Tag: Cultural Marxism

SubscribeStar Saturday: Christians Protect Other Faiths

The Portly Politico3 Comments

There’s been a debate raging on the Right between David French and Sohrab Ahmari that is ostensibly about civility in the political arena.  What it’s really about is a struggle for who will dominate conservatism:  the plucky culture warriors of the populist, Trumpian Right, or the hand-wringing sellouts of Conservatism, Inc.

That’s a story for another SubscribeStar Saturday, but is relevant to this topic.  Ahmari and other First Things writers signed their names to a manifesto in March detailing their resistance to and struggle against the prevailing liberal-progressive orthodoxy.  In his controversial follow-up piece, “Against David French-ism,” Ahmari soundly rejects hyper-individualism (and the kind of weak-willed ineffectualism of libertarian solutions to political and social problems) and vaguely calls for a state more attuned to Christian principles.

Critics are accusing him of advocating for a Catholic theocracy, which is, of course, completely unworkable in the pluralistic United States.  But I don’t think that’s precisely what Ahmari has in mind (although it’s a bit unclear).  He is correct that the United States was founded to be an implicitly Christian country.

To read more, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or higher.  Surely you want to read how I support such a sweeping claim, yes?

McClay & Sheaffer on American History

The Portly Politico1 Comment

It’s been a history-packed week for yours portly.  Tuesday morning my History of Conservative Thought students and I continued our examination of Edmund Burke, the great Member of Parliament and godfather of Anglosphere conservatism.  Burke foresaw the radical nature of the French Revolution well before the guillotining began.

On Thursday, I had the opportunity to substitute a colleague’s summer course, Terror and Terrorism, a popular course he’s run for several summers now.  Students in that course read excerpts from John Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (PDF, the same one the students read, in part), a political philosophy perhaps the polar opposite of Burkean traditionalism.

Rousseau’s theory of the “general will” is, I would argue, responsible for the radicalism of the French Revolution—which wrought the Bolshevik (Russian) Revolution, the Maoist revolutions of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and on and on.  There’s a reason one of my Conservative Thought students claims that “the French Revolution was the first Communist revolution,” by which he means it contained within it the collectivist ideals of Rousseau’s general will.

But I digress.  In the spirit of all that historical musing, I thought I’d recommend two pieces I’ve read recently about the historian’s craft, and the dangers of applying a progressive lens to our understand of the past.

The most recent piece is a post from Practically Historical, entitled “Expunging Our Past.”  Gordon Sheaffer‘s pithy historical posts are enlightening and engaging, and fits with an argument he makes in this post:

“History should be popular.  Our past must be understood by the citizenry- historical studies targeted only at academics cannot be how we measure the discipline.  There is a way to make history insightful and enjoyable.”

Amen!  One of my great frustrations while in graduate school was the ponderous relativism inherent in the jargon-laden, hyper-focused monographs we were forced to read.  I certainly acknowledge the usefulness and necessity of thoroughly researching a small corner of our historical experience, but what happened to the grand, sweeping histories of the eloquent generalist?

When I was a younger man, I relished reading accessible (but, nevertheless challenging) works of history, especially broad overviews of a time period or nation.  It’s fascinating to learn about the minutiae, to be sure, but a good historian should be able to give the broad strokes and the colorful details.

But the real point of Sheaffer’s piece is that the progressive revisionists are attempting to reduce American history to a Marxist (and Manichean) story of class struggle.  That trend dates back to Progressive Era historian Charles Beard, who famously argued that the Constitution was merely an economic arrangement that benefited the wealthy Framers, protecting their wealth and privilege at the expense of the common man.

Archfiend (and political scientist, not historian) Howard Zinn continued that theme in the popular-but-inaccurate A People’s History of the United States, which has sadly been adopted in many school districts across the country as an American history textbook.  Zinn presented American history as a procession of plutocrats exploiting the working people and racial minorities for personal aggrandizement, rather than the rich tapestry of hard-working yeoman and laborers who really built the country under the protective auspices of the Constitution.

Just as Burke was the antidote to Rousseau, so historian Wilfred McClay serves as a corrective to the partisan excesses of Zinn.  He’s written a new textbook, Land of Hope, which strives to be a “well-written and appealing history of the United States that, while being informed by the best scholarship, does not lose sight of the big picture about our nation’s admirable and exceptional history.”

McClay argues that without a proper foundation in our own nation’s history, we are unable to govern ourselves.  Quite true:  I would argue that a large part of our current national discontent and brutal culture war is that we have two very different visions of America.  The one is an America that is strong, liberty-loving, fair-minded, and great; the other is of an America that is exploitative, prejudiced, greedy, and callous.

That’s why I’ve long argued that simply requiring students to take an American history course to graduate from high school and/or college isn’t enough to move the needle.  It does no good if the course is a collection of progressivist pabulum or a crash-course in victim studies.  There’s no guarantee your high school history teacher—likely certified from a progressive education program—will actually teach American history fairly or accurately, much less your community college adjunct.

There are a ton of choice tidbits in this interview McClay gave to Encounter Books, the publisher of Land of Hope, but here’s a good excerpt on Zinn:

Encounter: Howard Zinn said that his goal in writing A People’s History of the United States was to create a “quiet revolution” in our understanding of American history. Did he succeed in that endeavor?

McClay: Yes and no. He succeeded in unsettling many aspects of the consensus in which American historical writing was embedded. He did this to an astonishing degree, particularly since he was not himself a historian. But he did not succeed in providing a substitute account of American history that goes beyond simplistic melodrama. Most honest historians will acknowledge that, even if they are sympathetic to Zinn’s leftist politics.

Encounter: Why was Zinn’s account so popular?

McClay: It is engagingly written, and gives a simple-minded, moralistic, account of the past as the struggle between the white hats and the black hats, the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. For some people, including many Americans who have felt disillusioned by our national flaws, this has been irresistible.

He also rails against the AP US History exam, which used to the “gold standard,” as he puts it, but which has suffered due to constant “tinkering with the exam, and interjection of themselves into what teachers actually teach in AP courses.”  I teach APUSH, and what McClay writes is absolutely true.  It’s bad enough teaching to a test every year—you don’t have the opportunity to luxuriate in the warm waters of historical detail—and it’s worse when the College Board tries to alter the exam every five minutes.

To close, one more powerful quotation from McClay:

Students should learn that history is not merely an inert account of self-explanatory details, but is a task of reflection that calls to our deepest sense of our humanity. And learning our history, the history of our own country, is part and parcel of learning who we are, and learning about the society of which we are already a part.

Again, I say, amen!

SubscribeStar Saturday: Asserting Conservativism

The Portly Politico1 Comment

As I’ve been developing my History of Conservative Thought course, one of my goals is to define “conservatism” positively; that is, on it’s own terms, and not merely as a reaction to progressivism.  Too often—including on this blog—we conservatives define our movement as what we’re against, rather than what we support.

That’s understandable, in part, for two reasons:  the Left’s vicious tactics are hard to ignore, and what we think of as “conservatism” is often the other side of a liberal coin.

On that second point:  conservatives often struggle to hold truly distinct positions because we’ve embraced the underlying assumptions of liberalism.  This explains the much-derided tendency of National Review to write headlines such as “The Conservative Case for [Deranged Leftist Policy Here].”  Conservatism, Inc., is also obsessed with policing our side, punching to the right as frequently as the left (take for instance, Kevin Williamson’s piece on the Crowder demonetizing situation; Williamson can barely wait to insult Crowder as “stupid” and childish, even as he feigns to defend the YouTube star).

We also tend to see compromise as part of the hurly-burly of electoral politics, so in a practical sense, we do so out of a good-faith understanding that our political opponents will do the same.  The Kavanaugh hearings largely dispelled that myth once and for all, as Lindsey Graham’s powerful reaction to that witch-hunt demonstrated.

Such is the theme of Angelo Codevilla’s latest piece, “A Conservative Resistance?”  Thanks to photog at Orion’s Cold Fire for linking to it.  Readers will recall that I wrote some months ago about Codevilla’s excellent essay on secession.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe at $1 or more on my SubscribeStar page!

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Conservative Inheritance

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In 1950, literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote in The Liberal Imagination (PDF) the following about conservatism, which he viewed as being virtually extinct following the Second World War:

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

It’s probably the most frequently cited quotation from a liberal among conservatives, because it did, in 1950, offer a practical assessment for the state of conservatism in the United States.  The twin struggles of the Great Depression and the war led to a triumph of what Russell Kirk called “Rooseveltian liberalism,” which sought to use the power of the government to address economic problems.  With the defeat of Nazism and Japanese imperialism, and entering the long Cold War with the Soviet Union, Americans placed great faith in the ability of their government to solve basic problems.

Indeed, the experience of conservatism since the Second World War has largely been that of accepting liberalism’s underlying propositions.  “Conservatism,” then, came to be more of reaction to the excesses of liberalism—a tapping of the brakes, not a full stop or reversal—rather than a cogent philosophical and social system on its own.

While that’s a controversial statement with many exceptions—there remained many conservatives, like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who continued to resist Rooseveltian liberalism—consider that the first Republican President since 1932, Dwight Eisenhower, accepted much of the New Deal, and left it virtually intact.  His signature achievement as president, other than ending the Korean War, was to champion the construction of the Interstate Highway System.  That was a worthy undertaking, to be sure, but the legacy of a major Republican president was to spend millions, rather than rolling back the interventionist state.

Since then, conservatism has gone through a number of permutations, many of which I’ll cover throughout my History of Conservative Thought course this summer.  My point here, however, is that conservatism, strictly speaking, cannot exist in the dominant framework of modern liberalism.

I’m not rejecting the tenants of classical liberalism—equality before God, the possession of God-given natural rights, the freedom of association—per se.  But conservatism is an empirical, rather than a rationalistic, endeavor.  Indeed, Russell Kirk argued that conservatism is not an ideology, as such, but the result of millennia of human experience.

Or, as Ted McAllister writes in “Toward a Conservatism of Experience” for RealClearPolicy, “Conservatism is an inheritance, not an ideology.”  He continues:

American conservatism emerged out of our experiences as a self-governing people who love their inherited liberties rather than abstract rights; whose laws have historically emerged out of our norms rather than a specious theory of justice; whose gift for creating and protecting political freedom (the freedom to govern ourselves, our communities, our associations) has served as the primary obstacle to the relentless drive toward an egalitarian administrative state.

McAllister’s essay—which is really a book review of Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed—makes a compelling case for a conservatism based not on metaphysical abstractions but on the “discovery, articulation, and defense of a reality we experience and of affections formed long before we needed to defend them.”  McAllister argues that conservatism had to adopt a more universal, ideological paradigm during the Cold War to face the major existential threat of international communism, but should return the localized, particularized forms of organic social arrangements America enjoyed prior to 1945.

Part and parcel to this restoration is a rejection of democracy’s excesses.  McAllister writes that “democratic culture overindulges a love of equality and abstract moral truths,” that it encourages a leveling of all people into bland masses and, paradoxically, hyper-atomistic individuals.  In such a culture, perverse individualism separates Americans from their communities and their heritage.  Instead, our churches, schools, social clubs, and other institutions have fallen prey to progressive ideologues, rather than serving as the glue that binds society together.

There’s a lot to chew on in McAllister’s review.  Permit me one more extended quotation:

American conservatism is rooted in inheritance, in the rough guidance of experience over abstract idealism, and in the protection of the pluralism found in voluntary association and in self-governing communities. This is why something profoundly American is lost when conservatives embrace abstraction and universal slogans in their struggle with either liberalism or progressivism….

Suffice it to say that today we lack a strong and traditionally conservative intellectual — and specifically academic — class. The easiest measure of this weakness is found in both the number and the intellectual range of conservative academics. Of particular importance here is the dearth of conservatives in the humanities. Indeed, the number of conservative scholars devoted to such studies as philology, literature, theology, philosophy, and history as well as themes such as imagination, beauty, and truth, has dwindled both in raw numbers and as a percentage of conservative academics. Of course, outside the academy, there are journals and institutions that engage the moral, literary, historical imagination, which offer some reason for hope. But the overall trend on the Right has been toward intellectual work geared toward contemporary and immediate concerns — more about power than about beauty.

In essence, McAllister argues that, while we often appeal to abstractions in our never-ending battle against progressivism, we adopt their rationalist framework by doing so, albeit out of necessity and expediency.  That said, our focus on the immediacy of political power has led conservatism to sacrifice culture—a key reason, I would argue, as to why progressives are so dominant there.

McAllister overstates the problem slightly—just look at New Criterion to see “conservative scholars devoted to… themes such as imagination, beauty, and truth”—but the Left certainly dominates our culture.

At this point, though, I wonder how we can get back the old conservatism.  It’s a worthy goal, but it seems unlikely in an age in which progressive and postmodern dogma reign supreme.  The extent to which the progressive frame infects conservatism—even down to our mental processes—is disheartening, and explains the capitulatory approach of once-great conservative publications like National Review, which can barely contain its eagerness to run and apologize to Leftists for challenging them.

In the long-run, though, conservatism’s foundation—its groundedness—in objective reality, as opposed to rationalist abstractions, will allow it to prevail in all its beautiful, localized, variegated permutations.  That “long-run” just might take a very long while to arrive.

The Price of Freedom: A Good Attorney

The Portly Politico4 Comments

A common observation on the Right is that the process is the punishment.  Leftists understand this premise well:  the power of an accusation and an attending lawsuit is that, even if the allegation is ultimately untrue, their opponent has endured costly legal battles.  That battle can cost them even more, including their livelihoods and their families.

Few people are able or willing to pay the costs, both financial and psychological (and, increasingly, physical) of Leftist attacks.  Those that do can look forward to years of grueling court appearances and legal fees, as the Masterpiece Cakeshop case demonstrated.

Conservatives know that story well:  the Christian owner of the Colorado bakery refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission trampled all over his religious convictions.  Rather than knuckle under to the social justice tyrants, the owner won a case in the Supreme Court after years of litigation… only to return home and have a man request a cake for a “gender transition” party.  The CCRC pounced on Masterpiece Cakeshop again.

The Left, in this regard, is relentless, as we saw last week with the Carlos Maza incident.  There is no pretext of fair play beyond the flimsiest, airiest of rhetoric—and, increasingly, the Left doesn’t bother with that.

Case in point:  a small, family-run bakery, Gibson’s Bakery, in Oberlin, Ohio, won a three-year suit for $11 million in damages against ultra-progressive Oberlin College.  The bakery was robbed the day after the 2016 election by three young black men, students at Oberlin.  The owner reported it to the police, and the three men were arrested.

But, because the burglars were black and the owners white—and, as the Breitbart piece reporting on the case implies, the progressives of Oberlin wanted to vent their tear-soaked anger at Donald Trump’s presidential victory on some unsuspecting white folks—the arrests soon became about race.

Not only did students protest—their professors and administration gave them time out of class to do so (and snacks)!  A college vice president, Meredith Raimondo, distributed flyers denouncing the bakery as racist, and which recommended other bakeries in the area.  The college also severed its business relationship with the bakery.

Like a medieval pope demanding criminal bishops be tried in ecclesiastical courts instead of civil ones, Oberlin further demanded that “first-time” offenders who are students at the college be turned over to the school for punishment.  Ignoring the glaring problem of how a shopkeeper is supposed to intuit if thugs in his store are first-time or repeat-offenders, that move to skirt the law through extralegal college tribunals smacks of the campus “rape” scare and its kangaroo courts—young men found guilty on flimsy charges of “retroactive rape” and the like.  Of course, in this situation, we all know that the college “courts” would sweep the criminal indiscretions of its students under the rug.

The result:  Gibson’s Bakery laid off most of its employees and nearly went out of business.

Justice was served in this instance with the much-deserved settlement (which has the potential to triple in value, pending a further hearing), but to quote commenter “mercury” on the Breitbart piece:

Unfortunately, there are probably 1,000,000 other cases that didn’t end so well for urban grocery stores, gas stations, convenience markets, clothes stores, and so on. This is where the perps got away with the theft, harassed or stole from customers, or shot the owners for resisting the theft.

Consider, too, the thousands of establishments that sucked it up and took one on the chin to stay in business.  Freedom, sadly, isn’t free.  Gibson’s Bakery defeated the Goliath of Oberlin College, but many Davids wither before progressive dominance.

Lazy Sunday XIV: Gay Stuff

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Apparently, June is Pride Month, so there’s a lot of gay stuff going around.  If you’re part of the expansive LGBTQ2+ABCDEFGetc. community in New York City, you get two parades to show off your bedroom antics.  From deplatforming conservatives to avoiding prosecution for hate-crime hoaxes, it’s never been a better time to be out and proud.

To celebrate “pride”—which I take to mean loudly proclaiming who you like to sleep with while wearing ass-less chaps in public—this week’s Lazy Sunday looks back at the influence of gay stuff on our body politic.  Enjoy!

  • “Gay Totalitarianism” – This post discussed the prevalence of homosexual hate-crime hoaxes, the most ubiquitous being Empire actor Jussie Smollett’s claim that a couple of white Trump supporters assaulted him with bleach and nooses in a tony, largely gay Chicago neighborhood early in the morning.  I linked to Pedro recent piece for American Greatness, “Our Queer Decline,” which deftly analyzed this phenomenon:  if homosexuals really faced persecution, they wouldn’t feel safe lying to the authorities about being attacked.  Instead, they know they’ll have the full support of and sympathy from the government, corporations, and the media.

    As the Smollett case showed, agents within the government would simply refuse to enforce the law via prosecution.  The issue here is not that gays are receiving legal protection—like all Americans, they should be protected from assaults on their persons—but that there is a dual-standard at play.  Jussie Smollett received egregious preferential treatment in part because he is gay (and, presumably, because he’s black and connected to the Obamas).

  • “Buttigieg and Buchanan: Redefining Morality” and “Bland and Gay” – These twin screeds explore South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s appeal to voters—and his ungodly misinterpretation of Scripture regarding his homosexual lifestyle.  The former essay pulls heavily from a piece Pat Buchanan wrote for Taki’s Magazine about Buttigieg’s radical redefinition of Christian teaching on homosexuality (essentially, Buttigieg’s argument is “God made me this way, so I’m supposed to ignore His teachings on homosexuality”).

    The latter essay attempts to explain Buttigieg’s appeal to voters, which seems to be waning a bit.  At the time, I argued that Buttigieg’s popularity was due to his blandness—he speaks largely in indefinable generalities, a la Barack Obama’s “Hope and Change” slogan—mixed with the mildest splash of exoticism—his homosexuality.  Now that same-sex marriage is legal and homosexual behavior is largely normalized in the United States—but still, we all tacitly acknowledge, abnormal—Buttigieg’s gayness offers the slightest frisson of excitement for voters.  The thought process seems to be “oh, he’s a safe, non-offensive, boring white guy, but I can virtue-signal on the cheap because he’s gay!”

  • “First They Came for Crowder” – This piece covered the demonetizing of conservative comedian Steven Crowder, all because a flamboyant “journalist” at Vox pitched a hissy-fit.  If that’s not proof that being gay aligns you with the full power and influence of big corporations and our techno-elites, then there’s no convincing you.

There you have it!  Some celebratory reading for Pride Month 2019.  Here’s hoping your Sunday is as fabulous as Milo Yiannopoulos.

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

First They Came for Crowder

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The big news in the conservative world this week was YouTube’s unceremonious demonetizing of Steven Crowder, yet another example of techno-elites censoring conservative and dissident voices.  Apparently, YouTube has somewhat reversed that decision if Crowder removes the hilarious “Socialism is for Figs” t-shirt from his website’s store (which, if that link is any indication, they have done).

The occasion for this deplatforming was a bout of limp-wristed hysterics from gay Hispanic (that’s a two-fer) Carlos Maza, a whinging, soyboy-ish fop with a penchant for calls of violence against conservatives.  Once again, loafer-lightened totalitarianism rears its fabulous head.

Maza argued that Crowder had “bullied” him in a series of sketches lampooning the sassy Latina’s emphatic videos for Vox.  As such, Maza demanded YouTube demonetize Crowder’s videos on its site.  When YouTube refused, Captain Canines led progressive journalists on a crusade against YouTube, claiming it didn’t do enough to protect LGBTQ2+etc. creators.

Please.  As Will Chamberlain writes in a piece on Human Events, Maza is one of the most privileged people on the planet:  he’s a flamingly gay Hispanic journalist.  Few people enjoy greater access to the full might and rancor of the progressive press (but I repeat myself) than this guy.

Crowder, on the other hand, has to hawk humorous t-shirts and hand-etched mugs to create a source of non-YouTube funding in order to keep his show going.  He’s been urging fans to subscribe to Mug Club for years for precisely this reason:  YouTube could pull the rug out at any moment (use promo code “Free Speech” for $30 off an annual subscription—that’s an incredible bargain).

YouTube brought in users with the promise of using their platform to make a living.  Now that they have a monopolistic market share of viewer eyeballs, they murkily shift their guidelines like a witch’s cauldron, booting conservatives for the slightest perceived offense.

Conservative content creators need reliable sources of funding to fight against the progressive media machine.  Steven Crowder needs your support.

And trust me—the mug alone is worth $70.

Carnival Gets Even Lighter in the Loafers

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There’s something inherently flamboyant about Latin cultures.  Maybe it’s all the hip-thrusting dances and melodramatic machismo, coupled with the passionate temperaments of the people.

Whatever the reason, Brazil just got even gayer.  Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled 11-6 last week in favor of criminalizing homophobia and transphobia.  Wrongthink regarding same-sex marriage and other issues will be treated as equivalent to racism.

Violent crimes committed against homosexuals are a problem in Brazil, so rather than prosecute those assaults and murders as such, Brazil will now treat them as “hate crimes.”  Apparently, simply enforcing the law isn’t good enough for gays, so to be treated like everyone else, they want special treatment.

A homosexual rights group in Brazil argues that their kind are subject to violent attacks, citing the deaths of 141 homosexuals in the tropical nation this year.  That figure is, of course, tragic, but consider the high-risk lifestyle associated with being gay, lesbian, or transgender.  We don’t often discuss these risks in polite company, but the gay lifestyle invites dealings with some shady characters—older gays grooming younger men for the lifestyle, dangerous “bed-hopping” activities, etc.

Part of this vote is, surely, a reaction to Right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, a self-described homophobe.  I would never endorse treating homosexuals poorly—or, God forbid, attacking them—because of their sexuality, but it takes a certain amount of courage and bravado to straight-up call yourself a homophobe in 2019.

But I digress:  President Bolsonaro, the “Trump of the Tropics,” strenuously opposes gay marriage and the undermining of traditional Brazilian values.  We might disagree with his tactics here in the United States, but, to his credit, he’s seen what happens when homosexuality becomes normalized.

Consider:  here in the United States, deep-blue States were voting against legalizing same-sex marriage just fifteen years ago.  Now we have trannies reading pro-LGBTQ2+ books to pre-school kids in public libraries.  You can’t blame Bolsonaro for wanting to block his country from sliding down that same slippery slope.

The other part of this ruling must surely be the creeping secular-progressivism that seems to afflict ruling elites of many Western and Western-ish nations.  No good thing can go unsullied for long from the globalist tentacles of Soros, Inc.

Finally, it does seem that Bolsonaro’s popularity is fading.  But like Trump, he retains a die-hard group of core supporters, and it could be that the overwhelmingly enthusiasm of his historic campaign is merely dwindling as the difficult task of governance continues.

All people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.  That said, the aggressive attempts to normalize homosexual behavior and other alternative “lifestyles” are destructive to social stability and civilizational survival.  We shouldn’t be celebrating our own decadent embrace of decline.

More Never Trump Treachery

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In the Culture Wars, the Right struggles with a commitment to principles, decorum, and intellectual honesty.  In every area of life, those qualities are virtues, but in the battle against the progressive Left, those virtues quickly become liabilities.

Nowhere is this handicapping more apparent than on the “Never Trump” Right.  In some cases—think neocon loons Max Boot and Bill Kristol—these figures are not even properly part of the “Right.”  In other cases, they’re effete elites—like George Will—who comprise the “loyal opposition” to the dominant Leftist paradigm.

In still others, the Never Trumpers are overly-literal ideologues who can’t accept anything but 100% ideological purity.  These are the Libertarians or “libertarian Republicans” that love 99% of what Trump has accomplished as president, but can’t abide tariffs or border control.  They point to Trump’s seemingly “authoritarian” rhetoric as evidence that the freedom-loving real estate mogul is not-so-secretly an American Mussolini.

Such is the case with Michigan Congressman Justin Amash, the self-styled “libertarian Republican,” who announced on Twitter that President Trump has committed impeachable offenses (without identifying what those offenses may be).

There are also rumors that Amash might run for president in 2020 as a Libertarian.  Given his tenuous but significant popularity in Michigan, he could siphon away enough votes from President Trump to cost him a crucial State and its electoral votes.

And herein rests the problem with so-called “libertarians” like Amash:  they’re willing to sacrifice the good—in Trump’s case, the overwhelmingly great—for the perfect.  “I can’t have Milton Friedman for President, so I’ll make sure the depraved socialists take office.”

Further, Amash has spent his entire career in politics, with the exception of one year working for his father’s company.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it definitely doesn’t fit with the Randian Übermensch ideal of spergy libertarianism.  Libertarianism works great if you’re shielded completely from the vagaries of the real-world job market.

The most generous interpretation is that Amash sincerely believes that the president’s reactions to the Mueller probe constitute what he calls “impeachable conduct” (never mind that the Constitution doesn’t identify “conduct” as worthy of impeachment, just “high crimes and misdemeanors”).  I can accept that Amash has applied his ideology so rigidly—and his distaste for real political brawlers so completely—that he believes the president should be impeached.

On the other hand, given his utter lack of real-world experience, it could be that Amash is attempting to make a name for himself after he leaves Congress (or gets voted out).  There are a number of Never Trumpers who, I’m convinced, are biding their time.  Should Trump lose in 2020—or when he leaves office in 2025—they look forward to resuming their place atop the political ruling class, getting back to their ineffectual, noodle-wristed “opposition” to official, state-sanctioned Leftism.

Regardless, the Right has no room in its ranks for such traitors (the Great One, Mark Levin, characterized Amash as a “Benedict Arnold against the Constitution“).  Fortunately, Michigan State Representative Jim Lower has announced a primary challenge to Amash.  Here’s hoping Lower lowers Amash a peg or two.

Barr and the Deep State

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Blogger photog at Orion’s Cold Fire has an excellent analysis of Attorney General Bill Barr’s handling of the Mueller Report, as well as an hysterical Congress’s insistence that he somehow lied about the Mueller Report because his summary didn’t adequately convey the tone of the report.  Apparently, the Democrats consider an accurate, straightforward summary constitutes “lying to Congress” because Barr didn’t include Mueller’s anti-Trump rhetoric.

The Democrats are grasping at straws here.  They’ve lost the collusion battle, which was supposed to be their Waterloo against President Trump.  Instead, it’s turned into their Gallipoli (and Trump’s Battle of Tours).  Their panic is palpable, so now they’re resorting to the “Trump-is-a-meanie-and-unpresidential” line, and that the president’s angry outbursts at news of the probe suggests he was up to no good.

Foolishness.  As AG Barr noted, you’d be mad, too, if you’d been accused of a crime you didn’t commit, and one that would hobble your presidency in its infancy.  The Democrats are essentially attacking President Trump for being a normal human being—all the more reason to oppose the Democrats at every turn.

photog’s piece is a reevaluation of Barr in the wake of his strong resistance to the Democrats and their perfidy.  In an earlier essay, photog argued that Barr was likely another swamp creature, and would wilt under the heat of his Deep State peers.

In the wake of his Senate testimony, however, that no longer seems likely.  The question now, as photog writes, is whether or not Barr will strike back against the Deep State and go after McCabe, et. al.—or even the Clinton crime family.

photog poses another interesting question:  are McCabe and Peter Strzok “fall guys” for the Deep State, the public figures willing to fall on their swords to save the whole rotten apparatus?  It’s an intriguing notion, and one I had not considered.

If they aren’t stooges, however, the implications are staggering.  To quote photog at length:

If McCabe turns state’s evidence then Comey, at least, is dead meat.  And after watching Jim Comey over the last few years I would be very surprised if he didn’t roll over and give up everyone involved up to and including his boss, Loretta Lynch.  After that, who knows?  Could these people be rolled up all the way to Obama.  I guess it’s possible.  But a thing that has to be remembered is that just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be.  Convicting a former Attorney General of the United States of conspiracy to undermine the election of a U. S. President would be tantamount to starting a civil war between the left and right.  And I’m not saying it would be unjustified.  Basically, what has been done is treason.  But the consequences of pursuing this all the way will not be without severe consequences for both sides.

Those are some sobering conclusions.  What would it mean for the health of the body politic and our political system if we start imprisoning former AGs—and higher?  If legitimate crimes have been committed, they need to come to light and be prosecuted, but would doing so begin a treacherous round of tit-for-tat?

I understand photog’s concern here—I share it—but the lesson of recent political history seems to be that the Left will do whatever it takes to win, damn the consequences.  In a healthy system, such high crimes would be unfortunate and shocking, but they could be prosecuted fairly.  In our current system—the kind that enables such corruption and abuse of power—the Democrats would just be biding their time until they could purge the government of any remaining dissident patriots.

Just look at the purging of conservative and Dissident Right voices from the public square.  Facebook purged major Dissident Right figures, some of whom merely talked with Gavin McInnes outside of Facebook!  McInnes says some outrageous (and hilarious) stuff, but he’s not a hatemonger.  The Proud Boys are not a white supremacist group, much less a terrorist organization.  Yet claiming that Western Civilization is the best and that women are usually happier having children (but, of course, are free to live their lives as they choose) is somehow “hate.”  Yeesh!

Take some time this afternoon to read through photog’s reassessment of Barr.  It’s nuanced and thoughtful, and poses some interesting questions.  Here’s hoping Barr takes the fight to the Deep State, and begins rolling back the Deep State.