Burnout

Not Politics

Measuring human worth

MacIntyre acknowledges that such a society would not make the kind of material progress that our society has. But then again, to believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mitchell & Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (H/T @ChrisJWilson on micro.blog)

Is there an app for that?

The West has forgotten how to do wisdom, and it doesn’t really care. There’s probably an app for it anyway.

Paul Kingsnorth

Advice du jour

Tell someone you love them today, because life is short. But shout it at them in German, because life is also confusing and terrifying. (Unearthed by the Missus on Pinterest)

Politics

Neutral public square

There is no such thing as a perfectly neutral public square … Tuck that away with the Easter bunny and tooth fairy—it does not exist.

Michael Knowles at the National Conservatism Conference, quoted by Joseph Keegin, ‌Up From Despair

I can’t disagree, but I reject the implication that anyone should take over with an illiberal ideology and consciously dominate the square because of their confidence that they’re right.

"Education" is not a proxy for racism

Of Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia Gubernatorial race:

Those saying ‘education’ is simply a proxy for racism, and that this result is proof that white or conservative parents really don’t want schools to teach about topics like slavery or give a complete picture of American history, have misread the full picture of parents’ anxieties.

Kristen Soltis Anderson, quoted by Peggy Noonan. Noonan continues:

Were voters, Tuesday, saying, “Gee, we’re all Republicans now!” No, and it would be foolish for Republicans to think so. It means more voters than usual saw Republicans as an alternative, and took it. It means what a crusty political operative told me decades ago. He had no patience for high-class analyses featuring trends and contexts. When voters moved sharply against a party he’d say, “The dogs don’t like the dog food.” Tuesday they vomited it up.

We’d rather whine in white nationalist hell than rule in our progressive heaven

Tom Scocca is going for the “[CRT is] just a ginned-up controversy that no liberals have been pushing for.” Scocca obviously knows that thousands of liberals have in fact gone to war for CRT in that span, arguing that CRT is good actually and every student should be taught it. But that’s not rhetorically convenient, so let’s pretend nobody, not a single Democrat, has been playing into the frame. That will be constructive.

Of course if Scocca is right it means that liberals got rolled by Christopher Rufo, in which case they deserve to lose and should never speak in public again.

…

“Republicans only won because of racism.” Yes, it’s impossible to imagine voters rejecting the party of Andrew Cuomo and Kyrsten Sinema and Gavin Newsome for any reason other than racism, agreed. So what? Who do you think is going to come and correct that injustice for you? The only opinion that matters is that of the voters, and they think your whining about unfairness makes you look weak.

Freddie DeBoer, There Are No Refs — nobody cares, work harder

There are many wise people, some of them in unexpected places, who do not wish the current GOP well. Too few Democrats are listening.

Trusting princes

Friend-of-the-blog John Brady admonishes against putting "trust in princes, in sons of men in whom there is no salvation" (Psalm 145, sung weekly as the first Antiphon in the Russian Orthodox liturgy — and the Orthodox Church in America, influenced by the Russians). It’s getting easier to heed that.

At the same time, something there is in my American breast that says it’s time for a massive third-party outmigration from the corruptions of the two major parties today. If that’s its own kind of trust in princes, I nevertheless can’t help myself.

I note that this is my blog post #3001. I used to post almost daily.

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

A.D.D., but organized after the fact

There’s no single theme today, just as there usually isn’t. But I took the scattered stuff and sorted it.

Politics

Josh Hawley’s voodoo

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley unveiled a proposal last week that he believes will “solve” the current supply chain crisis by requiring companies manufacture “over 50 percent of the value” of certain goods in the United States, but Eric Boehm of Reason argues it would make today’s shortfalls permanent. “One must assume that if the lights in his home went out due to a storm, Hawley would respond by declaring electricity to be a mistake and demanding that the government require homes to be lit with candles and gas lamps,” Boehm jests in response to Hawley’s plan. “After all, what is the electrical grid but a complicated supply chain that leaves Americans woefully dependent on production and distribution systems (power plants, substations, and lines) that they do not fully control? Better to produce your own lighting, right? If that means you have to live without television or the internet, well, those are just the trade-offs required to achieve self-sufficiency.”

The Morning Dispatch 11/1/21.

I commented on this column very briefly already, as well as separately registering my opinion on Josh Hawley (“braying populist(ish) ass”), its author.

S.B. 8

For anti-abortion activists, Texas’s recent law, Senate Bill 8, must have seemed like magic—a way to stop abortion immediately, without the grind of constitutional litigation and its attendant legal fees.

Mary Ziegler, ‌The Anti-abortion Movement Will Win Even If It Loses

You should actually ask a few anti-abortion activists outside of Texas, Professor Ziegler, instead of speculating.

Whistling (an amusing little ditty) in the dark

White and suburban kids in Virginia are now saved from CRT and Sharia and Bigfoot and Unicorns.

Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali, Tweeting about Glenn Youngkin’s election win. Yascha Mounk, more open to reality, says “It is impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary”.

I was irritated when Christopher Rufo started agitpropping that anything he didn’t like was Critical Race Theory:

“We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” [Rufo] wrote.

Jelani Cobb, ‌The Man Behind Critical Race Theory

But I’m becoming equally irritated at Democrats’ insouciant and sometime dishonest Motte and Bailey denial that there’s anything there at all. There is, as Mounk outlines:

[A]cross the nation, many teachers have, over the past years, begun to adopt a pedagogical program that owes its inspiration to ideas that are very fashionable on the academic left, and that go well beyond telling students about America’s copious historical sins.
In some elementary and middle schools, students are now being asked to place themselves on a scale of privilege based on such attributes as their skin color. History lessons in some high schools teach that racism is not just a persistent reality but the defining feature of America. And some school systems have even embraced ideas that spread pernicious prejudices about nonwhite people, as when a presentation to principals of New York City public schools denounced virtues such as “perfectionism” or the “worship of the written word” as elements of “white-supremacy culture.”

Maybe that’s nut-picking, but I’m irritated at the Democrats because my former party, the GOP, still kisses Donald Trump’s a**, and is not fit to govern in its present state. (Youngkin has pledged to ban CRT, a pledge he’ll either ignore or botch in the execution — see next item, for instance.) But “govern” the GOP will, starting in January 2023, if Democrats don’t wise up — and the Left end of its base resists all wisdom.

Opposing perspectives on the Holocaust?!

The most notorious example of this came two weeks ago in Southlake, Texas, when a school administrator told teachers that, if they include a “book on the Holocaust” in their syllabi, then they also have to include one with “opposing perspectives.”

David French

This is what happens when populist bulls decide to visit the Left-illiberal china shop, passing vague laws against divisive and hateful ideologies in public schools.

Counting all the chickens in one medium egg

Is it a “done deal” that the GOP regains control of House and Senate in 2022? Not so fast, buddy!

Candidates matter. Youngkin became the candidate after a nominating convention for state party diehards used ranked-choice balloting to pick among seven contenders. And they did it this way on purpose to ensure that “a crazy” didn’t tank their chances of winning the race. Jonah is more in favor of cigar smoke-filled back rooms with party bosses than I am—the big difference, I think, being how many times our butts would be touched if we were ever invited into such a room. But clearly picking an electable candidate is important. And a political party willing to give serious thought to what process is most likely to yield the most electable candidate is going to have an advantage in midterm elections.
Which is all to say, no, I don’t think Virginia is proof that the Senate and House will flip. It’s quite likely that the House does, in my view. But I think the primaries for these Senate seats are going to dictate a lot about what it means to have a winnable race for either party.

Sarah Isgur (emphasis added).

The folks on the Dispatch podcast the day after the elections were even more explicit: had the GOP not used a ranked-choice vote at its convention, its nominee would have been State Sen. Amanda Chase, “Trump in heels,” and it’s much less likely they’d have won.

I’m with Jonah on returning to smoke-filled rooms — both parties — and if the voters don’t like it they can abandon the parties or start new, more “democratic” ones. Well, maybe I’m being impetuous, but it’s not the first time I’ve thought of how different things would be if candidates were chosen for electability rather than for how violently they’ll trigger the other guys. Both parties, I think, are likelier to elect extremists in primaries than to select them with party professionals.

(I sort of miss the military draft, too, but that’s for another day’s installment of “Times When Young Tipsy Was Naïve.”)

Of court the Grey Lady says “Republicans pounce.” What else would she say?

There it was, just as media critics parody:

Republicans Pounce …

More specifically, “Republicans Pounce on Schools as a Wedge Issue to Unite the Party.” (Caveat: The Times tends to change its headlines to create the impression of fresh content, but that was the headline at 6:30 am EDT November 4.)

In the Times thinking, I guess, there’s never a fair issue that simply works to the advantage of Republicans because Democrats are firmly tied to an unpopular approach.

The subheadline was

Rallying around what it calls “parental rights,” the party is pushing to build on its victories this week by stoking white resentment and tapping into broader anger at the education system.

On “parental rights,” the Democrats have it right legally. If you send your kids to public school, you don’t get to reach in and custom-tailor their education. Your key parental right is to not send them to public schools in the first place.

On “white resentment,” that’s right up there with “Republicans pounce.” But “along with Glenn Youngkin, Virginians elected Winsome Sears, a black woman, as lieutenant governor and Jason Miyares, a Cuban American, as attorney general.“

Not politics (or not really politics, anyway)

The Second American Republic

[E]ven before the passage of [the] Reconstruction amendments — indeed, as a kind of precondition for them — Lincoln fatally injured the Constitution of 1787. He consciously and repeatedly violated core elements of that Constitution as they had been understood by nearly all Americans of the time, himself included.
Through those acts of destruction, Lincoln effectively broke the Constitution of 1787, paving the way for something very different to replace it. What began as a messy, pragmatic compromise necessary to hold the young country together was reborn as an aspirational blueprint for a nation based on the principle of equal liberty for all.

Noah Feldman, Lincoln Broke Our Constitution. Then He Remade It.

Some whip-smart conservative decades ago noted that Lincoln ushered in our Second Republic. He also claimed that FDR brought our Third Republic.

His main point, I think, was that we should stop flattering ourselves about being the world’s longest-lived stable democracy. We’re really just uncommonly good at putting liptick onto, and keeping blood out of, some of our revolutions.

“Higher” education

They have built colleges on an equal scale, only to see them turned into playgrounds for grown-up children or centers of vocationalism and professionalism. Finally, they have seen pragmatists, as if in peculiar spite against the very idea of hierarchy, endeavoring to turn classes into democratic forums, where the teacher is only a moderator, and no one offends by presuming to speak with superior knowledge.

Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

Sending everyone to college hasn’t given everyone a college education. That can’t be done. It’s given everyone what used to be a high school education. A very, very expensive high school education.

J Budziszewski

Reaching a political dead end

Only an open semiotic system can clear space for us to affirm life. Only open trade will bring peace. Only open borders will bring saving diversity. Only open minds can stop the return of Auschwitz. There is simply no other way. When intelligent, educated, and responsible people talk this way, we know that we’ve reached a dead end.

R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. I have come to distrust Reno because of his Trumpist and populist conversion, but I try to read across a wide spectrum of opinion, and this hyperbole is provocative.

Genocide of the Tomboys

One mom spoke about how having to fight the culture at her middle-school daughter’s school, on behalf of her daughter. Her daughter is a tomboy, and the culture at school is aggressively pro-trans. She thanks God that her daughter is a solid and committed Christian, and wants nothing to do with that. The mom said that she has worked hard to help her daughter understand that there’s nothing wrong with being a tomboy, and that it doesn’t mean she is a transgendered male.

Rod Dreher

More about his weekend with an unusual Evangelical group — one that “gets” the Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies:

“This isn’t a typical Evangelical service,” the guy sitting next to me said. I repeated that to someone else at the church, who said, “Yeah, if you went to a megachurch, you’d hate it. It’s basically 45 minutes of concert followed by a TED talk about how God wants you to be happy.”

Our Father, Who Art in the White House …

National governments are widely assumed to be responsible for and capable of providing those things which former generations thought only God could provide—freedom from fear, hunger, disease and want—in a word: “happiness.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens. (Gosh I quote him a lot!)

Catechesis failure

Though my identity as unequivocally Evangelical is more than 40 years in my past, I still watch, and am aghast at my credulity for ever accepting unquestioningly that we Evangelicals were true and countercultural Christians.

That Donald Trump with his crudities and cruelties could ever be a mad crowd favorite of evangelicals is just mind-boggling. How could that happen?

The best monocausal explanation I’ve seen is catechesis failure:

“What we’re seeing is massive discipleship failure caused by massive catechesis failure,” James Ernest, the vice president and editor in chief at Eerdmans, a publisher of religious books, told me. Ernest was one of several figures I spoke with who pointed to catechism, the process of instructing and informing people through teaching, as the source of the problem. “The evangelical Church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness. All that was needed to cause the implosion that we have seen was a sufficiently provocative stimulus. And that stimulus came.”
“Culture catechizes,” Alan Jacobs, a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University, told me. Culture teaches us what matters and what views we should take about what matters. Our current political culture, Jacobs argued, has multiple technologies and platforms for catechizing—television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts among them. People who want to be connected to their political tribe—the people they think are like them, the people they think are on their side—subject themselves to its catechesis all day long, every single day, hour after hour after hour.
On the flip side, many churches aren’t interested in catechesis at all. They focus instead on entertainment, because entertainment is what keeps people in their seats and coins in the offering plate. But as Jacobs points out, even those pastors who really are committed to catechesis get to spend, on average, less than an hour a week teaching their people. Sermons are short. Only some churchgoers attend adult-education classes, and even fewer attend Bible study and small groups. Cable news, however, is always on. “So if people are getting one kind of catechesis for half an hour per week,” Jacobs asked, “and another for dozens of hours per week, which one do you think will win out?”

Peter Wehner, ‌The Schism in the Evangelical Church

That’s not perfectly satisfying since I don’t know whether or why Evangelicals watch more television (or more FOX and OAN) than other religious groups, but it feels like it’s on the right track.

(And I’ve become fairly sure that Evangelicals would be in the vanguard of falling for Antichrist.)

Republican Justices revive a cottage industry

A cottage industry has revived in the law schools: re-writing Roe v. Wade to prove how the Constitution really does require abortion essentially on demand. ‘Roe’ Was an Originalist Reading of the Constitution – The Atlantic. If you’re interested in wagering that the upcoming Dobbs case out of Mississippi (abortion banned after 15 weeks) has nothing to do with it, let me know. I’m not opposed to easy money.

(I acknowledge that Planned Parenthood v. Casey has replaced Roe as our controlling abortion precedent — but it’s no better-reasoned.)

New atheists

The new atheists’ texts are manifestoes, buoyantly coarse and intentionally simplistic, meant to fortify true unbelievers in their unbelief…

David Bently Hart, The Experience of God

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

Random thoughts and clippings

With so many people voluntarily (and bafflingly) unemployed, I’m not hearing much talk about how Universal Basic Income wouldn’t disincentivize work.

I’m not going to quote much from this short Volokh Conspiracy item. It involves lesbians who are excoriated — sometimes by themselves — for shunning "trans women."

I’m also going to resist the temptation to valorize the relatively sane just because they’re being attacked by the batshit crazies.

But I cannot resist the three-point view of Eugene Volokh:

People who want to have sex with you may indeed try to make you feel bad for not agreeing.
"You owe it to someone to enjoy letting me penetrate you" is a very old story.
It’s just not clear to me how this gives them the moral high ground.

Nothing Says "Free to Be Me" Like Compulsory Pansexuality – Reason.com

In a way Republicans have already won in Virginia. Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a former governor and longtime party mover, has been forced to fight for his life in a state Joe Biden won by 10 points. If Mr. McAuliffe pulls it out Tuesday, his not-so-Trumpy challenger, Glenn Youngkin, will still have come close in the age of Trump, and his campaign will have provided a rough pathway for how future party candidates can make their way through: 1. Be a respectable, capable-seeming person who focuses on legitimate local issues (schools, taxes.) 2. Don’t say crazy things. 3. Don’t insult Donald Trump but do everything to keep him away.

If forced to wager I’d bet on Mr. Youngkin. I think he’s done something remarkable. But whatever happens Democrats should stay nervous and Republicans can feel some degree of relief: a template is emerging, at least as to states like bluish-purple Virginia.

Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan is very sharp, but I fear she, with her long-term crush on the GOP, has lapsed into wishcasting here about the winning "template."

The "Christian’s" political favorite gives his favorite life advice:

In a 2011 speech, Donald Trump explained his single top rule in life: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.” He’s repeated the same idea over and over again in speeches, tweets, and books published under his byline. In 2024, the targets of Trump’s revenge are American law and American democracy. At a September 25 rally in Perry, Georgia, Trump excoriated state Republican officials who failed to subvert the state election for him. In Iowa two weeks later, Trump delivered more attacks on the 2020 election process, focusing this time on state Republicans who failed to steal Arizona for him.

In 2016 and through the early part of Trump’s presidency, there was often an edge of Friars Club comedy to Trump’s rally performances: not very nice comedy, a little out of style in tone and sensibility, but comedy all the same. Not in 2021. Now it’s all dark and bitter.

David Frum, ‌Is Donald Trump Already Running for President in 2024?

Most Republicans have wagered that the road to office runs through Mar-a-Loco, where you must walk barefoot across the hot ashes of your incinerated pride to kneel at his throne and feed a bit of your soul to him.

Frank Bruni, ‌J.D. Vance’s hillbilly hypocrisy Vance has made that pilgrimage.

A New York Times Guest Column Saturday:

The Only Way to Solve Our Supply Chain Crisis Is to Rethink Trade

The pandemic has exposed problems decades in the making. We need to fix them.

By Josh Hawley
Oct. 29, 2021

The topic interested me, but Josh Hawley has so beslimed himself that I no longer trust a word he says or writes.

Anyway, I’d eat my hat if he conceded that bringing more production back to the U.S. would result in a lower "standard of living" under our current consumerist models (which live by the fallacy "if we can’t measure it, it isn’t real). Rather, he would perpetuate the delusion that we can have it all, no trade-offs.

The only Republican who has held up fairly well against my initial expectations (yes, I had hopes for Hawley) is Ben Sasse. So far, I’m interested in rookie Pete Meijer, too — who is the current occupant of Justin Amash’s old seat. Southwest Michigan produces some interesting pols these days.

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

Outing myself

I drafted an item on my personal politics and my reasoning therefor. Then I read a Sunday blog post by that reinforced my position.

But then I read an interview of of Sohrab Ahmari by Ross Douthat. (‌Ross Douthat: Interviews Sohrab Ahmari for ‘The Ezra Klein Show’. If you can’t get that transcript, you may nevertheless be able to get the podcast, the October 30 posting of the Ezra Klein Show.) Ahmari didn’t persuade me, but I now think I’ve been selling him short as a serious thinker, and conceivably selling short the case for Right illiberalism. Ahmari’s description of his policies is just so darn benign.

But revolutions generally turn ugly, and for the time being, I think his position (based on an analogy to the Iranian Revolution) boils down virtually to "don’t be too illiberal Left culturally or you’ll get an illiberal Right governmental coup, and in a binary choice, I’ll be supporting it."

So here’s my original item, updated with a few quotes from this morning’s David French piece.

The last few years have been politically revelatory.

It probably started with Trump’s nomination in 2016. Although I left the GOP in the middle of Dubya’s second inaugural address, over a particularly delusional statement ("So it is the policy of the United States to … end[] tyranny in our world." Yes, you may quibble over that ellipsis.) that was the complete betrayal of why I voted for him in 2000 (promise of humbler foreign policy), Trump’s nomination told me the GOP was becoming something really weird. That an openly declared socialist had done well in the Democrat primaries meant that the Democrats were radicalising, too.

I’ve paid particularly close attention to subsequent developments on the Right, with guys like Sohrab Amari and Adrian Vermeule advocating what struck me as illiberal, and once-promising figures like Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance becoming braying populist(ish) asses (I can’t believe either of them is entirely sincere). Even spirit-brother Rod Dreher has added to his customary alarmism (no judgment implied on whether alarm is warranted) at least qualified admiration for Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán.

Further, I follow the blog of an Orthodox American man who followed his younger wife back to Russia, her homeland, in large part to protect their children from American culture. He hasn’t regretted it; he’s now a dual citizen.

Toward the other end of the spectrum, at least as the press sets up conflicts, I spent some time reading about the theory of an "open society" and thus figured out that George Soros might be wrong, but I had no reason to think he was evil.

So I’ve seen further out the political spectrum in both directions and have concluded that I’m … a liberal. A classical liberal. Center-right to be more specific. A David Frenchist. That’s my big reveal.

I just haven’t seen an illiberalism I think would be an unequivocal improvement on our liberalism even in theory, and the would-be illiberal leaders of left and right in this land fill me with dread. An Orbán would be an improvement over any of them, if only because he’s not a pandering clown.

And that’s all assuming that an illiberal revolution wouldn’t turn really bad, like historically bad.

So that’s my big reveal. Make of it what you will.

UPDATE:

I encountered these (and their surrounding essay) the morning after writing what’s above:

[T]he rights to speak, to exercise your faith, to be free from cruel and unusual punishments, to be liberated from arbitrary exercises of state power, and to enjoy equal protection under the law all proclaim a secular version of a divine truth—each person is of incalculable worth.
The cry of the oppressed across the American centuries hasn’t been to overturn the classical liberal ideals of the founding, but to uphold them, to extend them and to keep the promises so clearly made in America’s founding documents.
[O]ur modern class of post-liberals consistently demonstrate why they are so dangerous. Through their all-too-common cruelty, cancelations, and profound intolerance, they demonstrate day-by-day that their governance would be anything but benign.

David French (emphasis added)

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

Potpourri 10/28/21

Misguided, yes, but not criminals

Insofar as Attorney General Merrick Garland has sicced the FBI on parent-protesters at school board meetings, I’m glad Mitch McConnell stonewalled his Supreme Court nomination.

On the other hand, see the first item here. I have thoughts, too, about how parents are in some instances shooting themselves in the foot (feet?) by extremely weird efforts to style teaching of our racial history as "CRT."

Dying for the state?

On the one hand, the democratic state modestly claims to be a mere means toward an end. On the other hand, the same state needs to convince its citizens that it can give them a meaningful identity because the state is the only means of achieving the common good. Dying for this state, as Alasdair MacIntyre has said, is “like being asked to die for the telephone company”

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

Conservative low and high "churches"

[L]ow church conservatism retains the anti-clericalism of its religious counterpart. This entails a pervasive anti-elitism. For the low church conservative, a popular broadcaster such as Rush Limbaugh possesses greater authority than a scholar such as Russell Kirk. The former derives his position from (or has it affirmed by) the congregation—his listeners. A Kirk, on the other hand, appears all too priestly.

Becevich, Hoeveler, Kurth, Quinn, Weyrich and Lind, The Essence of Conservatism

Democracy’s currently degraded form

[I]t is hardly clear that American democracy even in its currently degraded form will survive much longer. It thus seems unduly optimistic to make calculations about the second- or third-order side effects of a judicial ruling on future electoral outcomes, when those elections may well be decided by the fiat of conspiracy-theory-believing Trumparatchiks ….

Michael C. Dorf

I disagree strenuously with Dorf on the supposed constitutional right to abortion, but other than that, these musings on ‌Will the SB8 Case Allow SCOTUS to Appear Moderate? If So, What Follows? are interesting, and the pull-quote above is not really wrong.

But as of this writing, I’m worried, too, about the frivolity of our democracy: two items in this morning’s news involve (a) bestowing a Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously on a fine young Marine from not far from my home who got killed in the botched Afghan air lift, and (b) some sort of honor for Prince.

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

Curated for 10/27/21

The cure for out-of-parental-control public schools

Terry McAuliffe may have been too candid for his own good, and Republicans may have "pounced" on his statement (“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”), but his statement parallels the state of the law:

[T]he state does not have the power to “standardize its children” or “foster a homogenous people” by completely foreclosing the opportunity of individuals and groups to choose a different path of education. We do not think, however, that this freedom encompasses a fundamental constitutional right to dictate the curriculum at the public school to which they have chosen to send their children.

1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Brown v. Hot, Sexy, and Safer Productions, Inc., via David French.

Since public school parents are not a homogenous bunch, how could any other rule work?

National Review’s Andy McCarthy addresses a bolder claim than a parental constitutional right to dictate public school curriculum, namely that public schools are unconstitutional:

Professor [Philip] Hamburger is right to highlight this project’s offensiveness to the parents of schoolchildren as among its worst features. That said, parental dissent, which is widespread but not unanimous, is just one reason why the project should be resisted. And Hamburger strains mightily not only to portray this dissent as the dispositive objection to progressive curricula, but to portray such curricula as a violation of the constitutional right to free speech.

It is an ill-conceived theory, and reliance on it will only disserve a critical cause by giving progressives an easy target to shoot at.

Hamburger asserts:

Education is mostly speech, and parents have a constitutional right to choose the speech with which their children will be educated. They therefore cannot constitutionally be compelled, or even pressured, to make their children a captive audience for government indoctrination.

It would be generous to describe these propositions as dubious. Let’s assume for argument’s sake that most pedagogy, like most human interaction, takes the form of speech, and therefore that the whole of education is, as Hamburger maintains, covered by the First Amendment. Even if all that were true, what he is arguing for here would not be freedom of speech, but freedom from speech.

Essentially, he posits that the First Amendment gives one party to a protected communication a veto over the other. By this logic, if parents wanted their children to be taught that two plus two equals five, teachers would be expected to comply. Ironically, moreover, Hamburger’s suggestion that public schools are compelling parents to “make their children a captive audience for government indoctrination,” or at least pressuring them to do so, is belied by the very legal authority that he offers in support of his specious First Amendment claim.

The best solution for parents who don’t like what’s going on in public schools is to get their kids out of public schools.

Two final, somewhat tangential, observations:

I sympathize with public school board members. They are almost always (so far as my experience goes) well-meaning volunteers, dependent on educational professionals for their information, and, realistically, serving these days mostly as lightning rods for those educrats.
Phillip Hamburger’s piece was so flawed that I’ve got to suspect the Wall Street Journal of high-class clickbaiting.

Time to descend from the pulpit

Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony. They are not therapy sessions or occasions to obtain recognition. They are not seminars or “teaching moments.” They are not about exposing degenerates and running them out of town. If you want to save America’s soul, consider becoming a minister. If you want to force people to confess their sins and convert, don a white robe and head to the River Jordan. If you are determined to bring the Last Judgment down on the United States of America, become a god. But if you want to win the country back from the right, and bring about lasting change for the people you care about, it’s time to descend from the pulpit.

Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal

As if on cue, Damon Linker on wokeness:

Then why does wokeness nonetheless drive me crazy?

The beginning of an answer can be found in the fact that wokeness makes me feel like I’m attending Sunday school in a denomination and parish I never chose to join. I just turn on the radio or open the paper or scroll through Twitter — and the next thing I know, a finger-wagging do-gooder with institutional power behind him is delivering a sermon, showing me The Way, calling on me to repent, encouraging me to be born again in the moral light.

Do not underestimate Russians

Napoleon at last occupied Moscow as he had occupied the capitals of Austria and Prussia, but instead of surrendering, as those countries did, the Russians retreated and fought on. Suddenly Moscow burned down and Napoleon, facing the Russian winter in a destroyed city, was forced to make a rapid retreat. Assuming that history is made by decisive actions, historians asked whose idea it was to incinerate Moscow. Some credited the city’s furiously patriotic mayor, Rostopchin; others picked other Muscovites. Nonsense, Tolstoy replies. No one decided to burn the city down. No one had to, since a city made of wood, where scarcely a day passes without a fire, “cannot fail to burn when its inhabitants have left it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke pipes, make campfires . . . and cook themselves meals twice a day.” Likewise, no one ordered the inhabitants to leave—Rostopchin in fact tried to stop them—but the civilian equivalent of “the spirit of the army” led them to feel that they simply could not remain under French rule. By leaving, they unintentionally made the city burn and, without intending it, saved Russia. Tolstoy concludes: “Moscow was burned by its inhabitants, it is true, but by those who abandoned her, not by those who stayed behind.”

Gary Saul Morson, ‌Tolstoy’s Wisdom and Folly

An organized vehicle for neurotic progressivism

But even accounting for their courage, Martin Luther King Jr., who began his career in ministry as a staunch liberal inspired by Unitarian Pastor Theodore Parker, felt compelled to renounce the flimsiness of unitarian liberal theology in a 1960 essay: “liberalism’s superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. … Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man’s defensive ways of thinking.” The delusional optimism of liberal theology, according to King, could not stand up against the hard, grim reality of human chauvinism and cruelty.

From its inception in 1825, the American Unitarian Association—formed from a schism within the Congregationalist church, with the Unitarian contingent leaving behind those committed to Calvinism—was as much an institution for social reform as a religion. Theologically, however, it could never really get its act together.

… in lieu of having commitments to theology or anything identifiable as the divine, the Unitarian Universalist church has functioned for decades as primarily an organized vehicle for … neurotic progressivism ….

‌The High Church of Wokeism

Seeking status and significance?

[I]n the United States, a record nearly 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August, according to the Labor Department, and more than 10 million positions were vacant — slightly down from July, when about 11 million jobs needed filling …

… [T]here might also be something deeper afoot. In its sudden rearrangement of daily life, the pandemic might have prompted many people to entertain a wonderfully un-American new possibility — that our society is entirely too obsessed with work, that employment is not the only avenue through which to derive meaning in life and that sometimes no job is better than a bad job.

… They’re questioning some of the bedrock ideas in modern life, especially life in America: What if paid work is not the only worthwhile use of one’s time? What if crushing it in your career is not the only way to attain status and significance in society? …

Farhad Manjoo, ‌Even With a Dream Job, You Can Be Antiwork.

So the goal is "status" and "significance"?

I don’t think so:

if a man lived in obscurity making his friends in that obscurity, obscurity is not uninteresting.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

And don’t forget that leisure is the basis of culture.

Beta male smackdown

I’m old enough to remember when John Zmirak was bragging to his friends about hanging a picture of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in his Manhattan office. He had much better taste in right-wing strongmen then. They were actually, you know, strong.

Rod Dreher, responding to Trumpkin "failed writer and professional ankle-biter" John Zmirak who called Rod (and others outside the asylum) "beta males." Rod’s response is pretty devastating — especially if one’s familiar with Zmirak.

Empathy failure

Came across this from last year, as I was still reading anything from any plausible source to explain why my fellow-American Trump supporters weren’t patently wrong, but had reasons I could apprehend with enough effort:

…as preposterous as it may sound given Trump’s penchant for exaggeration and sarcasm, a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for truth against the overt political propaganda of the corporate media.

Robert Hutchinson, Why so many voters support Donald Trump: a letter to baffled non-Americans

For the record, I highlighted this for the outlandishness, not that it helped me understand. It is not logical to vote for a terrible President because the media lie about him, and Trump’s lies and cruelties were not mere "exaggeration and sarcasm."

I just cannot get into the mind of Trump voters, and their own explanations have more drollery and trolling than plausibility. I only hope that the madness somehow — ummmmm — dies down before 2024, and the only obvious way for that to happen is something that I, not having rightful power over life and death, dare not pray for.

Shithole University

“The Liberty Way”: How Liberty University Discourages and Dismisses Students’ Reports of Sexual Assaults — ProPublica

Is anyone really surprised? My only surprises are:

that Liberty hung on to a handful of very good people, like Karen Swallow Prior, as long as it did; and
at Liberty, as elsewhere, almost all of the young women who got sexually assaulted were partying and drinking, as were the louts who assaulted them.

But we’re not supposed to notice the nexus between getting blasted and getting sexually assaulted, because that would be blaming the victim. So the only effective preventive — sobriety in comportment and drinking — is off-limits for discussion.

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

Gleanings

From Deschooling Society

Hope, in its strong sense, means trusting faith in the goodness of nature, while expectation, as I will use it here, means reliance on results which are planned and controlled by man. Hope centers desire on a person from whom we await a gift. Expectation looks forward to satisfaction from a predictable process which will produce what we have the right to claim. The Promethean ethos has now eclipsed hope. Survival of the human race depends on its rediscovery as a social force.
Classical man framed a civilized context for human perspective. He was aware that he could defy fate-nature-environment, but only at his own risk. Contemporary man goes further; he attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it. We now must face the fact that man himself is at stake.
I know a Mexican village through which not more than a dozen cars drive each day. A Mexican was playing dominoes on the new hard-surface road in front of his house – where he had probably played and sat since his youth. A car sped through and killed him. The tourist who reported the event to me was deeply upset, and yet he said: “The man had it coming to him”. … At first sight, the tourist’s remark is no different from the statement of some primitive bushman reporting the death of a fellow who had collided with a taboo and had therefore died. But the two statements carry opposite meanings. The primitive can blame some tremendous and dumb transcendence, while the tourist is in awe of the inexorable logic of the machine.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society.

This is the first Ivan Illich I’ve read. It’s mind-expanding, but my mind is not yet capacious enough to find many of his proposals for alternatives to "schooling" realistic.

Perhaps that means that my mind is captive to the schooling mentality, but I can’t help but note that the suggestion is both ad hominem and circular.

On at least one thing do Illich and I agree: As one who identifies as auto-didact (one much provide one’s identity these days, right?), I agree that most of what I know I learned outside of school. And that goes double for important things (beyond basic learning skills).

That should disabuse us of any servility to schooling.

A Counterworld

The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, or even to adapt the world to Christianity; Her function is to maintain a counterworld in the world.

Nicolas Gomez Davila, Escolios a un Texto Implicito, via John Brady’s Rags of Light e-newsletter.

And if you understand that, you should understand:

The case for The Benedict Option; and
That The Benedict Option is, as many have said, "just the Church being the Church."

How badly must Trump botch this notion to disenthrall his acolytes?

DWAC, the Trump Social-Media SPAC, Soars in GameStop-Like Frenzy
Shares of Digital World Acquisition more than doubled to $94.20 Friday after trading as high as $175; have risen nearly tenfold in two days

Maybe losing beaucoups bucks will disenthrall Trump’s sycophants. Something needs to.

Decadent Jazz & Journalism

Jazz has been compared to “an indecent story syncopated and counterpointed.” There can be no question that, like journalism in literature, it has helped to destroy the concept of obscenity.

Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.

Even the greats can be wrong sometimes — about jazz, not journalism, of course.

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

Mostly political

David Shor

I do hope the Democrats listen to [David Shor] even if it means they do better in elections. Why? Well, for several reasons. First, because if they listened to him, the Democratic Party would move rightward. Second, I think the actual policies associated with “defund the police,” “birthing persons,” “Latinx,” etc. are profoundly bad for America. And third, because if the Democrats stopped talking about ridiculous things, it would deny many Republicans the psychological permission to behave like idiots or support demagogic buffoons.

Jonah Goldberg, That Shor Sounds Good

So what’s Shor saying that the Dems should listen to?

At its most basic, Shor’s theory goes something like this: Although young people as a whole turn out to vote at a lower rate than the general population, the aforementioned type of young person is actually overrepresented within the core of the Democratic Party’s infrastructure. According to Shor, the problem with this permanent class of young staffers is that they tend to hold views that are both more liberal and more ideologically motivated than the views of the coveted median voter, and yet they yield a significant amount of influence over the party’s messaging and policy decisions. As a result, Democrats end up spending a lot of time talking about issues that matter to college-educated liberals but not to the multiracial bloc of moderate voters that the party needs to win over to secure governing majorities in Washington.

Ian Ward, ‌The Democrats’ Privileged College-Kid Problem

David Brock

(David Brock left the GOP long before Donald Trump:)

Issues like racial justice, the environment and immigration are already resonating online with audiences Democrats need to win over, such as young people, women and people of color. Democratic donors have long overlooked efforts to fund the media, but with so much of our politics playing out on that battlefield, they can no longer afford to.

David Brock

It would be interesting to hear the two Davids, Shor and Brock, debate Democratic Party messenging.

Full disclosure for invitees

Alan Jacobs has a modest proposal:

This is related, in a way, to my previous post: After reading yet another invitation-disinvitation story, I think every university should – in the interests of full disclosure, honesty, and charity – prepare a list of Topics On Which Dissent Is Not Permitted and send that list to everyone who is invited to speak. That way prospective lecturers will know in advance whether they hold views that are not tolerated at those universities and can decline the invitation immediately rather than having to be canceled later on.

When Pandemic becomes Endemic, can we take off our masks?

I didn’t have much hope for ‌How Will Blue America Live With Covid? but it raises good questions.

As we saw after Sept. 11, certain forms of security theater, once established, become extremely difficult to dislodge as long as there is still any arguable threat. So as long as Covid stays in the news, it’s not hard to envision masking requirements for airplanes and trains persisting far into the future, much as we still try to foil Al Qaeda by taking off our shoes for airport security lines. It’s also possible to imagine a future in which the weird emergent norm of “masks for the help but not the V.I.P.s” — visible everywhere from the Met Gala to political fund-raisers to posh hotels — becomes an expected feature of life among the blue-state upper class (as well as a potent symbol for its critics).

Then there are blue-state elementary schools, where some of the constituencies that support mask requirements may not be assuaged even after vaccines are available for younger kids. At that point, according to both polls and personal experience, there will still be lots of vaccine hesitancy among even liberal parents — and you could imagine a coalition of more Covid-fearing parents and teachers’ unions demanding masking requirements until a school hits a vaccination threshold that remains perpetually out of reach.

…

Endemic Covid ensures that this dynamic will never simply vanish … deep-blue America will have to decide, in a world that’s postpandemic but not post-Covid, whether it wants to become the safety-above-all caricature that deep-red America has made of it — or if it can settle instead on masking a little more every December and January, a reasonable adaptation to the coronavirus experience, while otherwise leaving the age of emergency behind.

Ross Douthat

I’m seeing signs of this division among my acquaintances. And I suspect that public schools that veer into safetyism will find that a straw that breaks the camel’s back and sends more students off to private schools.

… boring me to death

Roughly a half decade or so ago, I started noticing that everyone began to believe that their political opinions were the most interesting thing about them. When it’s usually exactly the opposite. As a journalist, I always found that talking to people about their actual lives – their hurts, ambitions, failures, families, amusing asides – produced infinite and pleasant surprises. Only when they started talking politics could I finish all their sentences. As a right-leaning person throughout my life, I became unwittingly involved in more and more conversations, feeling like a trapped rat all the while, in which my conversational companions gave me their harangues on how biased the liberal media was. In fairness, the mainstream media does lean liberal, and often is biased. (Who isn’t, these days?) But if every other sentence you utter ends in the refrain “liberal media bias,” it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re lying or wrong, just that you’re boring me to death over dinner. I get it. But that’s been settled law for decades. Try to be more interesting.

Besides, achieving equanimity isn’t just a natural state, but a choice. These days, it very much involves swimming against the tide. You nearly have to choose not to get riled by all the manufactured outrages, Kabuki-theater conflagrations, and faux-Twitter fights that are conducted by catty people, for catty people. The rage merchants abound, and are all too willing to make a buck from stoking your anger and wet-nursing your resentments over “issues” you’d never even heard of five minutes prior. Don’t be such an easy mark.

Matt Labash

No senses

I’ve long known that ultra-progressives have no sense of humor. Now it appears that perhaps they have no sense of chronology, either:

When I appeared on Megyn Kelly’s podcast, she shared an anecdote (at 46:00 minute mark) about a friend of hers who worked as an editor at a major publishing house. The editor had received a manuscript of a historical novel, based on a true story, of a woman who had to pose as a man in order to receive a medical education and become a surgeon in the 1920’s1. The editor admired the novel and circulated it for feedback from some junior editors.

Perhaps you can anticipate what happened next. The book was attacked by other staffers for its failure to portray the woman who posed as a man in order to practice medicine as transgendered. The author had failed to frame her story through an anachronistic projection of today’s gender ideology onto a past in which the ideology did not yet exist. This meant her work was therefore “transphobic.” The editor was reported to HR for forcing them to read the book and subject to a disciplinary process. He was unable to move forward with the acquisition he had intended.

…

J.K. Rowling, Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle. They exist in a strange form of cossetted duress. They are still beloved by millions, wealthier and more widely exposed than ever before. But they are pariahs from the official pseudo-consensus that the Successor Ideology has captured and that a growing body of the gullible and the opportunistic alike have signed on to join with the forces that they anticipate will be in the ascendancy soon.

Wesley Yang, Cancellation, or Cultural Change

How do you marginalize normalcy?

No amount of effort at revising my attitudes (not that I’m especially inclined to try, sorry) would do much to change the fact that however effete and aloof and sensitive I may be, (and I am surely in the 95th percentile among men along both of these dimensions), I am nonetheless, for better or worse, unambiguously a cisgendered, (a term that the late comedian Norm MacDonald characterized “a way of marginalizing a normal person), heterosexual man, and all that entails.

Wesley Yang, ‌Preface to a 20-volume Dave Chappelle Review

Pregnant women at SCOTUS

SCOTUS is going to hear the Texas abortion law case on its "rocket docket;" briefing next week, argument November 1:

Justice Sotomayor wrote a six-page dissent. She repeatedly referred to pregnant "women," without a footnote about gender identity. Call the cancellation squad.

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

Riding the emotional roller-coaster

It pains me to see the wave of puritanism in the arts, arts organizations competing to see who can write the most militant mission statements declaring their dedication to Equality and Inclusivity and Anti-Elitism, which tells me clearly that the end is near. Art is elitist because some people are better singers than almost anyone else and some plays astonish and others only fill the time, and if equality is now the goal, then where do we go to experience the extraordinary? Art then becomes ideology, and for astonishment we must wait for the next blizzard or thunderstorm. A Manhattan thunderstorm is worth waiting for, but still.

We have a long haul ahead of us, people. Children dressed up as malevolent beings for Halloween: is this a good thing? I doubt it. November is a miserable month, with elections at which old people will outvote the young and timid school boards will be elected who’ll cut out any remaining art or music education and require history teachers to offer opposing points of view as to the legitimacy of the 2020 election ….

Garrison Keillor

That an aging lefty can call bullshit on the illiberal left and the trendier-than-thou institutions is a sign of hope. That "requiring history teachers to offer opposing points of view as to the legitimacy of the 2020 election" doesn’t sound too far-fetched is the antidote to that hope.

I read a Damon Linker column yesterday that instantly reminded me of Micael Anton’s then-pseudonymous Flight 93 Election of 2016. The form of both was "if you really believe that [the other party] is an existential threat, you’d be [doing more]." In Anton’s case, doing more was voting for a debauched, orange, and questionably sane poseur (since we certainly would die if Hillary got into the cockpit). In Linker’s case, doing more is "prioritizing election reform" by things like, "at the very least, overhauling the poorly drafted and dangerously ambiguous Electoral Count Act of 1887" or keeping Republicans from "rig[ging] the system so that Democrats can never win power again."

I don’t mean to suggest a simple "to hell with both parties." The Republicans were lying or hysterical when they said HRC was an existential threat. She was a crook and the bearer of bad policy, and not much more. The Democrats are stone-cold right about the Republicans threatening liberal democracy, which is why it truly is baffling that they’re farting around with progressivist megaspending proposals instead of protecting democracy.

Have I mentioned lately that if the center-left and center-right cannot find a way to win elections (and retention), I don’t see how this country isn’t doomed.

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

School Devolution

Too many of my blogs are a mish-mash. I’m going to publish a series of short blogs over the next hours or days.

First up:

A student who [spoke at the Fairfax County School Board meeting] that evening defended the contested [library] material, saying “there is nothing that is inappropriate unless you go looking for it.” [PTSA President Harry] Jackson takes it as a backhanded admission. “I am glad to see we agree there’s pornographic material in the library,” he says.
…
Like many of those rallying outside Thursday night’s meeting, Mr. Jackson wore a T-shirt saying “Parents are not ‘domestic terrorists.’ ” It’s a reference to a Sept. 29 National School Boards Association letter asking President Biden to investigate threats or disruptions at school board meetings as a possible form of “domestic terrorism.” In response, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. attorneys to look into the threats.
…
Mr. Jackson sees the school board protests as fallout from the Covid-19 lockdowns. “Because kids were home and learning online, parents got a look at what their kids were being taught in the classroom, and they didn’t like it,” he says. “Now they’re speaking up.”
They’re also learning the school system isn’t interested in what they have to say. Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s Democratic candidate for governor, confirmed suspicions during a recent debate when he declared, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” It was the ultimate gaffe—a politician inadvertently telling the truth.

William McGurn, WSJ

These are parents, mostly Democrats and racially very mixed, with students at Thomas Jefferson High School. These are not yahoos and riff-raff.

Take school devolution seriously.

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