Politics

[dshans]

Well then don't threaten to ban me for making claims that are true.

Try a second reading of my post.

I was gladly accepting my own possible ban for a comment I stand by and feel still applies.

 

[NDgradstudent]

Try a second reading of my post.

I was gladly accepting my own possible ban for a comment I stand by and feel still applies.

My mistake. I don't think people should be banned for expressing opinions of any sort.

Of course, it doesn't apply; but then I guess you weren't claiming that anything I said was false. Only that it upsets you that it is true. I can't help that.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

For what it's worth, which isn't much...

Pat Robertson: Gays & Islamists Are Allies So 'Let Them Kill Themselves' | Right Wing Watch

 

[dshans]

... Of course, it doesn't apply; but then I guess you weren't claiming that anything I said was false. Only that it upsets you that it is true. I can't help that.

A reputable news source simply reporting newsworthy comments or relating a misreading and distillation of others' comments hardly makes them true.

Peace and love, brother.

 

[NDgradstudent]

A reputable news source simply reporting newsworthy comments or relating a misreading and distillation of others' comments hardly makes them true.

Let's look again at my comment:

Prepare for liberals and Democrats to declare that the "rhetoric" of Christian opponents of the Obama men-in-ladies-rooms policy played some "role" in the Orlando shooting, even though the shooter was a Muslim terrorist. This is an move on their part that goes back a long time: when JFK was assassinated some people, including his wife, openly expressed their desire that his shooter was a racist, and were upset he was 'only' a Communist. People NBC interviewed on the street also said they thought the JFK shooter was a racist and that Republican "rhetoric" caused the shooting (although the Republican guy they interview says he thinks it is probably a communist).

What can you say about American politics? Same as it ever was.

What I said was that some liberals and Democrats would partially blame conservative Christians for the shooting. So reports that some liberals and Democrats did in fact partially blame conservative Christians for the shooting makes my claim true.

 

[woolybug25]

Let's look again at my comment:



What I said was that some liberals and Democrats would partially blame conservative Christians for the shooting. So reports that some liberals and Democrats did in fact partially blame conservative Christians for the shooting makes my claim true.

Weird... I don't see the word "some" anywhere before the word "liberal" in the OP...

 

[IrishJayhawk]

Let's look again at my comment:



What I said was that some liberals and Democrats would partially blame conservative Christians for the shooting. So reports that some liberals and Democrats did in fact partially blame conservative Christians for the shooting makes my claim true.

And some conservatives came out in support of the murder of gay people.

"Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today?" asked Jimenez. "Um no. I think that’s great. I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida, is a little safer tonight. The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die. The tragedy is I’m kind of upset he didn’t finish the job – because these people are predators. They are abusers."

Sacramento Baptist pastor praises Orlando massacre | ABC10.com

What's your point?

ETA: Perhaps I should have taken out the word "some"?

 

[GoIrish41]

Sacramento Baptist pastor praises Orlando massacre | ABC10.com

This is absolutely disgusting!

 

[Whiskeyjack]

First Things' R.R. Reno just published an article titled "Left or Right, No One Is Happy":

On a number of ocassions I've thumped my conservative friends on the head, trying to convince them that progressives likewise feel that things are going against them. Given the Left's dominance of higher education and the media, as well as our defeats in the culture wars, my remarks are always met with disbelief.

All the more reason to read James Kwak's recent blog post, “Yes, I'll Vote for HRC. No, I'm Not Happy About It.”

Kwak's unhappiness does not stem from Hillary Clinton's less-than-scrupulous conformity to the law when it comes to emails. Nor is he concerned about the Clinton Global Machine, er, Initiative. Instead, Kwak draws attention to a structural fact about Democratic presidential politics over the last generation. It has been center-left, not left. And it seems to have encouraged, or at least failed to stem, a steady shift toward the right in American elections as a whole.

Kwak also points out that when it comes to economic issues, the center-right of the Republican Party tends to win. Taxes on dividends and capital gains have fallen, even though Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years. Capital keeps winning.

The signature achievements of center-left Bill Clinton and (in Kwak's estimation) pseudo-progressive Barack Obama are almost all center-right in spirit. Welfare Reform under Clinton enacted conservative ideas. Obamacare is a modified version of an earlier Heritage Foundation proposal. Gay marriage? It succeeded without support from the Clintons and Barack Obama, who waited until all the political liabilities of leadership on the issue had dissipated.

Given this generation-long experience, Kwak concludes that more of the same from the Democratic Party won't advance progressive ideals. “What we're doing isn't working. It needs to change.” Again, Clinton is “the candidate of the Democratic status quo, and the Democratic status quo isn't working.”

Kwak is a man of the Left, and so it's obvious to him that Clinton is a better option than Trump. He thinks she'll be a decent, competent President. But his dissatisfaction with the status quo should be noted. Harvard grad, UC Berkeley Ph.D., J.D., McKinsey consultant, and now law professor: Kwak is hardly a bomb-throwing, anti-establishment radical. Yet he feels stymied by our current political system.

I'm unhappy as well. In my view, the system is rigged in favor of rich progressives who compliment themselves on their multicultural inclusiveness while dismantling the moral culture for working people and the poor. I, too, am hardly a bomb-throwing anti-establishment radical. But like Kwak, I'm increasingly convinced that the Republican status quo isn't working. It has done little to stem the cultural dominance of the Left. Which is why I'm anti-anti-Trump. His success in the primaries dramatizes the fact that the Republican status quo isn't working. It can't even win Republican primaries. Anti-anti-Trumpism refuses to ignore this failure.

The convergence of disgruntlement—in spite of the ideological divide the separates me from Kwak—is important. And I don't think we're outliers. On the contrary, the dissatisfaction seems to run deep and wide. Our postwar political order is losing its currency. An earthquake is coming.

 

[NDgradstudent]

Weird... I don't see the word "some" anywhere before the word "liberal" in the OP...

I think it's obviously implied, but you can remove it if you'd like. Makes no difference; the claim remains true.

And some conservatives came out in support of the murder of gay people.

Did I ever say that they would not do so?

What's your point?

The people I quoted were sympathetically profiled in the NYT, NPR, etc. They weren't comments from some lunatic pastor somewhere; they were from "leaders" of the gay rights movement, etc. Strikes me as significantly different, but whatever.

 

[phgreek]

The straw man lurking in your post is that Trump clearly told American voters to look at his business success and ethics, and those were a primary reason for Americans to vote for him. Obama said that he would use all the skills he developed from his experience to find innovative ways to solve problems. Two totally different things. Kind of like day and night. And by the way, with Obama you had his decriers making unsubstantiated claims about his past. Oh, yeah. And Obama was President of the Harvard Law Review. Not shabby. More than anecdotal evidence of intelligence.

Some times there is a fine line between banality and hypocrisy.

Strawman....Whaat?

Trump's expertise is generally thought to be business...taxes make sense as one of the artifacts to look at. As well, I'd like to see some "deals" he made on paper. BTW...Are you really fucking going to tell me that no one saw Trump as a business man before he said so? SMH.

Mr. Obama's expertise is generally thought to be what? Most folks did not say "community organizer", nor did they really see him as a politician, and while some believed it, they did not say Mesiah. When pressed, They described some form of an intellectual. What are the artifacts of an intellectual BOGS?

Books...2 (none academic or legal/scholarly texts)
Articles in the law review...1 (rights of fetuses to sue their mothers)
Transcripts...?
Peer reviewed professional articles...?
Standards of Practice...?

Seriously, whats your argument here BOGS?

Indeed, Donald Trump should provide tax and other documents, but don't be surprised if the masses who like him now don't reject him if he doesn't provide them as we've seen an earlier precedent in Mr. Obama failing to really provide much of anything relevant to being an intellectual.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

New York Magazine's Parker MacDougld just published an article titled "Why Peter Thiel Wants to Topple Gawker and Elect Donald Trump":

On Friday, Gawker Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The move follows a devastating $140 million judgment against the company in a breach-of-privacy lawsuit, brought by the former wrestler Terry Bollea (a.k.a. Hulk Hogan) and financed by PayPal founder and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Thiel has nursed a grudge against the company since 2007, when Gawker site Valleywag revealed what, apparently, most of the Valley already knew: that “Peter Thiel is totally gay.”

The judgment, the revelations of Thiel’s involvement, and the subsequent bankruptcy have literalized, in the high dramatics of a pro-wrestling plotline, the complete upheaval of the media business at the hands of the tech industry — in particular Facebook, in which Thiel was an early investor. The saga is also the culmination of an already-weak fourth estate’s worst fears about a new class of superrich. Gawker prided itself on its combative sensibility and unwillingness to flatter the powerful, though an expansive definition of “powerful” may have alienated some bystanders (including the jurors). The apparent success of an aggrieved billionaire in destroying the media company over a personal slight sets a disturbing precedent — paving the way for a future in which “comic-book villain” billionaires can strike down unwelcome coverage with impunity.

But while it’d be easy, and not incorrect, to cast him in the role of a latter-day Charles Foster Kane — à la Frank VanderSloot, the Republican donor who’s offered to fund any lawsuits against Mother Jones — Peter Thiel is more interesting than your run-of-the-mill rich guy. Some of his eccentricities, like his plan to live forever, are to be expected from a high-powered tech entrepreneur. But he’s known for odd politics as well: He’s a big Republican donor in a Valley dominated by Democrats. Though a self-described libertarian, he’s advocated for monopoly and argued that companies should be structured like monarchies. He’s funded idiosyncratic “political” initiatives, such as the Seasteading Institute’s project to create floating libertarian city-states. Famously, in a 2009 essay for Cato Unbound, he declared that he “no longer believe that capitalism and democracy are compatible.” (Thiel has since said that he was wrong to think America was a democracy, calling it instead a “state dominated by very unelected, technocratic agencies”).

Perhaps most interestingly, Thiel’s raised eyebrows by backing Donald Trump — not the candidate you’d expect to be the choice of a science-obsessed, futurist zillionaire. Recent media coverage of Thiel’s support for Trump has tended to focus, naturally, on Trump’s threat to “open up” libel laws and make it easier to sue the press. But there are also a host of odd connections between Thiel’s post-libertarianism and the new forms of right-wing politics that have accompanied Trump’s rise.

Trump has awoken the mainstream media to the “alt-right” and its cousin neoreaction (a.k.a. NRx or the Dark Enlightenment) — loosely related, web-based “movements” that combine internet culture with far-right politics. The alt-right is associated with Trump, 4chan, and anti-Semitic Twitter trolling (think Gamergate and Microsoft’s Tay debacle), while neoreaction, which is smaller and centered on a few major blogs, tends toward intellectual defenses of hierarchy, race science (“human biodiversity”), and the virtues of nondemocratic government. Both exist in opposition to the broadly “liberal” values, like anti-racism and democracy, shared by both sides of the mainstream political spectrum.

Neoreaction has a number of different strains, but perhaps the most important is a form of post-libertarian futurism that, realizing that libertarians aren’t likely to win any elections, argues against democracy in favor of authoritarian forms of government. In this guise, it’s a heretical offshoot of Valley nerd culture, and has particular associations with Thiel. Mencius Moldbug (real name Curtis Yarvin), the “founder” of neoreaction, is a Bay Area programmer whose start-up, Urbit, is backed by Thiel; and reactionary blogger Michael Anissimov was formerly media director at the Thiel-funded Machine Intelligence Research Unit (MIRI). Even Nick Land, the major NRx figure after Moldbug (whom I’ve written about before), has no personal connections to the Valley but shares many of its peculiar cultural interests: Before his neoreactionary conversion, he spent much of the 1990s as a rogue academic writing philosophy-fiction about the Singularity, killer-AI, and time travel. So when it came out that Thiel was attacking a media company and supporting a candidate already perceived as a neo-fascist, it looked a little like some Pynchon-esque conspiracy coming to fruition.

What’s more interesting, however, than Peter Thiel being the shadowy puppetmaster behind a neoreactionary conspiracy — he’s not, and one doesn’t exist — is why he doesn’t need to be. It may seem a little puzzling why a tech entrepreneur, whose own interests include “disruption” and high-modernist sci-fi dreams of space travel and life extension, might get in bed with Trump’s brand of strongman bullying and populist white resentment. But we’re living through a number of crises in our liberal-democratic political system that have no obvious way out, and that are pushing all sorts of different people to react and realign in similar ways. It shouldn’t be a surprise if some are beginning to converge on pretty weird positions.

The first problem — and perhaps the biggest and most obvious — is the economy. Both Trump’s and Sanders’s insurgent campaigns have been premised on anger at stagnant incomes and the decline of mass-employment manufacturing. The big drivers of these are structural forces like trade, technology, and the entry of places like China into the global labor market. None of these can easily be fixed by the state, which means that anger and perceptions of elite failure are only likely to grow. Inequality is persistent, long-term unemployment is still high, and more pessimistic forecasters are suggesting a future in which the labor market is split between a small, highly productive elite and a large underclass rendered unemployable by changes in technology. It’s a view popular among the tech elite, who generally support things like universal basic income (UBI) — free money, essentially — which will allow people to survive, and keep buying widgets, even after the robots take their jobs. Yet the neoreactionaries offer a dark twist on what is usually a story of sunny Valley optimism: Why should the elite consent to be ruled by the poor in such a society, especially if the poor don’t have the leverage that comes when the rich need their labor?

Another major inflection point — to understate the matter somewhat — is race. Racial tensions have been especially high in recent years, from the racially tinged birther movement to the Trayvon Martin shooting and Black Lives Matter. Commentators have pointed out that the alt-right is a form of “white identity politics,” and named Trump as an example of nascent white nationalism. But it’s not exactly clear what white identity even is, and it’s a question worth considering. Germanic and Celtic mythology? Homebrew and vinyl? What about libertarianism, or American nationalism?

If it sounds strange to say that libertarianism is “white,” well, it’s still true. Libertarianism is, empirically, really goddamn white, and some have suggested that that may not be a coincidence: That is, libertarianism makes assumptions about what’s normal for everyone on the basis of the white experience. Normally, that’s a point made by the left as a criticism, but the whiteness of libertarianism is increasingly accepted by post-libertarian reactionaries like Moldbug as a badge of honor. It could also indicate a wider trend in the future, if a combination of demographic changes and political projects to “make whiteness visible” lead more white people to think of cultural values like individual rights as tied to whiteness, rather than as universal principles. Certainly Trump’s brand of nationalism seems to rest on doing something similar with the idea of “America,” abandoning any pretense to a creedal idea of national identity in favor of one based on race. These trends could well produce, among whites, more conscious anti-racists and conscious racists at the same time.

Finally, there’s the question of democracy itself — and the signs of growing disillusion in its ability to confront the problems of the modern world. Andrew Sullivan recently speculated that Trump’s rise reflected the inevitable self-destruction of democracies, setting off a round of fighting about whether we have too much or too little democracy. Affluent urbanites who generally get their way are more socially progressive than the country at large, and popular policies currently include a ban on Muslim immigration. If polarization continues to increase, people may consider that keeping the other side out of power is more important than respecting democratic norms and procedures.

After the Gawker verdict, The New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann noted that courts have historically treated the press in accordance with public opinion: The less people like or trust the press, the less it’s offered legal protection. In that sense, Gawker’s immediate fate — bankruptcy at the hands of an unsympathetic jury — may be a predictable outcome in a country that has lost faith in its media. But the basic point is larger: Popular legitimacy is just as important to liberal institutions as formal legal protections, and public trust in all major institutions except for the military is declining. If that continues, why wouldn’t we expect those institutions to come under threat? We can see the consequences already among Trump supporters, who are willing to cheer unconstitutional policies because they see laws simply as the arbitrary rules of a hated elite.

It’s here that someone like Peter Thiel is most interesting. He probably wouldn’t describe himself as a neoreactionary, but he wouldn’t have to in order to end up in a similar sort of political place — looking for nondemocratic alternatives as our democratic institutions struggle with mounting problems and declining legitimacy. In a revealing comment to George Packer of The New Yorker, Thiel let slip that he was pessimistic about the current system continuing. The failure of the present Establishment, according to Thiel, may point to Marxism, libertarianism, or something else, but “it’s going to be this increasingly volatile trajectory of figuring out what that’s going to be.” Thiel, obviously, is not a Marxist. He puts his own faith in massive technological breakthroughs, like life extension, that would transform human life without the messiness of social revolution.

Thiel frames these big breakthroughs as “zero to one” innovations — which create something wholly new — rather than “one to n” innovations, which copy and extend something that already exists. Many have connected this “zero to one” frame both to Thiel’s Christianity and his distaste for imitation. James Poulos, however, in a perceptive review of Thiel’s Zero to One, sees in Thiel an echo of Nietzsche’s comment that the “maddest and most interesting ages of history” come when the “actors” — the imitators — rule over the “architects”; status games triumph; and the strength and courage to build for the future is lost. Thiel seems to believe something similar about our current age: He sees his peers as mired in groupthink and imitation, and he longs for the days when technology meant rocket ships and flying cars rather than social media. Scott Alexander, in a contrarian attempt to provide the best possible argument for reaction, suggests that, at a very basic level, it comes down to the idea that in a chaotic and disordered society, sometimes you need a strongman (and “architect”) like Lycurgus to sweep aside the old in order to make room for the new. Thiel often says that the solutions he’s looking for lie outside of politics, in technology. But if we put that together with his claim that “properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology,” we might worry about what a political zero to one would look like.

We live in interesting times.

 

[dshans]

...We live in interesting times.

It's a curse ...

and a blessing.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

It's a curse ...

and a blessing.

The Chinese, at least, would disagree with the bolded.

 

[dshans]

The Chinese, at least, would disagree with the bolded.

You got my point.

[I think]



To quote Roseanna Roseanadana, "It's always something. If it isn't one thing--it's another! It's always something."

 

[wizards8507]

From Joe Carter at The Acton Institute.

Election Season in the Spiritually Vacant State | Acton PowerBlog

“When the value-bearing institutions of religion and culture are excluded, the value-laden concerns of human life flows back into the square under the politics of politics,” wrote Richard John Neuhaus, “It is much like trying to sweep a puddle of water on an even basement floor; the water immediately flows back into the space you had cleaned.”Although he made the comment thirty-two years ago, the late Fr. Neuhaus could be describing the current election season.

While there is much that could be said about how and why we allowed our “value-bearing institutions” to fall into disrepair, for now I merely want to discuss what has replaced them. Everything is now about politics and all politics is now about liberalism.

As David Koyzis notes in his superb study of ideologies, Political Visions and Illusions, the first and most basic principle of liberalism is that everyone possesses property in their own person and must be free to govern themselves in accordance with their own choices, provided that these choices do not infringe on the equal right of others to do the same.

Whether they call themselves a progressive, libertarian, or conservative, almost every politically involved American (and most who are not) subscribes to this foundational belief in the near-absolute sovereignty of the individual. The differences in political persuasions derive not from a denunciation of this principle but merely from disagreements over the role of the state in relation to the individual.

In his chapter on liberalism, Koyzis states that the ideology progresses through five distinct stages. While it is difficult to adequately summarize his explanation, the stages could roughly be outlined as follows:

First Stage: Hobbesian commonwealth
Example: early modern absolute monarchies
Distinctive aspect: Limits on the state are practical rather than legal or ethical and rooted in the self-interest of the sovereign, who refrains from doing anything that might cause his subjects to prefer the state of nature to his own rule.

Second stage: Night watchman state
Example: America from its founding to the late 1880s
Distinctive aspect: The focus on the individual right to self-preservation is expanded to cover property, in recognition of the connection between preserving one’s life and earning a livelihood.

Third stage: Regulatory state
Example: Teddy Roosevelt and the progressive movement of the early twentieth century.
Distinctive aspect: The realization that nonstate actors (i.e., corporations) can be a threat to individual liberty and that the state has a role in limiting and protecting against such infringement.

Fourth stage: Equal opportunity state
Example: The New Deal under FDR
Distinctive aspect: The creation of a more interventionist government which can offset the impact that impersonal factors (such as lack of economic resources) have on individual freedom. This attempt to increase individual liberty for all citizens often leads to the creation and expansion of the “welfare state.”

Fifth stage: Choice enhancement state
Example: Modern America (?)
Distinctive aspect: The task of liberalism is to accommodate the common desires of individuals without prejudging the choices being made. Because the individual is sovereign, the state must simply provide a broad procedural framework within which individuals are enabled to pursue their goals; to do otherwise would be a violation of the equality rights of the individuals.

Koyzis also refers to this fifth stage of liberalism, which takes a neutral stance towards different lifestyle choices, as a “spiritually vacant state.” The main problem with this state is that different lifestyle choices have different consequences that affect not just the individual, but society as a whole (e.g., higher rates of illegitimacy cause the state to expand itself to compensate for those ill effects).

Koyzis made reference to these categories in a 2004 election postmortem:

I wouldn’t wish to overstate the differences between the two parties, both of which represent the larger legacy of liberalism, though drawing on different strands. Using my own categories, the Republicans tend to reflect the influence of the 2nd and 3rd stages of liberalism, viz., the night watchman state and the regulatory state, while the Democrats embody liberalism in its 4th and 5th stages, viz., the equal opportunity state and the choice-enhancement state. Republicans have figured out a way to synthesize traditional Christian belief with this classical liberal ideology. Witness Bush’s speeches ascribing near redemptive qualities to the spread of freedom. Yet the Democrats have bought into a more obviously secular mindset for which belief in a transcendent God is increasingly foreign. How long this can last is difficult to say. The self-interested desire to win power, if nothing else, may force an internal reassessment within the Democratic Party.

That the Republicans’ synthesis might be an unstable one is something which has not yet occurred to its supporters, especially among evangelicals and Catholics. However, for the near future the “Grand Old Party” has the advantage over its opponent.

A lot has changed in the 12 years since the 2004 election. Specifically, the GOP has lost the advantage it had in synthesizing traditional Christian belief with classical liberal ideology because it has become too much like it’s opponent. This is especially true when it comes to presidential politics.

While it is not true, as is often claimed, that there is no difference between the major political parties, the distinctions between the parties’ presidential candidates has certainly narrowed, especially on economic and cultural issues.

Consider the odd situation in which socialist Bernie Sanders is not an outlier but the center of the candidates. Although Sanders will not be president, he is the pole around which the other candidates align. Because they are from the same party, it’s not surprising that Hillary Clinton aligns closely with Sanders. But so too does Donald Trump, who espouses a type of folk Marxism that differs from Sanders mostly in emphasis and style. Even the libertarian candidate Gary Johnson says, “of all the presidential candidates, I next side with Bernie Sanders at 73 percent.”

Why do they align with the democratic socialist? Because the fifth-stage liberalism they espouse (the choice enhancement state) requires the interventionist policies of fourth-stage liberalism (the equal opportunity state) to ensure maximum “choice enhancement” for their constituencies.

While each of the candidates now endorses the fourth and fifth stages of liberalism, they each put different focus on different issues. Where they completely align, though, is on refusing to seriously propose shoring up the crumbling value-bearing institutions of religion and culture. Instead, they each promise that if elected they’ll use government power for the preferred mix of choice enhancement their particular voters prefer.

With the election of either Trump or Clinton, we will move further along on the path of of fifth stage liberalism, deeper into the morass of the spiritually vacant state. Trump is unlikely to win, of course, but if he did it would remove the primary reason Christians and conservatives had for supporting the GOP in the first place: Because the party was dedicated to slowing —albeit only moderately, only in certain areas, and only relative to the other party — the process of cultural and institutional disorder. The GOP didn’t do much to help non-political institutions but they did tend to institute policies that allowed us room to maneuver so that we could work on re-strengthening and fortifying other institutions within society. Trumpism may end that tendency for good.

Since we will be stuck with either Trumpism or Clintonism for at least the next four years, the political culture will continue to to emphasize atomized individualism over community-building institutions. Fifth-state liberals like Trump and Clinton tend to think that authority is a zero-sum game played out between the individual and the state. Although they may recognize other mediating institutions such as the family or church, they view them in completely contractual terms. In their view, these institutions have no inherent authority or claim over the individual. They are merely extraneous parts of the “social contract.”

So what’s the alternative? The antithesis of this idea is what Koyzis refers to this as a neo-Calvinist political theory, what I would call a “Kuyperian conservatism.” Unlike the ideological form of modern conservatism (and completely antithetical to Trump-style populist Marxism), the Kuyperian form recognizes that ultimate sovereignty belongs to God alone who delegates authority throughout society to various institutional structures (the family, church, business, etc.), an idea closely related to the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. While these institutions are not immune to the effects of sin or human depravity, they still retain the legitimate authority given to them by our Creator and do not subsume everything into the political sphere..

Unlike fifth-stage liberalism and the other forms of political idolatry, Kuyperian conservatism doesn’t require accepting a false eschatology. It doesn’t have liberalism’s naive utopian belief that progress, rationality, liberty, or democracy will lead America to become the “City upon a Hill.” Instead it strives to respect the individual while conserving the sovereignty of the various spheres of the polis, maintaining order and striving for justice in order to create the necessary space for human flourishing until Christ returns.

In an age when politics dominates everything, such ambitions are rather modest. Indeed, Kuyperian conservatism isn’t likely to became a major force in our political culture, much less make significant progress in rolling back fifth-stage liberalism. Advocating such a view will be, as Neuhaus said, much like trying to sweep a puddle of water on an even basement floor.

But it’s a necessary task, and one we must cheerful undertake. We can strive to achieve what we can knowing that it is only when the Kingdom of God is fully ushered in that we will finally be rid of the spiritually vacant state.

 

[Ndaccountant]

Daughter of First MLB Lobbyist Introduces Bill To Make Sure Minor Leaguers Continue To Live In Poverty

 

[connor_in]

 

[connor_in]

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Helen Andrews just published an article in the Hedgehog Review titled "The New Ruling Class". It's a long read, so rather than reconstruct the entire thing, I'll just share the closing section:

Aristocracy—Embrace It!

Meritocracy began by destroying an aristocracy; it has ended in creating a new one. Nearly every book in the American anti-meritocracy literature makes this charge, in what is usually its most empirically reinforced chapter. Statistics on the decline of social mobility are not lacking. In 1985, less than half of students at selective colleges came from families in the top income quartile; in 2010, 67 percent did. For those authors brave enough to cite Charles Murray (as Robert Putnam, for one, was not), Coming Apart documents quantitatively the growing tendency of the members of America’s cognitive elite to marry each other, live near each other in “Super Zips,” and launch their children into the same schools, and thence onto the same path to worldly success. Deresiewicz puts this betrayal of the democratic impulse neatly: “Our new multiracial, gender-neutral meritocracy has figured out a way to make itself hereditary.”

But the solutions on offer never rise to the scale of the problem. Authors attack the meritocratic machine with screwdrivers, not sledgehammers, and differ only in which valve they want to adjust. Some think the solution is to tip more disadvantaged kids over the lip of the intake funnel, which would probably make things worse. If more people start competing for a finite number of slots, slim advantages like those that come from having grown up with two meritocrats for parents will only loom larger. And has anyone asked working-class families if being sucked into a frantically achievement-obsessed rat race is a benefaction they are interested in?

Others favor the slightly more radical solution of redefining our idea of merit, usually in a way that downplays what Guinier calls “pseudoscientific measures of excellence.” She even has a replacement in mind, the Bial-Dale College Adaptability Index, the testing of which involves Legos. (Why are you laughing? It is backed by a study.) This is even less likely to work than fiddling with the equality-of-opportunity end. For one thing, the minority of families willing to do whatever it takes to get into Harvard will still do whatever it takes to get into Harvard. They have adapted to new admissions criteria before, and they will do so again. Furthermore, unless families are abolished, successful parents will always pass on advantages to their children, which will compound with each generation. It does not matter how merit is defined; the dynamic of meritocracy remains the same, its operations inexorable.

My solution is quite different. The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy—so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable? Allow the social forces that created this aristocracy to continue their work, and embrace the label. By all means this caste should admit as many worthy newcomers as is compatible with their sense of continuity. New brains, like new money, have been necessary to every ruling class, meritocratic or not. If ethnic balance is important to meritocrats, they should engineer it into the system. If geographic diversity strikes them as important, they should ensure that it exists, ideally while keeping an eye on the danger of hoovering up all of the native talent from regional America. But they must give up any illusion that such tinkering will make them representative of the country over which they preside. They are separate, parochial in their values, unique in their responsibilities. That is what makes them aristocratic.

A tough sell, I realize. Not since the Society of the Cincinnati has a ruling elite so vehemently disclaimed any resemblance to an aristocracy. The structure of the economy abets the elite in its delusion, since even the very rich are now more likely to earn their money from employment than from capital, and thus find it easier to think of themselves basically as working stiffs. As cultural consumers they are careful to look down their noses at nothing except country music. All manner of low-class fare—rap, telenovelas, Waffle House—is embraced by what Shamus Rahman Khan calls the “omnivorous pluralism” of our elite. “It is as if the new elite are saying, ‘Look! We are not some exclusive club. If anything, we are the most democratized of all groups.’”

Khan’s Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School is a fascinating document, because he seems to have been genuinely surprised by what he found when he returned to his old boarding school to teach for a year. Khan, the grandson of Irish and Pakistani peasants, worked his way to a Columbia University professorship in sociology via St. Paul’s and Haverford College. So he thought he knew meritocrats—but today’s breed gave him a bit of a fright. For one thing, they proved to be excellent haters. Consider how they talk about a legacy student whose background can be inferred from the pseudonym Khan gives him, “Chase Abbott”:

After seeing me chatting with Chase, a boy I was close with, Peter, expressed what many others would time and again: “that guy would never be here if it weren’t for his family.… I don’t get why the school still does that. He doesn’t bring anything to this place.” Peter seemed annoyed with me for even talking with Chase. Knowing that I was at St. Paul’s to make sense of the school, Peter made sure to point out to me that Chase didn’t really belong there.… Faculty, too, openly lamented the presence of students like Chase.

“Openly lamented”! Poor Chase. This hatred is out of all proportion to the power still held by the Chases of the school, which is almost nil. Khan discovers that the few legacy WASPs live together in a sequestered dorm, just like the “minority dorm” of his own schooldays, and even the alumni “point to students like Chase as examples of what is wrong about St. Paul’s.” No, the hatred of students like Chase feels more like the resentment born of having noticed an unwelcome resemblance. It is somehow unsurprising to learn that Peter’s parents met at Harvard.

Of course, Peter is not at St. Paul’s because his parents went to Harvard; as he makes clear to Khan, he is there because of his hard work and academic achievement. Here we have the meritocratic delusion most in need of smashing: the notion that the people who make up our elite are especially smart. They are not—and I do not mean that in the feel-good democratic sense that we are all smart in our own ways, the homely-wise farmer no less than the scholar. I mean that the majority of meritocrats are, on their own chosen scale of intelligence, pretty dumb. Grade inflation first hit the Ivies in the late 1960s for a reason. Yale professor David Gelernter has noticed it in his students: “My students today are…so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are.… t’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the twentieth century—just sees a fog. A blank.” Camille Paglia once assigned the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” to an English seminar, only to discover to her horror that “of a class of twenty-five students, only two seemed to recognize the name ‘Moses’.… They did not know who he was.”

Once again, Khan uncovers the clue to this phenomenon by letting his St. Paul’s students speak for themselves:

“I don’t actually know much,” an alumnus told me after he finished his freshman year at Harvard. “I mean, well, I don’t know how to put it. When I’m in classes all these kids next to me know a lot more than I do. Like about what actually happened in the Civil War. Or what France did in World War II. I don’t know any of that stuff. But I know something they don’t. It’s not facts or anything. It’s how to think. That’s what I learned in humanities.”

“What do you mean, ‘how to think’?” I asked.

“I mean, I learned how to think bigger. Like, everyone else at Harvard knew about the Civil War. I didn’t. But I knew how to make sense of what they knew about the Civil War and apply it. So they knew a lot about particular things. I knew how to think about everything.”

“How to think bigger” is indeed a fine quality for a governing class to have, but this young man was cheated if his teachers tried to cultivate it as a skill in isolation and not via the discipline of learning “particular things.” It was the meritocratic ideology that paved this road to ignorance. Being open to all comers, with intelligence the only criterion, meant that no particular body of knowledge could be made mandatory at an institution like St. Paul’s, lest it arbitrarily exclude students conversant only with their own traditions. This has predictably yielded a generation of students who have no body of knowledge at all—not even “like about what actually happened in the Civil War.”

Unlike meritocracies, aristocracies can put actual content into their curricula—not just academically, but morally. Every aristocracy has an ethos, and a good ethos will balance out the moral faults to which that aristocracy is prone. The upper-class WASPs who constituted “the Establishment” in twentieth-century America were very rich; so they instilled in their children a Puritan asceticism. The Whig grandees of eighteenth-century Britain, who were the opposite of ascetic, cultivated a spirit of usefulness to check their tendency toward idleness. The besetting sin of the current elite seems to be arrogance, both moral and intellectual, with humorlessness a close second. To address the first, their acculturating institutions might try putting greater emphasis on humility—and they may find that learning how to laugh at themselves is one way this virtue can be acquired.

There is a wonderfully sad anecdote about Kingman Brewster, the man who as president of Yale did more than any other individual to create the modern meritocracy. In his first portentous strike at the WASP elite that reared him, he turned down his Skull and Bones tap on anti-elitist grounds. He then hopped on his bicycle and rushed to boast of his principled stand to A. Whitney Griswold, his ultra-WASPy but reform-minded mentor, whom he would succeed as Yale president two decades later. Far from being impressed, Griswold was not even home to receive him—he was across town at his own secret society, Wolf’s Head, for its Tap Night ceremonies. The poignancy of this story lies in the realization that, for all his Mayflower pedigree, Brewster really did not understand at all the class he would destroy. In retrospect, it seems likely that Brewster could have achieved all he desired—a more diverse student body, a more rigorous academic curriculum, a more liberal general atmosphere—by building upon the existing virtues of Old Yale, its sense of public duty and fair play. Unfortunately, he was blind to these virtues. So he did the only thing contempt can do: He destroyed.

The task of reforming our present elite ought to be entrusted to someone with a feeling for what is good in it. For all its flaws, this elite does have many virtues. Its moral seriousness contrasts favorably with the frivolousness of certain earlier generations, and its sense of pragmatism, which can sometimes be reductive, can also be admirably brisk and hard-nosed. What is needed is someone who can summon a picture of the meritocratic elite’s best selves and call others to meet the example. But this process can begin only when this new ruling class finally owns up to the only name for what it already undeniably is.

Hierarchy (and aristocracy) is inevitable. But our elites have deluded themselves into thinking they're not an aristocracy, which renders self-reflection and improvement almost impossible.

 

[Legacy]

Is Donald Trump A Modern-Day George Wallace?

Donald Trump's enduring appeal in the Republican presidential contest has the GOP in a quandary, as it's forced to contend with voters fed up with party politics.

Some 50 years ago, another vociferous candidate put the scare in traditional power brokers. George Wallace fired up crowds with a similar anti-establishment message, and drew protests as passionate as are being seen at Trump's rallies today. Wallace also became a face of racial tension in America as the leading symbol for segregation in the 1960s.

When Wallace entered presidential politics in 1964, the then-Alabama governor was famous for declaring, "Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. And segregation forever."

Wallace allies and family see parallels today in Trump.

"It's just a replay," Charlie Snider, one of Wallace's most trusted political aides, told NPR. "We're looking at a modern-day George Wallace."

Snider is a Trump supporter. Wallace's daughter, a Democrat, hears it, too, but in a different way.

"Trump and my father say out loud what people are thinking but don't have the courage to say," Peggy Wallace Kennedy told NPR. Wallace Kennedy was 18 when she was on the campaign trail with her father in 1968. She believes Trump is exploiting voters' worst instincts, the way her late father once did.

"They both were able to adopt the notion that fear and hate are the two greatest motivators of voters that feel alienated from government," she said.

Tapping a vein of resentment

Wallace — the Southern populist and former Golden Gloves boxing champ — burst onto the national stage, tapping into a vein of resentment over the social upheaval of the day — namely new civil-rights laws.

In 1968, running as a third-party candidate, he drew large crowds to ever-more raucous rallies.

"We want Wallace! We want Wallace!" supporters would chant, as he took the stage at elaborate rallies that typically featured live country music acts.

Tens of thousands turned out in major Northeastern cities like Boston and New York. Wallace's racial rhetoric on this national stage was more coded. He berated both the federal government and the national political parties for being out of touch with average Americans.

"I want to tell these national parties this — they're going to find out there are a lot of rednecks come Nov. 5th in this country," Wallace said to a shouting crowd in 1968. "They've been used as a doormat long enough."

It was "doormats" in the '60s. Today, a "dumping ground."

"The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems," Trump declared when he announced he was running for president.

Snider, now 84, was chairman of two of Wallace's four presidential campaigns. Snider has been watching this year's race with great interest.

"George didn't have the party for him," he said. "He didn't have the hierarchy for him. He didn't have the major contributors for him. But he had the people for him. And that's exactly what's happening today with Donald Trump."

Winning the Deep South

Wallace shocked political pundits by winning nearly 10 million popular votes in the 1968 general election. He carried five states, sweeping most of the Deep South — Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and his home state of Alabama.

As the American Independent Party candidate, he won 46 electoral votes, the last third-party presidential candidate to win any electoral votes.

Wallace ran as a Democrat in 1972 and again in 1976. (During the '72 campaign, he was shot and wounded in an assassination attempt that left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair.)

Snider said watching the protesters at Trump rallies today reminds him of being on the campaign trail with Wallace. In an era of anti-war and civil-rights activism, there were always protesters in the audience.

"George kinda liked that 'cause he would badger with them," Snider said.

He said Wallace would make fun of men with long hair — or joke about them wearing sandals in the cold weather. "He kindly enjoyed it," Snider said.

He toys with a shouting man who has long hair. "I love you, too, I sure do," Wallace coos. "Oh, I thought you were a she. You're a he. Oh, my goodness."

In another scene, he shouts, "Why don't you young punks get out of the auditorium?" as the crowd jeers at demonstrators.

In this year's Republican race, Trump has made throwing out disruptive hecklers part of his stump.

"Ready? Are you ready?" he asked a crowd in Iowa City, Iowa. His supporters cheered wildly. "Get 'em outta here! Get the hell outta here!" Trump yelled, as security guards took away the protesters.

Trump is no racial segregationist, but there has been race-based controversy

While their combative styles mirror one another, Trump is no racial segregationist.

Wallace drew voters alarmed at eroding white privilege. Trump draws voters worried about the erosion of blue-collar jobs and competition from immigrant labor.

But Trump has also become embroiled in controversy over race. In his announcement speech, he said undocumented Mexican immigration was bringing drugs and "rapists." And he has called for a temporary ban on noncitizen Muslims entering the U.S. Those have become lightning rods in much the way Wallace's positions did in the 1960s....

 

[BobD]

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/18188866" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[pkt77242]

Steve King creates uproar with salute to contributions of white people

 

[NDgradstudent]

Steve King creates uproar with salute to contributions of white people

What have white people ever done for us?!

 

[zelezo vlk]

Steve King creates uproar with salute to contributions of white people

That entire article makes me sad. What King said and especially the person who brought up Hitler and Stalin.

 

[woolybug25]

What have white people ever done for us?!

yeah... What were those lazy black people doing at that time!?

Oh... wait...

 

[zelezo vlk]

yeah... What were those lazy black people doing at that time!?

Oh... wait...

 

[NDgradstudent]

yeah... What were those lazy black people doing at that time!?

Oh... wait...

Some of them were doing this.

 

[zelezo vlk]

Some of them were doing this.

C'mon man, this isn't a "tit for tat" balance sheet where one atrocity can cancel out another. Yes, the massacre was terrible, but so was chattel slavery. It's one thing to defend Western civilization, but it's another to play into Wooly's game and bring up the killing of white men by black men as an answer to the calls of "but slavery".

 

[Ultimate Penn St. Hater]

Rudy's speaking now. I have a hard time listening to him knowing that his first (of 3) wife was his second cousin.