A narrow path indeed

To employ the image of walking a tightrope to connote the need for steadiness in a perilously tricky environment doesn't require a great deal in the way of originality, but it is effective for conjuring the stakes involved. A false move midway between two high-rises at a quarter-mile altitude has immediate and irreversible consequences.

So that's what I'm going with as a metaphor for what's required of conservatives in the summer of 2018.

Nothing short of bringing to bear everything we know, with no slop in formulation, is going to ensure our survival.

Here at LITD, we've recently devoted a lot of posts to two concurrent threats - think of them as gusts of wind, or sudden noises - to the Grand Theme, the body of immutable principles, that hasn't changed and doesn't change in the face of historical comings and goings.

There's the recent exponential ratcheting up of the Left's frenzied bitterness. Since the Progressive era of a hundred years ago, and through its "achievements" such as the New Deal, the Great Society and the Obama era, it has insisted that the primary lens through which history and public policy should be viewed is struggle between classes - first, between economic classes (muckety-mucks versus working stiffs), then between races, then between genders, and then between those who understand that the universe self-evidently exhibit an a priori design and those who maintain that the human being can define and invent himself,  herself or itself.

In short, it keeps refining this notion of "systemic oppression" that has always fueled it:

Democrats have been grappling with key questions about coalition building since the 2016 election: Should they prioritize winning back the voters they lost to Trump? Should they attempt to woo the white voters gradually fleeingthe party? Progressives this weekend said, emphatically, no. It’s a genuine attempt to remake the Democratic Party at a time when racial and class tensions are the highest they’ve been since the 1960s—and it’s also put them on a collision course with party leaders and other Democrats.

“I think Trump’s win scared the shit out of everybody,” said Anoa Changa, a progressive activist and host of the podcast The Way with Anoa. “I think it’s been a wakeup call for a lot of people that we have to invest. We can’t just do the traditional model where we only talk to super-voters.”

That doesn’t mean ignoring whites and Trump voters, she says. Instead, “it’s rejecting the notion that our way to victory is having a centrist, moderate right-leaning strategy that feels like we could peel off Romney Republicans, versus investing in communities of color, marginalized groups and progressive white people,” Changa said. “There is this notion that...we can’t address the issues of race, systemic oppression because we don’t want to piss these voters off. We have to find a way to do both.”

It does lead to some odd delusions, such as the notion that nobody has been talking about race:

progressives are adamant that the only way to win in November and beyond has to be about more than economics, and that the right message—the one that will appeal to progressive whites, as well as turning out more people of color to the polls—invokes both race and class equally. Two Netroots trainings on developing a “Race-Class Narrative” were completely filled this weekend, with activists and organizers participating in mock-canvassing sessions in which they practiced delivering lines that contained both racial and economic messages. “The status quo has been not to talk about race, and there’s a myth out there is that if you talk about race you’ll lose,” said Causten Rodriguez-Wollerman, one of the leaders of the training, and a strategist with the public-policy organization Demos. “You cannot build a multiracial coalition by being silent on race.”

But for some, no amount of puking all over oneself about supposed demographic disadvantage is ever enough:

On Saturday, the final night of this year’s Netroots conference, a small group of young protesters from the “Black-Ass Caucus” took to the stage. “We will no longer be tokenized by so-called white allies,” one man shouted to the audience. Another protester, a young woman, criticized progressives who speak about economics and class, without mentioning race. “Everything—including class issues—are built on race issues!” she yelled into the microphone.

“I’m a woman of color and people do not pay attention to us, even in the littlest things. but we are always the ones saving the Democratic Party,” 27-year-old Ianthe Metzger, a staffer for the Human Rights Campaign and a Netroots attendee, told me earlier in the weekend. “Finally it feels like we have a say...it’s like finally, this is our moment.” 

The demands get ever more exacting. In a HuffPost piece by Jessica Prois,  we see an attempt to make Asians, an awfully broad categorization, but a demographic that routinely beats the pants off both blacks and whites in college-admissions scores, representation in well-paying occupations, and a number of other metrics, into a beleaguered group entitled to frenzied bitterness:

That The New York Times stood behind [Sarah Jeong's] anger means something to Asians. There are, of course, other outlets for Asian anger, but they aren’t mainstream. There is the original online purveyor, Angry Asian Man. Founder Phil Yu’s motto is “stay angry,” and one of his canonical questions when he features readers is “What makes you angry?”

Emma Sulkowicz, an Asian-American artist known for carrying a mattress across Columbia University’s campus as a visual reminder of her alleged rape, talked to HuffPost about where Asian anger comes from.

“There’s a lot of racism we have to deal with. Why are we angry Asians? It comes from a place of being stepped on. There is a level of invisibility we have.”

As we can see, leftists are not in a very good position for seeing any aspects of reality that don't fit into this oppressor - oppressed configuration. They are, for instance, utterly oblivious to the undercurrents in hinterland America that led to the populism that in turn gave rise to Trumpism. Laid-off blue-collar workers in Ohio? To the Left, there's no significant difference between them and seven-figure corporate titans. Privileged mostly-male white people, that's all.

Then there's the risk of not taking into account everything about the various types of Trump voters - that is, glossing over any traits that don't fit with a sympathetic portrayal. Yes, there are the above-mentioned small-town work-with-their-hands types, as well as a certain kind of suburban mom, those with pretty much single-issue focus on such issues as guns or immigration, and a certain kind of evangelical voter who has resolved to overlook Trump's sybaritic track record and his obvious lack of acquaintance with real faith or tradition because he advocates some policies (and appoints some judges) favorable to a Judeo-Christian worldview.

But for those looking at that collection of Trump types rather than from their perspective, there's a cult-of-personality component that binds them in a common enthusiasm that at least equals and may even exceed that with which the Left showered Barack Obama.

This is the crowd from which we hear a forthright admission that Trump's ways are crude and that he has no ideological consistency - is not even capable of it - and immediately afterward that anything less than our full-throated, unreserved fealty to whatever he's deciding to do at any moment is somehow a betrayal of actual conservatism on our part.

A recent piece by Daren Jonescu at his blog entitled "The Dangerous Idealization of Material Success" is pertinent here. It reminds me of Richard M. Weaver's warnings, in his 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences, that the West's losing sight of the role of transcendence in Western flourishing is proving to be its undoing.

He says that when safety, comfort and status became the most focused-upon fruits of human ingenuity and enterprise, we became less capable of exalting or even recognizing character and depth as the most admirable of human traits.

This, in turn, led to a veneration of the person who "gets things done."

The absolute reversal of Plato’s unrealizable ideal is the view, which has become disturbingly common among the last substantial faction on Earth still clinging to a semblance of the essentially modern project of individual practical liberty — i.e., American conservatives — that the only man fit to govern is precisely the man who has devoted his life to material gain. Hence these conservatives’ ill-conceived dream of the “CEO president” or “management skills president,” who, because he supposedly “knows how to run a business” or “knows how to manage people and budgets,” will, it is presumed, know how to “run” a nation and “manage” an economy. (As though a free republic and free economy were designed to be “run” or “managed” by a powerful central figure in the first place.) For an example of this perspective, one need look no further than the Republican Party’s mainstream voting block, which has selected its presidential candidates on this basis as often as not for many years — and that includes, most obviously, the current figurehead, who was alleged to be an anti-establishment muckraker, but who, when criticized for his leadership skills, knowledge, or economic policy, is invariably defended by his idolaters with the cliché that “He knows how to run a business,” or, as he laughably boasts of himself, he “only hires the best people.”

And what is the result of this absolute reversal of Plato’s governing ideal, and of the ethico-political devolution that precipitated the reversal? A once-free society that has come to identify wealth with wisdom, aggressive self-seeking with strong leadership, “winning” with principled statesmanship, and pragmatic opportunism with American individualism. 

We're then left with a grotesquely distorted notion of what it means to lead, or have vision:

Until modernity recognizes the error of confusing the real but secondary benefits of wealth-getting with ultimate human goods — in other words, until we stop reducing human nature to its physical necessities, and human fulfillment to material comfort and security — our only realistic hope of saving the continuity of civilization against the progressive tide, namely a free republic grounded in enlightened individualism, is doomed to self-destruction. For when, through popular distortions and exaggerations of early modernity’s paean to practical efficacy and its criticism of ancient and medieval notions of a hierarchy of human ends, the various possibilities of human life are placed on equal footing, morally and rationally, material gain is thereby implicitly legitimized as not merely a necessary but also a sufficient condition of wellbeing. Hence, the morally neutral activity of wealth-getting (which derives moral worth only from the ends it serves) assumes the mantle of a standard of excellence in its own right, as though there were no such thing as human nature at all — or as though human nature were purely physical and appetitive.

And then we're left with the irony that the leftists and the Trumpists have something very disturbing in common: the belief that to be comfortably situated in this material realm is the ultimate aim of human endeavor.

I doubt that the Jessica Prois / Sarah Jeong / Ta-Nehisi Coates / Linda Sarsour / Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez types have a clear view of just what happens when the dog actually catches up to the car - that is, when the white, straight, Christian male is resolutely quashed and transgendered amputees of color hold a majority in Congress - but we can safely say that it has nothing to do with God being glorified.

We're getting close to coming full circle with the tightrope metaphor with which this post was launched, aren't we?

See the various types of agents of cacophony besetting post-America from all sides?

Or perhaps another not-particularly-original metaphor - that of Michaelangelo's answer when asked how he carved David (he said he carved away all the stone that wasn't David) - applies here.

For that admittedly minority audience that at least hopefully grows some every day due to the curiosity of those sensing that something's amiss in ways that most observations don't take into account, the basic message - sort of like a tightrope walker somehow being able to get a high-altitude conveyance to supporters and curiosity-seekers on the ground - is along the lines of "For the moment I'm doing fine, but do what you can to support me in remaining true to  my understanding that

• this isn't about an improved GDP
• this isn't about NATO being equally funded by its members
• this isn't about any particular demographic group's advantage or disadvantage relative to any other particular demographic group
• this isn't about some scientific or technological advancement that makes human life more convenient, safe or enjoyable
• this isn't about getting a reasonably reliable assurance from any of the menacing nation-states or jihadist groups currently threatening us that they will reverse course

It's about understanding the human birthright, and responsibly exercising it. 

As I've said a few times in recent posts, those of us who continue to adhere steadfastly to the core principles are ultimately in the safest position of anyone at this crazy juncture at which post-America and the post-West generally finds himself or herself. The alternatives are all built on self-invented aspirations. "Making America great again" or "smashing the white Christian patriarchy" do not offer a prescription for what makes the human soul bleed and scream and finally either die or find its redemption.

It's noisy, cold and windy up here. The crowds clamoring on the street below - some for our success and some for our tragic end - are quite distracting.

Steady, now. Much rests upon the completion of our very careful walk.