a little bit of time googling “LGBT”, “feminist” and “foreign policy”. Western institutions are as militantly evangelical about these ideologies as the Church was about religion in the Age of Discovery.

If your country wants and needs development aid, but wants to maintain cultural sovereignty, you’re going to look to China. To be very clear, Chinese support also has strings attached! But they are different strings. My point is simply that mindless cheerleaders for the Western establishment, like the Newsweek essayist, should make the effort to see what things look like to people outside the Greater American Empire.

Rod Dreher, ’4 Legs Good! 2 Legs Bad!’ Conservatism

Pre-emptive strike

Ron DeSantis bans cultivated meat in Florida because … reasons:

I’m not making this up. He Tweeted this graphic.

Strong People

Whenever I watch a Netflix show these days, it seems as if there are several themes that are yawningly predictable. One of them is the motif of the “strong woman.” (I’m not referring to the South Park “strong woman.” That is a subject for another day.) 

I mean the way in which female characters must now almost always be shown to be people of unbelievable strength—including rather unbelievable physical strength. One reason the recent Amazon adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (called The Rings of Power) flopped is that it tried to push this motif at every turn. In one especially implausible scene, a “strong woman” fights off a whole horde of armor-clad men with her bare fists. We were meant to marvel at her strength. Most people reached for the off switch.

Douglas Murray

I didn’t make it past the first 15 minutes or so of The Rings of Power, but it took me 6 episodes to reach my limit on Apple TV’s Sugar, which ended with a similarly absurd show of superhuman strength.

Zero-sum

Maybe the prospective [wedding service] customers, like many Americans, do not see transcendent meaning in the ceremonial commencement of matrimony, because they associate a wedding as admittance to an institutional legal fiction that allows one access to nothing more than a cluster of political and social privileges not available to other friendships. So, given this understanding, it is not surprising that the customers see the provider’s refusal as a negative judgment on the public legitimacy of their union. Thus, it’s easy to see why the customers would be offended by the provider’s refusal and subsequently seek legal redress. But what the customers fail to see is that their demand that the courts force the providers to rescind their denial and be punished for it is really a demand that the state force the providers not to exercise their freedom of worship, the liberty not to participate in, or not provide assistance to, ceremonies that one believes have sacramental significance.

Robert P. George Amicus Brief in 303 Creative, quoted by Francis J. Beckwith in Taking Rites Seriously.

Anti-Trump screeds moved to my personal Journal

There were two screeds here. They’re gone now. You’re welcome.

Here’s the gist of the first.

The second is from his own mouth via The Guardian and the Morning Dispatch.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Tuesday, 11/14/23

Middle East

Evidence is what confirms your priors

It’s not just the activists. Congresswoman Tlaib has accused Biden of “funding Netanyahu’s genocide,” and said “We are literally watching people commit genocide” — referring to the blast next to a Gaza hospital caused by a Hamas rocket. Congresswoman Omar retweeted a photo of dead kids with the caption “CHILD GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE” — but the photo was from a 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria.

Andrew Sullivan

Culpably loose translation

At the pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests and in various “We Will Not Condemn Hamas” letters from academia, there are a lot of Arabic phrases bandied about. A lot of Arabic words showing up on posters. And those words are a translation, of a sort. So: when it says Free Palestine in English, in Arabic it often says Palestine Is Arab. The phrase Free Palestine sounds nebulous and nice. And sure! Free Everyone, I say! In Arabic, it’s a little less subtle: Palestine Is Arab. Palestine is not Jewish. It’s a call for the end of Jews in the area. (H/t Matt Yglesias for pointing this out.) You see, the same translation in the big “Academics and Intellectuals for a Free Palestine” letter. There, in English, it says Free Palestine. In Arabic: Palestine Is Arab.

Nellie Bowles

One picture’s worth …

Via Nellie Bowles

Anti-Zionist, antisemitic

Anti-Zionists claim the moral high-ground and often take great offense at any suggestion they are antisemitic. 

But that’s the amazing thing. 

We spend so much time on that debate, everyone thinks it’s just normal to say, “I don’t think Israel should exist.” Because that’s what anti-Zionism means. Zionism is the idea that Israel should exist as a Jewish homeland. It’s not more complicated than that. Anti-Zionism is the idea that Israel shouldn’t exist as a Jewish homeland.

Jonah Goldberg, How Anti-Zionism Shrugs Off Antisemitism

Moral clarity on Gaza

Barack Obama returns to the arena: Former president Obama jetted in from Martha’s Vineyard to say one quick thing, guys: the war’s kinda Israel’s fault! Or at least, we’re all guilty here, man. Hamas is the same as you and me. I’m reactive and need to learn how to take a deep breath before writing emails; Hamas tortured children and livestreamed it. Point is, we’ve all got issues. Here’s Obama: “If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.” It takes two to tango. Hamas killed infants point-blank; I never replace the toilet paper roll. 

You know who’s not talking like that? My woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who went on The View to deliver a shot of moral clarity straight into Stay-at-Home America’s veins. Here’s Mrs. Clinton: “Remember, there was a cease-fire on October 6 that Hamas broke by their barbaric assault on peaceful civilians and their kidnapping, their killing, their beheading, their terrible, inhumane savagery. It did not hold because Hamas chose to break it.” Moms around the country heard that call and are gathering arms. Hillary’s been through everything, so tarnished in battle she actually became clean again. I’m. With. Her, we all bellowed.

Trendy cultural relativists like 2023-era Obama can never really believe there’s a good guy. Nothing is ever better or worse than anything else. To the cultural relativists, Hamas is just another modern dance—a wild and beautiful expression of the human condition. The old-school feminists like Hilz are not so easily taken. They cut their teeth on brass tacks. They spend Saturday night preparing for the Model UN Conference, where they will crush. It does not take two to tango in the mind of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Nellie Bowles

Abortion

Abortion in perspective: politique and mystique

The string of political losses since Dobbs overturned Roe has some thoughtful Christian conservatives reconsidering — and a few suggesting that their past writings have been vindicated:

Several years ago Matthew Lee Anderson wrote in these pages that there is no pro-life case for Donald Trump …:

If abortions happen because of the breakdown of marriage, then there is nothing ‘pro-life’ about electing someone who is at best a serial monogamist. If the abortion culture has anything to do with the wider degradation of our society’s sex and morals — as pro-lifers have argued it does for as long as I have been alive — then there is nothing pro-life in endorsing a candidate who has bragged about the number of his sexual partners. It matters that Trump is unwilling to answer whether he personally has funded abortions. It matters a great deal.

Let me be as explicit as possible about what pro-lifers supporting Trump means: It means lending their aid to someone who (with Bill Clinton) was friends with Jeffrey Epstein who was eventually convicted of pedophilia. And Trump knew of it and commended Epstein. I mean, look at this glowing endorsement: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Think about that for a second: Conservative evangelicals and other pro-lifers have rushed to find any justification they can think of to vote for a fellow who almost certainly knew of pedophilia occurring, and, for all we do know of him, did nothing to prevent it. At the very least, he was not the one who went to the police about it. That pro-lifers have been reduced to this beguiles the mind, to put it gently.

…

As long as our laws allow for the killing of the unborn we cannot claim to be such a society. But the erasure of such laws will not, in itself, absolve us of the charge of being a society that is deeply inhumane and hostile to life.

…

[T]his is what makes the embrace of Trump as a pro-life champion so damaging to the movement: It … diminishes the goals of the pro-life movement, reducing them from the lofty and inspiring ideal of creating a society hospitable to life down [mystique]to simply overturning a badly argued Supreme Court ruling [politique]. And by reducing the ideal in this way it actually drains the life from the pro-life movement, rendering it equivalent to any other political advocacy group whose sole objective is narrowly political in nature.

…

To secure an admittedly significant political victory the pro-life movement has had to give up this broader vision, for how can you credibly claim to resist the culture of death when your champion is Donald Trump?

Of course, that may be precisely the point. There may be no eulogy more fitting for American Christian conservatism than this: That we secured our continued relevance in American society by giving up the things that might have made us a distinctive society ourselves. We have gained a political victory but even if we triumph, what will we have to say? And can we say any of it with even a modicum of credibility?

Jake Meador, The Mystique of the Pro-Life Movement: On Trump & the March for Life, a reprint from January 24, 2020.

Why Abortion is a losing issue for the GOP

In the eight years since the so-called New Right emerged on the scene and Trump began to dominate the Republican landscape, the Republican Party has become less libertarian but more libertine, and libertinism is ultimately incompatible with a holistic pro-life worldview … Libertarianism says that your rights are more important than my desires. Libertinism says my desires are more important than your rights, and this means that libertines are terrible ambassadors for any cause that requires self-sacrifice.

David French

(Note the congruence of these two perspectives.)

Culture

Liberal democracy’s tacit orthodoxy

Liberal democracy has created its own orthodoxy, which causes it to become less of a forum for articulating positions and agreeing on actions than—to a much higher extent—a political mechanism for the selection of people, organizations, and ideas in line with the orthodoxy. This phenomenon can be seen especially in Europe, where in the past few decades there has been a major ideological rapprochement of the right-and left-wing parties. This resulted in the formation of what is called “the political mainstream,” which includes Socialists, Christian Democrats, the Greens, Social Democrats, Liberals, and even Conservatives. The mainstream that runs in Europe today is tilted far more to the left than to the right. Within it, the left has made a slight shift to the right in some matters (mostly economic) and made a further move to the left in other matters (mainly moral), while the right-wing movement’s shift to the left was huge.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy

Bittersweet resolution of nostalgia

(James Matthew Wilson ached for Michigan during his long exile:)

We had chosen a difficult time to return. Michigan had legalized recreational marijuana use in 2018, and cannabis shops had sprung up all over the place, with their ridiculous names and vulgar slogans appearing on billboards along the highways. The whole state has been defaced with bad puns on words like “high” and “stoned.” And in 2022, the citizens of the state voted to lock abortion rights into the state constitution. It also elected its first Democratic legislature in forty years, and in the short time that coalition has been in power, it has pushed through a slew of left-leaning programs that will further erode the moral and educational standards of the place—all done, ironically, in hopes of luring new residents to the state. Michigan risks becoming a state where the slaughter of the innocent and the drugging of citizens into inertia and schizophrenia are celebrated as pastimes. Its governor proudly speaks of these things as part of a golden vision of the future, alongside the construction of a new Chinese-owned plant for electric vehicle batteries.

These changes have given my family occasion to see why the love of country, the piety of Virgil, is so essential. When one feels betrayed or disappointed—or wounded by the legal establishment of grave evil—the loving reaction is not to withdraw but to abide, to recommit oneself to the saving of what risks being lost. “It is good that you exist!” Love sees through the faults and perversions of the hour. It stands firm, when other kinds of commitment or affection would crumble. This kind of love has to be wound about the bone and deep within the sinew, just as its vision of the object loved is not subject to present appearances. Our truest loves are not universalizing, free, and deliberate, but stubborn, unaccountable, and particular. We do not love immutability, eternity, or omniscience. We yearn to see God’s face, which we find in the human countenance of Jesus. The same holds for natural pieties, especially love of one’s home.

I have a favorite Michigan vacation destination, Traverse City, and agree with him on the “ridiculous names and vulgar [marijuana] slogans.”

What happened to the ACLU

The ACLU really did stand for sincere liberalism during the middle decades of its existence, and perhaps for even longer than that. In the 1990s, when New York City’s Ancient Order of Hibernians wanted to keep a gay pride float out of its century-old St. Patrick’s Day Parade, the local affiliate of the ACLU took the parade organizers’ side. From the 1980s until recently, ACLU lawyers filed numerous amicus briefs against ordinances that banned protest and prayer outside abortion clinics, even though the organization was institutionally pro-choice and had its own “reproductive rights” division. For ACLU lawyers, it was a point of pride that they defended the free speech rights of pro-lifers with whom they disagreed.

Recently, something changed. Impartial liberalism is no longer the ruling ideology at the ACLU. The organization’s social media accounts now regularly weigh in on matters in which civil liberties either are not at issue or seem to lie on the other side. When Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on grounds of self-defense after shooting three assailants at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the ACLU Twitter account lamented that Rittenhouse “was not held responsible for his actions.” In a departure from longstanding practice, the organization began making political ads on behalf of candidates, $25 million worth in the 2018 midterm cycle. A million dollars were spent on an ad opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, not because of his legal views but because he had been accused, on flimsy evidence, of sexual assault.

In 2018, a memo titled “ACLU Case Selection Guidelines: Conflicts Between Competing Values or Priorities” formalized the end of the old era. Due to “limited resources” and the ACLU’s need “to recruit and retain a diverse staff,” its lawyers would now avoid taking clients whose “views are contrary to our values.” Among the criteria its lawyers would use when choosing cases were “the potential effect on marginalized communities” and the “harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed.”

The ACLU had come full circle. The new generation of left-wing “woke” lawyers is trying to impose on the American justice system the attitude to the law that prevails in Communist countries, where the most important question in any trial is whether a person belongs to a favored class, and where rights such as free speech and the presumption of innocence are derided as bourgeois proceduralism. And they are well on their way to succeeding.

Helen Andrews, What Happened to the ACLU

Things at hand

Now if it is my inclination to tune out the national news, or if I claim that being obsessed with it is a sign not of engagement in the world but of a pathological boredom with it, I do so because I believe that, by comparison, what’s “at hand” is far more important. And I leave aside asking whether there are no Shakespeare plays or sonnets or Melville novels we haven’t read yet that we could go and read instead of glutting our boredom on Fox and CNN. Are we really going to surrender our attention to what the precious twenty-somethings on NPR believe we should care about when we ourselves can take charge of our own attention and attending?

…

I am not suggesting that anyone abstain from voting in presidential elections, though I confess to having abstained on grounds that seem perfectly reasonable to me: I didn’t want to be implicated in the shenanigans of either of the clowns on offer. But what I am saying is that there are duties of citizenship confronting us not once every four years but every day. And those who account themselves citizens because they vote in abstract elections but cannot be bothered by the “things at hand” are, in my view, not citizens in any sense of the word. They are people sitting on their couches watching the Super Bowl or the Election News, elbow deep in Cheeze Doodles, too busy being consumers of far-away news or sports to be citizens of the near-at-hand—citizens performing, at scale, the offices of neighbor.

Jason Peters, in an essay well worth a few minutes, Citizens of the Things at Hand.

Why is such advice so hard to follow?

Politics

Long-term consquences of Trumpism

One of the many tragedies of this era for the American right is how Trump and Trumpism have consumed young Republican political talent.

The most promising young governor in the party is being steamrolled in this year’s presidential primary, a casualty of Trump’s hubris and ambition. He may never recover from the ridicule he’s endured for his “disloyalty.”

Successful young(-ish) governors like Chris Sununu and Doug Ducey are either out of politics or soon will be, despite how formidable they’d be as Senate candidates. They ran afoul of Trump and therefore would struggle to get through a primary, so they’ve decided not to bother.

Smart young conservatives like Elise Stefanik converted to Trumpism for the same reason, to not run afoul of him or his voters. There’s little left to distinguish phony, opportunistic populists like Stefanik from true believers like Marjorie Taylor Greene. They’re rubber stamps for Trump in equal measure; the only difference is that one mutters sotto voce while doing the stamping.

Right-wing political stars now tend to be made from charismatic charlatans who are good on television, in the image of the party’s leader, not from policy mavens. Kari Lake and Vivek Ramaswamy are better known than most Republican officeholders despite never having won an election.

The closest thing Trumpism has to a next-gen political success story is J.D. Vance in Ohio. In unguarded moments, Vance sounds like a fascist.

That’s a lot of political capital that Republicans have spoiled or squandered.

Nick Cataggio

Our libertarian land

Ross Douthat

I don’t find this surprising at all. I think America is a pro-choice, pro-pot, and pro-gun society. I think the legalization of marijuana in Ohio is going to be a total disaster. But I think social conservatism is largely correct, and unfortunately, fairly unpopular, and that’s bad for the country. But such is life.

Michelle Cottle

Such is a democracy. So you’re saying you believe in thermostatic voting, more or less.

Ross Douthat

I think that America has shifted meaningfully to the individualist left on a range of, quote unquote, “social issues” over the last 20 years, including not just issues about sex and reproduction, but also issues like marijuana.

And I think guns falls into this category. One reason I think the liberals lose on guns in certain ways for the same reason maybe pro-lifers lose on abortion, where if you poll people about specific gun control provisions, they might support them, but they don’t trust Democrats because they think Democrats want to take away their guns. And in the same way, I think it might be that people who would support a 12-week abortion ban in theory don’t trust Republicans to implement it because they think Republicans want to just ban all abortions. I think there may be similar dynamics in play there, in a very libertarian country.

New York Times

Don’t say he didn’t tell us

“If I happen to be President and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election,” – likely future president Donald Trump, to Univision.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Humpty Elon

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, via Goodreads.

We tweeted a line from Louise Perry’s remarkable essay, “We Are Repaganizing” (October 2023): “Abortion is not just ‘healthcare’; it is not at all like getting a tooth or a tonsil removed.” When we turned to promote the tweet as part of an X Ads campaign, the Ministry of Truth at X (formerly known as Twitter) informed us that the ad would not run. Its communication specified a violation of a policy that prohibits the promotion of health and pharmaceutical products and services. But the thrust of Louise’s observation is analytical, not promotional. It concerns what abortion is. Welcome to the Free Society™, brought to you by Silicon Valley. (Via First Things)

When we apply a rule, it means just what we choose it to mean — neither more nor less. The question is who is to be master — that’s all.

Living your faith

For me, faith is about uniting all people. It says all children are children of God. And if you’re truly living out your faith, you’re not playing into these anger and hatred games.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who won re-election November 7, via E.J. Dionne and David Brooks.

If divine law and human reason condemn hatred of anyone who is “Other” simply because of who he or she is, then even more so do they condemn the irrational and too-often lethal hatred of the People to whom God first made his promises—promises, the Second Vatican Council taught, of which God has never repented (see Nostra Aetate 4). Jew-hatred that leads to cries of “Kill the Jews!” and “Gas the Jews!” is as clear an example of a deliberate choice that “destroys in us the charity without which eternal beatitude is impossible” as one can imagine. It is loathsome. It is a gangrenous wound eating away at everything from higher education to politics. It cannot be tolerated, and those who advocate such barbarities should not be tolerated either. 

For Christians to engage in any form of anti-Semitism is to add further blows to the smitten back of Christ, tied to the Pillar of Flagellation. It is to press more thorns upon his bleeding brow. It is to pound more nails into his hands and feet. It is to thrust another spear into his side. For he was and is, eternally, the Son of David as well as the Son of God, and to scorn his kinsmen is to scorn him.

George Weigel

The human voice: That we can sing seems basis for conjecture that, despite our stupidities and our sinfulness, we might be the reason the universe exists.

Alexander Riley

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Monday, 9/25/23

Culture generally

Living with Autism

Lutz, a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who has previously written a book about her experiences raising a son (now an adult) with severe autism, goes on to lay out a fascinating history of this concept in the first half of Chasing the Intact Mind. She focuses heavily on memoirs written by parents of children with autism, showing how at every stage in the modern history of our understanding of this condition, such parents have pined for — and in some cases gone to herculean and frequently pseudoscientific lengths to free — the “intact mind” supposedly lurking behind their severely disabled child’s troubled exterior. It’s often quite difficult for these parents to accept that their experiences raising kids with severe autism, which can involve the everyday management of violent tantrums, obsessively repetitive behavior, and problems with toileting and basic communication, reflect not a temporary challenge that will be overcome, with a “normal” kid waiting at the other end of a journey, but rather simply who their child is and will always be. But sometimes, unfortunately, that’s the case.

Jesse Singal.

I selected this quote because it rings so true — even in the case fairly mild “on the spectrum” children. Of course, it doesn’t help if qualified doctors don’t give the blunt word “your child suffers Asperger’s Syndrome” (as was the current terminology for the child I”m thinking of). If doctors shilly-shally around with “we don’t know what’s wrong,” it’s understandable that parents would seek someone — heck, anyone — who says he does know.

Compelling governmental interests

[Escondido Union School District] contends that the government purpose of protecting gender diverse students from (an undefined) harm is a compelling governmental interest and the policy of non-disclosure to parents is narrowly tailored…. This argument is unconvincing. First, both the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court have found overly broad formulations of compelling government interests unavailing…. Second, keeping parents uninformed and unaware of significant events that beg for medical and psychological experts to evaluate a child, like hiding a gym student’s soccer concussion, is precisely the type of inaction that is likely to cause greater harm and is not narrowly tailored. ….

Mirabelli v. Olson (Southern District California, Sept. 14, 2023), via Religion Clause blog, Teachers Get Religious Exemption from School Policy Barring Disclosure to Parents of Gender Identity Changes

Nellie on the 15th

→ Working really hard to spin this: The New York Times is working very hard to somehow spin the migrant situation in New York and Chicago into being a problem Republicans caused. It’s hard. Biden is president and in charge of the border. These cities are all run by Democrats. But. . . there must be a way that Republicans created this. We got it! They hoped it into existence: 

I hope you’re happy, GOP, with all the families sleeping in gyms in Staten Island, just like you planned.

…

In Toronto public schools, to make it easier to ensure the books are equitable, everything written in 2008 or earlier has been removed from shelves. For real. It’s just too risky to have old books that might have old ideas written by the wrong type of author. And so, to make the so-called book “weeding” process easier, we’re not even looking past 2008. Goodbye to The Very Hungry Caterpillar and goodbye to The Diary of Anne Frank (I’m sure there are others, but really, are there?). The world began in 2009. We have no knowledge of what came before that year. Why are you asking about it? Why do you need to read a book from before then? Is it your homophobia? Is it that you hate Latinos? I’m just taking notes because it’s interesting that you’re so interested.

…

… Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a detransitioner who had a double mastectomy at 16 is suing the hospital. Literally, all these clinics need to do is wait until the kid turns 18.

Nellie Bowles

Miscellany

  • “The term ‘non-binary’ can be translated to Spanish as ‘no binario’ or ‘no binaria’ depending on the gender of the person,” – ChatGPT.
  • “Yale University has more employees than it does students. In fact, the school has 2.44 administrators for every faculty member, and one administrator for every four students. That’s the same ratio the government recommends for childcare of infants under twelve months,” – Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott.
  • “I do realize, in retrospect, that I was too quick to take the official story — that [Covid] came from a wet market where wild animals were sold — at face value. If I am honest, I accepted it because it served my own motivated reasoning and reinforced my worldview … [Steve Bannon and others’] over-the-top conspiracies fed our over credulity; their ‘question everything’ led many of us to not questioning enough,” – Naomi Klein.

Via Andrew Sullivan

What humanity as a whole needs

Although they differed on many matters, Dostoevsky, Danilevsky, and Leontyev did ultimately agree on one thing: the interests of humanity as a whole demanded that Russia not copy the West, but rather defend its own distinctive culture.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism

In case you were wondering,

The claim that peaceful January 6 protesters have been held without bail, which has become widespread in some quarters of the right, is false.

Fact Checking Vivek Ramaswamy’s Claims About January 6 Defendants.

(If you can get the September 17 Doonesbury, do.)

Speaking of which, half my kingdom to anyone who can non-violently wipe that cheesy grin off Vivek Ramaswamy’s face.

Pop starlets

Terry Mattingly tells of interviewing Allison Krause early in her career and asking why she was sticking with bluegrass and with her band Union Station (I believe she’s been offered a very big pop music deal). Her answer, basically, was “If I go to pop, will anybody be listening when I’m 60?”

A related question for young pop starlets is “Will anyone listen if I don’t show a lot of skin?” For very few (I’m looking at you, Taylor Swift) is the answer “yes.”

(And that’s not a “clean bill of health” for Swift. I don’t know her oeuvre well enough to give it more than one tepid thumb-up.)

Self-refuting

[I]f you want to know how NOT to start a letter defending yourself from accusations  of antisemitism, you can use this letter as a model. After noting that the festival has been harshly criticized by “the Jewish Federation and the ADL,” the organizers have this to say:

unlike our detractors, we do not operate in the shadows nor among elite decision makers and funders. Rather, we value transparency and public access, accountability, and scrutiny. We are also acutely aware of the power disparity between these highly funded, connected and organized Zionist organizations versus our small cultural institution run by volunteers and student organizations, most of them Penn students.

Talk about self-owns… The organizers are so clueless about antisemitism that they engage in classic anti-Jewish tropes while defending themselves from charges of antisemitism. Which kinda undermines anything else they have said or will say in their defense.

David Bernstein, Despite What Those Shadowy, Elite, Rich Jews Say, We’re Not Antisemites, quoting Spokespersons for the “Palestine Writes Literary Festival” at the University of Pennsylvania.

Caution

A people that extends its empire too far from its base commits the sin of Onan and spills its seed upon the ground.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Slowing Down

Liturgy of the Mall

What the liturgy of the mall trains us to desire as the good life and “the American way” requires such massive consumption of natural resources and cheap (exploitive) labor that it is impossible for this way of life to be universalized.

James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

Necessity is the mother

We did not downsize as a gesture of protest against consumer society. We simply found ourselves with a reduced income and set about discovering the things we could do without. We were helped by situating ourselves in a place where it is quite difficult to spend money in the ways we spent it before. Patmos did not have available the range of goods that eat up income at an expanding rate so that you never feel you have quite enough. And doing without them has the therapeutic effect of slowing you down. It takes time to hand-wash clothes or to jump up and down on sheets, rinse them, wring them out and hang them on a line between trees in the garden; to top and tail the beans; to mix, whip and grate by hand; to haul up buckets from a well. A life without gadgets develops a different, slower rhythm. And, oddly, more time seems to be available in a life without labor-saving devices.”

Peter France, Patmos: A Place of Healing for the Soul

Maybe lack of principles isn’t all bad …

Even if I don’t intend to keep the same pace as people here, I often just have to. In India, there’s none of that kind of stuff. The difference is as great as that between getting on a slow local train and getting on the bullet train.” When I ask her what she thinks the reason is, she says, “Well, the effect of the heat is one thing: India is hot. But don’t you think the principles they have are different? The focus of thinking in Japan is economics, or it has become that way recently. Even politics is more like a form of economics than an attempt to realize an ideal society. Politicians don’t have any principles in Japan.”

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

Sexual Revolution

How do you measure success?

The other day, the Free Press sponsored a public debate on the question of has the Sexual Revolution failed? Rob Henderson writes:

…

The sexual revolution obviously succeeded in its aim: more freedom.

The answer to the debate description (“The sexual revolution promised liberation. Fifty years on, we ask: has it delivered?”) is obviously yes.

But the reason why a debate makes sense is because many people conflate liberation (freedom) with happiness.

The revolution has unquestionably increased freedom. But it also made people less happy. Many people, though, anticipated that greater freedom would necessarily bring greater happiness.

Sadly the world doesn’t work that way.

We can’t have everything good all at once. We can have some good things, but we can’t have all good things at the same time.

…

So what’s more important, happiness for children, or freedom for adults? Our society has decided, and there’s no going back.

At the debate, there was a lot of attention devoted to discussing the impact of the sexual revolution on men and women—whether the revolution failed women, or failed men, or helped men more than women, or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know the answer.

The sexual revolution gave rise to new laws and cultural norms that made divorce and remarriage easier. This was not without cost.

The closest anyone came to discussion how children’s lives have changed in the wake of the revolution was Anna Khachiyan, who mentioned the Cinderella Effect.

Children living with one genetic parent and one stepparent are approximately 40 times more likely to be abused than children living with both genetic parents. This greater rate occurs even when controlling for poverty and socioeconomic status.

(via Rod Dreher)

I disagree that “there’s no going back.” I have no quick fix or straight path back, but I suspect we will somehow go back — some day. But there are going to be a lot of children irreparably damaged meanwhile, because the sexual revolution is another of those luxury beliefs that the elites can more-or-less survive but which devastates millions when it trickles down.

Dreher, musing on the topic agrees with Henderson: “We’re going to have to ride this thing out till the collapse.” I’m not sure that’s all that different from what I suspect. I just deny that “the collapse” is the end of the world; it may be a pivot-point. Apropos of this theme, which I’ve sounded several times recently, see Nathaniel Peters, Living Well at the End of a World.

Children’s happiness, adult freedom

So what’s more important, happiness for children, or freedom for adults? Our society has decided, and there’s no going back.

At the debate, there was a lot of attention devoted to discussing the impact of the sexual revolution on men and women—whether the revolution failed women, or failed men, or helped men more than women, or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know the answer.

The sexual revolution gave rise to new laws and cultural norms that made divorce and remarriage easier. This was not without cost.

The closest anyone came to discussion how children’s lives have changed in the wake of the revolution was Anna Khachiyan, who mentioned the Cinderella Effect.

Children living with one genetic parent and one stepparent are approximately 40 times more likely to be abused than children living with both genetic parents. This greater rate occurs even when controlling for poverty and socioeconomic status.

Rod Dreher, Sex, Freedom, Happiness

Poco Politics

Denizens of Delusionland

[W]hile 91 percent of college-educated conservatives agree that “children are better off if they have married parents,” only 30 percent of college-educated liberals agree, according to a report to be released next week by the Institute for Family Studies.

…

One stunning and depressing gauge of racial inequity in the United States: The study found that 62 percent of white children live in low-poverty areas with fathers present in most homes, while only 4 percent of Black children do.

Nicholas Kristof. Every once in a while, it’s nice to see conservatives so clearly a part of the “reality-based community” with liberals off in Delusionland.

Gender vs. Sex

While 66% of black Democrats say a person’s gender is their sex determined at birth, only 27% of white Democrats say the same.

Sheluyang Peng, Immigration is religion’s only hope.

Occasionally, something like this pops up and makes me realize why some voters consider “Republican” Donald Trump the lesser evil compared to any Democrat.

Why such a hack?

Everyone knows that Kamala Harris is, as one writer put it, a “hack with terrible political skills.” Peggy Noonan, has what seems like a plausible suggestion of how someone who has ascended so high could remain such a political klutz:

She is proof that profound and generational party dominance in a state tends to yield mediocrity. Politicians from one-party states never learn broadness. They speak only Party Language to Party Folk. They aren’t forced to develop policy mastery, only party dynamics. They rely on personal charm but are superficial. Going national requires developing more depth, or at least imitating depth. She didn’t bother to do that.

Note: Gavin Newsom will be just as bad if elevated to national office.

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Wednesday, 8/23/23

Culture

The collectivist-individualist dichotomy

The collectivist-individualist dichotomy is a clear example of the modern mind opposing ideas that are only in opposition once abstracted from reality. What is this collectivism? What is this individualism? I have never encountered a society that was not composed of individuals, and I have never met an individual who did not belong to a society. 

Take anyone you know, and try to imagine the pre-societal self that exists there free from all the social influences that have made him. If I try to imagine myself independent of where I was born, the family that brought me forth, the schools I attended, the language in which I think and speak, the books I’ve read, the friends I’ve made, I simply cannot do it, and if I were to achieve some imagining of such a pre-social self, it wouldn’t be me in any case.

So, what ought the conservative response to be in the face of people living in a way they find reprehensible, if it is not that of doubling-down on individualism? The true conservative response is: we live in a society, and there are some things we will accept and some things we will not, and where the line lies is worked out circumstantially by prudential deliberation and negotiation. We will tolerate certain behaviours which we dislike and be intolerant of others. But if you want to mutilate yourself, we will aim to prevent you from doing so, for we have to live in a community with you, and we think that such behaviour is impermissible in our community ….

Sebastian Morello, Libertarian ‘Conservatism’: A Trojan Horse

Countering the Zeitgeist

I don’t often recommend poetry, but Famous, by Naomi Shihab Nye, caught my ear in a podcast reading, and is notable in the context of Illich for its call to humbler ambitions.

Segregated sports

I had no idea that chess routinely holds separate men’s and women’s competitions, and that the women overall are objectively worse than men. See Frank Haviland, Chess: Checkmate for the Egalitarians for a fascinating and possibly illuminating treatment. I’m still scratching my head.

Striking

General Carrera Lake, Chile, via Prufrock

Legalia

Neutral laws of general applicability

Since Employment Division v. Smith in the early 1990s, we’ve been living under a constitutional regime which, viewed from a galloping horse, looks quite a bit less favorable than prior law for religious exemptions from some laws. So long as a law is neutral and generally applicable, one isn’t entitled to a religious exemption however strong one’s beliefs or weak the governmental interest in making the law.

But when you slow down and look closer, the concept of “neutral laws of general applicability” keeps tripping up rulemakers, as they keep creating loopholes for some but not for none. Sometimes, the loophole is as big as “we can make exceptions case-by-case.” In others, it’s gerrymandering the law to target a disfavored religious practice, as when Hialeah Florida tried to hobble the animal sacrifices of Santeria while permitting Kosher slaughter.

So I was gratified to see the religion-friendly ending to a case I’ve watched, on and off, since its 2017 beginning, Country Mill Farms, LLC. V. City of East Lansing, where the City of East Lansing excluded Country Mill Farms from its farmers market because it refused, at its own facility, to host same-sex weddings. Click the link for Euguene Volokh’s fuller description.

Politics

My Man Mitch strikes again

We’re mired in a hot-dog, look-at-me, dance-in-the-end-zone world. Success in public capacities seems reliant not on the quality of officeholders’ ideas or effectiveness, but on their cleverness and audacity in sound bites, tweeting and the other ‘performative’ arts.

Mitch Daniels in the Washington Post via TMD

“Vote fraud” was pre-baked into Trump’s cake

The most interesting act out of the 126 acts laid out in the indictment is the first one. It reads:

On or about the 4th day of November 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP made a nationally televised speech falsely declaring victory in the 2020 presidential election. Approximately four days earlier, on or about October 31, 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP discussed a draft speech with unindicted co-conspirator Individual 1, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, that falsely declared victory and falsely claimed voter fraud. The speech was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

The most significant claim here is that Trump always planned to cry, “Fraud!” if he lost regardless of the evidence. This is not a shocking revelation, given that he has a long history of preemptively saying that the only way he might lose anything is if his opponents cheated or rigged the game.

Jonah Goldberg, Trump’s Unconstitutional Enterprise

The Truthiness of Trump

More generally, Trump’s voters hold him as a source of true information, even more so than other sources, including conservative media figures, religious leaders, and even their own friends and family.

(CBS News, Emphasis added). “True information”! Words have lost all meaning!

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.

Friday July 7, 2023

Culture

Frog and Toad Christendom

I wanted to suggest a few ideas that could anchor what we might jokingly refer to as “Frog and Toad Christendom.”

The idea is best summarized, as one friend helpfully put it, as resetting society’s defaults to favor people’s long-term interests rather than short-term pleasures. At present, we make it easy for people to indulge in in short-term pleasures that will, stretched out over time, leave them poorer, more lonely, and less able to contribute to their communities. We also make it harder to pursue things that will be in our best interests long-term. This is precisely the opposite of how it should be. We want to make it easier to choose virtue and harder to choose vices on a broad, societal level.

Here are six ideas that I think could fit under this overall principle:

First, ban online gambling …

Second, ban porn …

Third, place higher taxes on vices, such as marijuana and alcohol …

Fourth, redesign cities to discourage speeding and to make roads more pedestrian friendly. Third places thrive in walkable neighborhoods and because so much of our social connectedness comes via third places, we should want our cities to be walkable …

Fifth, birth should be free …

Sixth, to make it easier for workers, particularly workers with only high-school degrees, to form and support families, we should repeal right to work laws where they exist …

Jake Meador.

I agree with the spirit of all these, particularly when Jake fleshes them out (my ellipses). But they’re the work of a generation, and David Samuels’ “glittering oligarchy” (see The problem, and the un-solution below) will fight them as the existential threat they are.

What if …?

What if Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII, had not died in his mid-teens?:

There would have been no Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the subsequent upheaval to the rhythm of rural English life. 90% of English art would not have been destroyed in an iconoclastic orgasm of ideological fervor, and English churches and shrines would have remained awash in color, rather than the stone or whitewashed sepulchers of today. There would have been no new aristocracy to steal the land of the peasants, and there would have been no Enclosures Act … There was no New England because there were no Puritans—no “City on a Hill,” no Protestant work ethic … The empire would have been English rather than British. The Industrial Revolution would have been muted, not being able to feed upon rural dispossession and poverty, and would consequently been less convulsive to English society.

Terry Cowan.

Since Terry’s an actual historian, he plays out a lot more detail than this. I, not a historian but made heartsick by Bradford Wicox’s Unintended Reformation, was reminded again that destroying culture and smashing artifacts was a Protestant thing before it was an ISIS thing.

Well played

(H/T Todd Grotenuis on micro.blog)

Must reading

When doctors fundamentally misunderstand the cause of a condition and treat the symptoms instead, and fail to properly monitor outcomes, and modify their practice in response to known adverse outcomes, our patients suffer — often greatly and for the rest of their lives — if indeed they survive. These fundamental errors underpin the depressingly regular scandals that punctuate the history of medicine. (The stakes are particularly high if surgery is involved.)

It is naïve to think that all these scandals are in the past … So where might the next medical scandal be brewing?

The increasing visibility of detransitioners suggests it may lie in wait in gender-affirming medicine. Many detransitioners are young women who underwent treatment for psychological distress that has left them with irreversible, life-long changes to their bodies: a deep voice, a beard, and compromised sexual function. Some have had their breasts surgically removed; some may be infertile. Others are young men who have been castrated.

…

For many detransitioners, the cause of their distress as a teenager was misattributed by their clinicians to the notion that they had been born in the wrong body, and that they would be helped by the surgical creation of the “correct” body ….

Sallie Baxendale

Mutilating bodies ought to be the very, very last resort for a problem that starts in the mind.

Ardently seeking catharsis

[I]ntroducing no-fault divorce was a travesty, and in many ways redefined marriage more drastically than Obergefell vs. Hodges. 

None of this is even on the radar of many of today’s conservative elites. As often as not, they have been through a divorce themselves, and the compromise that marks their personal lives renders them reticent about standing up for traditional marriage. The consequence has been that most conservative influencers seek to move on from same-sex marriage as quickly as possible. Battle lines have been redrawn, the tent broadened, and now—they loudly proclaim—we can get back to promoting the free market and taking on the really crazy leftist proposals. Sure, the institution of marriage might be an unfortunate piece of collateral damage in the fight, but at least we won’t give an inch on this transgender nonsense.

Clement J. Harrold

I, too, had never heard of Mr. Harrold. And I disagree with his vitriol toward the Respect for Marriage Act. But I’m glad someone had the balls to write something so contrary to the Zeitgeist that for a moment, I felt positively moderate.

The right kind of facts, mediated by our betters

In an important article titled “Google.gov,” the law professor Adam J. White writes that Google views “society’s challenges today as social-engineering problems” and aspires to “reshape Americans’ informational context, ensuring that we make choices based only upon what they consider the right kind of facts—while denying that there could be any values or politics embedded in the effort.”

Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive

Making ourselves stupid

A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledge must submit to tradition.

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. But we won’t submit because we’re Mur’cans.

Legalia

Protecting freedom of religion — through the speech clause

In case you hadn’t noticed, or had forgotten, the free speech clause of the First Amendment has been more effective in protecting religiously-informed conscience than have free exercise or non-establishment clauses, directly concerned with religion though they be.

I cannot imagine a factual scenario where that would not continue to hold true, though that may be a failure of imagination (from too many years between me and a Socratic law school classroom).

Simple question, botched answer

The reliance of religious dissenters on the free speech clause should have come up here, too:

Another dissenter has “a simple question regarding 303 Creative”:

If the website designer’s action is expressive, and if her closely held religious belief was to believe that God was against interracial or inter-religious wedding, is it okay for her to refuse service? If not, why not? If so, it would seem to open a Pandora’s Box of truly held religious beliefs (with no way to prove/disprove) overriding any and all anti-discrimination protections if the business’s product is viewed as expressive — which is just as nebulous as knowing if a belief is truly held.

One answer is that all the major religions bar homosexual sex. A better case would be where a religion forbids divorce. Would someone refuse to design a site for a second wedding? Possibly, I suppose. I don’t doubt that some of this is driven by homophobia and very selective enforcement of Biblical strictures. As a Christian, I think it’s immoral to single out gays — and only gays — in this way. But a fundamentalist may differ, and they have rights too.

Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan is a very smart fellow but he blew this one.

The simple answer to the dissenter’s simple question is “Yes, she may deny her expressive services to create custom websites for interracial or inter-religious weddings” in this fairly wild hypothetical, because this was a free speech case; all references to religious beliefs are beside the point because it’s not a free exercise of religion case.

Although I would find opposition to interracial weddings atavistic, offensive and anti-Christian, and opposition to inter-religious weddings surprising in this day and age, I believe that freedom from compelled expression is “high trump” and will be so held if challenges continue. The only viable question will be in edge cases: “is this really compelled expression”?

As I was writing the preceding, I remembered the days when I thought otherwise, thought that the gay tsunami would crush all before it — as its legal theorists intended:

In her symposium paper Moral Conflict: (Some) Religions and Marriage Equality, [Georgetown law prof and later Obama recess appointment to the EEOC Chai] Feldblum asked what effect “marriage equality” – i.e., marriage between members of the same sex – will have on the rights of those employers, landlords and others whose religion teaches them that same-sex sexual conduct is sinful (and perhaps harmful to society):

Let me be very clear … [I]n almost all the situations (not perhaps in every one, but in almost every one), I believe the burden on religious people that will be caused by granting gay people full equality will be justified …. That is because I believe granting liberty to gay people advances a compelling government interest, that such an interest cannot be adequately advanced if “pockets of resistance” to a societal statement of equality are permitted to flourish, and hence that a law that permits no individual exceptions based on religious beliefs will be the least restrictive means of achieving the goal of liberty for gay people.

Are gay rights in conflict with religious freedom? – Tipsy Teetotaler ن. I don’t know what Feldblum would have said about those “others” whose (religious) convictions might motivate a free-speech refusal of expressive services, and I won’t speculate about that. But with that sole carve-out, Feldblum has been vindicated so far.

Racial gerrymandering in a SCOTUS dissent on affirmative action

I got a kick out of David Bernstein’s demolition of Justice Sotomayor’s judicial gerrymandering of “race” in last week’s Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases. Nobody is better qualified to dissect American bullshitting on the legalities of race than he is, and he has a book to prove it.

I may have enjoyed Freddie DeBoer’s Socratic dialog, putatively on affirmative action, even better: The Point of College, My Dear Glaucon

Saying the quiet part out loud

Leftists who love racial discrimination when they control it have responded widely and loudly. This tweet from Erica Marsh, a Democrat operative, provides an excellent summary of them all:

Today’s Supreme Court decision is a direct attack on Black people. No Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system which is exactly why affirmative-action based programs were needed. Today’s decision is a TRAVESTY!!!

— Erica Marsh (@ericareport) June 29, 2023

Sven R. Larson, The America Report: Three Cheers for Conservatism (The European Conservative)

Twitter being Twitter, there was a nice pile-on, back-tracking, blacksplaining, etc.

(Do not rely on Mr. Larson for analysis of the Supreme Court cases he’s celebrating. He’s conservative, but he’s just as sloppy about the details as most liberals who are lamenting the same cases.)

SCOTUS

Be it noted that I disapprove the feeding frenzy of attacks on conservative Supreme Court justices, notably Thomas and Alito. I won’t go into the reasons why, which have been well-addressed by their defenders or, in Alito’s case, by himself.

But I can still appreciate the wordcraft of these bits via Frank Bruni:

  • In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick parsed the generosity from billionaires that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have so richly enjoyed: “A #protip that will no doubt make those justices who have been lured away to elaborate bear hunts and deer hunts and rabbit hunts and salmon hunts by wealthy oligarchs feel a bit sad: If your close personal friends who only just met you after you came onto the courts are memorializing your time together for posterity, there’s a decent chance you are, in fact, the thing being hunted.”
  • In The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri mined that material by mimicking the famous opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice.”

Politics

$35 million per quarter

Trump raking it in: The Prince of Mar-a-Lago pulled in $35 million in the second quarter of the year, double what he raised the quarter before. It looks like Republican donors not only weren’t put off by the classified document scandal. . . or the New York indictment. . . or the Georgia case, but are, in fact, rallying behind him, perhaps hoping to get a better seat at the document viewing table. If you had to guess, how much would you need to donate to see the aliens? Just images of aliens, printed and spread out next to a Diet Coke and onion rings, preferably. Asking for a friend.

Nellie Bowles

Orange Man bad

I was taken by surprised at least twice by this quote from Peggy Noonan:

Chris Christie could easily defeat Joe Biden. So could several of the GOP candidates now in the field. Donald Trump wouldn’t, for one big reason: His special superpower is that he is the only Republican who will unite and rally the Democratic base and drive independents away. He keeps the Biden coalition together.

A sad thing is that many bright Trump supporters sense this, and the case against him, but can’t concede it and break from him, in some cases because they fear him and his friends. They don’t want to be a target, they don’t want to be outside the in-group, they want to be safely inside. They curry favor.

This weekend at a party, one of Mr. Trump’s New York supporters, a former officeholder, quickly made his way to me to speak of his hero. He referred to the Abraham Accords and the economy and said: “Surely you can admit he was a good president.”

He was all wound up, so I spoke slowly. “I will tell you what he is: He is a bad man. I know it, and if I were a less courteous person I would say that you know it, too.”

He was startled, didn’t reply, and literally took a step back. Because, I think, he does know it. But doesn’t ever expect it to be said.

A journalist in our cluster said, musingly, “That was an excellent example of apophasis,” the rhetorical device of saying something by saying you’re not going to say it.

Imagine that! Knowingly forfeiting the Presidency for this evil man. But I think Noonan’s right, as she so often is.

The problem, and the un-solution

The country once defined by its powerful middle class is now a flagship of inequality that looks more like a high-end version of Brazil or Nigeria than the mid-20th century bastion of strong unions, churches, civic associations and inclusive political parties … A glittering oligarchy … presides over a simmering landscape of uncontrolled low-skill immigration, drug addiction and dead-end service jobs.

… Propelled by the rise of identity politics, the fragmenting logic of market capitalism or the force of new technologies that reconfigure space and time — or all three forces working hand-in-hand — America has become the prize for a set of tribes engaged in a zero-sum contest for power and spoils.

…

Where the idea of an American nation or community is increasingly rejected as a remnant of a hegemonic and oppressive past, the celebration of particularity reigns. There is the mandatory replacement of the American flag by sectarian banners — the Black Lives Matter flag for Black History Month; the ever-changing LGBTQA+ symbols for Pride Month — along with elaborate ceremonies of printing new postage stamps, and rewriting history books to focus on the laudable achievements of tribal heroes …

The paradoxical nature of the current American predicament is therefore hard to miss. On the one hand, Silicon Valley has cemented America’s place as the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth, the unchallenged global leader in fields like AI and biotech — capable of disintegrating any would-be rival by pushing a button and detaching them from the global banking system and the internet. On the other, the digital revolution propelled by American technology and finance is visibly disintegrating America itself. The meritocratic universities and other institutions that once made America the envy of the world are hostages of a new political system in which rote repetition of Democratic Party catechisms about race, class, gender and identity has replaced institutional values such as intellectual independence and critical inquiry. Such ambitions, along with the pursuit of beauty and other forms of excellence, are now signs of Right-wing heresy, to be stamped out by party administrators who administer, well, pretty much everything.

The Democratic Party plays a central role in the new American order, serving as a kind of shadow state, or state-within-a-state — the supremacy of the former being characteristic of so-called revolutionary regimes overseas. Once a vehicle for working Americans to achieve tangible goals such as home ownership, decent healthcare, national parks and a dignified old age, the Democrats under the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama found a new place in the sun as the address to which the oligarchs pay protection money and do deals with the security agencies in Washington — after endorsing a global trade regime that cost millions of Americans their jobs and flooded their towns with fentanyl.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, once the party of America’s richest moneymen and biggest industrialists, now poses as the party of small business and the dispossessed, under the leadership of an oft-indicted figure who surrounds himself with the dregs of American political life. Whatever threat Donald Trump once posed to the robber barons and the bureaucracies they have allied themselves with, he long ago revealed himself to be a clownish figure, alternating populist rhetoric with self-pitying conspiracy theories while repeatedly failing to protect himself or his followers from forces that mean them harm. The result has been political suicide for Republicans who support him, as well as those who oppose them.

David Samuels, The Puritan spirit of America’s civil war

See? I think I understand discontent with the way things have developed under the major parties. But nominating that evil man is not a solution.