"On matters of substance, it seemed to me that the conservative Catholics in the room had more in common with serious Calvinists than with liberal members of their own Church."
This has been the case for almost fifty years; they used to call it the "ecumenism of the trenches". Missouri Synod Lutherans too. Abortion was often the immediate cause of unity.
This attitude was well described by the Canadian Roman Catholic writer Anne Roche Muggeridge, who I believe would have been much better known has she been American. Her books "The Gates of Hell" and "The Desolate City" are still well worth reading. "The Desolate City" is available very cheaply on Alibris; sadly, "The Gates of Hell" will cost you a pretty penny. My own copy of "The Gates of Hell" fell apart from having been reread so many times. However the latter book is really an updated version of the former. It's all there: the strength of the Roman Catholic Church before Vatican II (Douthat also writes about this, but gives much less detail), the hijacking of Vatican II's agenda by the liberal periti, the vandalism of church interiors (which as she points out, as *not* mandated by Vatican II)", the disastrous weakness and equivocation of Paul VI (somewhat countered by Humanae Vitae), fights with priests and bishops over new liberal catechisms and youth teaching materials. She lived long enough to see optional Latin masses restored.
Her husband John Muggeridge (son of Malcolm) taught at an Anglican private school; he must have been there just a few years before I arrived. She offered her resignation as a teacher to her bishop, but it was not accepted. Both John and Malcolm eventually converted to Roman Catholicism.
Agreed. Also includes some Catholic Churches as well. Seems to align with these Bible verses.
2 Timothy 4:3-5
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.
Anne Muggeridge was a brilliant woman who died of Alzheimer's way too soon. I read "The Desolate City" about seven years ago and it very clearly explained what the modernists were doing to the Roman Catholic Church over forty years ago. Her interview with Michael Davies is a joy to listen to and can be purchased through Triumph Communications. May both Anne and Michael rest in peace.
It's completely non - germane to the discussion, but I read recently that when Malcolm Muggeridge was in Hamburg in 1961, he ducked into a dive for a quick drink. The band which was playing was taking a break, and on his way out, he ran into the band's leader, who was intrigued by Muggeridge and wanted to chat with him a little. Supposedly, when Muggeridge and John Lennon parted company after a civilized conversation of a few minutes' length, each had, as the writer who wrote about this put it, a good understanding of one another.
This is why we cannot let Sullivan et al separate themselves from gender ideology. They are inexorably tied together. We cannot let the Overton Window slide open to approve of homosexual relations ever.
You're way too late on that (unless you are just talking Church teachings of course). But in the larger sphere of things the culture moved beyond condemning gay relationships quite some time ago, and among younger people, even self-branded conservatives that's just no big deal any more.
If you want to fight the trans stuff, fight the trans stuff. But you do need allies, and purity tests that limit you to some small and dwindling clique on the far Right will earn you nothing but defeat. Sullivan can be your ally-- as can many of the rest of us, insofar as you don't try to force us into crusades on other matters as the price. The pro-life folks need pro-life feminists and, yes, pro-life atheists, and mostly they have had the sense to know that. This movement needs gays and liberals who are not board with the fifty-two flavors and counting of gender.
No father or mother celebrates the day that their comes out of the closet. As long as that remains the case, then we have a very good chance of changing the cultural attitude. Never give up.
I would say: no "sane" father or mother. Search tick-tok if you don't believe me.....or better yet, take my word for it.
Even so, I agree with your sentiment.
I'm on my way, this afternoon to a family reunion at a cousin-in-law's house. His oldest daughter came out about 2 years ago. She's a very attractive, tall, blonde.....really attractive girl. She was always, out of about 15 grandchildren, the "apple" of the 90 year old grandparents eyes. She is recently "engaged". These folks were always right-leaning...the extended family as well. It's "pride weekend" dontcha' know?
My guess is that I won't see any rainbow flags. He has had family-reunions before, and I think that is what it really is......I hope to God...it should be interesting. The grandparents are quite befuddled.
A friend of mine who is close enough to be honorary family "came out" earlier this year after over two decades of friendship. It's not that I was necessarily surprised since I knew something was off already twenty years ago but the "out" part is tough, now that he feels like he can run around with the "community" and asks me questions like whether he should pierce his ears or take on a more effeminate affect. Damn it, this is hard. On the other hand, I feel like God asked me over 20 years ago to love him no matter what, and I do my best. This friend knows this and if he's ever going to disentangle himself from the LGBTQ+ cul... I mean, "community", it's going to be through God.
Keep praying. I know it’s difficult, but God can change your friend, if its His will, and He will give you wisdom and love to keep witnessing the truth to your friend.
Thank you. I have seen God's Hand in this friendship for a long time, and I don't think the story's "over" in any sense. That being said, I know that it's not my job to "save" him; that ultimately, he's got to make up his mind to follow God or not. I have my role to play, and for the rest, I need to trust in God.
Jon, you're more right than wrong, certainly morally, but as a matter of practical politics Sullivan's position is just nowhere. How many people on the other side are going to pull their chins and say, "You know, the letters after "B" have really gone too far, Sullivan is right"? By all means let's make Sullivan an ally. But his effectiveness as such is basically zero.
Do you have liberal or even middle of the road friends? There's a huge amount of frustration out there among such people with the trans craze. It can be mobilized as long as the cause stays the course and doesn't become a stalking horse for another agenda. The history of BLM is a cautionary example. Lots of people were initially favorable when they thought the organization was just about reining in abusive and corrupt police practices . When they learned the full radical program of the movement the group's popularity dropped like a rock in freefall. This is a classic case where Nothing In Excess applies
Sorry, Jon. That's an own goal. What white suburban liberal is going to get up on his hind legs and declare BLM what it always was, a sordid and violent swindle? They're all chicken.
Look, this is my real name, and I have to careful, but I have detailed knowledge of a family (not my wife and kids, no) that has been gutted by this horror. The matriarch has been halfway brutalized into loving Big Brother, if she's not there already.
Will Mitt Romney ever have to pay a price for marching for BLM?
Re: What white suburban liberal is going to get up on his hind legs and declare BLM what it always was, a sordid and violent swindle?
Why is that that necessary? Dropping one's support is quite sufficient. One does not need to go to the other extreme in these things. Purists find it endlessly frustrating but most people really do come down somewhere in the mushy middle, contradictions and all.
Re: Will Mitt Romney ever have to pay a price for marching for BLM?
Why is that necessary? and isn't that up to the voters of Utah-- a people not known for leftwing loonery?
Define "dropping one's support". If it means more than shutting up rather than preening you'll have made your case, and you can't. How many of these born again classical liberal stalwarts are going to show up at a school board meeting and say, you know, gosh, I kinda think putting how-to buggery manuals in the hands of second graders is, you know, like, um, wrong and stuff. Zero, again zero.
Going halfway back is only resultant in turning back around eventually leading down the same road. It’s not worth the alliance if they really aren’t interested in solving the problems.
Compromise and horse trading is utterly necessary in politics-- which is always and everywhere the art of the possible, never of the pure. If you can't accept a half loaf you will end up with no loaf.
Agreed. The battle over gay marriage, etc., is over and done and really I am fine on that. Though I identify as conservative, I think the liberation of gays, women, minorities in the last few decades has been a substantial and necessary advance of civilization. That is not true of the present extremes of same (trans ideology, CRT, etc). What this country most needs now are people who are in the middle, more centrist, from each "side" to be more assertive and reduce the extremism on each side.
Whether God regards homosexuality as a sin I don't know, I honor the Bible and think it gives us a pretty good picture of Jesus but I don't think it's inerrant. However, I am willing to let that be between the individual gay person and God. In the meantime I know gay people and am glad they are safe to be "out" (in my state, Washington, anyway).
Meantime the trans movement is actually harming the kids it indoctrinates and we all ought to join in putting a stop to that.
I disagree with your liberal premise. So I hope the center can not hold and we have revolution somewhere down the road. You may consider yourself a centrist but, to a conservative, you are the same as a leftist.
Anything that takes away from a reproductive relationship is fundamentally damaging. Encouraging kids to be gay is just as bad as encouraging kids to be trans
"Whether God regards homosexuality as a sin I don't know, I honor the Bible and think it gives us a pretty good picture of Jesus but I don't think it's inerrant."
Oh, you know. You just don't want to conform to God's will because it would make you all judgy and icky and gross.
For the rest of the class, this is what I mean in my riff this morning about learning to be illiberal in private spaces. It's not enough that Dan has his mind right about trans stuff. He needs to be made to defend his "go along, get along" attitude towards the rest of the encroaching degeneracy.
It was just yesterday that Sullivan was dismissing any concern over this tranny wickedness. He was drawing the trannies as simply clowns acting out, us straights should just get over it.
Sullivan's post pissed me off so much I almost subscribed just to yell at him. I'm so tired of gay liberals who think the current trans craze is unconnected to them. Bari Weiss is in this camp as well. I respect her greatly (far more than Andrew), but they simply can't (or refuse to) see the connection: liberalism.
Liberalism is an ideology to liberate people from unchosen constraints. The same ideology that freed them from "hetero-normativity" (aka traditional marriage) is now freeing people from "cis-normativity" (aka biology itself). Andrew's idea "this far and no further" is completely absurd. You can't freeze a liberationist ideology at a single point in time. It doesn't work like that.
This train started rolling in the Enlightenment. I picked up speed in the J.S. Mill station. Then the postmodernist track made it a bullet train. The train is headed for a cliff and you can't stop it at this point. The only solution is to jump off, which is what The Benedict Option is.
Well, that's sort of my point. If that movement had been led by Andrew Sullivan types, we would be in a different place. But they cast him aside as soon as he had served his purpose.
I don't know about that, Rod. I know you guys go way back and I have read Andrew's stuff for some time (I've loosely followed him). Listen to Andrew's podcast with Louise Perry. They discuss sexual expression and at one point Andrew actually asks Louise, "Is there something wrong with me?" I was beginning to think the same thing. He was speaking for men in general but, of course, from his gay man's perspective. Even Andrew has praised much of what he sees in the gay/pride space, including drag stuff, that has evolved from the early days of the movement for equality (liberalism for all! no judging others' sexual expression!). I stopped subscribing to him because of this and I'm no prude. I just got tired of him describing all men (and boys) as these hormonal monsters that just have to be sticking their penises into anything that moves at all times. I would listen to him and think - No, Andrew, I was never like that. I came of age in the '70s and '80s but even so, it always felt wrong to me to behave that way. Andrew has a side to him that can be described as 'rules for thee but not for me' I think. I gave up on him - especially his podcast. Maybe that's the problem. When he is in a podcast discussion and gets a little fired up, the veil slips a bit. I could be wrong but I listened to him for quite a while before I just got tired of hearing his 'all men do it because it is how they naturally behave' excuses for bad behavior by men, straight or gay. Or, maybe I really am a prude!
As an admirer of Andrew Sullivan, I did come away from his Louise Perry podcast feeling something wasn't quite right: she talks about women getting choked to death by men who get away with it because of our current sexual culture, and he talks about how you have to have lots of sexual partners. One gets the impression of a certain callousness, or at least of a failure really to engage with some uncomfortable realities.
Agreed. I was very disappointed with him. I was creeped out a bit, actually, listening to the discussion. Also, and this is probably a little prudish on my part, he uses the word F&%K an awful lot. For a grown man, married and in his 50s, to still refer to sex or making love as FU$%^NG all the time is odd. One can say that there are new norms in the world - monogamy is out, open marriages are in, etc. - and I understand my unwillingness to buy into that is my choice. But, he throws those terms around a lot and I find it off-putting. To me, it basically says any partner of his is an object and he sees most men as feeling that way. I don't think of women that way and don't want to be associated with men who do - even someone like Andrew who has been an important thinker and writer for a long time.
I found I really like reading what he has to write. It is more political. But, when he does the podcast, he seems to get more personal, like with Louise Perry, and his 'all is fair in a liberal society' approach to sexuality comes out. That's fine. But, he's lost me as a spokesman for anything related to pushing back on the revolution in sexual and gender norms sweeping the culture lately.
Another thing about Andrew from the Louise Perry interview, Rod. Andrew is all in on porn. To hear Andrew tell it, men must have ready access to porn - they NEED access to porn - because we all know that is better than men whoring around. I believe the precise example he uses is for married men to have access so that they don't wind up out on the streets chasing other women around if they are experiencing a sexual lull in their marriages. To hear Andrew tell it in the interview (it was on his podcast, btw) it is ludicrous to tell men to keep it in their pants - that is wholly unnatural.
Aside - when he asked Louise if there was something wrong with him, she very deftly did not answer the question. It was quite a moment in the discussion.
I think of this sort of as a March of Dimes problem. Once an organization set up for a particular cause accomplishes its goal, what does it do with itself and all its employees and money and influence?
Once the polio vaccine was invented, the March of Dimes turned its attention to premature births, which was brilliant, because we will always have those and it's totally uncontroversial. But what were all these LGBTQ activist groups going to do with themselves after Obergefell and Bostock?
As for the type of illiberalism, it's ironic that conservatives are coming around to a version of Shariah law (i.e. integralism) of their own after screaming about it for years. 😂 But more seriously, Rod, you were right about the Benedict Option years ago and you are still right about it. On that note, I just learned about this Muslim BenOp community in Pennsylvania and it's very inspiring:
I don't know any conservative who is coming around to Integralism. There are probably as many true Integralists as there were passengers in the yellow submarine last weekend, and they're about as bright.
Do they ever. I wonder what polling of the vacant American public shows? I live in an area which has a world ( in ) famous Catholic university. Its radio station used to be a great thing. Recently, when a very proud father of two graduates of this rathole, and a community volunteer at the station, was reading the news of an afternoon, he read about the Southern Baptists' strong reaffirmation of male only clergy. The contempt in his voice couldn't be missed. I was tempted to phone the station and tell him, "They're being Biblical, you know," but at my age, I've finally learned the uselessness of much argument with such people.
I usually make phone calls to complain. I did with Target and representatives on several laws that I wanted defeated. I also chewed ass on a dean when my instructor was going on and on about white men-mind you this was mid nineties. Don’t allow them to think everyone agrees.
Rod, back in the days when I thought a political solution was possible, I read and appreciated Andrew Sullivan. Now, it appears to me that this present destruction was inevitable, its seeds sown many decades ago. John Adams said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” As a reader aptly noted, we have “knocked out the bearing wall” of our culture. By the time of Obergefell that wall had already crumbled and now the whole structure is collapsing. Wholly inadequate.
It's fascinating to anyone who knows a little history to remember that ninety years ago, the question being asked by the intellectual luminaries like Walter Lippman was whether democracy could survive the economic collapse. To Roosevelt's great credit, he declined the kind of dictatorial power he could have had, though he had it for that first year or so, essentially, because he got everything he wanted, at first.
What leadership do we have? No one who is serious takes Trump seriously. I'd like to believe that DeSantis has the "fire in the belly" of an Andrew Jackson, but I don't. Asa Hutchison, the first Replika candidate, is contemptible. Mike Pence is a stiff who thinks it's still 1978 and he's paraReagan. In a previous fraught period, the national instinct would have been to settle on a Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Jimmy Carter got elected in part as a social peace candidate after the turbulence and vapors of Nixon.
Who is there now, who, really, is there?
One of the ways God takes a nation down is to deprive it of godly leadership, but how many Americans want godly leadership?
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." - George Washington.
I don't see any realistic chance that civilization as we know it survives much longer. And those, like Jon, who expect the moderates to save the day, are totally deluded.
Problem among liberal people being that they define themselves as protectors and defenders of marginalized and oppressed minorities, so they have to have a new minority to defend, and ignore any evidence that minority is off the tracks.
And an enemy is needed for them to feel superior to, the dreaded conservatives and Christians, and a further bonus is that it gives them an excuse to conveniently write off the Christian faith.
Liberals also don't understand that times change. They're defending the marginalized of the 1980s. Nowadays the LGBT crowd is the darling of the media, corporations, the government, and so on.
If they really wanted to be radical they'd support conservative Christians
Someone else who doesn't understand that times change is Mike Pence, whose big thing is tax cuts. Pence could be a manikin for all the creativity he has, except the Manikin's Union would complain that he hasn't been properly vested.
Yep, and this is also how I feel about those who claim that conservative Christians are a major force behind book "bannings" or censorship. They talk as if it's still 1982, and one stern letter from an angry Christian housewife can get a comic strip cancelled in the newspaper or a TV show taken off the air. It's amazing how people will cling to old perceptions and not perceive obvious, blatant, sweeping changes in the real world around them.
(On a related note, I also remember Hillary Clinton, early in her political career after being First Lady, was trying to make her opposition to violence in video games a not-insignificant plank in her platform. She and her people thought she could appeal to some conservatives by advocating ratings and censorship, but she and her team failed to see the obvious cultural shift in which violence in video games wasn't remotely a partisan issue.)
"Church liberals wore their liberalism like a mask, dropping it once they achieved power. This is not surprising. Most church people have had the experience of liberals within arguing that they only want “diversity,” or to achieve modest goals like “tolerance” for their favored factions within the whole — only to become intolerant and authoritarian once they achieve power."
Yep. I've seen that again and again in both church and secular politics.
"They say it themselves: “They’re here, they’re queer, and they’re coming for our kids.”
And this clip should be featured prominently in 2024 Republican campaign commercials. These people want to queer your children. They're doing so with the help of the Democratic Party. Where do you stand?
re: Rick Santorum - Santorum was right. And I write that as someone who (along with everyone else I knew) lampooned him as an idiot back in the day. But he could see the slippery slope Sullivan tries to deny exists. And the rest of us should have seen it too, but how to know what's really coming? It's like that line from the book "They Thought They Were Free," about Germans with the coming of the Nazis: "They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.' And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end?"
Santorum was right primarily because he used a valid version of a slippery slope argument. The problem was that he didn't communicate it well. The point was not that the one thing would inevitably, automatically lead to the other, but that once you free sexual desire from its traditional moorings, you have no grounds by which to "re-moor" it against desires you don't like.
As someone put it, if you blow up the tradition that says that marriage is for a man and a woman, you have also destroyed the grounding that says marriage is between two people only, or two humans only, because it all comes from THE SAME TRADITION. A load-bearing wall is a load-bearing wall. You can't knock half of it down and still expect it to do its job.
The response offered at the time was something like "that mooring is mutual love", but that isn't really a "limiter". It doesn't limit marriage to two persons, for example, unless you specifically make that an a priori limitation, and why is that a priori limitation permitted while the one based on the sex of the parties is not? And the response to that offered at the time was a combination of a hand-wave, a frustrated eye-roll and an exaggerated "oh, that will never happen", as is usually the case with the left when it is pointed out that their argument leads to unintended consequences, but they want to proceed anyway.
"Minor-attracted persons" is another area for "growth and evolution" in mores in these contexts. The left currently insists that this is not in the cards, and typically bandies around the word "consent" as some kind of shibboleth when it does so. But as Rod points out in his post today, this is simply not the case (if it ever really was) in an era where children are being granted broad, unilateral rights to self-determine sexually in ways that seem at least as invasive and permanently damaging as a purportedly consensual age-barred sex act where the lack of consent is solely based on age. That contradiction won't last, because it can't last -- it is illogical. Of course, there isn't a large lobby pressing for this, which means that the current mores will likely remain undisturbed until such time as children themselves press to overturn them -- which may happen sooner than we think -- but there is no logical reason for them to remain intact, given the bridges that have been crossed regarding the sexual and physical autonomous right to self-determination of children, and how aggressively these are being pressed today.
In any case, the key in all of these things is the emotional imaging of the question. These things are not won and lost on the basis of the strength of an argument. The average person tends to favor the side in the argument that matches up most closely with the emotional imaging that resonates with them. And so it is a question of time, it seems to me, until the proper emotional imaging arises to justify these further "evolutions" along the same general theme in a way that will win public support. Emotional imaging is everything today -- the power of an image narrative to shape emotions is the key.
I agree. Given the widespread sexualization of children in other ways, on the one hand, and the never-ceasing expansion of rights for the sexually "marginalized" on the other, the eventual acceptance of some form of minor attraction as an orientation seems inevitable. I don't doubt that "minor attraction" exists, or even that it some sense it's ingrained. Not at birth, mind you, but as an acquired tendency due to exposure to abuse or pornography. But (and it's a big but) even if this is true the fact that this sort of attraction is fundamentally disordered and perverted, and if acted upon ends up as not just sin but crime, must never be lost or surrendered.
My fear is that the flexibility of the notion of consent will eventually cause resistance to it to dwindle. If a 14 year old girl "loves" a 21 year old, and wants to sleep with him, how do you deny her "Love is love!" claim?
Back in the '90s, the little sister of one of my sister's friends had a baby at age 12. The girl's parents refused to name the father of the baby - who was 21 - because "he's such a nice guy" and they didn't want him to get in trouble. I'm sorry, but if some guy knocked up my 12-year-old, I'd kill him. But... apparently this was fine by all. In a sane world, if the parents of a 12-year-old giving birth are okay with shielding a degenerate who would knock up an 11 or 12 year old, that 12-year-old and her baby should be removed from that household. However, this hasn't been a sane world for some time and all of them got to go back home and collect all their welfare benefits.
Had a similar situation in my small town in the 1970's. A girl from my neighborhood who was 15 got involved with an older guy who happened to be one of our borough policemen. She didn't get pregnant, but the thing caused all sorts of problems for the families involved and for the larger community, as he continued to "chase" her after her parents made her end the relationship. Back in those days, however, there was still some sanity left, and both the girl's parents and the local authorities stepped in to solve the problem -- the condemnation of the relationship and of the man's actions was universal.
On some other of Rod's recent posts I left a link to a child sexual abuse survivor's Substack in which she outlines how so-called "MAPs" is paving the way to a future societal acceptance of pedophilia. She makes the argument that according minors an ability to "consent" to adults touching their bodies and private parts for the purpose of cutting them off and otherwise sexually mutilating and sterilizing them, there will be no line left to uphold consent to pedophilic relationships.
She also wrote this piece, showing that the next salvo in this battle has already been fired, as a new "category" of minor is being pushed onto the stage: AAM or Adult-Attracted Minor. This will settle the issue of "consent" for minors and make it an "obvious" human rights issue to allow children...excuse me, "Adult-Attracted Minors"...to be accepted as fully rational (in the sexual arena) to make choices around their sexuality and sexual needs, since all kids are now already being positioned as ready to understand and make choices about gender and sex as early as three.
As this author pithily puts it:
"We are in a societal state now that is absolutely ideal for the pedophilia acceptance movement—one where a 13 year old can be deemed competent to consent to having an adult remove her breasts as medical waste, but not fondle them."
and:
"...we live in a culture that already has normalized pedophilia to the point that children putting their hands in adult underwear to pay for sexualized dances is something that happens regularly while adults look on, smile, and take pictures."
"a 13 year old can be deemed competent to consent to having an adult remove her breasts as medical waste, but not fondle them."
Logically, a direct descendent of the laws that required teen girls to have parental permission to get their ears pierced, but not to have an abortion.
Rob, sexual ethics slipped from their "traditional" moorings quite some time ago. Long, long before Oberfell. In fact I would argue that the entire Western Christian treatment of the subject was fatally flawed from its Scholastic outset. Our sexual ethic should be grounded in an ethic of both agape and ascesis, not arid abstractions about telē (I think that's the plural of telos) and the like.
"But he could see the slippery slope Sullivan tries to deny exists."
That's precisely where Sullivan's language gets slippery. Here's what he wrote: "There is no slope in the case I made." But that's not to say the slope wasn't there! Anybody but he could have seen it, anybody did, often said so, and was rhetorically cast into the outer darkness on the ineffable "Dish".
Exactly. At best Sullivan is saying "As I see it my liberal goals didn't need a slippery slope to be achieved." He is not wrong, from a secular classical liberal viewpoint that could even be seen as admirable, but he is describing a world that exists only in his own mind. In Rod's analogy he is a sexual liberation Menshevik.
"Seems to me that the most important question now for us on the Right is not whether to be illiberal, but what variety of illiberalism should we embrace and defend?"
*Sniff.
*Muted sob.
They just... they just grow up so fast.
*Sigh
It seems like just a couple of weeks ago that I welcomed Rod to the party, gave John McClane his retirement party, and kicked things up a notch:
Fly free, little bird. Go become what you were always meant to be- *sob- I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Look away.
Okay, enough of that. To business:
First of all, don't worry. You're not expected to have already bought a "Pinochet Helicopter Tours" t- shirt, much less start fueling the choppers. Yet.
Before you can be illiberal in public, you've got to learn be illiberal in private. That means you have to decide that you're not going to tolerate woke bullshit from those closest to you. And that can be really, really hard.
Personal example: I have a niece who is a lesbian. We all already knew that. A couple of years ago she started going by a different name (Joey) that admittedly can be a girl's name, but is usually a boy's name. My brother and the Yankee... woman... he married have gone along with it.
It has not been explained to me or my parents what's the backstory on this, but if the demand is ever presented that the rest of us play along because of some gender identity nonsense, I've resolved not to play along. So far her birthday cards and Christmas gifts have been addressed to her given name and nobody's said anything, but she's getting older and I'm pretty sure at some point a demand is going to be made. I will then have to declare that I'm not going to live by lies and it may be the last time my brother speaks to me.
Private illiberalism means you've got to be tough on Normie. If you catch them drinking Bud Light, you're busting their clangers for liking "Tranny Fluid." If they're excited for Disney's latest movie, you're worried about the grooming of kids. These are small things, but they matter.
Mostly you've got to be ready to be impolite and that's a much bigger ask of people than you might think. But if you're not willing to be impolite and risk hurting someone's feelings, you won't be able to be violent and actually hurt them.
Which very well may come to you. Hopefully not from the State, but you can find yourself on the wrong side of a protest or something. How fast can you run? For how many miles? And then what can you do? Do you have a gun? What can you do to protect yourself without one?
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. You are advised to get yourselves to a dojo or somewhere and literally get punched in the face a few times if you've never experienced that before. Then you need to learn how to effectively punch other people in the face. It's not like the movies. You've gotta learn how to do it right or you'll hurt your hand.
That's about enough for now. I guess my answer to Rod's question is "Most of you aren't ready for public illiberalism. You've got to develop it in your personal lives first and develop a capacity for violence to back it up."
That or palm- heel strike to soft(er) cartilage like the nose. Hitting big boney structures like the jaw or cheek bones with small boney structures like your knuckles in a closed fist is how you break your fingers.
Thanks! I'm still reading and subscribing but it's been a busy year with not as much time to comment : ). Honestly yall do a good enough job that I don't really have much to add anyway!
You ought not to call today's progressive left "liberalism." It stopped being about freedom a long time ago. As Rod points out, it's all about forcing everyone to accept their lies. So use the term "the left" or even "the far-left." Liberalism is long gone.
This is incorrect. These people aren't true leftists, as class-related issues only figure minimally into their ideology, if at all. It is better to call them "cultural leftists," but even that leaves out those who are in fact liberals, but who have moved to the left culturally.
To put this another way, there are liberals who side with the "progressive left," but the progressive left isn't itself "liberal," at least in any historical sense. Part of this confusion comes from the longtime American habit of conflating liberalism with leftism.
Former Episcopalian here (now Orthodox). I loved being Episcopalian. High liturgy, beautiful music, welcoming to all, and women and gay people could be priests. I loved the woke stuff, I thought it was probably how God wanted it...after all, He doesn't love me any less because I'm female. I also was not really catchetized.
In the summer of 2020 my church was totally shut, doing Livestream services on Facebook live. My priest put on his clerical collar and marched in our city's BLM march, then posted pictures of himself on social media at the march. My friends from church were posting about #ACAB, all cops are bad, racist etc. Meanwhile my husband the cop was getting spit on at work, threatened by young men hanging out of car windows, and people came and shot bullets into the outside of one of the stations. Nobody ever called to ask how he was doing.
In 2021, my church friends were posting about how all people who don't wear masks want the elderly to die. People who ask questions about injections are hysterical anti-vaxxers and deserve to lose their jobs and worse. We had cheeky cute signs around the church saying God wants you to "sanitize thy hands". People could come back 15 people at a time and sit 20ft apart masked. My priest preached a sermon comparing George Floyd to Jesus, saying "we killed him, too".
I love my Episcopalian friends, and I love that priest and the rest of the clergy at our old parish. But those years were revelatory for me. They helped me see the temptation of self righteousness and pride, and how I was embodying those, and what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that kind of faux-compassionate hatred. Hatred in the name of "love". It was utterly chilling. I could not be happier to be Orthodox. I have a prayer rule and more discipline. There is a focus on humility, sin and salvation - things that were never emphasized at my Episcopal church. The priest is not afraid to talk about evil and the reality of spiritual war. I was well catchetized. It feels like a church that can help us endure the hard times ahead.
I’m like you but my experiences have not been to that extent. I did have to seek out ACNA churches but alas there are none close to me. There are also anglo Catholic Churches around here and there. I tried the Orthodox Church in my area but the rituals are foreign and my children couldn’t understand what was happening, it all seemed pretty haphazard. I want to inculcate the liturgy rhythm to my children at this point and eventually move to an orthodox Anglican parish. I feel much anger and betrayal of what happened to the denomination that I voluntarily signed up for. It was crushingly sad when all of it happened; I was unaware of it until I heard about it on NPR.
The whole consent thing is vacuous, whether it relates to animals or minors. So, your dog cannot consent to you boinking it. True. But neither can it consent to being tied to a tree, put in a crate, or taken to the vet. It can't even consent to being euthanized. In a certain sense your dog having sex with you might be the least of its worries.
As far as minors go, note that libs and progs have no issues whatsoever with minors' ability to consent to sex with each other. In fact, it's encouraged. So obviously it can't be consent itself that's the point, but consent with whom. And the simple fact is that because the whole concept is malleable there will always be work-arounds for the "whom" part.
There was a small demonstration a few months back in Berlin where people advocated for sex between humans and animals. One guy bragged about fornicating with his "bitch," a female German Shepard. The dog looked absolutely terrified of its "owner." I wonder if the German equivalent of animal control was notified, not for the poor dog but for man who abuses animals for pleasure, but I doubt it.
From Sullivan: “[Liberalism] doesn’t seek to deliver the truth about anything either; it merely provides the mechanisms for the open-ended pursuit of truth.”
That is why liberalism was always doomed from the start in my estimation--especially once any shared belief as to God or a coherent moral order was gone. If all liberalism does (or is meant to do) is provide for the ability for each to search for truth, unimpeded by the state or his fellow citizen, then what happens when the citizenry arrive at radically different “truths”? A power struggle for which one will prevail. So here we are. Sullivan seems blind to that reality.
Exactly. Procedural liberalism inevitably crashes on the inconsistencies of ideological liberalism. The only thing that can sort out the claims of rival subjectivisms is power.
There's a popular form of utopianism among the Andrew Sullivan types that a society can be created where everyone's primary "truth" is a commitment to procedural liberalism -- that this is the prime directive of people's lives, regardless of what their "private notions about the meaning of life, etc." may be. The idea is apparently that we recognize how fundamentally unrealistic it is for our own beliefs to be universal, so therefore we prioritize procedural liberalism to protect everyone's beliefs equally, because it's the only way we can protect our own. David French is an example of this, I think.
It's a really odd, almost neurodivergent, way to view actual human beings and actual human motives, it seems to me, even when viewed on the level of abstraction. And of course, when measured against reality, it's patently false -- people hold those commitments about what is good, what ends are worth pursuing and so on in much higher esteem than their commitment to certain procedures. People will embrace procedural protections when they need them, and resist them when they don't -- that is the evidence of history and the present day and is fairly consistently observable throughout humanity. And so the drive is always to become the dominant perspective that can exclude others and use the system's power to promote its own ends and its own vision of the good.
The American experiment could only have "worked" in the context of a society which had a broad consensus about the good and the proper ends of society on the 30,000 foot level due to a kind of Christian-ish consensus. It wasn't the "hard version" of medieval throne-and-altar, but it was a soft version of it. The notion that the altar can be done away with entirely is utopian nonsense. All that happens is that you get a different altar.
I would have written "a kind of Protestant-ish sub-Christian consensus," in that it could include Unitarians, but not, as later events were to show, Catholics or Jews, unless these latter were to become "culturally Protestant," as the great majority of both proceeded to do.
"That is why liberalism was always doomed from the start in my estimation--especially once any shared belief as to God or a coherent moral order was gone."
Exactly, although I would use a reverse formulation: As long as citizens continued to share a belief in God and a coherent moral order, despite individual failures thereof, liberalism could flourish.
PS On reflection I really meant 'liberal society' rather than 'liberalism'. As a philosophy classical liberalism is what it is, and it is the attempts to add to it so that it could be extended ("flourish," and thus reduce belief and the moral order) that put us where we are today.
This is true. We have reached a point where people argue with a straight face that there is no such thing as biological sex. Compared to this, young earth creationists are models of rigorous reasoning. Any society must agree on some basic truths or it will fragment.
Rod said: "Seems to me that the most important question now for us on the Right is not whether to be illiberal, but what variety of illiberalism should we embrace and defend? Yeah, it makes me queasy. But what is the alternative?" That question should make everyone quesy, because if one really thinks about it, it leads to some dark places. But I think Rod is fundamentally correct that it needs to be seriously pondered because there may come a time when we will all have no choice but to make a choice.
This made me think of the well-intentioned folks who support the idea that convening a new constitutional convention in the U.S. will somehow right all the wrongs with our current screwed-up governmental structure. Well-intentioned but naive. There's an erroneous assumption that this would take us back to what the Founding Fathers actually intended and everything would work smoothly. It's naive because it doesn't face up to the reality that what we're going through now is a revolution (a slow moving one that arguably started in the 1960s but has been gaining velocity quickly in the last 25 years).
The only way a revolution is stopped is with a counter-revolution. And a counter-revolution is never just a return to the status quo ante, a counter-revolution is a new thing in of itself (even if it's sold as a return to the glory days). And to be successful, that counter-revolution has to purge (and I use that word intentionally with all its sad and terrible connotations) the body politic of the ideas and ideology that led to the initial revolution in the first place. And that's scary as hell because ideas and ideology don't exist on their own - real live people create them, believe in them, and implement them. So that means purging people.
And how has that played out in history? Everything from simple economic oppression to internal exile to ghettoization to the guillotine to shots to the back of the head in the Lubyanka basement to Guernica to one-way helicopter rides to the Gulag to Dachau to the Killing Fields. And once you've caught that revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) tiger by the tail you don't have much control over where it's going to take you. Maybe we can right our cultural and political ship without a descent into Hell - if any system can pull it off it's ours. But history since the French Revolution tells us the odds aren't great.
This is *exactly* why it makes me queasy. I don't want to live in that world. But the Left will not stop. We know this. It has now conquered the power centers, and is going to push and push and push. As I've been saying here, I really thought that when they inevitably, and openly, targeted children, that would be the bright red line. But it has not been, not yet, anyway. If liberal democracy means these evil trolls get to get inside the heads of our children, and into their bodies, then to hell with liberal democracy. Fortunately, we still have at our disposal the democratic means to reverse this, which is why we have to keep trying. If the Republican Party were actually serious about defending children and families from these sexual predators and their allies, we might have a chance. But you can go broke waiting on the Republican Party to do anything courageous but unpopular with the media and the oligarchy.
I hope you're right, but something nagging in the back of my head tells me we may have crossed the Rubicon. I agree that we have a democratic process to reverse things, but that's just a process (albeit a very good one). It needs people to make it work - and I'm not so sure having faith that our fellow citizens can be roused to do the right thing (however we define that) using that process will happen. Yes, we should try - I would love to be proved wrong. But if it doesn't happen, what then? We're back to your quesy question - will we be like the Spanish in the 1930s having no choice but to make a choice?
Read Burke, at the beginning of the Reflections, on just what you take in your hands when you decide on revolution. It is, he says, ENTIRELY OUTSIDE THE LAW. Tribunals fall down before it. Just as a matter of common sense we're not there yet.
Yes you are absolutely right. The revolution started in the 70s and has taken this long to fully grasp power and they have now. They openly attack the courts, subvert the law for there side while doctoring up charges against the other that they themselves would never be held too. We've fully crossed the line with Merrick Garland going after parents and Christians while fully ignoring attacks on Churches and NGOs on the right.
We're there and enough people have become aware to the disrepute before legal standards and fair play, the mockery of justice, that I cannot see the same tactics being used by the other side. Back and forth they might go for a while but eventually someone is going to come along and stop pussy footing with totalitarianism and dictatorship behind the mask and just take off the mask, kill his opponents, shut down decent, pardon himself and call it a day. Hell that might even be Biden or Trump 2024.
Important to point out that, as you say, the left has continually moved the goalposts. The regime, if that's the word, that obtained in, say, 1960, when both homosexual activity and abortion were largely illegal in this country, was by no sane estimate an illiberal polity. It was the freest place on earth, that would be, and is, regarded with horror and loathing by the cultural left.
Oppression. Let's take an example. Just remember. At that date the second most prominent poet in the U.S. was W.H. Auden (he held an American passport). The first was Robert Frost. The most notorious was Ezra Pound, but he lived in Italy. Eliot had renounced his American citizenship. Was there ANYBODY who took an interest is such matters who didn't know about Wystan's activities? Anybody? Would anybody like to return to that arrangement? I know I would.
I've mentioned this here before, but to me one of the most telling marks of what 60s America was is that in May, 1968, LIFE magazine believed it not a waste to run an article about which poets were supporting Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic nomination and which Robert Kennedy.
I remember that toward the end of summer, when Hunter Davies bio of The Beatles was published, a lot of people were unsettled by the photos of the future Fabs in their Hamburg days. There they were, in black leather and greased hair, and with the surly/lifeless look which is the default pose of all rock bands.
The trouble, though, is that, as Christopher points out, and as Sullivan is learning (or re-learning) the hard way, revolutions are not controllable. It's a kind of thing where they start and then the path they follow is not controllable, not by the people who started them, and not by the people who try to tamp them down in the middle, either. They either become entrenched, or they are reversed, or they run out of steam and things pass into a new phase after that happens, but the course must be run. There is no "off switch" available until the course has been run. And we are still mid-course. Andrew Sullivan and Douglas Murray are looking for the off switch, but they can't seem to find it. That happens to many revolutionaries, apparently unwittingly despite the historical record of revolution -- I suppose that has something to do with the mental mindsets of the kinds of people who take up the flag of revolution in the first place.
It's possible, of course, that the political system will find a way to reverse the revolution, but gosh the odds seem long on that. The cultural system is gone, and without that solid basis, no political effort will bear much useful fruit.
What I think is less clear is whether there will be a strong attempt to reverse, or whether we will be looking at periodic temporary pushbacks while the revolution continues apace until it becomes entrenched or spent, and a new phase follows which is unpredictable. I don't know. I struggle to see how a real attempt to reverse, even the kind that would result in some sort of civil conflict, could really take hold on the levels necessary to actually constitute a reversal, and not a mere protest. I suspect we may be in for an entrenchment or a waiting game until the fuel of the revolution started in the 1960s is finally spent, after which who knows.
This recent piece by Kat Rosenfeld in the Globe - also a liberal who wants to go back to 'reasonable liberalism' -- she asks, can't we all just agree that porn shouldn't be given to schoolchildren?
Rod, we have the means at our disposal, but not the ways. I would like to believe that DeSantis has the ballsiness of an Andrew Jackson. I'm afraid I don't. And what can be expected of a political group which thinks of a reelection of Trump as a Restoration?
Part of the issue with the kids is that there are far fewer people with children than there were a couple of generations ago. Up until the 1960s or so, most people got married, and most married people had at least a kid or two. These days, not so much. My grandmothers on both sides both have 5 great-grandchildren - and all five of those are mine! Neither my sister or any of my seven cousins have children, and a couple of them are aging out of being able to have kids at all. Throw in a couple of feminists who never want to have children, and we're down to just three who reasonably still might have kids, but the youngest of these is 35.
Especially among women, the attitudes towards culture and society are night and day with people who have kids and those who don't.
I think the first step is to stop being queasy. That feeling is a result of brainwashing by modern cosmopolitan western society, that says we all have to be prim and proper, and effeminately respect each other's differences.
People throughout the ages would have LOVED the chance to personally fight their enemies. It's time to rekindle that spirit.
Oh, Andrew Sullivan. He assures us that at some unspecified date "many moons ago" he insisted in a speech that he can only paraphrase that he said "gay marriage, but no further." Seriously? This reeks of what people who are a little too into comic books and TV shows call "retconning"—retroactively changing the storyline to conform to current narrative needs.
Well, it's more complicated than that. He does not paraphrase entirely that I can see. But I agree that the drift of his language often told a different story.
I follow a few (European) liberal Protestant pastors on Instagram, though it's not great for my blood pressure. Funnily enough, the steady decline of their churches doesn't seem to bother them much. They never mention it. They do publicly fret about all sorts of other things - climate change, homophobia, whether their churches are "safe spaces for people of colour" (oh yes, hip German pastors use that term now) - but not their plummeting numbers. Maybe it does bother them in private, but they're afraid to say so because they don't want to seem square. Maybe they're so used to looking out from the pulpit at an empty church that they don't really notice. Or maybe they think, deep down, that Christianity has had its day and should move over and make room for something else. Their role is to see off the last generation of churchgoing pensioners, secure their own pensions, and then skeedaddle.
I fear the last explanation is the most probable, in many cases.
Has it ever occurred to you that what they're interested in is power? That they see the way the therapeutic state is getting more and more powerful and that they want a piece of it? It's pretty well accepted that the bosses and the chic back in the fourth century were the Arians. The barbarian kings, who seemed to be the future, were their patrons, and the Empire tottered.
Let's say the Synodal Way is implemented as a radical decentralization of the Church (up to a point, Lord Copper) on the Chinese State Church model. Do you for a moment believe that Cupich, or Tobin, or Gregory, would hesitate for a moment to take their list of episcopal candidates from Joe Biden? And that would be just the start.
That's often because those are state churches supported by taxes, giving clergy--however small their congregations-- a steady pay check. They act much like monopolies, lazy and unconcerned about more non-state supported conservative upstarts competing with them
"On matters of substance, it seemed to me that the conservative Catholics in the room had more in common with serious Calvinists than with liberal members of their own Church."
This has been the case for almost fifty years; they used to call it the "ecumenism of the trenches". Missouri Synod Lutherans too. Abortion was often the immediate cause of unity.
This attitude was well described by the Canadian Roman Catholic writer Anne Roche Muggeridge, who I believe would have been much better known has she been American. Her books "The Gates of Hell" and "The Desolate City" are still well worth reading. "The Desolate City" is available very cheaply on Alibris; sadly, "The Gates of Hell" will cost you a pretty penny. My own copy of "The Gates of Hell" fell apart from having been reread so many times. However the latter book is really an updated version of the former. It's all there: the strength of the Roman Catholic Church before Vatican II (Douthat also writes about this, but gives much less detail), the hijacking of Vatican II's agenda by the liberal periti, the vandalism of church interiors (which as she points out, as *not* mandated by Vatican II)", the disastrous weakness and equivocation of Paul VI (somewhat countered by Humanae Vitae), fights with priests and bishops over new liberal catechisms and youth teaching materials. She lived long enough to see optional Latin masses restored.
Her husband John Muggeridge (son of Malcolm) taught at an Anglican private school; he must have been there just a few years before I arrived. She offered her resignation as a teacher to her bishop, but it was not accepted. Both John and Malcolm eventually converted to Roman Catholicism.
Agreed. Also includes some Catholic Churches as well. Seems to align with these Bible verses.
2 Timothy 4:3-5
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.
Amen, brother.
Anne Muggeridge was a brilliant woman who died of Alzheimer's way too soon. I read "The Desolate City" about seven years ago and it very clearly explained what the modernists were doing to the Roman Catholic Church over forty years ago. Her interview with Michael Davies is a joy to listen to and can be purchased through Triumph Communications. May both Anne and Michael rest in peace.
It's completely non - germane to the discussion, but I read recently that when Malcolm Muggeridge was in Hamburg in 1961, he ducked into a dive for a quick drink. The band which was playing was taking a break, and on his way out, he ran into the band's leader, who was intrigued by Muggeridge and wanted to chat with him a little. Supposedly, when Muggeridge and John Lennon parted company after a civilized conversation of a few minutes' length, each had, as the writer who wrote about this put it, a good understanding of one another.
This is why we cannot let Sullivan et al separate themselves from gender ideology. They are inexorably tied together. We cannot let the Overton Window slide open to approve of homosexual relations ever.
You're way too late on that (unless you are just talking Church teachings of course). But in the larger sphere of things the culture moved beyond condemning gay relationships quite some time ago, and among younger people, even self-branded conservatives that's just no big deal any more.
If you want to fight the trans stuff, fight the trans stuff. But you do need allies, and purity tests that limit you to some small and dwindling clique on the far Right will earn you nothing but defeat. Sullivan can be your ally-- as can many of the rest of us, insofar as you don't try to force us into crusades on other matters as the price. The pro-life folks need pro-life feminists and, yes, pro-life atheists, and mostly they have had the sense to know that. This movement needs gays and liberals who are not board with the fifty-two flavors and counting of gender.
Why, yes- I don’t sleep around. Do you think I should.
Chaos-- I'm talking in the mathematical sense-- is our only (worldly) hope.
No father or mother celebrates the day that their comes out of the closet. As long as that remains the case, then we have a very good chance of changing the cultural attitude. Never give up.
I would say: no "sane" father or mother. Search tick-tok if you don't believe me.....or better yet, take my word for it.
Even so, I agree with your sentiment.
I'm on my way, this afternoon to a family reunion at a cousin-in-law's house. His oldest daughter came out about 2 years ago. She's a very attractive, tall, blonde.....really attractive girl. She was always, out of about 15 grandchildren, the "apple" of the 90 year old grandparents eyes. She is recently "engaged". These folks were always right-leaning...the extended family as well. It's "pride weekend" dontcha' know?
My guess is that I won't see any rainbow flags. He has had family-reunions before, and I think that is what it really is......I hope to God...it should be interesting. The grandparents are quite befuddled.
A friend of mine who is close enough to be honorary family "came out" earlier this year after over two decades of friendship. It's not that I was necessarily surprised since I knew something was off already twenty years ago but the "out" part is tough, now that he feels like he can run around with the "community" and asks me questions like whether he should pierce his ears or take on a more effeminate affect. Damn it, this is hard. On the other hand, I feel like God asked me over 20 years ago to love him no matter what, and I do my best. This friend knows this and if he's ever going to disentangle himself from the LGBTQ+ cul... I mean, "community", it's going to be through God.
Keep praying. I know it’s difficult, but God can change your friend, if its His will, and He will give you wisdom and love to keep witnessing the truth to your friend.
Thank you. I have seen God's Hand in this friendship for a long time, and I don't think the story's "over" in any sense. That being said, I know that it's not my job to "save" him; that ultimately, he's got to make up his mind to follow God or not. I have my role to play, and for the rest, I need to trust in God.
Nah, gays are next right after the trannies. But I agree they can be temporarily useful.
We can do the slippery slope too 😁
The sexual revolution is the enemy in all of its particulars.
Jon, you're more right than wrong, certainly morally, but as a matter of practical politics Sullivan's position is just nowhere. How many people on the other side are going to pull their chins and say, "You know, the letters after "B" have really gone too far, Sullivan is right"? By all means let's make Sullivan an ally. But his effectiveness as such is basically zero.
Do you have liberal or even middle of the road friends? There's a huge amount of frustration out there among such people with the trans craze. It can be mobilized as long as the cause stays the course and doesn't become a stalking horse for another agenda. The history of BLM is a cautionary example. Lots of people were initially favorable when they thought the organization was just about reining in abusive and corrupt police practices . When they learned the full radical program of the movement the group's popularity dropped like a rock in freefall. This is a classic case where Nothing In Excess applies
Sorry, Jon. That's an own goal. What white suburban liberal is going to get up on his hind legs and declare BLM what it always was, a sordid and violent swindle? They're all chicken.
Look, this is my real name, and I have to careful, but I have detailed knowledge of a family (not my wife and kids, no) that has been gutted by this horror. The matriarch has been halfway brutalized into loving Big Brother, if she's not there already.
Will Mitt Romney ever have to pay a price for marching for BLM?
And I have no friends. Only admirers.
Re: What white suburban liberal is going to get up on his hind legs and declare BLM what it always was, a sordid and violent swindle?
Why is that that necessary? Dropping one's support is quite sufficient. One does not need to go to the other extreme in these things. Purists find it endlessly frustrating but most people really do come down somewhere in the mushy middle, contradictions and all.
Re: Will Mitt Romney ever have to pay a price for marching for BLM?
Why is that necessary? and isn't that up to the voters of Utah-- a people not known for leftwing loonery?
Re: And I have no friends. Only admirers.
Yes, of course, Your Grace :)
"Dropping one's support is quite sufficient."
Define "dropping one's support". If it means more than shutting up rather than preening you'll have made your case, and you can't. How many of these born again classical liberal stalwarts are going to show up at a school board meeting and say, you know, gosh, I kinda think putting how-to buggery manuals in the hands of second graders is, you know, like, um, wrong and stuff. Zero, again zero.
Going halfway back is only resultant in turning back around eventually leading down the same road. It’s not worth the alliance if they really aren’t interested in solving the problems.
Compromise and horse trading is utterly necessary in politics-- which is always and everywhere the art of the possible, never of the pure. If you can't accept a half loaf you will end up with no loaf.
Agreed. The battle over gay marriage, etc., is over and done and really I am fine on that. Though I identify as conservative, I think the liberation of gays, women, minorities in the last few decades has been a substantial and necessary advance of civilization. That is not true of the present extremes of same (trans ideology, CRT, etc). What this country most needs now are people who are in the middle, more centrist, from each "side" to be more assertive and reduce the extremism on each side.
Whether God regards homosexuality as a sin I don't know, I honor the Bible and think it gives us a pretty good picture of Jesus but I don't think it's inerrant. However, I am willing to let that be between the individual gay person and God. In the meantime I know gay people and am glad they are safe to be "out" (in my state, Washington, anyway).
Meantime the trans movement is actually harming the kids it indoctrinates and we all ought to join in putting a stop to that.
I disagree with your liberal premise. So I hope the center can not hold and we have revolution somewhere down the road. You may consider yourself a centrist but, to a conservative, you are the same as a leftist.
I think for myself. It is a huge error to force yourself to think like the tribe does so you can fit in.
I am glad you think for yourself.
Why are the trans harming kids but the gays not?
Anything that takes away from a reproductive relationship is fundamentally damaging. Encouraging kids to be gay is just as bad as encouraging kids to be trans
"Whether God regards homosexuality as a sin I don't know, I honor the Bible and think it gives us a pretty good picture of Jesus but I don't think it's inerrant."
Oh, you know. You just don't want to conform to God's will because it would make you all judgy and icky and gross.
For the rest of the class, this is what I mean in my riff this morning about learning to be illiberal in private spaces. It's not enough that Dan has his mind right about trans stuff. He needs to be made to defend his "go along, get along" attitude towards the rest of the encroaching degeneracy.
It was just yesterday that Sullivan was dismissing any concern over this tranny wickedness. He was drawing the trannies as simply clowns acting out, us straights should just get over it.
Sullivan's post pissed me off so much I almost subscribed just to yell at him. I'm so tired of gay liberals who think the current trans craze is unconnected to them. Bari Weiss is in this camp as well. I respect her greatly (far more than Andrew), but they simply can't (or refuse to) see the connection: liberalism.
Liberalism is an ideology to liberate people from unchosen constraints. The same ideology that freed them from "hetero-normativity" (aka traditional marriage) is now freeing people from "cis-normativity" (aka biology itself). Andrew's idea "this far and no further" is completely absurd. You can't freeze a liberationist ideology at a single point in time. It doesn't work like that.
This train started rolling in the Enlightenment. I picked up speed in the J.S. Mill station. Then the postmodernist track made it a bullet train. The train is headed for a cliff and you can't stop it at this point. The only solution is to jump off, which is what The Benedict Option is.
“In theory there could have been a liberal settlement along the lines he suggested during his activist days...”
In theory there never could have been a settlement because these lunatics are Hegelians that believe in continual revolution.
Well, that's sort of my point. If that movement had been led by Andrew Sullivan types, we would be in a different place. But they cast him aside as soon as he had served his purpose.
I don't know about that, Rod. I know you guys go way back and I have read Andrew's stuff for some time (I've loosely followed him). Listen to Andrew's podcast with Louise Perry. They discuss sexual expression and at one point Andrew actually asks Louise, "Is there something wrong with me?" I was beginning to think the same thing. He was speaking for men in general but, of course, from his gay man's perspective. Even Andrew has praised much of what he sees in the gay/pride space, including drag stuff, that has evolved from the early days of the movement for equality (liberalism for all! no judging others' sexual expression!). I stopped subscribing to him because of this and I'm no prude. I just got tired of him describing all men (and boys) as these hormonal monsters that just have to be sticking their penises into anything that moves at all times. I would listen to him and think - No, Andrew, I was never like that. I came of age in the '70s and '80s but even so, it always felt wrong to me to behave that way. Andrew has a side to him that can be described as 'rules for thee but not for me' I think. I gave up on him - especially his podcast. Maybe that's the problem. When he is in a podcast discussion and gets a little fired up, the veil slips a bit. I could be wrong but I listened to him for quite a while before I just got tired of hearing his 'all men do it because it is how they naturally behave' excuses for bad behavior by men, straight or gay. Or, maybe I really am a prude!
As an admirer of Andrew Sullivan, I did come away from his Louise Perry podcast feeling something wasn't quite right: she talks about women getting choked to death by men who get away with it because of our current sexual culture, and he talks about how you have to have lots of sexual partners. One gets the impression of a certain callousness, or at least of a failure really to engage with some uncomfortable realities.
Agreed. I was very disappointed with him. I was creeped out a bit, actually, listening to the discussion. Also, and this is probably a little prudish on my part, he uses the word F&%K an awful lot. For a grown man, married and in his 50s, to still refer to sex or making love as FU$%^NG all the time is odd. One can say that there are new norms in the world - monogamy is out, open marriages are in, etc. - and I understand my unwillingness to buy into that is my choice. But, he throws those terms around a lot and I find it off-putting. To me, it basically says any partner of his is an object and he sees most men as feeling that way. I don't think of women that way and don't want to be associated with men who do - even someone like Andrew who has been an important thinker and writer for a long time.
I found I really like reading what he has to write. It is more political. But, when he does the podcast, he seems to get more personal, like with Louise Perry, and his 'all is fair in a liberal society' approach to sexuality comes out. That's fine. But, he's lost me as a spokesman for anything related to pushing back on the revolution in sexual and gender norms sweeping the culture lately.
Another thing about Andrew from the Louise Perry interview, Rod. Andrew is all in on porn. To hear Andrew tell it, men must have ready access to porn - they NEED access to porn - because we all know that is better than men whoring around. I believe the precise example he uses is for married men to have access so that they don't wind up out on the streets chasing other women around if they are experiencing a sexual lull in their marriages. To hear Andrew tell it in the interview (it was on his podcast, btw) it is ludicrous to tell men to keep it in their pants - that is wholly unnatural.
Aside - when he asked Louise if there was something wrong with him, she very deftly did not answer the question. It was quite a moment in the discussion.
I think of this sort of as a March of Dimes problem. Once an organization set up for a particular cause accomplishes its goal, what does it do with itself and all its employees and money and influence?
Once the polio vaccine was invented, the March of Dimes turned its attention to premature births, which was brilliant, because we will always have those and it's totally uncontroversial. But what were all these LGBTQ activist groups going to do with themselves after Obergefell and Bostock?
As for the type of illiberalism, it's ironic that conservatives are coming around to a version of Shariah law (i.e. integralism) of their own after screaming about it for years. 😂 But more seriously, Rod, you were right about the Benedict Option years ago and you are still right about it. On that note, I just learned about this Muslim BenOp community in Pennsylvania and it's very inspiring:
https://www.almaqasid.org/
Wow—so interesting to learn about this. They're only a little over an hour away from me. Thanks for the tip.
I don't know any conservative who is coming around to Integralism. There are probably as many true Integralists as there were passengers in the yellow submarine last weekend, and they're about as bright.
And they get a similarly disproportionate amount of news coverage!
Do they ever. I wonder what polling of the vacant American public shows? I live in an area which has a world ( in ) famous Catholic university. Its radio station used to be a great thing. Recently, when a very proud father of two graduates of this rathole, and a community volunteer at the station, was reading the news of an afternoon, he read about the Southern Baptists' strong reaffirmation of male only clergy. The contempt in his voice couldn't be missed. I was tempted to phone the station and tell him, "They're being Biblical, you know," but at my age, I've finally learned the uselessness of much argument with such people.
I usually make phone calls to complain. I did with Target and representatives on several laws that I wanted defeated. I also chewed ass on a dean when my instructor was going on and on about white men-mind you this was mid nineties. Don’t allow them to think everyone agrees.
Rod, back in the days when I thought a political solution was possible, I read and appreciated Andrew Sullivan. Now, it appears to me that this present destruction was inevitable, its seeds sown many decades ago. John Adams said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” As a reader aptly noted, we have “knocked out the bearing wall” of our culture. By the time of Obergefell that wall had already crumbled and now the whole structure is collapsing. Wholly inadequate.
You may disagree, Martha, but as I have said before, I'd take a Franco at this point. Maybe better, a Bukele.
It's fascinating to anyone who knows a little history to remember that ninety years ago, the question being asked by the intellectual luminaries like Walter Lippman was whether democracy could survive the economic collapse. To Roosevelt's great credit, he declined the kind of dictatorial power he could have had, though he had it for that first year or so, essentially, because he got everything he wanted, at first.
What leadership do we have? No one who is serious takes Trump seriously. I'd like to believe that DeSantis has the "fire in the belly" of an Andrew Jackson, but I don't. Asa Hutchison, the first Replika candidate, is contemptible. Mike Pence is a stiff who thinks it's still 1978 and he's paraReagan. In a previous fraught period, the national instinct would have been to settle on a Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Jimmy Carter got elected in part as a social peace candidate after the turbulence and vapors of Nixon.
Who is there now, who, really, is there?
One of the ways God takes a nation down is to deprive it of godly leadership, but how many Americans want godly leadership?
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." - George Washington.
I don't see any realistic chance that civilization as we know it survives much longer. And those, like Jon, who expect the moderates to save the day, are totally deluded.
Problem among liberal people being that they define themselves as protectors and defenders of marginalized and oppressed minorities, so they have to have a new minority to defend, and ignore any evidence that minority is off the tracks.
And an enemy is needed for them to feel superior to, the dreaded conservatives and Christians, and a further bonus is that it gives them an excuse to conveniently write off the Christian faith.
Liberals also don't understand that times change. They're defending the marginalized of the 1980s. Nowadays the LGBT crowd is the darling of the media, corporations, the government, and so on.
If they really wanted to be radical they'd support conservative Christians
Someone else who doesn't understand that times change is Mike Pence, whose big thing is tax cuts. Pence could be a manikin for all the creativity he has, except the Manikin's Union would complain that he hasn't been properly vested.
Yes, but Paul Ryan will make sure that Mike Pence will have enough money to do maximum damager to serious candidates.
They could never sell the Edsel.
I tried watching Jordan Peterson's recent interview with Pence. Pence reminded me of someone playing Pence on Saturday Night Live.
Yep, and this is also how I feel about those who claim that conservative Christians are a major force behind book "bannings" or censorship. They talk as if it's still 1982, and one stern letter from an angry Christian housewife can get a comic strip cancelled in the newspaper or a TV show taken off the air. It's amazing how people will cling to old perceptions and not perceive obvious, blatant, sweeping changes in the real world around them.
(On a related note, I also remember Hillary Clinton, early in her political career after being First Lady, was trying to make her opposition to violence in video games a not-insignificant plank in her platform. She and her people thought she could appeal to some conservatives by advocating ratings and censorship, but she and her team failed to see the obvious cultural shift in which violence in video games wasn't remotely a partisan issue.)
You can get around the NYT paywall by plugging the URL into the search bar here: <https://www.ninjabrowse.com>.
"Church liberals wore their liberalism like a mask, dropping it once they achieved power. This is not surprising. Most church people have had the experience of liberals within arguing that they only want “diversity,” or to achieve modest goals like “tolerance” for their favored factions within the whole — only to become intolerant and authoritarian once they achieve power."
Yep. I've seen that again and again in both church and secular politics.
"They say it themselves: “They’re here, they’re queer, and they’re coming for our kids.”
And this clip should be featured prominently in 2024 Republican campaign commercials. These people want to queer your children. They're doing so with the help of the Democratic Party. Where do you stand?
re: Rick Santorum - Santorum was right. And I write that as someone who (along with everyone else I knew) lampooned him as an idiot back in the day. But he could see the slippery slope Sullivan tries to deny exists. And the rest of us should have seen it too, but how to know what's really coming? It's like that line from the book "They Thought They Were Free," about Germans with the coming of the Nazis: "They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.' And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end?"
Santorum was right primarily because he used a valid version of a slippery slope argument. The problem was that he didn't communicate it well. The point was not that the one thing would inevitably, automatically lead to the other, but that once you free sexual desire from its traditional moorings, you have no grounds by which to "re-moor" it against desires you don't like.
As someone put it, if you blow up the tradition that says that marriage is for a man and a woman, you have also destroyed the grounding that says marriage is between two people only, or two humans only, because it all comes from THE SAME TRADITION. A load-bearing wall is a load-bearing wall. You can't knock half of it down and still expect it to do its job.
Your analogy of a load-bearing wall is spot on!
Right.
The response offered at the time was something like "that mooring is mutual love", but that isn't really a "limiter". It doesn't limit marriage to two persons, for example, unless you specifically make that an a priori limitation, and why is that a priori limitation permitted while the one based on the sex of the parties is not? And the response to that offered at the time was a combination of a hand-wave, a frustrated eye-roll and an exaggerated "oh, that will never happen", as is usually the case with the left when it is pointed out that their argument leads to unintended consequences, but they want to proceed anyway.
"Minor-attracted persons" is another area for "growth and evolution" in mores in these contexts. The left currently insists that this is not in the cards, and typically bandies around the word "consent" as some kind of shibboleth when it does so. But as Rod points out in his post today, this is simply not the case (if it ever really was) in an era where children are being granted broad, unilateral rights to self-determine sexually in ways that seem at least as invasive and permanently damaging as a purportedly consensual age-barred sex act where the lack of consent is solely based on age. That contradiction won't last, because it can't last -- it is illogical. Of course, there isn't a large lobby pressing for this, which means that the current mores will likely remain undisturbed until such time as children themselves press to overturn them -- which may happen sooner than we think -- but there is no logical reason for them to remain intact, given the bridges that have been crossed regarding the sexual and physical autonomous right to self-determination of children, and how aggressively these are being pressed today.
In any case, the key in all of these things is the emotional imaging of the question. These things are not won and lost on the basis of the strength of an argument. The average person tends to favor the side in the argument that matches up most closely with the emotional imaging that resonates with them. And so it is a question of time, it seems to me, until the proper emotional imaging arises to justify these further "evolutions" along the same general theme in a way that will win public support. Emotional imaging is everything today -- the power of an image narrative to shape emotions is the key.
I agree. Given the widespread sexualization of children in other ways, on the one hand, and the never-ceasing expansion of rights for the sexually "marginalized" on the other, the eventual acceptance of some form of minor attraction as an orientation seems inevitable. I don't doubt that "minor attraction" exists, or even that it some sense it's ingrained. Not at birth, mind you, but as an acquired tendency due to exposure to abuse or pornography. But (and it's a big but) even if this is true the fact that this sort of attraction is fundamentally disordered and perverted, and if acted upon ends up as not just sin but crime, must never be lost or surrendered.
My fear is that the flexibility of the notion of consent will eventually cause resistance to it to dwindle. If a 14 year old girl "loves" a 21 year old, and wants to sleep with him, how do you deny her "Love is love!" claim?
Back in the '90s, the little sister of one of my sister's friends had a baby at age 12. The girl's parents refused to name the father of the baby - who was 21 - because "he's such a nice guy" and they didn't want him to get in trouble. I'm sorry, but if some guy knocked up my 12-year-old, I'd kill him. But... apparently this was fine by all. In a sane world, if the parents of a 12-year-old giving birth are okay with shielding a degenerate who would knock up an 11 or 12 year old, that 12-year-old and her baby should be removed from that household. However, this hasn't been a sane world for some time and all of them got to go back home and collect all their welfare benefits.
Had a similar situation in my small town in the 1970's. A girl from my neighborhood who was 15 got involved with an older guy who happened to be one of our borough policemen. She didn't get pregnant, but the thing caused all sorts of problems for the families involved and for the larger community, as he continued to "chase" her after her parents made her end the relationship. Back in those days, however, there was still some sanity left, and both the girl's parents and the local authorities stepped in to solve the problem -- the condemnation of the relationship and of the man's actions was universal.
I agree. Call me old fashion and closed minded but my view is a 21 year old that has sex with a 12 year old is NOT a nice guy.
On some other of Rod's recent posts I left a link to a child sexual abuse survivor's Substack in which she outlines how so-called "MAPs" is paving the way to a future societal acceptance of pedophilia. She makes the argument that according minors an ability to "consent" to adults touching their bodies and private parts for the purpose of cutting them off and otherwise sexually mutilating and sterilizing them, there will be no line left to uphold consent to pedophilic relationships.
She also wrote this piece, showing that the next salvo in this battle has already been fired, as a new "category" of minor is being pushed onto the stage: AAM or Adult-Attracted Minor. This will settle the issue of "consent" for minors and make it an "obvious" human rights issue to allow children...excuse me, "Adult-Attracted Minors"...to be accepted as fully rational (in the sexual arena) to make choices around their sexuality and sexual needs, since all kids are now already being positioned as ready to understand and make choices about gender and sex as early as three.
As this author pithily puts it:
"We are in a societal state now that is absolutely ideal for the pedophilia acceptance movement—one where a 13 year old can be deemed competent to consent to having an adult remove her breasts as medical waste, but not fondle them."
and:
"...we live in a culture that already has normalized pedophilia to the point that children putting their hands in adult underwear to pay for sexualized dances is something that happens regularly while adults look on, smile, and take pictures."
https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/next-step-in-the-war-on-kids
"a 13 year old can be deemed competent to consent to having an adult remove her breasts as medical waste, but not fondle them."
Logically, a direct descendent of the laws that required teen girls to have parental permission to get their ears pierced, but not to have an abortion.
"Minor-attracted persons."
The Devil is not incompetent, you know.
"Emotional imaging" — Thank you! That's a very apt phrase.
Rob, sexual ethics slipped from their "traditional" moorings quite some time ago. Long, long before Oberfell. In fact I would argue that the entire Western Christian treatment of the subject was fatally flawed from its Scholastic outset. Our sexual ethic should be grounded in an ethic of both agape and ascesis, not arid abstractions about telē (I think that's the plural of telos) and the like.
Oh, Jon, give it a rest.
Are you implying that teleology is a strictly Aristotelian concept? Back to Philosophy 101 for you!
No, but simple teleologies misunderstand the Nature of Time.
...curious, what is the nature of time, as you see it, and on what do you base that view?
Preach it brother.
"But he could see the slippery slope Sullivan tries to deny exists."
That's precisely where Sullivan's language gets slippery. Here's what he wrote: "There is no slope in the case I made." But that's not to say the slope wasn't there! Anybody but he could have seen it, anybody did, often said so, and was rhetorically cast into the outer darkness on the ineffable "Dish".
Exactly. At best Sullivan is saying "As I see it my liberal goals didn't need a slippery slope to be achieved." He is not wrong, from a secular classical liberal viewpoint that could even be seen as admirable, but he is describing a world that exists only in his own mind. In Rod's analogy he is a sexual liberation Menshevik.
The good news is that the Penn State professor who was arrested recently for having had intimate relations with his dog asked the cops to shoot him.
I really supported him as a candidate. He did an in depth interview with Tucker Carlson a couple years ago and my respect for him only grew.
"Seems to me that the most important question now for us on the Right is not whether to be illiberal, but what variety of illiberalism should we embrace and defend?"
*Sniff.
*Muted sob.
They just... they just grow up so fast.
*Sigh
It seems like just a couple of weeks ago that I welcomed Rod to the party, gave John McClane his retirement party, and kicked things up a notch:
https://youtu.be/xD0E_Gj9xMk
Fly free, little bird. Go become what you were always meant to be- *sob- I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Look away.
Okay, enough of that. To business:
First of all, don't worry. You're not expected to have already bought a "Pinochet Helicopter Tours" t- shirt, much less start fueling the choppers. Yet.
Before you can be illiberal in public, you've got to learn be illiberal in private. That means you have to decide that you're not going to tolerate woke bullshit from those closest to you. And that can be really, really hard.
Personal example: I have a niece who is a lesbian. We all already knew that. A couple of years ago she started going by a different name (Joey) that admittedly can be a girl's name, but is usually a boy's name. My brother and the Yankee... woman... he married have gone along with it.
It has not been explained to me or my parents what's the backstory on this, but if the demand is ever presented that the rest of us play along because of some gender identity nonsense, I've resolved not to play along. So far her birthday cards and Christmas gifts have been addressed to her given name and nobody's said anything, but she's getting older and I'm pretty sure at some point a demand is going to be made. I will then have to declare that I'm not going to live by lies and it may be the last time my brother speaks to me.
Private illiberalism means you've got to be tough on Normie. If you catch them drinking Bud Light, you're busting their clangers for liking "Tranny Fluid." If they're excited for Disney's latest movie, you're worried about the grooming of kids. These are small things, but they matter.
Mostly you've got to be ready to be impolite and that's a much bigger ask of people than you might think. But if you're not willing to be impolite and risk hurting someone's feelings, you won't be able to be violent and actually hurt them.
Which very well may come to you. Hopefully not from the State, but you can find yourself on the wrong side of a protest or something. How fast can you run? For how many miles? And then what can you do? Do you have a gun? What can you do to protect yourself without one?
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. You are advised to get yourselves to a dojo or somewhere and literally get punched in the face a few times if you've never experienced that before. Then you need to learn how to effectively punch other people in the face. It's not like the movies. You've gotta learn how to do it right or you'll hurt your hand.
That's about enough for now. I guess my answer to Rod's question is "Most of you aren't ready for public illiberalism. You've got to develop it in your personal lives first and develop a capacity for violence to back it up."
Why the ellipses around woman ("...woman...")? I could interpret that a few different ways.
Pick the most vulgar epithet you know and you're about halfway there.
About that punch: side of the fist, right?
Pinochet Helicopter Tours is inspired.
That or palm- heel strike to soft(er) cartilage like the nose. Hitting big boney structures like the jaw or cheek bones with small boney structures like your knuckles in a closed fist is how you break your fingers.
I learned this from one of Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels. Thanks for the confirmation, Officer.
Just go for the ears with an open palm. If you catch one or both you disrupt the equilibrium and now there head is in a good stomping position.
Very interesting! Because of your and Dukeboy's advice, I am now a killing machine.
I miss your comments, Eusebius. I'm pretty sure I told you that in another Internet incarnation, I was Robert Kirby.
Thanks! I'm still reading and subscribing but it's been a busy year with not as much time to comment : ). Honestly yall do a good enough job that I don't really have much to add anyway!
Via The Lamp: 88 new priests ordained in France in 2023
https://eglise.catholique.fr/approfondir-sa-foi/la-celebration-de-la-foi/les-sacrements/lordination/542711-88-nouveaux-pretres-ordonnes-pour-la-france-en-2023/
You ought not to call today's progressive left "liberalism." It stopped being about freedom a long time ago. As Rod points out, it's all about forcing everyone to accept their lies. So use the term "the left" or even "the far-left." Liberalism is long gone.
This is incorrect. These people aren't true leftists, as class-related issues only figure minimally into their ideology, if at all. It is better to call them "cultural leftists," but even that leaves out those who are in fact liberals, but who have moved to the left culturally.
To put this another way, there are liberals who side with the "progressive left," but the progressive left isn't itself "liberal," at least in any historical sense. Part of this confusion comes from the longtime American habit of conflating liberalism with leftism.
Former Episcopalian here (now Orthodox). I loved being Episcopalian. High liturgy, beautiful music, welcoming to all, and women and gay people could be priests. I loved the woke stuff, I thought it was probably how God wanted it...after all, He doesn't love me any less because I'm female. I also was not really catchetized.
In the summer of 2020 my church was totally shut, doing Livestream services on Facebook live. My priest put on his clerical collar and marched in our city's BLM march, then posted pictures of himself on social media at the march. My friends from church were posting about #ACAB, all cops are bad, racist etc. Meanwhile my husband the cop was getting spit on at work, threatened by young men hanging out of car windows, and people came and shot bullets into the outside of one of the stations. Nobody ever called to ask how he was doing.
In 2021, my church friends were posting about how all people who don't wear masks want the elderly to die. People who ask questions about injections are hysterical anti-vaxxers and deserve to lose their jobs and worse. We had cheeky cute signs around the church saying God wants you to "sanitize thy hands". People could come back 15 people at a time and sit 20ft apart masked. My priest preached a sermon comparing George Floyd to Jesus, saying "we killed him, too".
I love my Episcopalian friends, and I love that priest and the rest of the clergy at our old parish. But those years were revelatory for me. They helped me see the temptation of self righteousness and pride, and how I was embodying those, and what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that kind of faux-compassionate hatred. Hatred in the name of "love". It was utterly chilling. I could not be happier to be Orthodox. I have a prayer rule and more discipline. There is a focus on humility, sin and salvation - things that were never emphasized at my Episcopal church. The priest is not afraid to talk about evil and the reality of spiritual war. I was well catchetized. It feels like a church that can help us endure the hard times ahead.
Great comment -- thanks!
I’m like you but my experiences have not been to that extent. I did have to seek out ACNA churches but alas there are none close to me. There are also anglo Catholic Churches around here and there. I tried the Orthodox Church in my area but the rituals are foreign and my children couldn’t understand what was happening, it all seemed pretty haphazard. I want to inculcate the liturgy rhythm to my children at this point and eventually move to an orthodox Anglican parish. I feel much anger and betrayal of what happened to the denomination that I voluntarily signed up for. It was crushingly sad when all of it happened; I was unaware of it until I heard about it on NPR.
The whole consent thing is vacuous, whether it relates to animals or minors. So, your dog cannot consent to you boinking it. True. But neither can it consent to being tied to a tree, put in a crate, or taken to the vet. It can't even consent to being euthanized. In a certain sense your dog having sex with you might be the least of its worries.
As far as minors go, note that libs and progs have no issues whatsoever with minors' ability to consent to sex with each other. In fact, it's encouraged. So obviously it can't be consent itself that's the point, but consent with whom. And the simple fact is that because the whole concept is malleable there will always be work-arounds for the "whom" part.
There was a small demonstration a few months back in Berlin where people advocated for sex between humans and animals. One guy bragged about fornicating with his "bitch," a female German Shepard. The dog looked absolutely terrified of its "owner." I wonder if the German equivalent of animal control was notified, not for the poor dog but for man who abuses animals for pleasure, but I doubt it.
The other problem with consent is highlighted in Moria Greyland's The Last Closet: people acting under compulsion are incapable of full consent.
From Sullivan: “[Liberalism] doesn’t seek to deliver the truth about anything either; it merely provides the mechanisms for the open-ended pursuit of truth.”
That is why liberalism was always doomed from the start in my estimation--especially once any shared belief as to God or a coherent moral order was gone. If all liberalism does (or is meant to do) is provide for the ability for each to search for truth, unimpeded by the state or his fellow citizen, then what happens when the citizenry arrive at radically different “truths”? A power struggle for which one will prevail. So here we are. Sullivan seems blind to that reality.
Exactly. Procedural liberalism inevitably crashes on the inconsistencies of ideological liberalism. The only thing that can sort out the claims of rival subjectivisms is power.
Right.
There's a popular form of utopianism among the Andrew Sullivan types that a society can be created where everyone's primary "truth" is a commitment to procedural liberalism -- that this is the prime directive of people's lives, regardless of what their "private notions about the meaning of life, etc." may be. The idea is apparently that we recognize how fundamentally unrealistic it is for our own beliefs to be universal, so therefore we prioritize procedural liberalism to protect everyone's beliefs equally, because it's the only way we can protect our own. David French is an example of this, I think.
It's a really odd, almost neurodivergent, way to view actual human beings and actual human motives, it seems to me, even when viewed on the level of abstraction. And of course, when measured against reality, it's patently false -- people hold those commitments about what is good, what ends are worth pursuing and so on in much higher esteem than their commitment to certain procedures. People will embrace procedural protections when they need them, and resist them when they don't -- that is the evidence of history and the present day and is fairly consistently observable throughout humanity. And so the drive is always to become the dominant perspective that can exclude others and use the system's power to promote its own ends and its own vision of the good.
The American experiment could only have "worked" in the context of a society which had a broad consensus about the good and the proper ends of society on the 30,000 foot level due to a kind of Christian-ish consensus. It wasn't the "hard version" of medieval throne-and-altar, but it was a soft version of it. The notion that the altar can be done away with entirely is utopian nonsense. All that happens is that you get a different altar.
Your said it better than I did, Brendan. Well done.
+1
"a kind of Christian-ish consensus"
I would have written "a kind of Protestant-ish sub-Christian consensus," in that it could include Unitarians, but not, as later events were to show, Catholics or Jews, unless these latter were to become "culturally Protestant," as the great majority of both proceeded to do.
It only "works" when you have a country of mushy ideologues who don't actually believe that strongly in anything.
Those types of people are okay with live-and-let-live attitudes because they ultimately don't really believe their own stories.
When you have sincere proponents of a belief, religious or otherwise, that whole experiment breaks down
"That is why liberalism was always doomed from the start in my estimation--especially once any shared belief as to God or a coherent moral order was gone."
Exactly, although I would use a reverse formulation: As long as citizens continued to share a belief in God and a coherent moral order, despite individual failures thereof, liberalism could flourish.
PS On reflection I really meant 'liberal society' rather than 'liberalism'. As a philosophy classical liberalism is what it is, and it is the attempts to add to it so that it could be extended ("flourish," and thus reduce belief and the moral order) that put us where we are today.
This is true. We have reached a point where people argue with a straight face that there is no such thing as biological sex. Compared to this, young earth creationists are models of rigorous reasoning. Any society must agree on some basic truths or it will fragment.
Rod said: "Seems to me that the most important question now for us on the Right is not whether to be illiberal, but what variety of illiberalism should we embrace and defend? Yeah, it makes me queasy. But what is the alternative?" That question should make everyone quesy, because if one really thinks about it, it leads to some dark places. But I think Rod is fundamentally correct that it needs to be seriously pondered because there may come a time when we will all have no choice but to make a choice.
This made me think of the well-intentioned folks who support the idea that convening a new constitutional convention in the U.S. will somehow right all the wrongs with our current screwed-up governmental structure. Well-intentioned but naive. There's an erroneous assumption that this would take us back to what the Founding Fathers actually intended and everything would work smoothly. It's naive because it doesn't face up to the reality that what we're going through now is a revolution (a slow moving one that arguably started in the 1960s but has been gaining velocity quickly in the last 25 years).
The only way a revolution is stopped is with a counter-revolution. And a counter-revolution is never just a return to the status quo ante, a counter-revolution is a new thing in of itself (even if it's sold as a return to the glory days). And to be successful, that counter-revolution has to purge (and I use that word intentionally with all its sad and terrible connotations) the body politic of the ideas and ideology that led to the initial revolution in the first place. And that's scary as hell because ideas and ideology don't exist on their own - real live people create them, believe in them, and implement them. So that means purging people.
And how has that played out in history? Everything from simple economic oppression to internal exile to ghettoization to the guillotine to shots to the back of the head in the Lubyanka basement to Guernica to one-way helicopter rides to the Gulag to Dachau to the Killing Fields. And once you've caught that revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) tiger by the tail you don't have much control over where it's going to take you. Maybe we can right our cultural and political ship without a descent into Hell - if any system can pull it off it's ours. But history since the French Revolution tells us the odds aren't great.
This is *exactly* why it makes me queasy. I don't want to live in that world. But the Left will not stop. We know this. It has now conquered the power centers, and is going to push and push and push. As I've been saying here, I really thought that when they inevitably, and openly, targeted children, that would be the bright red line. But it has not been, not yet, anyway. If liberal democracy means these evil trolls get to get inside the heads of our children, and into their bodies, then to hell with liberal democracy. Fortunately, we still have at our disposal the democratic means to reverse this, which is why we have to keep trying. If the Republican Party were actually serious about defending children and families from these sexual predators and their allies, we might have a chance. But you can go broke waiting on the Republican Party to do anything courageous but unpopular with the media and the oligarchy.
I hope you're right, but something nagging in the back of my head tells me we may have crossed the Rubicon. I agree that we have a democratic process to reverse things, but that's just a process (albeit a very good one). It needs people to make it work - and I'm not so sure having faith that our fellow citizens can be roused to do the right thing (however we define that) using that process will happen. Yes, we should try - I would love to be proved wrong. But if it doesn't happen, what then? We're back to your quesy question - will we be like the Spanish in the 1930s having no choice but to make a choice?
Read Burke, at the beginning of the Reflections, on just what you take in your hands when you decide on revolution. It is, he says, ENTIRELY OUTSIDE THE LAW. Tribunals fall down before it. Just as a matter of common sense we're not there yet.
Yes you are absolutely right. The revolution started in the 70s and has taken this long to fully grasp power and they have now. They openly attack the courts, subvert the law for there side while doctoring up charges against the other that they themselves would never be held too. We've fully crossed the line with Merrick Garland going after parents and Christians while fully ignoring attacks on Churches and NGOs on the right.
We're there and enough people have become aware to the disrepute before legal standards and fair play, the mockery of justice, that I cannot see the same tactics being used by the other side. Back and forth they might go for a while but eventually someone is going to come along and stop pussy footing with totalitarianism and dictatorship behind the mask and just take off the mask, kill his opponents, shut down decent, pardon himself and call it a day. Hell that might even be Biden or Trump 2024.
Important to point out that, as you say, the left has continually moved the goalposts. The regime, if that's the word, that obtained in, say, 1960, when both homosexual activity and abortion were largely illegal in this country, was by no sane estimate an illiberal polity. It was the freest place on earth, that would be, and is, regarded with horror and loathing by the cultural left.
Oppression. Let's take an example. Just remember. At that date the second most prominent poet in the U.S. was W.H. Auden (he held an American passport). The first was Robert Frost. The most notorious was Ezra Pound, but he lived in Italy. Eliot had renounced his American citizenship. Was there ANYBODY who took an interest is such matters who didn't know about Wystan's activities? Anybody? Would anybody like to return to that arrangement? I know I would.
I've mentioned this here before, but to me one of the most telling marks of what 60s America was is that in May, 1968, LIFE magazine believed it not a waste to run an article about which poets were supporting Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic nomination and which Robert Kennedy.
I remember that toward the end of summer, when Hunter Davies bio of The Beatles was published, a lot of people were unsettled by the photos of the future Fabs in their Hamburg days. There they were, in black leather and greased hair, and with the surly/lifeless look which is the default pose of all rock bands.
Even I remember when Robert Lowell came out supporting Gene.
If you haven't read his eulogy for Robert Kennedy, seek it out. It's a magnificent thing.
The trouble, though, is that, as Christopher points out, and as Sullivan is learning (or re-learning) the hard way, revolutions are not controllable. It's a kind of thing where they start and then the path they follow is not controllable, not by the people who started them, and not by the people who try to tamp them down in the middle, either. They either become entrenched, or they are reversed, or they run out of steam and things pass into a new phase after that happens, but the course must be run. There is no "off switch" available until the course has been run. And we are still mid-course. Andrew Sullivan and Douglas Murray are looking for the off switch, but they can't seem to find it. That happens to many revolutionaries, apparently unwittingly despite the historical record of revolution -- I suppose that has something to do with the mental mindsets of the kinds of people who take up the flag of revolution in the first place.
It's possible, of course, that the political system will find a way to reverse the revolution, but gosh the odds seem long on that. The cultural system is gone, and without that solid basis, no political effort will bear much useful fruit.
What I think is less clear is whether there will be a strong attempt to reverse, or whether we will be looking at periodic temporary pushbacks while the revolution continues apace until it becomes entrenched or spent, and a new phase follows which is unpredictable. I don't know. I struggle to see how a real attempt to reverse, even the kind that would result in some sort of civil conflict, could really take hold on the levels necessary to actually constitute a reversal, and not a mere protest. I suspect we may be in for an entrenchment or a waiting game until the fuel of the revolution started in the 1960s is finally spent, after which who knows.
This recent piece by Kat Rosenfeld in the Globe - also a liberal who wants to go back to 'reasonable liberalism' -- she asks, can't we all just agree that porn shouldn't be given to schoolchildren?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/06/21/opinion/progressives-are-minting-conservatives/
I too would like to live in that world... but I don't see it happening at the moment.
Rod, we have the means at our disposal, but not the ways. I would like to believe that DeSantis has the ballsiness of an Andrew Jackson. I'm afraid I don't. And what can be expected of a political group which thinks of a reelection of Trump as a Restoration?
Part of the issue with the kids is that there are far fewer people with children than there were a couple of generations ago. Up until the 1960s or so, most people got married, and most married people had at least a kid or two. These days, not so much. My grandmothers on both sides both have 5 great-grandchildren - and all five of those are mine! Neither my sister or any of my seven cousins have children, and a couple of them are aging out of being able to have kids at all. Throw in a couple of feminists who never want to have children, and we're down to just three who reasonably still might have kids, but the youngest of these is 35.
Especially among women, the attitudes towards culture and society are night and day with people who have kids and those who don't.
I think the first step is to stop being queasy. That feeling is a result of brainwashing by modern cosmopolitan western society, that says we all have to be prim and proper, and effeminately respect each other's differences.
People throughout the ages would have LOVED the chance to personally fight their enemies. It's time to rekindle that spirit.
I wish I could read the Douthat piece. The guy has always had a megaton of sense, even if I have a quibble of two occasionally.
The Church must be in the world-- but never of the world.
Oh, Andrew Sullivan. He assures us that at some unspecified date "many moons ago" he insisted in a speech that he can only paraphrase that he said "gay marriage, but no further." Seriously? This reeks of what people who are a little too into comic books and TV shows call "retconning"—retroactively changing the storyline to conform to current narrative needs.
Well, it's more complicated than that. He does not paraphrase entirely that I can see. But I agree that the drift of his language often told a different story.
I follow a few (European) liberal Protestant pastors on Instagram, though it's not great for my blood pressure. Funnily enough, the steady decline of their churches doesn't seem to bother them much. They never mention it. They do publicly fret about all sorts of other things - climate change, homophobia, whether their churches are "safe spaces for people of colour" (oh yes, hip German pastors use that term now) - but not their plummeting numbers. Maybe it does bother them in private, but they're afraid to say so because they don't want to seem square. Maybe they're so used to looking out from the pulpit at an empty church that they don't really notice. Or maybe they think, deep down, that Christianity has had its day and should move over and make room for something else. Their role is to see off the last generation of churchgoing pensioners, secure their own pensions, and then skeedaddle.
I fear the last explanation is the most probable, in many cases.
Has it ever occurred to you that what they're interested in is power? That they see the way the therapeutic state is getting more and more powerful and that they want a piece of it? It's pretty well accepted that the bosses and the chic back in the fourth century were the Arians. The barbarian kings, who seemed to be the future, were their patrons, and the Empire tottered.
Let's say the Synodal Way is implemented as a radical decentralization of the Church (up to a point, Lord Copper) on the Chinese State Church model. Do you for a moment believe that Cupich, or Tobin, or Gregory, would hesitate for a moment to take their list of episcopal candidates from Joe Biden? And that would be just the start.
That's often because those are state churches supported by taxes, giving clergy--however small their congregations-- a steady pay check. They act much like monopolies, lazy and unconcerned about more non-state supported conservative upstarts competing with them