Tag: books

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2020

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.  NEW TIER: $3 a month gets one edition of Sunday Doodles every month!

It’s that time of year again:  summer!  That means we’re due for The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2020!

I’m actually a bit overdue for this list.  I typically publish it in early June, to give those of you blessed to enjoy summer vacation a chance to look them up.  But my long illness for the first couple of weeks of the month waylaid a number of plans, and last weekend I was occupied with family festivities, so the list is a few weeks later than I like.

But, like Sunday Doodles—a perk for $5 a month subscribers—my philosophy is “better late than never!”  And with the Independence Day holiday approaching, it’s a great time to do some reading.

For new readers, my criteria is pretty straightforward.  To quote myself from the 2016 list:

The books listed here are among some of my favorites.  I’m not necessarily reading them at the moment, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t!

Pretty vague, I know.  Additionally, I usually feature three books, plus an “Honorable Mention” that’s usually worth a read, too.

For those interested, here are the prior two installments:

But that’s enough yackin’.  Here’s The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2020:

1.) Richard Weaver, edited by George M. Curtis, III and James J. Thompson, Jr., The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver (1999) – Regular readers know I love Richard Weaver, and I featured his masterpiece Ideas Have Consequences on the 2016 list.  The Southern Essays feature a collection of Weaver’s writings on the South.

Weaver was a literary critic and English professor at the University of Chicago, but his roots were in Asheville, North Carolina.  He possessed a deep and abiding love of and respect for Dixie, particularly its writers.  Weaver’s background in literature and poetry is evident in these essays, in which he ruminates on the abundance of prolific Southern literary types.  He also brings some nuance to the question of the American Civil War and the South’s role therein.  I believe it was in this collection that I first learned of John Randolph of Roanoke, the great, ornery Virginian who resisted federal overreach in the early nineteenth century.

Weaver’s writing can be a bit dense, but once you get used to his mid-century style, his ideas are easy enough to absorb.  I highly, highly recommend you pick up this collection.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

TBT: Conservative Inheritance

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With the Summer 2020 session of History of Conservative Thought in full swing, I’ve been reviewing the Summer 2019 archives pertaining to the course.  Among the various class summaries and overviews of great conservative thinkers, I came across this short essay, “Conservative Inheritance.”

I’d largely forgotten about it, which is a shame—I think it might be one of my better analytical pieces (although you, dear reader, will be the ultimate judge).  I go back to the dominance of “Rooseveltian liberalism” following the Second World War, and how conservatism morphed into a political program that largely accepted the premises of that liberalism, but acted as something like the more cautious junior partner—“a tapping of the brakes, not a full stop or reversal” of liberalism.

The debate over what exactly is conservatism has grown thornier and more immediate over the last year.  There is a sense among the intellectual Right that the prevailing orthodoxy of Buckleyism is inadequate and outmoded, that it can’t really address the problems of our age and culture.  Indeed, this essay explores the idea that conservatives essentially abandoned the culture in favor of political victories.  The sad commentary on that decision, which made sense in the 1950s and 1960s, is that our political victories are hollow.  Without the culture, political victory merely forestalls progressive dominance for a season—the brakes are tapped, but the machine doesn’t stop.

These are sobering but necessary ideas to consider.  I spoke with a friend on the phone earlier in the week; he claimed that traditional conservatives and Christians have lost the culture wars.  I prefer to think that we’re losing the culture wars, but that there is still hope of a rear-guard action or some kind of renewal.  Either way, it’s an uphill battle, a Pickett’s Charge.

With that, here is June 2019’s “”Conservative Inheritance“:

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TBT: Sailer and Spotted Toad on Education

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The grand experiment in online learning continues apace, although it is (somewhat thankfully) reaching its summer-bound conclusion.  Unlike many colleagues and teachers I’ve spoken with about the hasty transition, I have thoroughly enjoyed the distance learning experience, but I am thankful for the advent of summer.

Recording lectures can be a marathon effort, not unlike actual classroom teaching, requiring rapid shifting from one topic to the next.  I try to record “horizontally”—that is, I try to record multiple lectures for the same class or subject at once—rather than “vertically”—recording for each day’s classes—as “horizontal” recording allows my mind to stay fixed on a single track, but this week I’ve been a “vertical” recorder.  Yesterday I recorded a review lecture on Jefferson’s presidency (with a dash of Madison and the origins of the War of 1812), then a review lesson on Congress, then a Music lesson about the Phrygian mode.  I call myself a “Renaissance Man” in the post below; I might be right!

Of course, almost all of teaching is, as one colleague recently put it, “rebuilding a plane while it’s in mid-air.”  A beautiful, gleaming craft takes off confidently in August; by Labor Day, you’re buffing out the first spots and adjusting the navigational systems; by October, you’ve replaced the entire fuselage.  Christmas is a lonely island in the South Pacific where you refuel and make calculations for the next leg of the journey, which feels like flying over 6000 miles of ocean with no land in site.  From January to Spring Break the plane pretty much gets rebuilt entirely, until it’s no longer properly the plane you begin with.

By summer, you’re flying the glider the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, and not the F-16 or B-52 or 747 you started with for the year.  Not only that, but your canvas wings are punctured and your tail-fin is missing.  You’re not even worried about saving the plane at this point—you’re just trying to land somewhere without killing yourself or anyone else.

But I digress.  It’s been, overall, a pleasant experience since day one, for reasons detailed elsewhere, and my Kitty Hawk glider is looking more like an F-16 at this point in the year than it usually does.

In casting about for this week’s edition of TBT, I stumbled upon this post from nearly a year ago, a look at Steve Sailer’s review of blogger (and former NYC science teacher) Spotted Toad‘s book 3 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning, which I read shortly after writing this blog post.  The book is a short read, and quite good, as it details the challenges a young Toad faced in adapting to the chaos of an inner city Middle School Science classroom.

With my own summer vacation approaching, and the blog focusing more and more lately on education, I’m kicking around the idea of putting together an eBook with my own reflections on teaching, with some unorthodox proposals about what the field could look like in the future.  Spotted Toad’s work could be a source of inspiration.

Regardless, here is May 2019’s “Sailer and Spotted Toad on Education“:

Demographer Steve Sailer has a review on Taki’s Magazine of a new book from blogger Spotted Toad.  The book, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning, is a narrative memoir detailing Toad’s decade teaching in public schools in the Bronx.

Sailer, a dedicated statistician in his own right, lauds Spotted Toad’s statistics-laden blog, but points out that his memoir eschews statistics in favor of narrative.  This focus on narrative, as Sailer points out, does not detract from the book’s insights about education, but makes them more viscerally real for the lay reader.

Based on Sailer’s summary of the book (which I plan to purchase and read soon), Spotted Toad’s teaching experience led him to insights similar to my own; that is, that administrators and school boards spend too much time chasing education fads and pushing a romantic narrative about teaching, rather than just getting out of the way and letting teachers… well, teach.

Toad was hired as part of the once-fashionable Teach for America program, which placed young, enthusiastic idealists into poor school districts, usually in tough inner city schools.  The theory was that bad or lazy teachers weren’t engaged enough, so schools needed an injection of Dead Poets’ Society-inspired young’uns who would bend heaven-and-earth to reach urban youths.

Sailer speculates about why Teach for America was so popular in the latter part of the last decade, and suggests that it’s because upper-middle class New York Times readers forwarded glowing articles about TFA to their out-of-work, overly-educated kids.

That somewhat comports with my own experience, as I briefly considered joining TFA upon finishing graduate school at the height of the Great Recession.  I think it’s even more accurate to say it was popular because it promised work during a time when few people could find it, and didn’t require lengthy additional years of education and training.

Sailer pooh-poohs the idea that TFA could create qualified teachers, and he’s not entirely wrong—the program was certainly overly optimistic about its own efficacy—but I think the apprenticeship model of “learning on the job” is one of the better ways to learn the craft.  Most education classes are a joke, and other than a few useful pedagogical insights, my impression is that many of them are indoctrination camps for the latest progressive educational fads.  I’d much rather have a “pure” young teacher learning the ropes with the assistance of battle-hardened veterans in the trenches than to have that teacher languish away in a series of Two-Minute Hates for another couple of years.

Indeed, that’s been my big complaint with the State of South Carolina’s alternative certification program.  We have a teacher shortage, but you want me to shell out cash and three years of my time to teach in a crummy public school?  No thanks.  How about adopt my proposal to grant automatic certification to any private school teacher with three years of teaching experience and a Master’s degree in a relevant field, or with five years and a Bachelor’s?  That would solve the problem more quickly, and would bring a number of qualified teachers into public schools quickly.

My premise is that credentials don’t make a good teacher; classroom experience does.  I’m generally anti-guildist, as I fancy myself a bit of a Renaissance Man.  Of course, that comes from my personal experiences professionally:  out of necessity, I’ve taught a slew of social studies courses, as well as music at different levels, for nearly a decade.  I would have benefited from some education classes to learn solid pedagogical methods in some areas (particularly music education), but I’ve picked up many of these methods through trial-and-error, and sheer force of will.  When you have to get twenty inexperienced middle school musicians to play a Christmas concert, you figure out how to make it work (and sound good).

Regardless, Spotted Toad’s experiences hit upon some common problems in education, particularly education policy.  Toad writes of the coming-and-going educational fads and programs, some supported by big-wigs like Bill Gates, that are championed, implemented hastily (and at great profit to the companies that market and develop these programs), and then abandoned in five years when some new, shiny trend emerges.

Take a moment to read Sailer’s review this morning, as it offers some interesting insights into the push-and-pull of education policy, and an interesting, if sad, retrospective on the bungled federal efforts in the Bush and Obama Administrations to address education in the United States.

That said, for all the doom-and-gloom surrounding discussion of education in America, Sailer ends on a positive note:

For example, as I’ve pointed out over the years, on the international PISA school tests, Asian-Americans do almost as well as Northeast Asian countries, white Americans outscore most white countries other than Finland and few other northern realms, Latino-Americans outperform all Latin American countries, and African-Americans beat the handful of black Caribbean countries that even try the test.

We Americans do spend a lot to achieve these educational results, but our outcomes by global standards are much less terrible than most Americans assume. (In particular, Indian states that have tried the PISA bomb it, scoring at sub-Saharan levels.)

At least we’re beating our peers in other countries—usually.

Spring Break Short Story Recommendations, Part II: “Thus I Refute Beelzy”

The Portly Politico4 Comments

As I noted yesterday, Spring Break is an excellent time to catch up on some reading.  I am particularly fond of short stories, especially ghost stories, which can thoroughly explore one or two ideas in a relatively bite-sized chunk.  They’re perfect for casual reading while enjoying some downtime.

Like yesterday’s selection, today’s short story recommendation, John Collier‘s “Thus I Refute Beelzy,” comes from 11 Great Horror Stories, a collection of short stories that are not entirely horrific in nature, the title notwithstanding.

“Thus I Refute Beelzy” definitely is a horror story, with touches of The Omen and Children of the Corn; that is to say, it’s a little bit of “terror-tot fiction,” a term I learned recently from Alan Jones’s review of the film Let’s Be Evil, one of the scores of bad horror films on Hulu.

The whole story is very short—about five pages—and can be read in around ten to fifteen minutes.  Indeed, there is a chilling recording of Vincent Price reading the story that is just shy of thirteen (mwahahahaha!) minutes long:

Within those five pages, though, Collier crams a great deal of characterization—and terror.

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Spring Break Short Story Recommendations, Part I: “The Judge’s House”

The Portly Politico5 Comments

One of the perks of teaching is all the time we get off.  For my money, it’s not the long summer break that is the best—usually because I spend my summers working—but Christmas Break, which stretches on for two stately weeks.  It’s the ideal amount of time to decompress after the long Fall semester.

Next to that, however, is Spring Break, which at my little school lasts for a gloriously overstuffed eleven days, if you include the weekends (it’s seven workdays in total).  I still contend that Easter should get its full due and, a la a Southern European and/or Latin American country, get a full two weeks.

Nevertheless, the time off gives me a bit more time to relax and reflect (although I’ve been promised quite a few chores from my parents, who I am visiting for a bit)—and to read.  When it comes to books, I have the same issue as I do at buffets:  my eyes are bigger than my stomach (or, in this case, my capacity to read everything).  I always bring too many books with me on any trip, and am lucky to crack even one of them.  I also overindulge in written junk food, like reading various articles and blog posts online.

Further, my parents’ house, like my own, is full of books.  So I often find myself thumbing through their collection while neglecting my own Babel-esque stack of half-read tomes.

Such has been the case this Spring Break.  My own stack of reading sits forlornly to my right, probably feeling (if books can feel) a tad unnecessary.  Instead, I’ve been reading through a short story collection, 11 Great Horror Stories, edited by Betty M. Owen.  It’s a collection my mother picked up from a Scholastic book sale when she was still in school (this particular printing, the fourth, was published in March 1970, though the original copyright date is 1969), and it’s held up remarkably well for a paperback.

The collection itself is not all that horrific.  Several of the stories are only tangentially related, at best, to the horror genre; some of them, like Poe’s “The Oblong Box,” are more properly mysteries.  The collection does open with H.P. Lovecraft’s magisterial “The Dunwich Horror,” which is a must-read, although I skipped over it on this reading because it’s nearly sixty-five pages long.

For a detailed synopsis of all eleven stories, GoodReads.com reviewer Williwaw has written an excellent and useful summary of the collection, without giving away any of the fun and macabre twists.

For our purposes today, I’m recommending one of the better stories from the collection, Bram Stoker‘s (of Dracula fame) “The Judge’s House,” first published 5 December 1891.

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The Boogie Woogie Flu

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Don’t let the title of today’s post fool you:  I’m not going to write about the coronavirus today.  I’m actually enjoying the relative freedom and flexibility of distance education, sipping car dealership coffee while I wait for my 2017 Nissan Versa Note to get a transmission flush and a belt and some wheel bearings replaced, all with appropriate social distance between me and the other people getting their cars fixed.

But in these plague-riddled times, I couldn’t resist this charming little Quora post about another, funkier plague:  the Strasbourg “Dancing Plague” of 1518.  Not that there’s anything charming about dancing yourself to hell, but it sounds a lot more fun than cloistering alone in your house for two weeks.

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Vacation Reading: Quintus Curtius’s “Digest”

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I’m hitting the road with my family for a fun-filled trip to Florida.  As such, posts will be a bit shorter through the weekend.

That said, it’s also the perfect time to catch up on some reading.  Classicist and antiquarian Quintus Curtius just released a massive collection of his blog essays, Digest, which I am excited to, um, digest.

Readers may recall a post I wrote last summer about an essay from Curtius about the ocean.  That essay is indicative of Curtius’s depth of thought and erudition; his mind is keenly analytical, and he writes with the perspective of someone who has lived and learned much.

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Lazy Sunday XLVI: Man Time

The Portly Politico28 Comments

It’s been a big week for events in the manosphere.  Popular (and controversial) game pioneer Roosh V essentially ratified a decision from last year, and unpublished the remainder of his smuttier oeuvre.  At nearly the same time, the venerable Christian writer Dalrock announced the retirement of his blog, but after an outpouring of support (and shock), he has decided to leave the blog up, though he’s disabling comments.

As often happens on the blog, the unplanned, unofficial theme of the week became, naturally, the manosphere, and some discussion of its current state.  As such, this edition of Lazy Sunday looks back at some posts pertaining to that complicated, oft-misunderstand corner of the Internet:

  • “The God Pill” (and “TBT: The God Pill“) – This post was my attempt to provide a (very brief) history of the manosphere in the context of one of its Big Three, Roosh V (the others in the triumvirate are Rollo Tomassi and the now-deplatformed Chateau Heartiste/Roissy).  Roosh in particular underwent a lengthy transformation:  he embraced a life of casual sex and, not surprisingly, found it unfulfilling and empty.  He then descended into a period of despair (the “Black Pill”), but God reached down and scooped him up—thus, the “God Pill.”  It’s been remarkable to see Roosh confirm his newfound faith with the voluntary unpublishing of much of his work—a move that has not been without controversy.
  • “The God Pill, Part II” – This post picks up the thread from Roosh’s conversion.  He kept several of his “game” books in print, but the conviction of the Holy Spirit finally led him to unpublish the remainder, including his bestseller, Game.  It seems Roosh is really attempting to live his faith fully, but he will need our spiritual support to stay the course.  He’s apparently even asking readers to give him advice on how to support himself going forward.
  • “Reacting to Hysterical Reactions: Peloton Ad” – This piece was one of those throwaways I wrote hastily to meet my self-imposed daily deadline, but the media coverage of this Peloton ad really ticked me off.  I have no desire to spend $2000+ on an exercise bike with a video of a lesbian shouting at me.  But everyone—including our friends on the Right—were alleging this ad was proof of toxic masculinity and all the rest, simply because the wife is grateful for the gift (watch the ad in the original post).  Kudos to Dalrock, too, for drawing this one to my attention.
  • “Royal Cuckery” – Poor Prince Harry.  It’s amazing how an attractive woman can make a man throw it all away.  It’s also amazing how the quality of “attractive”—which necessarily has a “best by” date affixed to it—can cause an otherwise upstanding man to ignore all the other warning signs:  a broken home, a prior divorce, a woke outlook on life.  A big thanks to Free Matt Podcasts for sharing this post in his weekly roundup, too.
  • “Get Woke, Get Dumped” – This post was the contrasting companion piece to the Prince Harry one.  British actor Laurence Fox has taken the other route, and dumped his SJW girlfriend summarily.  He’s also sworn off women under 35—a dicier proposition, but understandable.  Younger girls have been so infected with and indoctrinated by wokery, it’s like talking to aliens.  There are obvious exceptions, of course, but those are called “unicorns.”

Well, that wraps up another beefy Sunday.  If those didn’t put some hair on your chest, there’s probably too much soy in your diet.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

TBT: The God Pill

The Portly Politico7 Comments

It’s been a week for explosive news in that corner of the Internet known as the “manosphere”; indeed, two of my posts so far (“Royal Cuckery” and “Get Woke, Get Dumped“) have been manospheric efforts.

Regardless, there were two big pieces of news to break (three if you count the impeachment trial of GEOTUS Donaldus Magnus, the living embodiment of the Red Pill):  Christian blogger Dalrock is shuttering his blog, and Roosh V is unpublishing the rest of his various pickup books.

I’m going to write more about the latter on Friday, but I will note that it is with great sadness that I learned of Dalrock’s permanent hiatus (that’s how I prefer to think of it—it leaves open the possibility of his return).  I featured Dalrock in my second Dissident Write feature, which he richly deserved.  His biblical approach to dating, marriage, and masculinity, as well as his never-ending war against “chivalry,” which he argued was a perversion of true Christianity, was formative in my understanding of the God-ordained order of things.

But I digress.  In light of these events, I thought this week’s TBT should look back “The God Pill“; another monumental shift in the manosphere inspired it.  Chiefly, Roosh V announced last summer that his infamous forum would no longer allow discussions of seduction, pickup techniques, etc., that involved casual premarital sex.  He also removed several of his pickup books from his website.

At the time, there was a great deal of speculation about how sincere it was.  I argued at that time that it seemed like a sincere conversion:  Roosh had nothing to gain—and much to lose—financially when he decided to remove these books.  He has now taken the ultimate step and removed his seminal work, Game, from his website and Amazon.  It was his primary source of income for the past two years.

That is a bold declaration of independence from sin—and a bold act of surrender and submission to God.  Roosh’s transformation from woolly playboy to austere religious scholar (tee hee) is a true testament to the power of the Holy Spirit to transform lives.

More on that tomorrow.  For today, here is 2019’s “The God Pill“:

There’s some interesting developments in the “manosphere,” a sometimes seedy, always lively corner of the Internet.  The manosphere grew out of the pickup artist (PUA) phenomenon of the early 2000s, then morphed into a catch-all philosphical, cultural, and lifestyle movement that encapsulated all manner of ideas about relations between the genders.  While not necessarily “conservative,” the manosphere broadly occupied a space on the fringe of the Right, overlapping with Dissident or Alt-Right thinkers.

It also promoted strongly the idea of the “red pill” and “red pill awareness”:  its leading lights and most avid followers purported to see things as they really are, not the fantasy realm of blue pill NPCs.  That came with a number of time-tested insights about the nature of male-female relationships, along with some unfortunate detours down the dark by-ways of discourse:  anti-Semitism, racism, libertine sexual mores, and the like.

Ultimately, though, it was a beautifully messy example of what free speech should be:  free-flowing, raucous, even unsettling discussions about every conceivable topic.  We like to imagine the public square as some kind of sanitized, lofty forum of David French-ian gentlemen debating arid abstractions.  In the world of the Internet, it’s more of a mud-flecked, bloody arena.

The 2015-2016 election cycle probably witnessed the greatest growth in this movement.  Donald Trump—a man known for his success in business and with beauties—captured the imagination of the manosphere the same way he won over the Silent Majority:  he was tough, brash, and unpredictable.  More importantly, he challenged a stagnant, ossified establishment and status quo.

The manosphere glommed onto Trump like herbal supplements on an Alex Jones live-stream.  Until the implosion of the Alt-Right at Charlottesville, the ‘sphere was going strong.

There are many strains of thought within the broad Red-Pill/manosphere movement, and I can’t do justice to them in a short blog post.  What I found interesting while reading some of these authors—the “Big Three” are Rollo Tomassi, Roissy, and Roosh V—was their gradual transition from PUAs to snake-oil sophists to political theorists.  One might scoff at the idea of a dude teaching guys how to pick up chicks formulating political and cultural ideas, but, hey, they did it.

What’s even more fascinating was watching the probing into the foundations of political systems.  On the old Return of Kings website, controversial founder Roosh V wrote a series of articles examining the different world religions, weighing their perceived pros and cons.  He also seemed to grow increasingly disgusting with a life of meaningless sex (I’ll provide some actual links when I write a longer treatment of this transition).

Now, Roosh has done a dramatic turnaround, after he has undergone—he claims—a profound religious conversion.  Consistent with that conversion, he’s banned posts on his popular forum about “pre-marital sexual activity,” to great scorn from his readers.  He’s also removed eleven of his Bang guides from his website (books for hooking up with women at home and abroad).

Some of his readers are accusing him of engaging in censorship, a la big tech companies shutting down InfoWars.  This comparison is absurd.  Roosh is a single entity, maintaining a server with his own funds and for his own purposes.  He’s not crushing political discourse or criticism of a regime.

Other comments accuse Roosh of “selling out”—as if telling people not to talk about sex is somehow going to sell more books.  Maybe the eleven books he’s removed from his website weren’t selling well anymore, but it does seem like a sincere example of “putting your money where your mouth is.”  Sure, maybe he’ll parlay his newfound faith into giving talks to churches, but that’s a pretty big transition to swing.  He’s not tapped into that market at all.

I could be naive, but this doesn’t seem like a case of “conversion-for-cash.”  There was a distinct undertone of disgust with his former lifestyle in Roosh’s recent writing, and a subtle repudiation of the West’s culture of sexual license.

Even before his conversion, I noted the Augustinian quality of the path Roosh trod.  He gave himself fully to the pursuit of earthly pleasures, only to find that pursuit was fruitless:  no amount of casual encounters could give him meaning.  Indeed, a theme that was beginning to emerge on sites like Return of Kings was a call to return to traditional gender and sexual roles, including a renewed embrace of Christianity in the West.

“Game” practitioners like Roosh were researchers in the dark field of dating and relationships in the twenty-first-century West.  They developed some useful techniques and stratagems for navigating those murky, painful waters, but their experiences also led them to Truth.  Roosh might have been a dime-store Sophist, but he’s come to realize that only Christ can fill the void.

I do hope his conversion is sincere.  If it is, his moves to remove potentially damaging books from his website is commendable, and a show of good faith.

It’s no wonder, though, that heads are exploding.  Christians are guaranteed persecution.  As Roosh puts it:

If you’re not a believer, it is unlikely you will understand the nature of these decisions and similar ones that will come in the future.

Amen, brother.  God bless.

The Enduring Legacy of Milton Friedman

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One of the major debates on the Right over the past year or so has been the efficacy of libertarianism.  Part of that debate arises from disagreement about the role of government:  should it attempt to be neutral, as libertarians argue (which, we have seen, it is not), or should it act in the “common good” (or, as the Constitution puts it, the “common welfare”)?  In a world in which the Left wins victory after victory in the long culture wars, the assumptions of the “New Right” that arose following the Second World War are increasingly called into question.

Among those assumptions are libertarian economics.  Increasingly, conservatives are adopting a more suspicious view of concepts like supply-side economics and free-market capitalism.  That suspicion is not because capitalism is a failure, per se, but because it is almost too successful:  the wealth and prosperity it brings have also brought substantial social and cultural upheaval.  Because capitalism is an impersonal and amoral system, it doesn’t make value judgments about what is “good” or “bad” in the context of marketplace exchanges.  The Market itself is the highest “good,” so any hindrance to its efficiency is bad.

Ergo, we see arguments in favor of legalized prostitution, legalized hard drugs, legalized abortion, etc.  Again, if market efficiency is the greatest good, then why not allow these “victimless” activities?

Of course, unbridled libertarianism is doomed to fail, especially as it scales up.  Legalized hard drug use might keep junkies out of prison, but we don’t want heroine addicts buying their next hit at the grocery store.  Prostitution destroys families and the lives of the women (and men) involved, and spread disease.  Abortion is straight-up murder.

Capitalism cannot sustain itself in a vacuum.  It needs socially conservative behaviors and attitudes to sustain it.  If one wanted to live in a stateless libertarian paradise, one would need a small, tight-knit community in which everyone bought into the non-aggression principle and agreed to be honest in business dealings.  But as soon as one person decided not to abide by the unwritten social code, the entire experiment would unravel, like that scene in Demolition Man when the effeminate police force doesn’t know how to use force to subdue a violent criminal.

But for all of those critiques, capitalism remains the best system we’ve ever developed.  I agree with Tucker Carlson that the economy is a tool, not an ends to itself, but if government interferes too much with the tool, the tool is no longer effective.  If anything, the economy is a chainsaw:  too much regulation and the engine stalls and the blades become dull due to misuse and neglect; too little regulation and you lose an arm (or your life), even if you cut down a ton of trees in the process.

One of the most powerful books I ever read was Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962).  It transformed the way I viewed the relationship between the government and economics.  Friedman would have a huge impact on my life and my thought.  While I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, I still largely accept his conclusions.

Friedman was a minimalist when it came to government power, but he still recognized some role for government:  maintaining the national defense, combating pollution, and fighting against infectious diseases.

Here is a 1999 interview with Milton Friedman, from the excellent Uncommon Knowledge series, hosted by Peter Robinson.  It highlights some common objections to libertarian economic ideas, as we as Friedman’s thoughtful, nuanced responses:

For what it’s worth, I’ll add that Peter Robinson is a fantastic interview.  He possesses that perfect quality in an interviewer:  he doesn’t steal the limelight.  I grew so weary of Eric Metaxas‘s interviews, not because his guests were uninteresting—he has great guests!—but because he can’t help but talk over them constantly (his penchant for campiness also goes a bit overboard, and I love that kind of cheesy stuff).  After listening to some of Peter Robinson’s interviews Sunday afternoon, I never found myself wishing he would shut up—always a good sign.

Regardless, these are some weighty issues.  I have been hard on libertarians over the past year because I think they tend to reduce complex issues to supply and demand curves, and I can’t help but notice how we keep losing ground in the culture wars by espousing endless process and slow persuasion (which seems to be stalling in its effectiveness).

On the other hand, I’m glad that conservatives don’t wield power the way progressives do; as Gavin McInnes once put it in a video (one I would never be able to locate now) after the 2016 election, Trump and conservatives have sheathed the sword of power.  Progressives, masters of psychological projection, expected Trump to come out swinging, because that’s what they would do.

I just don’t know how long we can delay them from swinging the sword again, and after Trump’s unlikely victory (and his likely reelection), I imagine progressives will no longer even engage in the pretense of even-handedness and fair play:  they will crush us relentlessly if given the chance, rather than face an uprising again.

Libertarianism doesn’t have the answer to what to do to prevent that scenario.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure any faction on the Right does—at least not in any way that is palatable.