A Review of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, Part I

Patrick Deneen's new book, Why Liberalism Failed, has caused a bit of a stir, largely because it implicates thinking of those on both sides of the political spectrum on the problem of what is wrong with our culture. It won't make those who call themselves conservatives happy and it won't make those who call themselves liberals happy either. And the reason for this is that conservatism—at that strain of conservatism that fashions itself "libertarian"--shares the same basic assumption as the liberals.

The difference between liberals and libertarians—as I have said many times—is only three or four letters.

In fact the reason I'm blogging on it now, is my recent Twitter exchange with Andrew Walker, the former Baptist ELRC director who recently left that organization to return here to Kentucky to take a position with his alma mater, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Andrew and I worked together as lobbyists several years ago, and so we know each other well. I took the opportunity of yanking his chain about a tweet with an endorsement (and link) to Paul D. Miller's "Against 'Conservative Democracy'," an article which was remarkable largely for its lack of insightfulness. I see he has since redeemed himself by tweeting a link to the far more insightful thinker, the British philosopher Roger Scruton, even though what Scruton says and what Miller says are quite different, if not completely inconsistent.

Anyway, it prompted me to ahead and start on Deneen's book, which I will be reviewing in several posts over the next week or so.

Deneen takes an admittedly hard line against our twin liberalisms, one espoused by Democratic progressives and the other espoused by people who call themselves conservatives but whose thought bears little similarity to the thought of Edmund Burke and T. S. Eliot, the thinkers between whom Russell Kirk sandwiched the history of conservatism in what remains the greatest book about conservatism yet written: The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot. Most people who call themselves conservatives in the United States, in fact, are no different in their fundamental assumptions about politics--a prominent theme of Deneen's book. 

The central tenet of the book is that liberalism is immolating itself in the flame of "freedom" and more liberalism will just feed the fire. The problems with liberalism are inherent in its very nature, and cannot therefore be solved by anything within liberalism. "Liberalism," he says, "has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself." The "ruins it has produced are the signs of its very success."

The aspect of this book that I suspect will be most suspect—at least among conservatives—is the implications of his analysis for America itself. America "is the first nation founded by the explicit embrace of liberal philosophy, whose citizenry is shaped almost entirely by its commitment and vision."

According to Deneen, what we are seeing now in what all sides of the political spectrum recognize as, if not a crisis, at least a problem, is the breakdown of an ideology, and the kind of breakdown common to all ideologies:

Among the few iron laws of politics, few seem more unbreakable than the ultimate unsustainability of ideology in politics. Ideology fails for two reasons—first, because it is based on a falsehood about human nature, and hence can't help but fail; and second, because as those falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the live experience of human beings under its domain until the regime loses legitimacy.

Deneen argues that this is indeed what is happening: Liberalism is based on a false view of human nature and now in a crisis of confidence in politics, economics, education, and science and technology.

We'll talk about how in the next post.

Suffice it to say for now that the book is about not just the failure of liberalism and the inevitability of that failure, but also about the nature of true conservatism.

Why is America Divided? Are contemporary political debates really more divisive?

My newest post at Intellectual Takeout:

In one sense political divisiveness has always been with us. The United States was birthed in political animosity ... 

... So why do we think the divisiveness of modern politics is so historically unique? How can some people say that the debates of our own time are worse than those which not infrequently consummated in two men firing pistols at each other? 

Is there some sense in which contemporary political debates are divisive in a way the older ones were not? How exactly does the attack on Fox News host Tucker Carlson's home differ from a duel?

Read the rest here.

Lexington mayor issues open invitation to every crazed White supremacist in the country. Bad idea. #Racism #

From my article at Intellectual Takeout yesterday:

Okay, so the last time someone took down a Confederate monument, hundreds of racists showed up and precipitated a violent class with anti-racist demonstrators some of whom unwisely brought weapons themselves. The result was someone dying. 

Now you're the major of an arguably Southern town, and what do you do? You announce to the country that you're going to take down a Confederate monument. 

Yeah. That'll calm everybody down.

Read the rest here.

Liberal standards that only non-liberals must follow

At the Atlantic magazine Jonathan Merritt condemns the recent statement from Intervarsity Christian Fellowship that its employees must adhere to traditional Christian teachings on marriage. He imagines all the bad things that could happen under such a policy, such as that people who work for them would have to, well, adhere to traditional teaching on marriage.

Imagine. An institution requiring people to adhere to its purpose.

Once again we have liberals who want to hold others to standards they themselves refuse to adhere to. Liberal institutions routinely reject people for employment who hold conservative views. Go try applying for a job at at your local college's "women and gender studies" department and tell them of your traditional views on sexuality and see how far you get. Go try applying at Planned Parenthood and divulging that you are pro-life and see what kind of reception you receive.

And, of course, the Atlantic itself is so tolerant and diverse. Surely they would not exclude writers who, say, take a traditional view of marriage. Why there's ..., er, well, the writer, uh... Hmmm. Come now that I think about it, they don't have any writers who take that position.

Physician, heal thyself.

The End of the Liberal Tradition?

As even liberals are now abandoning their own cherished principles of tolerance and diversity under the very guise of implementing them, it's not like there's anyone anymore who thinks Francis Fukuyama was right when, in his "End of History," when he said that we were approaching the liberal utopia where we would all live in peace and prosperity under a tolerant secular regime.

Still, it's interesting to read about the demise of liberal utopianism in places like First Things magazine where Mark Movsesian writes, in his article, "The End of the Liberal Tradition":

In fact, a fascinating new paper in The Journal of Democracy suggests that liberal democracy is losing ground even at home, in the West. Political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk review data from recent World Values Surveys and observe some truly remarkable trends, especially among young people. Young people often reject the traditions of their elders; that’s nothing new. What they seem to be rejecting nowadays, though, in increasing numbers, is the tradition of liberalism itself.

Read more here.

Elitism in Democratic Drag: Why liberals opposed BREXIT

I was out of town when the British thumbed their noses at the EU and much of their own government by voting to leave the European Union. I walked back to my hotel room from the convention I was at and turned on CNN, where commentator after commentator declared that BREXIT was the end of British civilization as we know it, and that, in general the sky was falling and we're all going to die.

The curious thing about all the hand-ringing is that it was accompanied by virtually no explanation as to why, exactly, BREXIT was bad for Britain or anyone else. I watched for a full two hours and didn't hear a single reason why this was such a disaster, other than that it was upsetting to liberals. There may very well be a downside, but you wouldn't have been able to actually detect it in any of the apocalyptic rhetoric coming from the media.

In fact, for some of us, large numbers of upset liberals is itself a good sign. 

Why did liberals oppose BREXIT? This question is of course related to the question of why liberals like the EU so much in the first place. 

The reason liberals opposed BREXIT (and like the EU) is that liberals are elitist. Despite all the rhetoric about democracy and egalitarianism, liberals are fundamentally and philosophically opposed to both.

What inclusion in the EU means for the common person is that he will have important decisions made for him by faceless bureaucrats in Brussels, the capital of the EU. 

It is a maxim of organizational political dynamics that the bigger the bureaucracy, the more liberal is its leadership. Exhibits A and B: the EU, the UN. Elite bureaucracies are always more liberal than the people.

In addition, having a governing system in which decisions are made by anonymous people in faraway places means never having to say you're sorry. And to be a liberal leader in a member country puts you in the position, when you are criticized for some absurd liberal policy imposed on you by the technocratic elites in Belgium's capital city, to be able to simply shrug your shoulders and say, "I'm sorry, but we have no choice but to comply because we're EU members."

Most liberal policies would never see the light of day if liberals had to depend upon the ordinary processes of an even vaguely democratic government. The only way most of them can ever succeed in being implemented is if they are forced on the public by institutions that are unaccountable to the people.

This is how here in the United States we got abortion-on-demand, same-sex marriage, and now transgender bathrooms. Only rarely are these kinds of policies the result of the democratic process. They are almost exclusively the product of some unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic or judicial elite. And that's how we get trade deals that enrich trans-national corporations and line the pockets of people like Hillary Clinton while putting middle class Americans out of work.

Like all elite institutions, the EU is peopled by "progressives," the Anointed Ones, who know better than the rest of us how we should live our lives. 

And that's the way liberals want to keep it. That's why they are in favor of the Supreme Court in the United States being able to rewrite the U. S. Constitution on a whim without going through the constitutionally appointed process of amending it. It's why they want the bureaucracy in Washington to be able to issue proclamations that have no grounding in any law passed by Congress. It's why they like the UN.

And it's why they opposed BREXIT. 

Have liberals educated themselves out of thinking straight?

S. M. Hutchins, on the Intelligence of Liberals:

I have seen much evidence of high intelligence and strategic thinking among liberals.  When they give themselves as a class credit, as they always do, for superior intellect, I am bound to concur, since to become a liberal one must have the ability to be trained in overcoming, in the name of reason, the morality and common sense that are naturally present to  the human mind.  One would have difficulty making a calculating liberal of a someone who is not smart enough to be educated out of thinking straight.  

Read the rest here.

The Liberal Pose: Politics as Fashion Statement

I swear, every time I leave town, the world falls apart. Sheeez. Okay. I'm back. Can we all calm down now and be reasonable?

Just as I was leaving last week, I heard the news about the Church killings in Charleston. Now according to news reports, nine people in a Black church were killed by a crazed racist with a gun. But, after listening to the commentary on the incident, it has became apparent to me that there are some people who are under the impression that the parishioners of this Black church were killed, not with a gun, but with a Confederate flag, although I have yet to hear anyone explain exactly how Dylann Roof could have killed nine people with a large red and blue piece of cloth.

If you trace the reasoning back from consequent to ground, it seems clear that these people believe that, had these flags not been available, these deaths would not have happened. And further deaths, this implicit logic would seem to suggest, will be prevented if we will remove these flags.

Of course, this is just the usual routine we all have to go through every time there is a high profile crime committed in this country--particularly if it has anything to with race or gender (or purported gender).

Every crime that is committed now must, if possible, be universalized and fitted into some pre-existing narrative framework of oppression--that of widespread racism, or anti-gay oppression, or latent hostility toward women. These are categories into which, if at all possible, we must fit every violent event.

And not only must it fit into the narrative of oppression, it must be seen as a crisis. Any particular act is not just a particular act: It is always an instance of some larger conspiracy of Intolerance against the oppressed group of the week. If a White person performs an act of violence against a Black person it is never an isolated act (whereas if it is Black on White violence, it is, of course, an isolated incident).

Liberals don't want good race relations. It is in their interest to fan racial tensions as often as possible. Black leaders like Al Sharpton can't have much to say about Rachel Dolezal, the head of the NAACP. While she is not in fact Black, she shares with Sharpton and his ilk the fact that she is a professional Black--someone who strikes the oppressed Black pose. They're in the same business.

The criminals themselves love this. They know their cause will be front and center on the evening news. When Dylann Roof was shooting members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, he intentionally left one survivor, telling her that he wanted her to live because "we need someone to survive," presumably so she could tell others what happened.

Liberal politicians love it too. They can line up at microphones and strike the liberal pose, pretending to be at the forefront of the War on Racism to which they attribute all the violence is our society.

It's not difficult at all.

Why I would be less bothered by a new mosque in my community than a new state college

The conservatives who are so worried about the threat of Islam should look a little closer to home for the real enemies.

If you asked most conservatives to identify the greatest threat to America, they will inevitably point outside the United States, usually to ISIS. Undoubtedly ISIS is a threat, and could some day actually affect the U.S., which it doesn't seem to be able to do right now.

And then there is always the lurking suspicion of Muslims in the United States who, almost without exception, mind their own business and don't bother anyone.

It is hard to figure out why liberals are so indulgent toward Muslims. My theory is that it is easy for liberals to be magnanimous toward Muslims. Unlike Christians, there are not a lot of them. And because of their low representation in the population they don't affect the culture much. In the United States, they're pretty harmless.

Christians are dangerous because they are still culturally influential. That's why Muslims are tolerated and Christians aren't.

But this inordinate fear of Islam is rife among rank and file conservatives. How many times have you heard someone say they believe Obama is a Muslim? Every time I hear a friend say this my response is the same: "We would be a lot better off if Obama were a Muslim. Think about it: He would be pro-life, against gay 'marriage,' and impatient if not condemning of the mindless egalitarianism he and his liberal friends are using to destroy the culture. No Muslim would take the positions Obama takes on issues of cultural significance.

And this brings me to my main point, which is this: We have a lot less to fear from Muslims from faraway places than we do from liberals right here at home.

It isn't Muslims who are destroying American culture: It is liberals who are destroying American culture, which leads me to a corollary observation: The average conservative American has far more in common with the average Muslim than he does with the liberal anchor of the news program he watches every night, or with the liberal professor at the university down the road, or with the liberal bureaucrats who run our government, or with the drug-riddled, serially monogamous, animal rights activist celebrity who appears on his television set every night. 

In fact, one uncomfortable fact we don't want to face is that many of the excuses used by radical Muslim groups to oppose the United States are perfectly valid. We hear all about how how Arab Muslims are upset with the United States because of our over-involvement in their internal affairs. But that is not the main reason America is hated overseas by so many people—Muslims and non-Muslims.

When I hear people talk about "exporting democracy" to other countries, I just laugh. Is that really what we export to the world? Here's what we export to the world: pornography and rap music written by misogynist thugs. And then we give them lectures on how to treat women!

If you are a person in a traditional community living in a foreign country and you saw the garbage America was sending into your country, how would you feel? The world—and the underdeveloped world in particular—has become the cultural trash dump for America.

This is not a justification for the violence perpetrated on Americans. If Americans are killed, we should go after the perpetrators and destroy them. But it sure does make it a lot harder to occupy the moral high ground when you are giving these people legitimate reasons to stir people up.

The only thing saving us from being hated worse than Isis is that Isis cuts peoples heads off and enslaves women and doesn't apologize for it. Fortunately most people think that's worse than self-righteous Americans who simply corrupt their culture and pretend they're doing them a favor.

I mentioned to a friend the other day, after having seen a very large new mosque just outside of Toledo, Ohio, that I would be less bothered by a new mosque moving into my town than by a new state college. Even if the mosque contained Islamic radicals, it could not come close to matching the cultural destruction perpetrated by the class of people occupying academia who seem determined to destroy the very beliefs, traditions and customs that have always held our society together.

I'm less concerned about what Hillary Clinton let Al Qaeda radicals do to Americans in Libya than I am about what Hillary Clinton would do to America from the Oval Office.

Go watch a Muslim wearing a burkha, bowing down and peacefully saying his morning prayers. Then go watch a man in a gay pride parade, in dark leather and metal spikes (before the police crack down on him for public lewdness). And then ask which thing bodes most ill for American culture.

Are you more disturbed to know someone is shouting "Allah Akbar" 5,500 miles away, or someone saying "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go!" a half an hour down the road?

The barbarians aren't at the gate. They're inside the gate pretending to manage the defenses.

Rolling Stone Magazine's Credibility, RIP

Another media narrative bites the dust: The Atlantic pronounces Last Rites over Rolling Stone magazine's credibility, after the magazine not only completely ignored basic rules of journalism in its bogus story of fraternity rape at UVA, but refuses to acknowledge that something is seriously wrong at the magazine:

Despite the high-profile scandal caused by "Rape on Campus," Rolling Stone insisted after the report's publication that the errors did not result from systematic error, and thus would require no change to operating procedure. The magazine also announced that Erdely, Dana, Woods, and other personnel responsible for the article would not be fired. Dana also said that the story would have not have broader consequences for media coverage of rape.

Read more here.

Ann Coulter: "Every single cause championed by liberals is based on a fake story"

Ann Coulter on the liberal's new anti-religious freedom crusade:

Having won the war on gay marriage (by judicial fiat), now some liberal zealots insist on going house-to-house and shooting the survivors. They seem to seek out Christian businesses to provide floral arrangements and cakes for gay weddings so they can call the cops if the Christians try to pass. 

A roomful of gays would say, "Why don't you guys just go to one of the nine out of 10 florists who would be happy to have your business?" (My guess is, if the zealots looked really hard, they might even be able to find a gay florist!)  

That is all the religious freedom laws do: Encourage steely-eyed activists to stop requiring every last Christian to celebrate gay marriages. 

...Do not assume that because liberals are in an absolute panic over Indiana's law, they must have a point. To the contrary, the more hysterical they are, the more you should assume the whole story is a sham.

Read more here.

Yuval Levin: How today's so-called "conservatives" think like liberals

I have said more than once that we are all liberals now―either what Allan Bloom called left-wing liberals or right-wing liberals. As much as modern conservatives think they are different from the people who call themselves liberals (at least in America), they are really using the same basic philosophical playbook, which consists of worshiping the abstract rights of the choosing individual.

Every pimp and drug dealer, if he knows little else, knows at least this: "I got my rights."

For liberals this means expanding government to protect the rights of atomistic individuals; for so-called conservatives, this means contracting it. They come to different conclusions, but they use the same basic premises. They are two sides of the same coin.

If you are a conservative who is confused about what it is to be a conservative (which is most conservatives today)―or a liberal who wonders why you believe what you believe, then you need to read Yuval Levin's new article in First Things magazine: "Taking the Long Way," one of the most cogent and insightful recent essays on what it is to be a conservative--and a liberal progressive.

A sample:

For many decades now, America’s political life has been divided between people who call themselves “conservatives” and people who call themselves “liberals” or “progressives.” This suggests that Americans are moved to conserve the good we have and to champion liberty and progress, which might make us better still. These are noble aspirations. But unfortunately, the left and right alike seem confused about what liberty and progress really mean and require. Our ­conservative party is confused about what it should conserve and our liberal or progressive party is confused about what it should advance. The two are not misguided in exactly the same way, but both tend toward radically deficient visions of the life of a liberal society.

Read the rest here. It is behind a firewall, but you can buy the article online for $1.99. It will be the best two dollars you ever spent.

Kalb Speaks: What do traditionalists and progressives really disagree about?

James Kalb, author of two excellent books of political and cultural analysis―The Tyranny of Liberalism and Against Inclusiveness―is one of those rare people who can tell you why people think the way they do. He has another excellent essay on the divide between traditionalists and progressives in the always excellent Crisis Magazine:

A recent account of moral sentiments, proposed by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), has attracted attention for its explanation of the difference between progressives and traditionalists.

According to the account, moral judgments typically have to do with six dimensions of concern: care versus harm, fairness versus cheating, liberty versus oppression, loyalty versus betrayal, authority versus subversion, and sanctity versus degradation. Surveys show that progressives, by and large, are concerned with the care, fairness, and liberty dimensions, while traditionalists are concerned with all six. So it appears that the “culture wars” have to do with the moral status of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Traditionally minded people accept them as morally important, while their more progressive fellows do not.

But why the difference? It appears, although Haidt’s concerns lie elsewhere, that the difference lines up with the opposition between the modern tendency to view man as radically free and the world as technological, and the traditional, classical, and religious view of man as social, and the world as pervaded by intrinsic meanings, natural ways of functioning, and natural ends.

Read more here.

Fairy Tale Economics: The minimum wage debate another example of why it's so easy to be a liberal

While the rest of the world is celebrating May Day by Morris dancing, or crowning a May Queen, or enjoying a bank holiday, or recovering from Walpurgis Night, Democrats here in America are celebrating it as International Workers Day, an international socialist holiday.

And that's only appropriate. The minimum wage issue is a paradigm case of the liberal mindset on policy issues. It is a case study showing the key features of the liberal worldview:

• Good intentions count for everything
• The mere passing of well-intentioned legislation is sufficient to discharge one's obligations as a statesman
• Disagreement with liberal policy positions is evidence of evil intentions and bad faith and is sufficient to prove the moral evil of the person disagreeing

It is also an example of how easy it is to be a liberal.

Liberalism is the political path of least resistance. It is the position that requires the least critical thought because it does not require you to ask hard questions about your policy stance. It merely requires a pledge of good faith.

In the case of the minimum wage, the only thing you need think about is that workers at the bottom of the economic ladder will get paid more. Period. Stop there. No more questions are to be asked. You simply declare that you are in favor of workers making more money.

The problems with this position are not evident until a step or two into the economic thought process, a thought process that is never pursued because it would make the good intentions problematic.

And because the consideration of minimum wage laws never extends beyond the intention of helping workers to the reality of their actual effect, it never has to be considered.

The actual effect, of course, is that many workers--many of them new to the job market or trying to find their first job--will either lose their jobs or be faced with fewer job opportunities.

The extent of this effect is subject to debate, but the actuality of it is not. And those who attempt to deny it (the discussion never really gets to that point because this effect is seldom argued against and is more often simply ignored) should simply be asked, "Why are you settling for setting the minimum wage at $10.10 per hour?" "Wouldn't workers benefit more by raising it higher?"

In Seattle there is a movement to raise the minimum wage to $15.00 per hour--a proposal that is garnering the opposition of even politically liberal businessmen to whom good intentions are all-of-a-sudden not enough. Recent immigrants who run businesses in the city are particularly upset by the prospect, since their profit margins are lower than most other small businesses.

But what is the problem with $15 an hour? Why not $20? Why not $25? Why not $50? Would the person opposing such proposals be opposed to the well-being of workers in the same way they are characterized by minimum wage supporters as being in the case of the $10.10 legislation?

The problem, of course, is that such legislation would throw a lot of people out of work--something the $10.10 minimum wage would do as well, just not quite as much.

This is an election year political move, of course, of the kind both parties engage in when the prospect of facing the voters draw nigh. But that fact doesn't make it any less odious.

Why liberals need racism to continue

Liberals need racism. And they need it—or the perception of it—to continue. If it were to go away, a good part of their very reason for existence would disappear.

That is why they reach for any little scrap of evidence that it is still rampant in our society—so that we are all assured that we still need liberals—if, for no other reason, than that they are the only ones with the sophisticated racism detectors that can detect the slightest hint of the deep-seated racism that is still rampant.

This is why, whenever Billy Jo Bob, his brothers, and his loser friends have a little too much Wild Turkey and decide in a less than sober moment to form a chapter of the KKK in some Kentucky town that doesn't even show up on a map, the Courier-Journal runs a front page story on the "Return of the Klan," with a large picture of six hungover guys with pot bellies wearing sheets they took from momma's closet that morning.

Or check out the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of hate groups, which they use to hate on legitimate conservative groups like the Family Research Council on the sole reason that they oppose same-sex marriage. If you go on their website and check out some of the many "hate groups" they list, you will find that many of them are completely inactive—or they're run by Billy Jo Bob and his other brother, Billy Jo Bob.

Now there I go using all kinds of stereotypes of country people. But that doesn't count as anti-Ruralism because liberal journalists don't seem to think too highly of country people (they're probably just racist anyway) and so their intolerance detectors don't pick it up. In fact, it's an open question whether they run such stories as the one above just because it furthers the stereotype that country people are racists.

Maybe I'll spend 832 words writing about such outrages the next time I hear a liberals calling into a radio program calling someone a "rube."

On the other hand maybe I won't—largely because it would be a completely illegitimate inference. There are very few conservative groups in the Indignation Industry that I could go around and quote in order to smear a conservative radio talk show host whose beliefs I don't like.

But that didn't stop Joe Gerth from attempting a silly hit job on Leland Conway, whose new show on WHAS received a call from someone named "Gary" who called President Obama a name which may or may not have been racial in nature and who Conway cut off in short order anyway.

Conway (like almost every other talk show host in existence) just cut the call short and went on with his show. So Gerth went around interviewing other, like-minded liberals (you know, the ones who pride themselves on independent thought) on whether Conway should have openly condemned the man after the call.

But (not even recognizing the remark as racist) Conway didn't, and this amounted to an incident of racism that called forth from the vasty deep of Gerth's racial indignation a column of some 832 words arguing that Conway was racially insensitive.

This, the reader was given to understand, was further evidence of the specter of racism which all of us ought to be thinking about all the time, except when we're thinking about the bliss of same-sex marriage and the glories of public school teachers' unions and desirability of big government.

No, this one caller on one conservative talk show is a sign of the end of Western civilization as we know it.

Oh, wait a minute, I forgot: Modern liberals don't like Western civilization as we know it. It's racist and sexist and isn't worth teaching in our schools, which is why they mostly don't do it anymore.

So never mind about that.

Gerth thinks this is another example of the coarsening of political discourse, pointing as his sole example to a rude remark by a Republican congressman. Liberals, as we all know, are so high-minded that they would never, EVER use course words about conservatives.

Gerth writes for a paper that regularly runs pieces that either propagate or pass on hate speech in the form of anti-religious bigotry. But there are only certain groups on the liberals' list of specially protected groups and religious people just don't make the cut.

It is a measure of just  how desparate liberals are becoming in their crusade to keep racial politics alive and thriving (and in the process contribute to the very coarsening of politics that they lament) that they have to resort to something so insignificant as this.

A test for Joe Gerth: Is the CJ accepting money from a racist radio show?

The Louisville Courier-Journal is willing to smear a conservative radio talk show host by asserting that his actions were racially insensitive, but it is perfectly willing to accept money from the company that airs and promotes his show!

The Courier-Journal today ran an op-ed by Joe Gerth lamenting that someone named "Gary" called into the Leland Conway Show on WHAS and used what Gerth thought was a racial slur in reference to President Obama, after which point Conway quickly dispatched the caller and went on with his show, but didn't explicitly condemn the caller's (debatably) racist remark.

This, according to Gerth--that one caller called into a conservative talk show and used what might have been (but wasn't necessarily) a racial reference and who was basically cut off anyway--is evidence not only of continuing racism in larger society and a coarsening of political rhetoric, but of Conway's own racial insensitivity.

Seriously? This must be the first time Gerth ever listened to a radio talk show, since strange people call in all the time and say insensitive things and are cut off by hosts who just go on with the show.

But to Gerth, it was a racial incident calling for condemnation of Conway and his show.

But here's the funny thing: Take a look at the screen shot below. Notice anything interesting? Above the very article in which Conway's show is condemned is an advertisement for Conway's show!

This is priceless. If Conway's show is insensitive on racial issues, then why is the CJ accepting advertising money from it—to advertise the very show its writer condemns as racially insensitive?

Joe, are you going to call on your employer to cut its ties to WHAS and its advertising money?

The Redcoats are Coming: Queen reasserts British rule, citing government shutdown

Okay. We've really stepped in it now. But at least liberals will be happy, they've been praising constitutional monarchies for years:

In light of your immediate failure to financially manage yourselves and also in recent years your tendency to elect incompetent Presidents of the USA and therefore not able to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately. (You should look up 'revocation' in the Oxford English Dictionary.)

We're going to have to relearn how to spell certain words like 'colour' and 'doughnut,' stop celebrating on July 4th, and drive on roundabouts. And you better start looking for good Spam recipes because the cooking's going to get a lot worse.

Read the rest here.

Kalb Speaks: How liberals are sterilizing our culture

I fly a lot and one of the things that surprises me is that, when you are waiting to board at the gate, there are certain people who get preferential treatment.

If you are an Executive Platinum member or Premier Access member or a member of Delta's SkyMiles program or U.S. Airways Silver Preferred, American Airlines AAdvantage Elite, or any number of other such programs, you get, in some airports, to go through an accelerated security check and in almost all cases, you get preferred boarding privileges.

And not only is this preferential treatment given, but it doesn't seem to bother anybody. And that is actually what surprises me even more. After all, we're all supposed to be equal now, right?

Imagine, for example, if, say, males received such preferred privileges over females. Or if Christians received them over Muslims. Or, heaven forfend, if married couples got preferred treatment over single people. There would be immediate and vocal outrage.

Why is it that preferential treatment based on wealth (which is what frequent flyers and business travelers have that others don't) is considered acceptable and other kinds of preferential treatment are not?

James Kalb answers this question in his new book Against [Inclusiveness]: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It. He explained what I see at the airport in the first two paragraphs of the book:

Liberals pick and choose their discriminations. Financial, bureaucratic, and academic distinctions are acceptable, while natural and traditional ones are not. You can choose a Yale man over a Harvard man--the schools are a bit different, so their products may differ--but not a Yale man over a Yale woman. Engineers can earn more than janitors, and Chinese-Americans than the Scoth-Irish, but if schools discipline blacks more than whites, that is a gap that must be closed. 

The idea, it seems, is that there is something odd and irrelevant about distinctions such as sex, family, kinship, culture, and religion that makes it wrong for them to have material consequences, unless the consequences disrupt the effect of such distinctions in general. People seem to think the principle is obvious, so it is never explained, but the idea seems to be that the informal social hierarchies and the traditional patterns of conduct and belief that related to them have no legitimate functions. We should, it appears, carry on our lives exclusively through relationships that are either strictly private and idiosyncratic or contractual and bureaucratic.

Kalb has the great gift of making sense out of the seemingly senseless. In The Tyranny of Liberalism and in this new book, he roots to the root liberal assumptions that govern their beliefs and behavior. He is a cultural anthropologist, a Margaret Mead--only with liberals instead of Samoans. Oh, and unlike Mead, he's actually right about the subjects he studies.

Read more here.

Kalb Speaks: "Out of the Antiworld"

From James Kalb's new article in Modern Age:

For all the talk of diversity, today's politics are extraordinarily uniform. The West lives under a single political regime, managerial liberalism, that combines an emphasis on individual choice and democratic values with domination of social life by experts, functionaries, and commercial interests. The liberal and managerial aspects of the system seem at odds with each other, but both are basic, and together they have led to the suppression of many things that have always been fundamental to human society--religion, cultural particularity, even the distinction between the sexes. 

...Why the uniform insistence on such an odd political orthodoxy in an age that supposedly believes in freedom, diversity, and reason?

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First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes ... Hmmm

If you ever want to know what is happening to the culture and why, all you need do is consult James Kalb. Here he is on gay marriage:

Progressives had long recognized that the family was profoundly at odds with their project. The problem was what to do about something that was at once so recalcitrant and so deeply embedded in human nature. Communist regimes initially tried to do away with it, but failed because of their hurry and the crudity of their methods, and they soon gave up the effort. Liberal modernity has made much more progress, as it has in other aspects of life. Its strategy of radicalism by degrees has transformed religion more profoundly than communism ever did, cut our connection to the past more effectively, and is discovering how to control our thoughts and redefine our social relations under cover of what is thought to be freedom. 

Its mills grind slow but they grind exceeding fine. The attack on the family, less a conscious campaign than a natural consequence of liberal practices and understandings that have become ever more demanding, has proceeded in depth and on a broad front. Step by step it has chipped away at the functions, solidity, and legitimacy of the family. Divorce has been made easy, childcare professionalized, schooling extended, family meals replaced by fast food, and a combination of professional expertise and all-pervasive electronic entertainment become the universal guide and teacher. A feminism that denies all legitimate distinctions between the sexes, except those intended to counter assumed masculine privileges, has become official in government and all respectable institutions.

And here is the central insight:

What “gay marriage” does is bring the attack on the family to a new level by destroying the basis of marriage in human nature. It means that marriage is a creature not of nature or natural law or metaphysics but of what particular people want and law provides for them. It thereby puts the belief that marriage is a pure human construction at the heart of social life.

But liberalism is never permanent; it is always in a state of becoming. So what's next? Kalb knows that too:

However bad things are, they can always get worse. If marriage is a pure construction, then the family is simply a group of people who agree to associate with each other and have whatever status the law defines. If that’s so, it’s not obvious what’s special about the bond between parents and children. That too has been considered a matter of natural or metaphysical right, a view that is radically opposed to the ideal of individual choice on which liberalism is based. So why not view it instead as a creation of the state for public purposes, a sort of foster-parenting arrangement, to be administered as such in the interests of the child and the larger society?

Children's rights. Strap yourself in.