Leftism in Summary

In “Leftism” I discuss at length the left’s agenda, assumptions and attitudes, strategy and tactics, and psychology. I then address the costs of leftist schemes and possible remedies for the left’s encroachments on liberty.

There are, spread throughout the entry, many aperçus about leftism. This one comes closest to a summation of the left’s motivations and aims:

The most obvious assumption [of leftism] is that perceived “problems” — perceived by leftists, that is — must be “solved” by state action.

That statement warrants elaboration. Leftism isn’t just sympathy for the poor and oppressed or fear for the fate of mankind. If it were, an overwhelming majority of human beings would be leftists. Leftism is the conjoining of those attitudes and the deluded belief that the best (and sometimes only) vehicle for redressing “wrongs” and remedying “problems” is the use of state power to command the necessary resources and coerce the necessary actions.

The presumption of governmental omniscience and omnipotence has many anti-libertarian implications. Here are some leading examples:

Income and wealth belong to the state.

The property of individuals and businesses is the state’s to control.

Individuals and businesses do not have freedom of association.

Religion, beyond ceremonial observances, has no place in the governance of the populace and must not be allowed to influence or interfere with that governance.

The state decides basic social questions, such as (but far from limited to) the nature of marriage and gender.

The state decides religious and scientific matters, such as (but far from limited to) the legality of teaching alternatives to neo-Darwinianism and the “correctness” of carbon-dioxide-driven “climate change”.

All persons are born equally meritorious in all respects, regardless of their (apparent) intellectual and physical endowments (“nurture” 100%, “nature” 0%), and must be accorded the same opportunities regardless of their endowments.

Exceptions may be made for persons who govern, “entertain”, play professional sports, deliver “news” and opinions, profess and administer at expensive universities, or are otherwise deemed worthy of special treatment — because some people are “more equal” than others. But at every opportunity, the exceptions will be limited to those persons who confess to the omniscience and omnipotence of the state.

Despite universal equality of merit, the state may authorize the killing of some otherwise blameless persons (e.g., children in the womb, the elderly) if they are deemed to be “unequal” (or simply an inconvenience to others).

Despite universal equality of merit, some persons commit acts that are called crimes because “society” denies them a “fair share” of economic rewards and social recognition.

Dissent from the foregoing positions (and others not listed here) is punishable by ostracism, loss of position, and in some cases (there should be more) civil and criminal penalties. (Execution isn’t out of the question.)

Most leftists won’t admit to such absolutism and barbarism, and will try to find “acceptable” ways of characterizing their implicit views. But leftism is what it is, and shouldn’t be sugar-coated.

The Allure of Leftism

When I think of leftism, I often conjure my memory of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). If you haven’t seen the film, here’s the premise of the action:

Dr. Miles Bennell returns to his small town practice to find several of his patients suffering the paranoid delusion that their friends or relatives are impostors. He is initially skeptical, especially when the alleged doppelgangers are able to answer detailed questions about their victim’s lives, but he is eventually persuaded that something odd has happened and determines to find out what is causing this phenomenon.

The essence of what follows is captured in the following excerpts of the script:

Dr. Miles Bennell:

Jack! Thank God [you’re here]! The whole town’s been taken over by the pods!

Jack Bellicec:

Not quite. There’s still you and Becky.

Miles, it would have been so much easier if you’d gone to sleep last night.

Relax. We’re here to help you….

There’s nothing to be afraid of. We’re not going to hurt you. Once you understand, you’ll be grateful.

Remember how Teddy [his wife] and I fought against it. We were wrong.

Miles:

You mean Teddy doesn’t mind?

Jack:

Of course not. She feels exactly the way I do.

Miles:

Let us go! If we leave town, we won’t come back.

Jack:

We can’t let you go. You’re dangerous to us.

Don’t fight it, Miles. It’s no use. Sooner or later, you’ll have to go to sleep….

Miles, you and I are scientific men. You can understand the wonder of what’s happened.

Just think. Less than a month ago Santa Mira was like any other town — people with nothing but problems. Then out of the sky came a solution. Seeds drifting through space for years took root in a farmer’s field. From the seeds came pods which had the power to reproduce themselves in the exact likeness of any form of life….

There’s no pain. Suddenly, while you’re asleep they’ll absorb your minds, your memories — and you’re reborn into an untroubled world.

Miles:

Where everyone’s the same?

Jack:

Exactly.

Miles:

What a world.

We’re not the last humans left. They’ll destroy you!

Jack:

Tomorrow, you won’t want them to. Tomorrow, you’ll be one of us….

[Later, Miles is trying to flee the city with his girlfriend, Becky]

Becky:

I went to sleep, Miles, and it happened….

They were right. Stop acting like a fool, Miles, and accept us.

Miles [interior monologue]:

I’ve been afraid a lot of times in my life but I didn’t know the real meaning of fear until I had kissed Becky.

A moment’s sleep, and the girl I loved was an inhuman enemy bent on my destruction.

That moment’s sleep was death to Becky’s soul just as it had been for Jack and Teddy and Dan Kauffman and all the rest.

Their bodies were now hosts, harboring an alien form of life, a cosmic form. which, to survive must take over every human man….

Miles [later, screaming at passers by]:

You fools! You’re in danger! Can’t you see?

They’re after you! They’re after all of us! Our wives, our children, everyone!

They’re here already!

You’re next!

You’re next!

You’re next!

You’re next!

You’re next!

Miles’s pleas go unheeded and the pod people seem destined to conquer humanity. Resistance is met by force, of course, because there must be no dissent from the true way.

So why not just let go of yourself and give in to the allure of leftism? It’s as easy as going to sleep.

All you have to do is forget …

the bonds of love and fellowship that attach you to family and friends … because all human beings (and animals, too) are brothers and sisters under the skin, and even unknown strangers half a world away must be treated as family, notwithstanding human nature (and the mendacious nature those who spout this nonsense);

the ancient, civilizing, and uniting moral code that is embedded in the Ten Commandments … for it teaches hate toward those who don’t observe it (hate being whatever offends the stated beliefs of those who spout this nonsense);

the derivative practice of taking others as individuals, judging them by their actions, and rewarding them for their contributions … for that is discrimination and it must be remedied by celebrating and elevating persons because of certain preferred characteristics that they happen to possess (skin color, sex, sexual orientation, gender “identity” — preferred characteristics that are subject to change without notice);

the vast improvements in the well-being of humanity that are due to the free exchange of products and services, and which are diminished by governmental dictation of the scope and kind of exchange (beyond obviously harmful products and services) … for it is not right that some persons (owing to their inborn intelligence, creativity, effort, and willingness to take risks) should reap “inordinate” rewards for having made and done things that benefit others (though it is right that those who spout this nonsense should be honored and rewarded for doing so);

the lessons of failure seen time and time again where the foregoing practices have been suppressed in favor of social and economic “equality” (though the rulers and the favorites have always been more equal than everyone else) … because the next time it (the suppression) will be done right.

As Miranda says in The Tempest, about another realm of magical thinking,

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in ’t!

Related page and posts:

Leftism

Asymmetrical (Ideological) Warfare
An Addendum to (Asymmetrical) Ideological Warfare
Insidious Leftism
Intellectuals and Authoritarianism
Socialism, Communism, and Three Paradoxes
Understanding the “Resistance”: The Enemies Within
Leninthink and Left-think
The Subtle Authoritarianism of the “Liberal Order”
Society, Culture, and America’s Future
The Democrats’ Master Plan to Seize America

One Kind of Deep-Stater

I correspond with a fellow whom I’ve known for almost 50 years. He’s a pleasant person with a good sense of humor and an easy-going personality (which masks dogged determination). His career as a defense analyst lasted for 40 years, the final 20 years of which were spent as a senior civil servant in the U.S. government. He was considered for a deputy-assistant secretaryship but didn’t get the post.

I suspect that there are many like him in the active ranks of the civil service: senior civil servants who have risen to the level of being considered for — and sometimes getting — deputy-assistant secretaryships. They are mainstays of the deep state. They know where all the bodies are buried, and — being denizens of the D.C. area and mostly Democrats — they tend to push the agenda of Democrat administrations even when there’s a Republican in the White House. When it isn’t prudent to actively push the agenda of a former Democrat president, it is quite possible to obstruct a sitting Republican president’s agenda.

In that regard, my correspondent has several traits which I suspect are not uncommon among senior civil servants: nostalgically loyal to those served and respected in the past; intelligent but not creative; resistant to change; polite in the nth degree; offended by crudeness; and eager to seem agreeable to those around him.

Members of that species are quite capable of dragging their feet (needing more time, more information, more staff) in order to derail or delay the furtherance of policies that they find too “radical”. They redouble their efforts if they have bosses whom they consider too bold, brash, or crude — or simply bent on rocking a boat that needn’t be rocked (which is most of time). They are able do such things while seeming to be ideal civil servants: dedicated to the agency’s mission, subservient to their current bosses, organized and hard-working, and never (openly) pursuing an agenda other than the one (officially) before them.

Such behavior is so natural to them that they don’t consider themselves obstructionists, and aren’t detectable as such. They are therefore all the more effective as operatives of the deep state.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not saying my correspondent would do such things, just that he represents a type that is capable of such things. Consider it a passing thought, for what it may be worth.

The Shallowness of Secular Ethical Systems

This post is prompted by a recent offering from Irfan Khawaja, who styles himself an ex-libertarian and tries to explain his apostasy. Khawaja abandoned libertarianism (or his version of it) because it implies a stance toward government spending that isn’t consistent with the desideratum of another ethical system.

Rather than get bogged down in the details of Khawaja’s dilemma, I will merely point out what should be obvious to him (and to millions of other true believers in this or that ethical system): Any system that optimizes on a particular desideratum (e.g., minimal coercion, maximum “social” welfare by some standard) will clash with at least one other system that optimizes a different desideratum.

Further, the various desiderata usually are overly broad. And when the desiderata are defined narrowly, what emerges is not a single, refined desideratum but two or more. Which means that there are more ethical systems and more opportunities for clashes between systems. Those clashes sometimes occur between systems that claim to optimize on the same (broad) desideratum. (I will later take up an example.)

What are the broad and refined desiderata of various ethical systems? The following list is a start, though it is surely incomplete:

Liberty

Freedom from all restraint

Freedom from governmental restraint

Freedom to do as one chooses, consistent with traditional social norms (some of which may be enforced by government)

Freedom to do as one chooses, regardless of one’s endowment of intelligence, talent, effort, wealth, etc.

Equality

Equal treatment under the law

Economic equality, regardless of one’s intelligence, talent, effort, wealth, etc.

Economic and social equality, regardless of one’s intelligence, talent, effort, wealth, etc.

Democracy

Participation in governmental decisions through the election of officials whose powers are limited to those deemed necessary to provide for the defense of innocent citizens from force and fraud

Participation in governmental decisions through the election of officials who have the power to bring about economic and social equality

Governmental outcomes that enact the “will of the people” (i.e., the desiderata of each group that propounds this kind of democracy)

Human welfare

The maximization of the sum of all human happiness, perhaps with some lower limit on the amount of happiness enjoyed by those least able to provide for themselves

The maximization of the sum of all human happiness, as above, but only with respect to specific phenomena viewed as threats (e.g., “climate change”, “overpopulation”, resource depletion)

Animal welfare (including but far from limited to human welfare)

Special protections for animals to prevent their mistreatment

Legal recognition of animals (or some of them) as “persons” with the same legal rights as human beings

No use of animals to satisfy human wants (e.g., food, clothing, shelter)

It would be pedantic of me to explain the many irreconcilable clashes between the main headings, between the subsidiary interpretations under each main heading, and between the subsidiary interpretations under the various main headings. They should be obvious to you.

But I will show that even a subsidiary interpretation of a broad desideratum can be rife with internal inconsistencies. Bear with me while I entertain you with a few examples, based on Khawaja’s dilemma — the conflict between his versions of welfarism and libertarianism.

Welfarism, according to Khawaja, means that a government policy, or a change in government policy, should result in no net loss of lives. This implies that that it is all right if X lives are lost, as long as Y lives are gained, where Y is greater than X. Which is utilitarianism on steroids — or, in the words of Jeremy Bentham (the godfather of utilitarianism), nonsense upon stilts (Bentham’s summary dismissal of the doctrine of natural rights). To see why, consider that the blogger’s desideratum could be accomplished by a ruthless dictator who kills people by the millions, while requiring those spared to procreate at a rate much higher than normal. Nirvana (not!).

A broader approach to welfare, and one that is more commonly adopted, is an appeal to the (fictional) social-welfare function. I have written about it many times. All I need do here, by way of dismissal, is to summarize it metaphorically: Sam obtains great pleasure from harming other people. And if Sam punches Joe in the nose, humanity is better off (that is, social welfare is increased) if Sam’s pleasure exceeds Joe’s pain. It should take you a nanosecond to understand why that is nonsense upon stilts.

In case it took you longer than a nanosecond, here’s the nonsense: How does one measure the pleasure and pain of disparate persons? How does one then sum those (impossible) measurements?

More prosaically: If you are Joe, and not a masochist, do you really believe that Sam’s pleasure somehow cancels your pain or compensates for it in the grand scheme of things? Do you really believe that there is a scoreboard in the sky that keeps track of such things? If your answer to both questions is “no”, you should ask yourself what gives anyone the wisdom to decree that Sam’s punch causes an increase in social welfare. The philosopher’s PhD? You were punched in the nose. You know that Sam’s pleasure doesn’t cancel or compensate for your pain. The philosopher (or politician or economist) who claims (or implies) that there is a social-welfare function is either a fool (the philosopher or economist) or a charlatan (the politician).

I turn now to libertarianism, which almost defies analysis because of its manifold variations and internal contradictions (some of which I will illustrate). But Khawaja’s account of it as a prohibition on the initiation of force (the non-aggression principle, a.k.a. the harm principle) is a good entry point. It is clear that Khawaja understands force to include government coercion of taxpayers to fund government programs. That’s an easy one for most libertarians, but Khawaja balks because the prohibition of government coercion might mean the curtailment of government programs that save lives. (Khawaja thus reveals himself to have been a consequentialist libertarian, that is, one who favors liberty because of its expected results, not necessarily because it represents a moral imperative. This is yet another fault line within libertarianism, but I won’t explore it here.)

Khawaja cites the example of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) program that might cure cystic fibrosis or alleviate its symptoms. But Khawaja neglects the crucial matter of opportunity cost (a strange omission for a consequentialist). Those whose taxes fund government programs usually aren’t those who benefit from them. Taxpayers have other uses for their money, including investments in scientific and technological advances that improve and lengthen life. The NIH (for one) has no monopoly on life-saving and life-enhancing research. To put it succinctly, Khawaja has fallen into the intellectual trap described by Frédéric Bastiat, which is to focus on that which is seen (the particular benefits of government programs) and to ignore the unseen (the things that could be done instead through private action, including — not trivially — the satisfaction of personal wants). When the problem is viewed in that way, most libertarians would scoff at Khawaja’s narrow view of libertarianism.

Here’s a tougher issue for libertarians (the extreme pacifists among them excluded): Does the prohibition on the initiation of force extend to preemptive self-defense against an armed thug who is clearly bent on doing harm? If it does, then libertarianism is unadulterated hogwash.

Let’s grant that libertarianism allows for preemptive self-defense, where the potential victim (or his agent) is at liberty to decide whether preemption is warranted by the threat. Let’s grant, further, that the right of preemptive self-defense includes the right to be prepared for self-defense, because there is always the possibility of a sudden attack by a thug, armed robber, or deranged person. Thus the right to bear arms at all times, and in all places should be unrestricted (unabridged, in the language of the Second Amendment).

Along comes Nervous Nellie, who claims that the sight of all of those armed people around her makes her fear for her life. But instead of arming herself, Nellie petitions government for the confiscation of all firearms from private persons. The granting of Nellie’s petition would constrain the ability of others to defend themselves against (a) private persons who hide their firearms successfully; (b) private persons who resort to other lethal means of attacking other persons, and (c) armed government agents who abuse their power.

The resulting dilemma can’t be resolved by appeal to the non-aggression principle. The principle is violated if the right of self-defense is violated, and (some would argue) it is also violated if Nellie lives in fear for her life because the right of self-defense is upheld.

Moreover, the ability of government to decide whether persons may be armed — indeed, the very existence of government — violates the non-aggression principle. But without government the non-aggression principle may be violated more often.

Thus we see more conflicts, all of which take place wholly within the confines of libertarianism, broadly understood.

The examples could go on an on, but enough is enough. The point is that ethical systems that seek to optimize on a single desideratum, however refined and qualified it might be, inevitably clash with other ethical systems. Those clashes illustrate Kurt Gödel‘s incompleteness theorems:

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system capable of modelling basic arithmetic….

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.

There is the view that Gödel’s theorems aren’t applicable in fields outside of mathematical logic. But any quest for ethical certainties necessarily involves logic, however flawed it might be.

Persons who devise and purvey ethical systems, assuming their good intentions (often a bad assumption), are simply fixated on particular aspects of human behavior rather than taking it whole. (They cannot see the forest because they are crawling on the ground, inspecting tree roots.)

Given such myopia, you might wonder how humanity manages to coexist cooperatively and peacefully as much as it does. Yes, there are many places on the globe where conflict is occasioned by what could be called differences of opinion about ultimate desiderata (including religious ones). But most human beings (though a shrinking majority, I fear) don’t give a hoot about optimizing on a particular desideratum. That is to say, most human beings aren’t fanatical about a particular cause or belief. And even when they are, they mostly live among like persons or keep their views to themselves and do at least the minimum that is required to live in peace with those around them.

It is the same for persons who are less fixated (or not at all) on a particular cause or belief. Daily life, with its challenges and occasional pleasures, is enough for them. In the United States, at least, fanaticism seems to be confined mainly to capitalism’s spoiled children (of all ages), whether they be ultra-rich “socialists”, affluent never-Trumpers, faux-scientists and their acolytes who foresee a climatic apocalypse, subsidized students (e.g., this lot), and multitudes of other arrant knights (and dames) errant.

Atheists are fond of saying that religion is evil because it spawns hatred and violence. Such sentiments would be met with bitter laughter from the hundreds of millions of victims of atheistic communism, were not most of them dead or still captive to the ethical system known variously as socialism and communism, which promises social and economic equality but delivers social repression and economic want. Religion (in the West, at least) is a key facet of liberty.

Which brings me to the point of this essay. When I use “liberty” I don’t mean the sterile desideratum of so-called libertarians (who can’t agree among themselves about its meaning or prerequisites). What I mean is the mundane business of living among others, getting along with them (or ignoring them, if that proves best), treating them with respect or forbearance, and observing the norms of behavior that will cause them to treat you with respect or forbearance.

It is that — and not the fanatical (unto hysterical) rallying around the various desiderata of cramped ethical systems — which makes for social comity and economic progress. The problem with silver bullets (Dr. Ehrlich’s “magic” one being a notable exception) is that they ricochet, causing more harm than good — often nothing but harm, even to those whom they are meant to help.

Related pages and posts:

Climate Change
Economic Growth Since World War II
Leftism
Modeling and Science
Social Norms and Liberty

On Liberty
Greed, Cosmic Justice, and Social Welfare
Democracy and Liberty
Utilitarianism vs. Liberty
Fascism and the Future of America
The Indivisibility of Economic and Social Liberty
Tocqueville’s Prescience
Accountants of the Soul
Pseudo-Libertarian Sophistry vs. True Libertarianism
Bounded Liberty: A Thought Experiment
Evolution, Human Nature, and “Natural Rights”
More Pseudo-Libertarianism
The Meaning of Liberty
Positive Liberty vs. Liberty
Facets of Liberty
Burkean Libertarianism
What Is Libertarianism?
True Libertarianism, One More Time
Utilitarianism and Psychopathy
Why Conservatism Works
The Eclipse of “Old America”
Genetic Kinship and Society
Liberty as a Social Construct: Moral Relativism?
Defending Liberty against (Pseudo) Libertarians
Defining Liberty
The Pseudo-Libertarian Temperament
Modern Liberalism as Wishful Thinking
Getting Liberty Wrong
Romanticizing the State
Libertarianism and the State
My View of Libertarianism
The Principles of Actionable Harm
More About Social Norms and Liberty
Superiority
The War on Conservatism
Old America, New America, and Anarchy
The Authoritarianism of Modern Liberalism, and the Conservative Antidote
Society, Polarization, and Dissent
Social Justice vs. Liberty
The Left and “the People”
The Harm Principle Revisited: Mill Conflates Society and State
Liberty and Social Norms Re-examined
Natural Law, Natural Rights, and the Real World
Natural Law and Natural Rights Revisited
Libertarianism, Conservatism, and Political Correctness
My View of Mill, Endorsed
Rights, Liberty, the Golden Rule, and Leviathan
Suicide or Destiny?
O.J.’s Glove and the Enlightenment
James Burnham’s Misplaced Optimism
True Populism
Libertarianism’s Fatal Flaw
The Golden Rule and Social Norms
The Left-Libertarian Axis
Rooted in the Real World of Real People
Consequentialism
Conservatism, Society, and the End of America
Conservatism vs. Leftism and “Libertarianism” on the Moral Dimension
Free Markets and Democracy
“Libertarianism”, the Autism Spectrum, and Ayn Rand
Tragic Capitalism
A Paradox for Liberals
Rawls vs. Reality
The Subtle Authoritarianism of the “Liberal Order”
Liberty: Constitutional Obligations and the Role of Religion
Society, Culture, and America’s Future

The Subtle Authoritarianism of the “Liberal Order”

There is a smug kind of person whom I know well, having been trained in the economics of control; having worked for more than thirty years with economists, engineers, mathematicians, statisticians, and others whose penchant it was to find the “best” solution to every problem; and having known (too many) “right thinking” persons whose first reaction to every disaster, sob story, and inconvenience is that government experts should make it stop (liberty, unintended consequences, and costs are of no importance).

A small sample of the smuggies’ certainties: “Efficient” means of transportation (e.g., fast intercity trains, urban light rail) should be provide by government (i.e., taxpayers) because they’re obviously the “best” way to move people, the revealed preferences of consumers (and voters) to the contrary notwithstanding. Cities should be zoned to encourage density (because, you know, cities are “cool”, “climate change”, yadayadyada), the preference of actual people (and evidence against “climate change”) to the contrary notwithstanding.

The list goes on and on. You can easily add to it even if you haven’t had your morning coffee.

The kind of smug person who holds such views holds them for many reasons: peer influence, virtue-signaling, educated incapacity, public-school and university indoctrination, and good old-fashioned snobbery (the “deplorables” must be made to do what’s in their own interest). Most such persons are also financially comfortable — too comfortable, obviously, because they seem to have nothing better to do with their money than to pay the higher taxes that inevitably result from their electoral choices: candidates who believe that government is the answer; bond issues and other ballot measures that enable politicians to spend more money to “fix” things. The less-comfortable contingent (e.g., school teachers and low-level government employees) go along to get along and because they must believe that government is good, just as a young child must believe in Santa Claus.

The agenda and constituency of the “liberal order” parallel those of the so-called liberal international order, which Sumantra Maitra addresses in a review article, “The End Times of the Liberal Order“? (Spectator USA, October 26, 2018):

A liberal order is not natural. Robert Kagan admits as much in his new book, The Jungle Grows Back, when he writes that the ‘the creation of the liberal order has been an act of defiance against both history and human nature’. Nor is a liberal order an ‘order’, or liberal in nature. It is a sort of hegemonic or imperial peace.

Nothing wrong with that, of course; peace, any peace, is important. Unfortunately, it is the liberal part, which causes the problem. An internationalist, utopian worldview, liberalism is full of crusaderly zeal, constantly ‘going abroad in search of monsters to destroy’. Liberal internationalists badly want to shape the world. When given the chance, they do manage to shape the world, very badly indeed….

[John] Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion claims that liberalism itself is paradoxical. It supports tolerance, but it is a universalist paradigm, deeply committed to borderless values. There cannot be any compromise or cooperation, because everything, everywhere is an existential battle. This causes conflict both at home and abroad. Domestically, liberalism divides a nation into good and bad people, and leads to a clash of cultures. Internationally, it leads to never-ending wars.

Encore: Domestically, liberalism divides a nation into good and bad people, and leads to a clash of cultures.

The clash of cultures was started and sustained by so-called liberals, the smug people described above. It is they who — firmly believing themselves to be smarter, on the the side of science, and on the side of history — have chosen to be the aggressors in the culture war.

Hillary Clinton’s remark about Trump’s “deplorables” ripped the mask from the “liberal” pretension to tolerance and reason. Clinton’s remark was tantamount to a declaration of war against the self-appointed champion of the “deplorables”: Donald Trump. And war it has been. much of it waged by deep-state “liberals” who cannot entertain the possibility that they are on the wrong side of history, and who will do anything — anything — to make history conform to their smug expectations of it.

Related reading:

Joel Kotkin, “Elites Against Western Civilization“, City Journal, October 3, 2019 (examples of the smug worldview, from a non-smug academic)

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Globalist Mindset: They Hate You“, American Greatness, December 16, 2018 (more, from another non-smug academic)

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Military-Intellegence Complex“, American Greatness, November 3, 2019 (even more)

Lyle H. Rossiter Jr., M.D. “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness“, Townhall, December 4, 2006 (a psychiatrist’s diagnosis confirms mine)

Related pages and posts (focusing on various aspects of delusional “liberalism”):

Abortion Q & A
Climate Change
Economic Growth Since World War II (see especially The Rahn Curve in Action)
Leftism
Modeling and Science
Political Ideologies
Spygate (a.k.a. Russiagate)

Hurricane Hysteria
“Tribalists”, “Haters”, and Psychological Projection
“Science is Real”
“Liberalism”: Trying to Have It Both Ways
Understanding the Resistance: The Enemies Within
Intellectuals and Authoritarianism
More Unsettled Science
Homelessness
Leninthink and Left-Think
More Unsettled Science
Not-So-Random Thoughts (XXIV) (especially The Transgender Trap: A Political Nightmare Becomes Reality and Assortative Mating, Income Inequality, and the Crocodile Tears of “Progressives”)
Climate Hysteria
Rawls vs. Reality

Intellectuals and Authoritarianism

In the preceding post I quoted the German political theorist, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). The quotation is from a book published in 1926, seven years before Schmitt joined the Nazi Party. But Schmitt’s attraction to authoritarianism long predates his party membership. In 1921, according to Wikipedia,

Schmitt became a professor at the University of Greifswald, where he published his essay Die Diktatur (on dictatorship), in which he discussed the foundations of the newly established Weimar Republic, emphasising the office of the Reichspräsident. In this essay, Schmitt compared and contrasted what he saw as the effective and ineffective elements of the new constitution of his country. He saw the office of the president as a comparatively effective element, because of the power granted to the president to declare a state of exception (Ausnahmezustand). This power, which Schmitt discussed and implicitly praised as dictatorial,[21] was more in line with the underlying mentality of executive power than the comparatively slow and ineffective processes of legislative power reached through parliamentary discussion and compromise.

Shades of Woodrow Wilson, the holder of an earned doctorate and erstwhile academician who had recently been succeeded as president of the United States by Warren G. Harding. Wilson

believed the Constitution had a “radical defect” because it did not establish a branch of government that could “decide at once and with conclusive authority what shall be done.”…

He also wrote that charity efforts should be removed from the private domain and “made the imperative legal duty of the whole,” a position which, according to historian Robert M. Saunders, seemed to indicate that Wilson “was laying the groundwork for the modern welfare state.”

Another renowned German academic, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), also became a Nazi in 1933. Whereas Schmitt never expressed regret or doubts about his membership in the party. Heidegger did, though perhaps not sincerely:

In his postwar thinking, Heidegger distanced himself from Nazism, but his critical comments about Nazism seem “scandalous” to some since they tend to equate the Nazi war atrocities with other inhumane practices related to rationalisation and industrialisation, including the treatment of animals by factory farming. For instance in a lecture delivered at Bremen in 1949, Heidegger said: “Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.”…

In [a 1966 interview for Der Spiegel], Heidegger defended his entanglement with National Socialism in two ways: first, he argued that there was no alternative, saying that he was trying to save the university (and science in general) from being politicized and thus had to compromise with the Nazi administration. Second, he admitted that he saw an “awakening” (Aufbruch) which might help to find a “new national and social approach,” but said that he changed his mind about this in 1934, largely prompted by the violence of the Night of the Long Knives.

In his interview Heidegger defended as double-speak his 1935 lecture describing the “inner truth and greatness of this movement.” He affirmed that Nazi informants who observed his lectures would understand that by “movement” he meant National Socialism. However, Heidegger asserted that his dedicated students would know this statement was no eulogy for the Nazi Party. Rather, he meant it as he expressed it in the parenthetical clarification later added to Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), namely, “the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity.”

The eyewitness account of Löwith from 1940 contradicts the account given in the Der Spiegel interview in two ways: that he did not make any decisive break with National Socialism in 1934, and that Heidegger was willing to entertain more profound relations between his philosophy and political involvement.

Schmitt and Heidegger were far from the only German intellectuals who were attracted to Nazism, whether out of philosophical conviction or expediency. More to the point, as presaged by my inclusion of Woodrow Wilson’s views, Schmitt and Heidegger were and are far from the only intellectual advocates of authoritarianism. Every academic, of any nation, who propounds government action that usurps the functions of private institutions is an authoritarian, whether or not he admits it to himself. Whether they are servants of an overtly totalitarian regime, like Schmitt and Heidegger, or of a formally libertarian one, like Wilson, they are all authoritarians under the skin.

Why? Because intellectualism is essentially rationalism. As Michael Oakeshott explains, a rationalist

never doubts the power of his ‘reason … to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action. Moreover, he is fortified by a belief in a ‘reason’ common to all mankind, a common power of rational consideration….

… And having cut himself off from the traditional knowledge of his society, and denied the value of any education more extensive than a training in a technique of analysis, he is apt to attribute to mankind a necessary inexperience in all the critical moments of life, and if he were more self-critical he might begin to wonder how the race had ever succeeded in surviving. [“Rationalism in Politics,” pp. 5-7, as republished in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays]

If you have everything “figured out”, what is more natural than the desire to make it so? It takes a truly deep thinker to understand that everything can’t be “figured out”, and that rationalism is bunk. That is why intellectuals of the caliber of Oakeshott, Friederich Hayek, and Thomas Sowell are found so rarely in academia, and why jackboot-lickers like Paul Krugman abound.

Collaborationist Conservatives

Michael Anton, author of “The Flight 93 Election“, has coined the apt term Vichycons for collaborationist conservatives. (I wish I had thought of it first.) Anton nails them in “Vichycons and Mass Shootings“:

One prominent member of the species has called for “civility.” I’m all for “civility,” but it takes two to tango and the kind of “civility” on which he insists amounts—in the face of the Left’s intensifying power-hungry wrath—to unilateral disarmament. The Vichycons are like pearl-clutching old ladies somehow unperturbed by the ambient culture’s mass obscenity who upbraid their husbands for saying “damn.” They may claim to favor high standards for all, but in practice all their fire is consistently directed rightward….

Conservatives, as noted, are supposed to know something about nature, human nature, natural limits, politics, history, and permanent truths. That they do not is plainly evident from the fact that an alternative explanation for El Paso—and for other recent mass atrocities—is right under their collective nose and yet has never occurred to them. Or maybe it has but they’re too chicken to voice it. Again, I don’t know which would be worse.

Anton’s “alternative explanation” is the unraveling of social norms since the 1960s, which has led to greater violence and far less social harmony.

And Vichycons bear a big share of the responsibility for what has happened. Too many of them — especially in high and influential places — have been (and are) so anxious to seem “civil” and so eager to “get along” that they have failed to challenge the willful unraveling of social norms by the left. Theirs is a moral failing, though they don’t think of it as such because, for them, “image” and “connections” are far more important than actual adherence to principle. Perhaps it’s because, like Max Boot, they were never really conservative in the first place.

“Justice on Trial” A Brief Review

I recently read Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino. The book augments and reinforces my understanding of the political battle royal that began a nanosecond after Justice Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court.

The book is chock-full of details that are damning to the opponents of the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh (or any other constitutionalist) to replace Kennedy. Rather, the opponents would consider the details to be damning if they had an ounce of honesty and integrity. What comes through — loudly, clearly, and well-documented — is the lack of honesty and integrity on the part of the opponents of the Kavanaugh nomination, which is to say most of the Democrats in the Senate, most of the media, and all of the many interest groups that opposed the nomination.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely the authors’ evident conservatism and unflinching condemnation of the anti-Kavanaugh forces will convince anyone but the already-convinced, like me. The anti-Kavanaugh, anti-Constitution forces will redouble their efforts to derail the next Trump nominee (if there is one). As the authors say in the book’s closing paragraphs,

for all the hysteria, there is still no indication that anyone on the left is walking away from the Kavanaugh confirmation chastened by the electoral consequences or determined to prevent more damage to the credibility of the judiciary… [S]ooner or later there will be another vacancy on the Court, whether it is [RBG’s] seat or another justice’s. It’s hard to imagine how a confirmation battle could compete with Kavanaugh’s for ugliness. But if the next appointment portends a major ideological shift, it could be worse. When President Reagan had a chance to replace Louis Powell, a swing vote, with Bork, Democrats went to the mat to oppose him. When Thurgood Marshall, one of the Court’s most liberal members, stood to be replaced by Clarence Thomas, the battle got even uglier. And trading the swing vote Sandra Day O’Connor for Alito triggered an attempted filibuster.

As ugly as Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle became, he is unlikely to shift the Court dramatically. Except on abortion and homosexuality, Justice Kennedy usually voted with the conservatives. If Justice Ginsburg were to retire while Trump was in the White House, the resulting appointment would probably be like the Thomas-for-Marshall trade. Compared with what might follow, the Kavanaugh confirmation might look like the good old days of civility.

Indeed.

Colleges and Universities are Overrated

Keith Whittington writes at The Volokh Conspiracy about “The Partisan Split on Higher Education“:

A new Pew survey reveals that the partisan split that became visible a couple of years ago in public perceptions of American higher education has continued. In the long term, this cannot be good for American colleges and universities….

Colleges and universities are fairly distinctive in being non-political institutions that are nonetheless seen in increasingly partisan terms. There is an extensive conservative infrastructure now dedicated to publicizing the foibles of academia. Of course, the reality is that college professors and administrators lean heavily to the political left, though this has been true for decades. Republicans now perceive universities as politicized, partisan institutions….

[I]f Republicans continue to believe that on the whole universities are damaging American society, they are unlikely to try to defend them against misguided political interventions from the political left and are more likely to propose misguided political interventions of their own.

Colleges and universities are (and long have been) “political” institutions, as Whittington himself acknowledges. But that isn’t my quibble with Whittington.

His tone implies that he holds colleges and universities in higher regard than they should be held. But there isn’t anything sacred about colleges and universities. Free inquiry (which most of them no longer support) can go on without them. Advances in theoretical and applied science can go on without them, as long as there are free markets to support the development and application of scientific knowledge. In fact, colleges and universities have (on the whole) become so inimical to free markets that Americans would be better off with far fewer colleges and universities.

Sending kids to college has become conspicuous consumption. The practical value of colleges and universities is realized through courses that could be replicated by for-profit institutions. The rest — including the bloated, mostly leftist administrative apparatus — is waste.

Some Conundrums

Here are five (my answers are below):

1. Why are killers (too often) not killed for their crimes?

2. Why can some parties suppress and distort the speech of others, yet continue to enjoy the liberties (including freedom of speech) that enable their actions?

3. How is it that some very-rich persons claim to pay “too little” in taxes, yet they (a) do not voluntarily contribute to the U.S. Treasury and (b) want to impose higher taxes on persons who are not very rich?

4. If “climate change” is a problem that causes the governments of some cities and States to impose extraordinary regulations (e.g., extra gasoline taxes, tighter emissions standards), why do those same governments countenance any activity that (supposedly) contributes to “climate change” (e.g., municipal transit, official travel, subsidized arenas, the construction of houses larger than, say, 2,000 square feet)? (And do the officials who push such regulations bother to compute the vanishingly small effect of those regulations on “climate change”, assuming that there is any effect?)

5. Why do so many people choose to live in metropolitan areas — only to complain about crime, traffic congestion, high prices, and stress — when they could be relieved of those woes by moving out? The opportunities are rife:

Answers:

1. The opposition to capital punishment is an exemplar of politically correct (i.e., muddled) thinking. It is epitomized in this common combination of attitudes: aborting an innocent fetus is all right; killing a killer is bad. Why? Because killing is “bad”, regardless of the end it serves. It is like the PC idea that saying “gun”, drawing one, or owning one is bad because guns are “bad”, no matter what (unless your hired bodyguard carries a gun).

2. Leniency with respect to entities that suppress speech is of a piece with pacifism. It invites the aggressor to do unto you what you should do unto him before he can do it unto you.

3. Some very-rich persons are empty-headed twits who care more about virtue-signalling than they care about the welfare of their fellow citizens (those who pay taxes, at any rate), and they are hypocrites, to boot.

4. Change the preceding answer by substituting “municipal and State officials” for “very-rich persons”.

5. The are many reasons for staying in a metropolitan area, some of them good ones; for example, moving to an extra-metropolitan area would mean the loss of ready access to “culture” (arts, entertainment, dining, organized sports), the abandonment of established social relationships, and very possibly (because of a dearth of suitable jobs) a drastic reduction in one’s standard of living despite lower housing costs. There are, however, some reasons that are merely self-defeating, namely, inertia and pride (e.g., reluctance to give up the Lexus SUV and McMansion). Putting up with crime, traffic congestion, high prices, and stress — while complaining about such things — points to the uselessness of most surveys. Talk is cheap.

First They Came For …

… the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

So goes one version of “First they came …”

the poetic form of a prose post- war confession first made in German in 1946 by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). It is about the cowardice of German intellectuals and certain clergy (including, by his own admission, Niemöller himself) following the Nazis’ rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets, group after group.

Niemöller’s message has been repeated time and again by observers of political developments in the U.S. Sometimes in defense of the communists being “persecuted” by Joe McCarthy, and sometimes by conservatives who are (rightly) fearful of the power of Big Tech.

But I find myself in disagreement with the message and its assumptions.

For one thing, it is right to go after some groups (e.g., Big Tech). The “marketplace of ideas” is a fatuous notion, and liberty cannot be sustained if its enemies are allowed free rein to convert the populace to anti-libertarian dogmas. The First Amendment was not meant to be a prescription for political suicide.

For another thing, it is ridiculous to think that intellectuals and clergymen could have prevented the rise of Nazism and its eventual (and largely successful) effort to eradicate the Jews of Germany and occupied territories. In fact, a goodly share of Germany’s intellectuals (and clergy and affluent professionals) gave aid and comfort to the Nazi regime.

The same is true, in large part, of American intellectuals, clergy, and affluent professionals. That they are dupes of the left’s coterie of would-be dictators doesn’t occur to them. But they are dupes, and with the left in the saddle and riding hard toward economic and social dictatorship, it will not matter whether any or most of them recant before dictatorship is upon us.

Some of the dupes, if they are suitably subservient, will become court favorites — until they say or do something that puts their allegiance in doubt, when they will be purged à la Stalin. Those who turned against the left during its rise to absolute power will be remembered and dealt with harshly in Orwellian fashion, as enemies of “equality”, “social justice”, “sexual liberation”, and other such perverted concepts. The silent majority will be left (mostly) alone, though only by dint of its continued silence in an economic and social wasteland.

The Enlightenment’s Fatal Flaw

The fatal flaw is the reliance on reason. As Wikipedia puts it,

The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of knowledge….

Where reason is

the capacity of consciously making sense of things, establishing and verifying facts, applying logic, and adapting or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information.

So much of life is — of necessity — conducted in a realm beyond “reason”, where instincts and customs come into play in a universe that is but dimly understood.

By contrast, as the Wikipedia article admits, the Enlightenment — like its contemporary manifestations in pseudo-science (e.g., Malthusianism, Marxism, “climate change”), politics (e.g., “social justice”), and many other endeavors — relies on reductionism, which is

the practice of oversimplifying a complex idea or issue to the point of minimizing or distorting it.

Reason relies on verbalization (or its mathematical equivalent), but words (and numbers) fail us:

Love, to take a leading example, is a feeling that just is. The why and wherefore of it is beyond our ability to understand and explain. Some of the feelings attached to it can be expressed in prose, poetry, and song, but those are superficial expressions that don’t capture the depth of love and why it exists.

The world of science is of no real help. Even if feelings of love could be expressed in scientific terms — the action of hormone A on brain region X — that would be worse than useless. It would reduce love to chemistry, when we know that there’s more to it than that. Why, for example, is hormone A activated by the presence or thought of person M but not person N, even when they’re identical twins?

The world of science is of no real help about “getting to the bottom of things.” Science is an infinite regress. S is explained in terms of T, which is explained in terms of U, which is explained in terms of V, and on and on. For example, there was the “indivisible” atom, which turned out to consist of electrons, protons, and neutrons. But electrons have turned out to be more complicated than originally believed, and protons and neutrons have been found to be made of smaller particles with distinctive characteristics. So it’s reasonable to ask if all of the particles now considered elementary are really indivisible. Perhaps there other more-elementary particles yet to be hypothesized and discovered. And even if all of the truly elementary particles are discovered, scientists will still be unable to explain what those particles really “are.”

Reason is valuable when it consists of the narrow application of logic to hard facts. But it has almost nothing to do with most of life — and especially not with politics.

Just as words fail us, so has the Enlightenment and much of what came in its wake.

As exemplified by this “child of the enlightenment”:

Child of the enlightenment

(See also “In Praise of Prejudice” and “We, the Children of the Enlightenment“.)

Oberlin

Poetic justice: The “social justice” college was hit with $11 million in punitive damages, $22 million in compensatory damages, for defaming Gibson’s Bakery.

I have warned against drawing conclusions from outliers. But my ditzy, meme-spouting, lesbian*, leftist, Oberlin grad, niece-by-marriage isn’t an outlier. To know her is to know Oberlin. One example: She participated in Occupy Wall Street and then sponged off my investment-banker daughter.

As they say, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. But ditzes like her — and AOC (and most of the Dem candidates for president) — just don’t get it. That’s why they’re so dangerous.
__________
* NTTAWWT, if one is in fact genetically predisposed to homosexuality. But the number of persons thus endowed must be far smaller than the number proclaiming to be homosexual (or something else “queer”) because of the power of social pressure on those of an impressionable age (which most definitely includes college students). The niece-by-marriage, for example, went off to Oberlin as a sexually active heterosexual and emerged from that cesspool of muddled leftist sloganeering as a lesbian, but — tellingly — a lesbian of the “lipstick” preference.

Beware of Muslim Airline Pilots

Fox News has a story about Maylasia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean. The details are in the story. Here’s the gist of it:

The night the aircraft went missing, control was seized in the cockpit during a 20 minute period between 1:01 a.m. and 1:21 a.m. and radar records show the autopilot was probably switched off, according to [aviation specialist William] Langewiesche….

When the report by a 19-member international team was released last July, Chief investigator Kok Soo Chon said during a media briefing there was no evidence of abnormal behavior or stress among the two pilots – Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah and co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid – that could lead them to hijack the plane.

Langewiesche notes that while the co-pilot had nothing but a bright future ahead and no red flags in his past, Zaharie’s life raised multiple concerns. After his wife moved out, the captain, who was reported to be “lonely and sad,” also “spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms” and obsessed over two young internet models.

Forensic examinations of the pilot’s simulator by the FBI also revealed he experimented with a flight profile that roughly matched what’s believed to have happened to MH370, and that ended in “fuel exhaustion over the Indian Ocean.” New York Magazine reported in 2016 that the simulated flight was conducted less than a month before the plane vanished.

That’s not all. The story goes on to remind readers of

a similar incident, [in which] EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed off the coast of Massachusetts in October 1999 on its way from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York to Cairo. Audio captured by the co-pilot caught pilot Gameel Al-Batouti say 11 times in Arabic, “I rely on God.”

Two years later, the National Transportation Safety Board determined Al-Batouti had been suicidal and purposely crashed the plane while the first pilot was out of the cockpit.

Yes, there’s also mention of

Germanwings Flight 9525, which crashed into the French Alps in 2015, [and] was also determined to be a case of suicide-by-pilot. Officials determined co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies, flew the airliner into the mountains on purpose.

The case of Lubitz notwithstanding, there’s more to fear from the likes of Zaharie Ahmad Shah and Gameel Al-Batouti — suicide flying as a substitute for suicide bombing. I’m glad that my days of international air travel are long over.

Power Is Power

Most libertarians and conservatives have a reflexive — and negative — reaction to proposals for government intervention to “fix” private-sector problems. The attitude is well-founded, in that many serious private-sector problems (e.g., soaring medical costs, dependency on tax-funded subsidies) are the result of government intervention.

But there are times when government intervention –were it politically feasible — could alleviate serious private-sector problems. Consider two such problems: (1) suppression of conservatives and their views on campuses and in public fora owned by private companies (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter); (2) soaring prescription-drug prices caused by Big Pharmacy (not the drug makers of Big Pharma, but the middlemen like CVS who manage prescription-drug plans for the insurance companies with which they are often entangled).

The academic-information and prescription-drug complexes — to name just two — are already exerting government-like power. In fact, it is far more power than was actually exercised by the “trusts” wrongly targeted for government intervention (“trust-busting”) during the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s. (They were providing new and invaluable products at low prices, thanks to economies of scale.) Contemporary trusts, unlike the ones of yore, are in fact the products of government interventions on behalf of powerful private interests, which is why it will be hard to bring the academic-information and prescription-drug complexes (and others) to heel.

It won’t be easy, but it is possible. And badly needed.

Spygate, Russiagate, or the Attempted Theft of the 2016 Election

My thesis, which I posted here in August, looks better every day. The argument is brief, though the entry is long because of the ever-expanding list of links to supporting material. The recent infighting between Comey and Brennan supports my view that Brennan was the ringleader and Comey was nothing more than what he has always been: an opportunistic suck-up. In any event, the bottom line — a deep-state conspiracy against Trump, before and after the election — looks more like the truth with every new revelation about the Obama administration’s shenanigans.

A Nation of Enemies

The title of this post is hyperbolic, but it is nearer today’s truth than was Lincoln’s assertion at the end of his first inaugural address:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

The United States of 1861 was genetically and culturally close-knit by comparison to the genetically and culturally fractured nation of today. It is impossible to turn the clock back. We must accept the United States for what it is — a fractured nation dominated by a powerful, intrusive central government.

That government’s vast power, by the way, stems largely from Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War. The North’s victory in that war paved the way for the demise of the constitutional order — a strictly limited central government responsible to States that still possessed most governmental power. Decentralization made it easier for citizens to control the degree to which governments could prey on them. And it made voting with one’s feet a real option, even in that age when inter-State mobility was an arduous and risky proposition.

Unfair Play

When your opponent aims to win, at all costs (especially yours), the rules go by the boards. If you obey them, he will not. And if he wins, you can be sure that he will discard them (in your case, at least). The only way to preserve the rules of fair play (constitutionalism, due process, etc.) is to win. And then, by all means, enforce the rules, especially those that punish treachery.

Not with a Bang

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Elliot, The Hollow Men

It’s also the way that America is ending. Yes, there are verbal fireworks aplenty, but there will not be a “hot” civil war. The country that my parents and grandparents knew and loved — the country of my youth in the 1940s and 1950s — is just fading away.

This would not necessarily be a bad thing if the remaking of America were a gradual, voluntary process, leading to time-tested changes for the better. But that isn’t the case. The very soul of America has been and is being ripped out by the government that was meant to protect that soul, and by movements that government not only tolerates but fosters.

Before I go further, I should explain what I mean by America, which is not the same thing as the geopolitical entity known as the United States, though the two were tightly linked for a long time.

America was a relatively homogeneous cultural order that fostered mutual respect, mutual trust, and mutual forbearance — or far more of those things than one might expect in a nation as populous and far-flung as the United States. Those things — conjoined with a Constitution that has been under assault since the New Deal — made America a land of liberty. That is to say, they fostered real liberty, which isn’t an unattainable state of bliss but an actual (and imperfect) condition of peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior.

The attainment of this condition depends on social comity, which depends in turn on (a) genetic kinship and (b) the inculcation and enforcement of social norms, especially the norms that define harm.

All of that is going by the boards because the emerging cultural order is almost diametrically opposite that which prevailed in America. The new dispensation includes:

casual sex
serial cohabitation
subsidized illegitimacy
abortion on demand
easy divorce
legions of non-mothering mothers
concerted (and deluded) efforts to defeminize females and to neuter or feminize males
gender-confusion as a burgeoning norm
“alternative lifestyles” that foster disease, promiscuity, and familial instability
normalization of drug abuse
forced association (with accompanying destruction of property and employment rights)
suppression of religion
rampant obscenity
identity politics on steroids
illegal immigration as a “right”
“free stuff” from government (Social Security was meant to be self-supporting)
America as the enemy
all of this (and more) as gospel to influential elites whose own lives are modeled mostly on old America.

As the culture has rotted, so have the ties that bound America.

The rot has occurred to the accompaniment of cacophony. Cultural coarsening begets loud and inconsiderate vulgarity. Worse than that is the cluttering of the ether with the vehement and belligerent propaganda, most of it aimed at taking down America.

The advocates of the new dispensation haven’t quite finished the job of dismantling America. But that day isn’t far off. Complete victory for the enemies of America is only a few election cycles away. The squishy center of the electorate — as is its wont — will swing back toward the Democrat Party. With a Democrat in the White House, a Democrat-controlled Congress, and a few party switches in the Supreme Court (of the packing of it), the dogmas of the anti-American culture will become the law of the land; for example:

Billions and trillions of dollars will be wasted on various “green” projects, including but far from limited to the complete replacement of fossil fuels by “renewables”, with the resulting impoverishment of most Americans, except for comfortable elites who press such policies).

It will be illegal to criticize, even by implication, such things as abortion, illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, anthropogenic global warming, or the confiscation of firearms. These cherished beliefs will be mandated for school and college curricula, and enforced by huge fines and draconian prison sentences (sometimes in the guise of “re-education”).

Any hint of Christianity and Judaism will be barred from public discourse, and similarly punished. Islam will be held up as a model of unity and tolerance.

Reverse discrimination in favor of females, blacks, Hispanics, gender-confused persons, and other “protected” groups will be required and enforced with a vengeance. But “protections” will not apply to members of such groups who are suspected of harboring libertarian or conservative impulses.

Sexual misconduct (as defined by the “victim”) will become a crime, and any male person may be found guilty of it on the uncorroborated testimony of any female who claims to have been the victim of an unwanted glance, touch (even if accidental), innuendo (as perceived by the victim), etc.

There will be parallel treatment of the “crimes” of racism, anti-Islamism, nativism, and genderism.

All health care in the United States will be subject to review by a national, single-payer agency of the central government. Private care will be forbidden, though ready access to doctors, treatments, and medications will be provided for high officials and other favored persons. The resulting health-care catastrophe that befalls most of the populace (like that of the UK) will be shrugged off as a residual effect of “capitalist” health care.

The regulatory regime will rebound with a vengeance, contaminating every corner of American life and regimenting all businesses except those daring to operate in an underground economy. The quality and variety of products and services will decline as their real prices rise as a fraction of incomes.

The dire economic effects of single-payer health care and regulation will be compounded by massive increases in other kinds of government spending (defense excepted). The real rate of economic growth will approach zero.

The United States will maintain token armed forces, mainly for the purpose of suppressing domestic uprisings. Given its economically destructive independence from foreign oil and its depressed economy, it will become a simulacrum of the USSR and Mao’s China — and not a rival to the new superpowers, Russia and China, which will largely ignore it as long as it doesn’t interfere in their pillaging of respective spheres of influence. A policy of non-interference (i.e., tacit collusion) will be the order of the era in Washington.

Though it would hardly be necessary to rig elections in favor of Democrats, given the flood of illegal immigrants who will pour into the country and enjoy voting rights, a way will be found to do just that. The most likely method will be election laws requiring candidates to pass ideological purity tests by swearing fealty to the “law of the land” (i.e., abortion, unfettered immigration, same-sex marriage, freedom of gender choice for children, etc., etc., etc.). Those who fail such a test will be barred from holding any kind of public office, no matter how insignificant.

Are my fears exaggerated? I don’t think so, given what has happened in recent decades and the cultural revolutionaries’ tightening grip on the Democrat party. What I have sketched out can easily happen within a decade after Democrats seize total control of the central government.

Will the defenders of liberty rally to keep it from happening? Perhaps, but I fear that they will not have a lot of popular support, for three reasons:

First, there is the problem of asymmetrical ideological warfare, which favors the party that says “nice” things and promises “free” things.

Second, What has happened thus far — mainly since the 1960s — has happened slowly enough that it seems “natural” to too many Americans. They are like fish in water who cannot grasp the idea of life in a different medium.

Third, although change for the worse has accelerated in recent years, it has occurred mainly in forums that seem inconsequential to most Americans, for example, in academic fights about free speech, in the politically correct speeches of Hollywood stars, and in culture wars that are conducted mainly in the blogosphere. The unisex-bathroom issue seems to have faded as quickly as it arose, mainly because it really affects so few people. The latest gun-control mania may well subside — though it has reached new heights of hysteria — but it is only one battle in the broader war being waged by the left. And most Americans lack the political and historical knowledge to understand that there really is a civil war underway — just not a “hot” one.

Is a reversal possible? Possible, yes, but unlikely. The rot is too deeply entrenched. Public schools and universities are cesspools of anti-Americanism. The affluent elites of the information-entertainment-media-academic complex are in the saddle. Republican politicians, for the most part, are of no help because they are more interested on preserving their comfortable sinecures than in defending America or the Constitution.

On that note, I will take a break from blogging — perhaps forever. I urge you to read one of my early posts, “Reveries“, for a taste of what America means to me. As for my blogging legacy, please see “A Summing Up“, which links to dozens of posts and pages that amplify and support this post.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

Voltaire, Candide

Related reading:

Michael Anton, “What We Still Have to Lose“, American Greatness, February 10, 2019

Rod Dreher, “Benedict Option FAQ“, The American Conservative, October 6, 2015

Roger Kimball, “Shall We Defend Our Common History?“, Imprimis, February 2019

Joel Kotkin, “Today’s Cultural Engineers“, newgeography, January 26, 2019

Daniel Oliver, “Where Has All the Culture Gone?“, The Federalist, February 8, 2019

Malcolm Pollack, “On Civil War“, Motus Mentis, March 7, 2019

Fred Reed, “The White Man’s Burden: Reflections on the Custodial State“, Fred on Everything, January 17, 2019

Gilbert T. Sewall, “The Diminishing Authority of the Bourgeois Culture“, The American Conservative, February 4, 2019

Bob Unger, “Requiem for America“, The New American, January 24, 2019

A Summing Up

This post has been updated and moved to “Favorite Posts“.

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