The World As It Is

Not As We Wish It Were: Random Observations From The Weekend

An American

Good morning from Delaware. I hit the ground running here at the ISI conference, and have barely had time to breathe. Thank God for coffee, else the remnants of the Man Cold and the jet lag would have torn me down. Our dear Linda Arnold brought me Sudafed for the trip, which, along with strong coffee, is keeping me going. Thank you, Linda, for taking such good care of your scribe!

I’m writing this morning — Sunday, before I head to the airport to fly back to Europe — because we are in such an incredible moment. The ISI conference was full of conservative academics, and it’s fair to say that everybody here can hardly believe what just happened in our country this week. For once, “morning in America” doesn’t seem like a stale 1980s cliche.

It is not so for anti-Trump Americans. No, I’m not going to quote a bunch of freakouts and gloat over it. That’s fun, and I’ve had that fun since the election results. I’m now looking at some of this stuff and am intrigued, and even dumbstruck, by the incapacity of so many people to understand the bleeding obvious.

For example:

This is what happens when, like Discordian Kitty, you live for so long inside your social and conceptual bubble that you lose touch with reality. In a good op-ed in today’s NYT, Thomas Frank, the leftie who wrote What’s The Matter With Kansas? ages ago, tries to talk sense into his fellow libs. Excerpts:

Everyone has a moment when they first realized that Donald Trump might well return, and here is mine. It was back in March, during a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, when I happened to read the explanatory text beside an old painting. This note described the westward advance of the United States in the 19th century as “settler colonialism.” I read it and I knew instantly where this nation was going.

My problem with this bit of academic jargon was not that it was wrong, per se, or that President Biden was somehow responsible for putting it there, but rather that it offered a glimpse of our poisoned class relations. Some curator at one of our most exalted institutions of public instruction had decided to use a currently fashionable, morally loaded academic keyword to address a visitor to the museum — say, a family from the Midwest, doing the round of national shrines — and teach them a lesson about American wickedness.

Right. The people don’t exist for the cultural elites except as subjects to be improved. (And when I say “cultural elites,” I perfectly well know that I’m an elite by any realistic measure; I’m talking rather of that class of people who run the institutions and the leadership networks, and whose views dominate the discourse.)

More Frank, recalling his book:

My Kansas story was mainly about Republicans, but I also wrote about the way the Democrats were gradually turning away from working people and their concerns. Just think of all those ebullient Democratic proclamations in the ’90s about trade and tech and globalization and financial innovation. What a vision they had: All those manifestoes about futurific “wired workers” or the “learning class” … all those speeches about how Democrats had to leave the worker-centric populism of the 1930s behind them … all those brilliant triangulations and reaching out to the right. When I was young, it felt like every rising leader in the Democratic Party was making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called “the center,” the well-educated suburbanites and computer-literate professionals whom everybody admired.

Well, those tech-minded Democrats got exactly what they set out to get, and now here we are. At the Republican convention in July, JD Vance described the ruination visited on his working-class town in Ohio by NAFTA and trade with China, both of which he blamed at least in part on Mr. Biden, and also the human toll taken by the Iraq War, which he also contrived to blame on Mr. Biden. Today Mr. Vance is the vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, with Democrats.

By comparison, here is Barack Obama in 2016, describing to Bloomberg Businessweek his affinity for the private sector: “Just to bring things full circle about innovation — the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.”

I hope Mr. Obama finds his silicon satisfaction. I hope the men of capital whose banks he bailed out during the financial crisis show a little gratitude and build him the biggest, most expensive, most innovative presidential library of them all. But his party is in ruins today, without a leader and without a purpose.

It would have been nice if the Democrats could have triangulated their way into the hearts of enough educated and affluent suburbanites to make up for the working class voters they’ve lost over the years, but somehow that strategy rarely works out. They could have gone from boasting about Dick Cheney’s endorsement to becoming a version of Mr. Cheney themselves, and it still wouldn’t have been enough. A party of the left that identifies with people like Mr. Cheney is a contradiction in terms, a walking corpse.

What a rebuke! I remember being an ardent high school and early college liberal in the mid-Eighties, and trying to harass my father into realizing that Ronald Reagan was WRONG, and that he didn’t care for working people like him and our neighbors. Daddy thought I was full of shit. Daddy was right, of course, but looking back on all that this morning, what strikes me is how unthinkable it was for me to have stopped for a single damn second to think about just why it was that Reagan won the loyalty and votes of old-school Democrats like my father and his friends. Nope, from my side, it was all high-handed lecturing and sour fretting that those idiots just don’t recognize their own interests.

But see, I was 17, 18, 19 then. Today, we have grown-ups behaving like petulant undergraduates. See this quote from a new Jonathan V. Last piece on The Bulwark:

I saw that quoted by the liberal Vox reporter Zack Beauchamp, on X. As progressive as he is, even this was too much for Beauchamp, who said it was “a horrible thing to write.”

I don’t begrudge J.V. Last his anger at Trump voters, of whom I am one (well, not really; I waited too long to ask for a ballot — but of course I was a Trump backer). This is normal. Had Kamala won, my side would be mad too. But his aspersions at “Cletus in Alabama” give the whole game away, don’t they?

Peggy Noonan, from her WSJ column on Friday:

What are the Democrats? What’s that party for? When I was a kid they were the party of the working man, the little guy. That’s the Trumpian GOP now. When I was a young woman they were the antiwar party. That’s the Trumpian GOP. The party of generous spending? The Trumpian party says hold my beer. What belief do the Democrats hold that distinguishes them? LGBTQ, woke, gender theory, teachers unions, higher taxes? Why not throw in cholera and chlamydia?

Look at this (clicking here will take you to the tweet, where you can watch the video clip):

The guy on the left, Jay Michaelson, lays into the black Republican on the right because he said “there are a lot of families out there who don’t believe boys should play girls’ sports.” BOOM! Michaelson tears into him for “transphobia,” and just will not shut up about it. Bullying. The CNN host lets him get away with it, too. This is such a perfect example of the moralistic, pushy Left patrolling the discourse. The GOP guy kept his cool and stayed polite, but I wish he wouldn’t have. This little exchange of theirs felt so old-fashioned, so of the era that just ended on Tuesday. We on the Right don’t have to take this crap anymore. We never did, but we damn sure don’t now. Push back hard against these bullies, y’all. Their day is done. They don’t get to do this anymore.

Still, from a purely analytical point of view, it’s incredible that, his side having just received a thorough smackdown from the American people in a monumental election, this jackass Michaelson, rather than listen to his black Republican interlocutor, from whom he might have learned something about why it happened, instead jumped on his high horse about “transphobia.” There you have it: the Democratic Party 2024.

It’s really wonderful, for once, to be with my people and have everybody happy about politics, for once. No wailing and gnashing of teeth. Lord have mercy, even Rod Dreher is optimistic about the political future! I think what has most people especially excited is the expectation that Trump will have learned from the errors of his first presidency, and will move with all deliberate speed and force to implement his agenda.

Look at this. I had not realized that Justine Bateman — Mallory from “Family Ties” — has become Alex P. Keaton. This is great, and Megan — who does not support Trump — is completely right. Click here to see the tweet:

This is all so, so important for all of us to keep in mind going forward. As my friend Peter Boghossian, the left-wing anti-woke warrior, said the other night at our Budapest event, now is not the time to rest, thinking the dragon has been slain. Peter, who was driven out of his university, Portland State, by woke militants in the administration, simply for defending free speech and opposing the woke madness, explained that he knows intimately how these people think and act, and the idea that you can reach accommodation with them, a modus vivendi, is delusional. We have to be undeceived going forward.

Here’s a pretty great short clip by a young Trump-voting lesbian, responding to the creepy genderfluid guy Jeffrey Marsh. She fillets him, telling him that trans people like him are ruining it for everybody else. There are lots of gay people who don’t want this crap forced onto children, and they voted for Trump in part to protect kids from people like Jeffrey Marsh, who had free run during the Biden administration. A friend messaged me yesterday:

Knowing a lot of liberals, I think most mean well, assume that trans is the next civil rights movement and it’s bad not to support it, and haven’t thought about it at all. If you sit down 100 liberals for 30 minutes and just explain how puberty blockers and gender surgery actually works how many walk out saying “this is healthcare and I have no problem with it”?

Also, duh, a lot of them don’t have kids. It’s theoretical to them. Who would rather raise a kid that takes an expensive drug regimen for life and never gives you grandchildren, over a kid who has a phase and gets over it?

It’s almost time to check out of the hotel and head to the airport, so I want to throw two more things out there. First, a friend sent me this pic he just took in a Mississippi (!) Barnes & Noble bookstore:

He said that this is evidence of what the Anglican seminarian Daniel Kim told me at Oxford in 2022: that the occult, not atheism, is the biggest pastoral challenge of his generation, something he’s going to be dealing with for the rest of his life as a pastor. I write about this in Living In Wonder. Of course I want you to buy my book, folks, but let me emphasize that the question of wonder, and re-enchantment, is central to our time. You need to know this, if not for yourself, then for your kids. And you need to act on that knowledge.

Second thing: I loved being here at ISI with all those intellectual conservatives, but several of us after the conference shared our sense that most people there really don’t seem to have a strong grasp on the nature of the challenge facing us, and its immensity. We all picked up over the weekend a sense that most people we heard from and spoke to think this is primarily an intellectual matter, and that there’s nothing wrong with the world that can’t be fixed by reading more of the Founders, and returning to old-fashioned American virtues. Heaven knows that it’s important to read the Founders, and that we should all strive to return to old-fashioned American virtues. Three cheers for that!

But y’all, what’s going on now is so much deeper and darker and more complex than all that. It really is. The political dimension of the crisis is its own thing, and politics has a very important role to play. But our world has changed so very much since the days of Ronald Reagan. America is post-Christian now, and that has profound implications for what we should do, politically and otherwise. I was thinking last night about something an Evangelical pastor friend told me a year or so ago, about his deep frustration with leaders in his denomination, who think and act according to assumptions they made about the world in which they grew up, in the 1970s and 1980s. That’s not how things are now. Not even close. We have to struggle in and against the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. The saying goes that generals are always fighting the last war. If that’s how we think about this present moment, we are going to lose, and lose badly.

The last panel of the day, the one I participated in, was about Renaud Camus, the French cultural critic who is responsible for the “Great Replacement” concept. It is almost certainly not what you think it is, and it definitely isn’t what the media have told you it is (e.g., racist conspiracy theory). It’s a deep and serious and urgently necessary critique about the process of internal colonization of the West. Mass migration is the most visible manifestation of it, but not the only one. The book to read is last year’s Enemy Of The Disaster, the first time Camus’s political essays have appeared in English. I got the impression that the things we speakers were saying — N.S. Lyons, Nathan Pinkoski, Rusty Reno, and me — were things that many in the audience were hearing for the first time. That’s not their fault — but they all need to read, understand, and strategize based on what they learn. You too, perhaps.

The world is not what you think it is. That’s the first line of Living In Wonder. I meant it about the woo, but there’s more to it than that. America and the West are at a dramatic crossroads now. This is no ordinary moment. It is very, very important that all of us, whatever our political and faith commitments, strive to see and to think with as much clarity as we can.