Really good read over at NRO from last week by Peter Lawler on teaching American government. I was particularly taken by the way he explained the divergence between two very different strains of American political thought.
There were the original settlements — one in Virginia and one in New England. And ever since that time, you’ve had two conflicting impulses in American political life. The Virginians are all about liberty, as in Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. And the New Englanders — the Puritans or the Pilgrims — are all about participatory civic equality through the interdependence of the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.
. . . The Puritans, in general, tend to be too moralistically intrusive, to turn every sin into a crime. They’re an important source of our history of taking sexual morality very seriously, and for believing that American liberty depends on Americans sharing a common religious morality. They’re also the source of some of our most ridiculous and meddlesome legislation, such as prohibition (and, in some indirect way, Mayor Bloomberg’s legal assault on our liberty to drink giant sodas in movie theaters).
On the other hand, the individualism of American liberty sometimes morphs in the direction of cold indifference to the struggles of our fellow citizens. Mr. Jefferson spoke nobly against the injustice of slavery as a violation of our rights as free men and women. But he wasn’t ever moved to do much about it. And today members of our “cognitive elite” are amazingly out of touch with those not of their kind, living in a complacent bubble.
Forrest McDonald writes about this Virginia-New England divide in Novus Ordo Seclourum,and it’s as good a way to frame the ideological divide in our early republic as any.
I also link to it because it is the perfect way for me to finally segue into the series I have hoped to begin ever since I restarted this blog.
What shattered my complete apathy over American politics, other than the musical Hamilton, was the realization that this American project was too important to just give up on. While there were any dozens of different directions I could have gone in, my main desire was to not just explain but defend the ideals of our founding, of the constitution, and of American conservatism.
Too often it seems we’re content to vaguely state how a certain policy, way of thinking, etc. is against the ideals of our founding. We talk about defending our constitution without explaining why the constitution is worth defending. The mere fact of its long existence does not suffice as a justification for its merits as a governing document.
So for the next months most of my posts will be on this American Project series (until I come up with a better name for it). Said posts will have the American Project tag. I might blog about other issues as they come up, but that will be the main focus.
It might seem like a fruitless endeavor, and I may very well be whistling pass the graveyard. But I’m not going to throw away my shot to help salvage what is left of American constitutional conservatism, in the hopes that there is still enough of a movement to preserve it and our republic.
Interesting take on a familiar theme by Mark Signorelli at the Federalist. In it he takes on the idea that we’re stuck between two very different groups: snobby elitists and angry populists. According to Signorelli, there’s much more in common between the two groups than meets the eye.
Signorelli first attempts to define populism:
Evidently, we are not discussing any kind of theory or ideological commitment. The mass of people, thankfully, are never philosophers. Populism is a spirit, an attitude, informed by varying degrees of pride, self-sufficiency, frustration, resentment, and wrath.
Because populism is an attitude, and not a philosophy, it is typical for populist movements to fail to make important distinctions—crucially, the distinction between the corruption of present institutions, and the desirability of institutions as such.Hence, populism usually tends towards suspicion of social structures, and loves to indulge in the utopian reverie of a world without institutions, along with the ranking of persons they inevitably entail. The soul of the true populist is engaged in a perpetual revolution.
Any attempt to define a political term, as I discussed a couple of weeks ago, is fraught with the danger that it will be twisted to meet the biases of the writer, but this seems generally right to me.
At any rate, Signorelli explores the way modern elites use populist sounding rhetoric, even though they are people who have some degree of power themselves. As he puts it:
It is why the people running our civilization have never developed the virtues necessary to carry out their duties adequately. Determined to always think of themselves as persons out of power, they never learned to regard themselves as persons with power, and all the responsibilities power entails. They never learned to imagine the kinds of moral formation that would fit a person for rule, rather than for protest.
Ultimately, we have a set of people in power who don’t know how to use that power in a constructive sense. Thus they seek to tear down institutions completely, as do the folks on the other side of the spectrum.
By the way, I should note I was alerted to this piece by the blogger Ace of Spades. Despite my disillusionment with Ace, I still check in from time to time to see what he is saying. I was struck by this:
First of all, I’m not even sure what “populist” means. It seems to me to mean someone who believes the people running things are dishonest, self-serving, and inept.
Who disagrees with that? I don’t remember, until this very contentious year, conservatives arguing so vigorously that we must Trust our Beloved Government and of course our Venerable White-Jacketed Expert Class.
Before Trump, populism — generalized, inchoate resistance/defiance of self-proclaimed authority — was generally acknowledged to be an important and vital part of conservatism. The heat in its blood, actually.
Populism is at the heart of conservatism? Somewhere Russell Kirk is exclaiming:
Ace engages in yet another strawman characterization of the conservative movement in the second paragraph, though I suppose the complete b0ne-dry ignorance on display about the relationship between conservatism and populism is responsible for that. The very article Ace approvingly links to helps explain what populism is about, and there is nothing “conservative” about it. As he would understand if he really read the article he seems to find so interesting, the only alternative to populism is not blind submission to experts.
Hillary Clinton spent her campaign speech in Reno today attacking Donald Trump’s racist appeals,connecting him with insidious elements of the far right, including admitted white nationalists, truther nutjobs like Alex Jones, and the alt right fringe on social media.
At the outset let me say that she is not wrong about much of what she said. Trump has absolutely refused to distance himself from this element. For once the comments about dog whistles are fairly accurate. Furthermore, I generally concur with her appraisal of the alt right and the pathetic losers that comprise this movement.
If you are not familiar with the alt right, well consider yourself fortunate. This from Jonah Goldberg is about a perfect distillation of what they are. They are the scum of the social media world, and they constitute a larger portion of the body politic than I would have imagined a year before. While there is plenty of guilt by association in this speech, and I think she stretches in some places to label Donald himself a racist, she’s not that wide of the mark.
That being said, it’s a bit rich coming from her. First of all, as Daniel Horowitz notes, the left’s attacks on the alt right mask the degree to which the far left has taken over the Democrat party. While there is a genuine battle taking place for the soul of the Republican party, no such battle is taking place in the Democrat party because the extreme elements of the left have more or less subsumed the party.
What’s worse is Hillary, and many on the left who are nodding in agreement with her, are all a bit like the boy who cried wolf. Just about every mainstream Republican politican for four decades has been accused of being a racist, sexist, homophobe, and just about every other-phobe you can think of. Suddenly now Hillary and the Democrats are left saying, “Oh no, we really mean it this time.”
Usually Democrats wait until Republicans are bed to talk well of them, but Hillary’s speech today included positive references to recent GOP presidents and candidates.
Twenty years ago, when Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination, he pointed to the exits and told any racists in the Party to get out.
The week after 9/11, George W. Bush went to a mosque and declared for everyone to hear that Muslims “love America just as much as I do.”
In 2008, John McCain told his own supporters they were wrong about the man he was trying to defeat. Senator McCain made sure they knew – Barack Obama is an American citizen and “a decent person.”
We need that kind of leadership again.
Well it’s nice of Hillary to suddenly speak well of GOP politicians, but we’re not quite four years removed from Mitt “binders full of women” Romney and the supposed Republican war on woman. Right now the Democrats are fighting tooth and nail against voter ID laws, claiming that the efforts to have people actually offer identification when they vote is purely motivated by racism. Welfare reform, were told, was all about racism. Opposition to abortion is, of course, driven purely by opposition to women’s rights – strangely even for pro-life women.
In other words, you don’t get to routinely accuse candidates and an entire political party of being motivated by bigotry, and then retroactively paint them as the better angels of our nature in order to paint your current opponent as the true bigot. So while it’s nice that Hillary has suddenly realized John McCain and George Bush are the leaders we “need,” and while she correctly (for once) identifies the malignancy affecting the right, excuse me if I roll my eyes at this bit of concern trolling on the part of a presidential candidate.
To which someone tweeted back “How is that whole walking thing working out . . you got forsaken Bro.” Governor Abbott had the class to simply tweet back, I’ve been blessed. I pray God blesses you too.”
The idiotic tweet has since been deleted, as in fact has the tweeter’s entire account, but not before the individual became the focus of (much deserved) outrage. Several people made reference to the person’s place of employment, a not very subtle hint that the place of employment will soon be made aware of the tweet in question.
Social media lynch mobs are a frightening spectacle, even on the rare occasion – such as this – when the focus of attention deserves to have a spotlight shown on their stupidity. Social shaming is not in and of itself a bad thing, though we have all seen these mobs get spectacularly out of control for far less grievous offenses.
Where I get particularly concerned is when a person’s livelihood is put on the line for an ill-conceived tweet. Now, don’t me wrong, my first thought was this guy needs to get sacked over this. But as I sat back and reflected, I think such a response is not quite merited. It turns out this person works in IT for a law firm. As vile as what he tweeted was, should he really lose his job for it? He is not in some sort of public-facing capacity, representing the firm. His tweet is unlikely to bring disgrace upon the firm, nor impact its ability to perform its job for its clients, even though it is a Texas-based firm.
Before I continue, I need to stress this has nothing to do with the first amendment. This is not a case involving censorship by the federal government. A firm is within its rights to fire someone for just about any cause, depending on the contractual situation. If the firm feels this is so out of line it merits dismissal, they are within their rights. That said, were I in a position of importance with this firm, I don’t think I would fire the tweeter, though I would have strongly suggested they tone down their twitter account, and it looks like this has already happened.
A more difficult case is one involving Mark Shea, who was fired by the National Catholic Register. Shea is a big fish in the small pond of Catholic punditry, and has become notorious in many quarters of Catholic blogdom. His caustic tone has irked many would-be admirers, but it has also garnered a sizeable readership.
No particular post seems to have led to Shea’s dismissal, though it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that it comes on the heels of this stark takedown by Jason Scott Jones at Lifesite News calling Shea out for calumny and a host of other sins.
If you’ve interacted with me for any amount of time you probably are familiar with my thoughts on Mark Shea. I once read him with regularity, but became more annoyed with the way he treated those he disagreed with. Contrary to his belief, I finally stopped following him not because of his writings on torture, but rather his shallow and strawmen laden screeds against traditionalists, particularly those who enjoy the Tridentine Liturgy.
Shea does have an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate or just get simple facts wrong. (Such as his insistence that I wrote for a blog called the Coalition for Fog when I did nothing more than comment on it – by this standard I was equally a writer for Catholic and Enjoying It.)
Despite my feelings towards Shea, as I said, it’s a little concerning when someone’s livelihood is impacted, although in Shea’s case I’m not sure NCR even pays its bloggers or, if it does, it represented Shea’s primary source of income. But that’s not the point. Shea has a tendency to be a jackass, but the one place where he tends to have a softer tone is NCR. NCR is basically letting Shea go for his tone in other venues.
There is some cause for NCR to fire Shea. One would assume as a Catholic institution it is looking for writers who represent Catholicism well, and thus a writer’s reputation and actions outside of his or her work for NCR might actually matter. Any regularly employed writer for NCR represents it in a way that some IT guy at a law firm does not represent his company.
While I’m on the fence about his firing, perhaps it will help to chasten Mark.
Don’t misunderstand. The folks at NCR like Pope Francis just fine. Pat [Archbold] was fired because he loudly and vehemently made clear his contempt for the Holy Father. In short, he was heterodox. NCR will very properly can you for that, whatever the donor base thinks because the donor base cannot make a coherent *out loud* case for hating Francis. In my case, my displays of anger made a good excuse for whisper campaigns from the Righteous. But the real issue was, make no mistake, my failure to observe Republican Rite piety. All you need to do is look in on the rejoicing of the orcs over the past day to see how little interest they have in the gospel and how much it is about intensely personal hatred. NCR had to bow to that. These are people who seek the destruction of a culture way enemy, not the repentance of a sinner. They treated prayer like a hex. Really sick stuff.
Well in one fell swoop he manages to lie about the reasons Pat Archbold was let go from NCR, while maintaining the reason he was fired was because he didn’t “observe Republican Rite piety.” Odd, considering Pat’s politics would seem to more squarely fall within GOP orthodoxy, although he is also stridently anti-Trump (not that that’s a contradiction in the slightest, ahem). There doesn’t seem to be any effort to reflect and ponder that maybe, just maybe, his critics have a point and his tone does not reflect well on his efforts at Catholic apologetics. So be it.
Sadly Shea seems incapable of honest self-reflection. Here is a post from a month ago where Shea responds to a friend’s honest note of concern about his tone. It would be easier for me to show you video representation of Mark’s post in order for you to get the gist of it.
Look, most of us act like idiots in public from time to time. The internet is a blessing and a curse. The ability to immediately make one’s thoughts known to the great wide world gives all of us, theoretically, more reach than every writer who has ever lived. Those moments where we don’t think, or when we react stridently to someone we dislike, can’t be erased. Well, you can delete tweets and posts, but the internet has a memory of its own.
I don’t know that firing people for public displays of stupidity is generally the right call, but it would be wise to sit back and reflect on your behavior and make sure no one has good cause to let you go because you just made an asshole of yourself before the entire world.
It’s just not a good look.
Update: Mark Shea has written a more official note on his blog, and he seems a bit more gracious there.
Who is the head of FEMA? Go ahead, name the person without Googling. If you actually know who it is you are, well, you’re a dork.
Now who was the head of FEMA at the time of Hurricane Katrina? I’m going to guess you didn’t need to Google that name.
Complaining about media double standards and media bias is admittedly somewhat trite, but the glaring double standard when it comes to how the media treats one president handling of a terrible storm and subsequent flooding in Louisiana* versus how it has handled another president’s handling of a terrible storm and subsequent flooding is pretty stark. While George W. Bush was all but held personally accountable (and in some cases, not “all but,”) for the death toll, hardly a peep has been said about Obama’s handling of the current crisis. Heck, some of you are firing up that Google machine again to even know what’s I’m talking about.
*: The coverage of Hurricane Katrina was bad enough, but what made it worse was the overwhelming coverage allotted to New Orleans when the death toll and catastrophic effects were as bad, if not worse, in Mississippi and other points along the Gulf Coast. I guess when people in Gulfport are driven from their homes for two years it just isn’t as newsworthy as when it’s folks from the Crescent City.
Barack Obama offering a few meaningless words of comfort before he hits the links for the 300th+ time during his presidency is somehow supposed to be a more heartening show of support than George W. Bush merely flying over the wreckage. The governor of Louisiana in 2016 assures the world that it is better for the president not to be here, and thus not divert precious resources from the recovery, while in 2005 Bush’s inability to personally rescue everyone trapped in the French Quarter demonstrated how his heart was 1/3 the size of the average human’s.
Even if one acknowledges a difference in circumstances – there wasn’t a presidential campaign occurring in 2005 – the markedly different coverage is staggering. Not only has President Obama all but gotten a free ride, the event itself barely gets a mention in most news coverage.
The thing about all this is the lack of media furor over Oabama’s (in) actions is . . . commendable. We are obsessed with presidents taking photo ops, as though President Obama personally surveying Louisiana would make a lick of difference in the lives of those affected by the flooding. As for President Obama playing golf every chance he gets – who cares? There is no more stresssful job on planet Earth. Let the man have some time to himself to relieve stress.
But when George W. Bush was president, anything short of the man frantically running around and pressing his nose into every single action undertaken by the federal government was proof of his lack of concern. President Bush ultimately decided that playing golf sent a bad message, and so he never played a round during his final six years or so as president. And this ultimately wrong. The idea that the president must be “on duty” at all times of the day is absurd. When President Bush went on vacation in Crawford, do you think he was completely shut off from what was happening in the world? When President Obama is mucking it up with the elites in Hyannisport, do you think he is completely shut off from all information? Of course not. Yet only one of these two men were held to account for what they didn’t do during times of catastrophe.
It must be said, do you want to know what fuels the resentment leading to the rise of men like Donald Trump? Crap like this is as good a place as any to start.
Rick Perry has not covered himself in glory recently. A man who once called Donald Trump a “cancer” on the Republican party – in a speech that has since been memory holed, at least on Perry’s website – has become an ardent Trump supporter. Then in an interview yesterday, well, I’ll just copy and paste the Texas Tribune headline:
Rick Perry to Fallen Muslim Soldier’s Father: “Shame On You”
That indeed looks bad for Perry. What could have made Perry say such a stupid thing to a fallen soldier’s father?
As you undountedly guessed, the father in question is Khizr Khan, the man who gave a firy speech at the DNC attacking Trump, to which Trump shot back and reponded to . . . inelegantly.
But let’s look at what Perry said in full.
“In a campaign, if you’re going to go out and think that you can take a shot at somebody and not have incoming coming back at you, shame on you,” Perry said in an interview Tuesday on CNN.
So that is the context of his “shame on you” comment. Well that’s certainly a bit more revealing than what was transcribed on twitter.
Here’s more on what Perry said:
On Tuesday, Perry made clear he saw Khizr Khan as fair game. He insisted he admires veterans and their families but said the patriarch “politically used his time on that stage to go after Donald Trump.”
“Why in the world that he thought he was going to get a free ride with that is beyond me,” Perry said. “He shouldn’t get a free ride when he’s going to inject himself into the political arena.”
Here’s the thing: Perry is right, at least in the abstract. No one who makes a speech at a national political convention, no matter their history or background, and denounces another individual should be free from criticism. Khizr Khan placed himself into the political discourse, and he should not be immune from having his words challenged.
Donald Trump had absolutely every right to respond, and in fact one of the few almost commendable things about the Donald is his refusal to remain silent against all attacks. I agree with those who think George W. Bush made a mistake in never hitting back against his critics. While I understand the gentlemanly code of conduct Bush was attempting to live up to, his complete silence allowed his critics to define him. So, in a sense, Trump’s insistence on defending himself is the right move.
However, as is always the case with Trump, the way he shot back was the completely wrong approach- first attacking the man’s wife and inferring she was domineered into silence, then questioning (or having his surrogates question) Khan’s loyalties. When I say it’s fair to respond to criticism, you do have to do it with a measure of tact. That’s just not in the cards when it comes to Trump.
So I don’t think Perry’s words are as awful as some on Twitter made them out to be, but Perry also should have acknowledged that the way in which Khan was personally attacked was inappropriate.
Few things bug me more than the misappropriation of political terminology. Words which have clear, distinct definitions become twisted into little more than a way of stigmatizing one’s political opponents. Sometimes the word is used in precisely the opposite way it was intended.
Fascism is one such label. It has become fashionable to decry conservatives as fascist. Jonah Goldberg, in particular, demonstrated how terribly inapt this usage was, as America’s brand of conservatism, imbued at least partly with classical liberalism, is the least fascistic ideology on Earth.
During the Bush administration, neocon became a term of disapprobation applied, in the main, by Pat Buchanan and his acolytes. Admittedly there is no precise definition of neoconservative other than the most simple one: a person who literally had a conversion from left to right and is a newly christened member of the right. There are certain general characteristics of neoconservatism, but as applied by the Buchananites, it basically meant anyone who approved of the war in Iraq.
More recently, the dreaded Establishment has been used to frighten school children. Both the left and right rely on the Establishment trope to attack their intraparty enemies. Again, while the Esablishment is a nebulous term, it’s not wholly made-up. The real question is who or what constitututes the Establishement. For example, Ted Cruz is a member of the U.S. Senate. By definition he would seem to be of the Establishment, and yet he is an outspoken critic of the leadership of his own party, and he doesn’t exactly seem to have a lot of friends on the Senate playground. So is he anti-Establishment? It would seem the Establishment would be, at least, DC party insiders of both groups who are primarily interested in promoting politics, not policy, and who seek to constrain the role of members of the non-Establishment.*
*I think a better frame for this demarcation is policy people versus political people. Policy people – like myself and countless other writers – are people whose first concern is advancing policy ideas. We are less concerned, though obviously not wholly unconcerned, with electoral politics, (because we do not elected officials to advance our policy ideals) but who are not blindly loyal to advancing the interests of the “party” over principles. Party men are first and foremost concerned with the inside politics – the rambling and scrambling. In other words, they’re more concerned with how the sausage is made, and getting deals done.
Which brings me to the most recent term of abuse: elitism. I’ve seen it bandied about particularly by Trump supporters. First they deemed him to be the anti-Establishment candidate, and now they seem to have shifted slightly to charges that he is the enemy of the elites. In other words, only elites dislike Donald Trump.
Elitism or “elites” may be an even tougher term to pin down. Are elites the members of the bureaucratic and elective leadership of the country? Are we talking about material elites? Educated elites? Ben Shapiro offers his hand at a working description.
Here’s what “elites” should mean, in a political context: people who think they can control your life better than you do. End of story. It’s not “elitist” to say that as a consumer, I should have the ability to buy any product I want, to say that as an employer, I should have the right to hire anybody I want; free trade isn’t “elitist.” Bernie Sanders, in this definition, is an elite. Donald Trump’s trade policy – a policy by which he sits on a mountaintop and deigns to determine which jobs are most important, and who should pay more for which product – is actually elitist.
This jibes with my understanding. Whenever I’ve thought about elites what is brought to mind are the antagonists in one my favorite novels, C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength – the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, aka N.I.C.E. The institute is made up of the “smart set,” who ultimately seek to establish a utopian society based on scientific methods. The plot is a lot more detailed, of course, and absolutely worth a read (as is the entire “Space Trilogy,” of which this is the final part).
The way many Trump supporters use the term, however, is slightly different. They paint Trump opponents as snobbish elites who look down upon them and their champion. While some of the conservative opposition to Trump can be snobbish, it’s a bit much to decry it as elitism, especially when Trump himself fits just about any definition of being an elite – be it based on money, access, education, or background. That’s not to say elites cannot look down on other members of the elite, it’s just that opposition to Trump (or any populist candidate, for that matter), does not establish one as an elitist.
If we use Shapiro’s definition of elites, and I tend to think it’s largely accurate, conservative opponents of Trumpism are the very opposite of elitist. It is precisely because we do not think society ought or really cannot be governed by the “smart set,” to borrow Lewis’s terminology, that we are suspicious (to put it mildly) of both Trump and Clinton. They both propose far more elitist solutions than their starboard critics would.
I had to laugh the other day when involved in a brief exchange involving Kurt Schlichter and others. He is one of the logic-impaired writers on the right who believe those in the Never Trump camp are de facto Clinton supporters, and of course he resorted to the elitism charge against Trump opponents, or at least how the elites made Trump’s rise possible. It’s actually not totally incorrect to blame the rise of Trump at the feet of elites, but it’s absolutely wrong to accuse his current critics of being elitist. This led to Adam Baldwin (yes, that Adam Baldwin) to tweet this passage from a Thomas Sowell book back at me.
I’m not sure if Baldwin or any of the individuals who liked or retweeted the link thought he was arguing against my point. I suspect I am a tad more familiar with the works of Thomas Sowell* than any of the people barking at me, and probably agreed with the passage more than they did. Yes, there absolutely is a cycle of elitist-backed policy failures, compounded by a redoubling of the foolish policy. Sowell’s absolutely on point. But this passage, as well as Sowell’s distinction in A Conflict of Visions between those with a constrained and unconstrained vision of the world, only buttresses my point that those who follow Sowell’s train of thought should be repulsed by both Trump and Clinton. It is their vision of the world that seeks to elevate the role of the state, and in turn create even greater dependence on those very same elites we’re supposed to be mad at.
As I have alluded to, this blog won’t necessarily be chock full of hot takes on the latest news, especially the dreadful presidential election. This doesn’t mean I won’t be blogging about current events at all, but I sure as hell am not going to write thought pieces on Trump joking about “2nd Amendment types” maybe, oh I don’t know, gunning down Hillary – who by the way, had the father of a mass murderer sitting behind her at a rally.
Nope, not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent, at this juncture. However that doesn’t mean I’m not otherwise moved to the occasional hot take. So, if you’re so inclined, the Cranky Conservative facebook page should be accessible to all, as is my twitter account. Both are located over there on the right (naturally).
The Cranky Conservative 