Yeah, there's been a realignment, but it's as garbage as the previous alignment

 We're starting to see the broad outlines of a second Very Stable Genius administration come into focus, and it indicates, as expected, an incoherent populist-nationalist mess where the few sound, conservative policies get sullied by having been folded into the overall cluster-you-know-what.

Henry Olsen is kind of an odd cat. He's a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a fine house in Washington, and he's capable of articulating the conservative vision as applied to specific areas, but he, for some reason, seems to have a soft spot for Trump. 

The latest example is his current New York Post column, in which he asserts that Trump's November victory signals an historic American political realignment, which is probably true, but doesn't follow up with much in the way of signals as to whether he thinks it's a healthy one:

Signs suggest it could be something even worse: a historic defeat that puts Republicans in the political driver’s seat for a generation or more.

That’s because the exit poll showed that more voters said they were Republican than Democrat — for the first time in a presidential election since 1928.

Such a result hasn’t happened since talking pictures were new and Babe Ruth clobbered homers in the original Yankee Stadium.

No one alive today has ever voted in a presidential race where this has occurred.

Now, watch how he words this part.:

A world where Republicans lead Democrats by 8 to 10 points in partisan preference is one where Republican preferences and priorities prevail.

Like the GOP in the last century, Democrats could win only by running as “me too” candidates, offering a slightly less bold version of the Republican agenda.

Well, okay, but those preferences and priorities are, as I say, populism-nationalism with the occasionally actual conservative position showing up like a blob of flour in a lumpy gravy. 

Olsen does qualify his wowee-zowee level of amazement with this:

This isn’t set in stone, though: Trump needs to have a successful term.

If the economy tanks, or illegal migration continues, or Trump goes to war with China or Russia, voters will flee from the GOP like rats off a sinking ship.

Trump could also mess up by prioritizing issues he didn’t run on.

George W. Bush did that in 2005, when he tried to reform Social Security without first getting a mandate to do so.

Barack Obama, too, in 2009 and 2010, when he made passing Obamacare his focus even after running as a centrist.

Trump could make either or both mistakes. Failure and fecklessness will be punished.

But imagine if he doesn’t.

Imagine an America in 2028 that’s at peace, with illegal immigration virtually ended, the woke tsunami broken and the economy humming.

Henry, the signs during this transition period don't point in the direction of the scenario you want us to consider.

At a time when the very notion of the West is extremely wobbly (the financial woes of Britain and France, the Orban camp within NATO, Turkey's clear shift to an anti-Israel stance, the ongoing inadequate trickle of what Ukraine needs to defeat Russia, the cultural rot and population decline common to Western nations on both sides of the Atlantic), he's getting his kicks with kidding-on-the-square comments, as well as outright threats, to the United States' allies and neighbors:  

Trump on Wednesday continued to tease US territorial expansion in social media posts, criticizing the operation of the canal and doubling down on suggestions the US should absorb Canada and Greenland, a territory controlled by Denmark.

In a sardonic Christmas message, Trump claimed Chinese soldiers are operating the Panama Canal and reiterated his criticism that Panama is exploiting US vessels that use the waterway.

“Merry Christmas to all, including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal (where we lost 38,000 people in its building 110 years ago), always making certain that the United States puts in Billions of Dollars in ‘repair’ money, but will have absolutely nothing to say about ‘anything,’” Trump wrote on his Truth Social network.

In the same message, Trump called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “governor,” again insinuating Canada should become a US state. He also suggested the citizens of Greenland “want the US to be there, and we will.”

Recall that he also got off on a contentious footing with Mexico's new president Claudia Sheinbaum, suggesting US forces may have to enter Mexico to deal with the cartel problem.

Then there are the tariffs, about which a National Retail Federation report released last month had this to say:

• The proposed tariffs on the six product categories alone would reduce American consumers’ spending power by $46 billion to $78 billion every year the tariffs are in place.

• The proposed tariffs would have a significant and detrimental impact on the costs of a wide range of consumer products sold in the United States, particularly on products where China is the major supplier.

• The increased costs as a result of the proposed tariffs would be too large for U.S. retailers to absorb and would result in prices higher than many consumers would be willing or able to pay.

• Consumers would pay $13.9 billion to $24 billion more for apparel; $8.8 billion to $14.2 billion more for toys; $8.5 billion to $13.1 billion more for furniture; $6.4 billion to $10.9 billion more for household appliances; $6.4 billion to $10.7 billion more for footwear, and $2.2 billion to $3.9 billion more for travel goods.

• Based on current trade, average tariff rates for all categories examined would exceed 50% in the extreme tariff scenario, up in most cases from single or low double digits.

Then there is - yeah, I'm gonna go there - the appearance that the VSG is instinctively drawn to associates and appointees whose sex lives and marital track records are as sordid as his. Musk, Hegseth, Kennedy. Matt Gaetz, who is no longer in the running for Attorney General, nor even a House member, but to whose defense the VSG came a couple of days ago, calling the exhaustive ethics report "unfair."

Henry, character is not a part of the Trumpist vision that now pervades the Republican Party.

Then there is the hawking of a perfume line and the Lee Greenwood Bible during this transition period. 

Donald Trump thinks this whole thing is a hoot. He's never experienced more glorification, which is the end aim of anything he does in life.

Henry, I honestly don't get your wow-this-is-exciting assessment of this new Republican alignment. It's not going to achieve your dream scenario, and any table scraps of conservatism to be found in it are hopeless tainted by the surrounding garbage.

"New political era." Big effing whoop. We're still headed toward the same accelerated decline the Left had us on. 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlie Sykes and the mirror opposite of the Flight-93-election argument

 You may recall the article that instilled a sense of urgency in a number of right-leaners two presidential election cycles ago:

In September 2016, Michael Anton wrote an essay for the right-wing Claremont Institute, “The Flight 93 Election,” making the case for Donald Trump’s election as a necessary gamble to stave off the destruction of conservatism. Anton then did a stint in Trump’s National Security Council, and last night was rewarded by the president with a posting to the National Board for Education Sciences. It was a fitting coda for Trump to single out the figure who most perfectly captured the spirit that right-wing intellectuals brought to the era.

Anton’s case was notable, first, for its novelty. Before Trump won, “Never Trumpers” constituted the dominant strain of right-wing intellectual sentiment. Here was a prestigious organ of the intellectual right making a positive case for a nominee that the movement had dismissed as a clown and a surefire loser. Anton memorably seized the imagination of his audience by likening the choice to that faced by the passengers of Flight 93, who wrested control of the plane from Al Qaeda hijackers on 9/11. Allowing Hillary Clinton to win would mean certain death for conservatism, whereas electing Trump was risky — “you may die anyway” — but clearly preferable to certain death.

Anton’s argument was filled with dramatic rhetorical flourishes like this, and what little of it that was not non-falsifiable was demonstrably false. (According to Anton, “liberals took over criminal justice in the mid-’60s,” Democrats “treat open borders as the ‘absolute value,’” and Barack Obama engaged in “flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents.”)

Despite (or perhaps because of) these flaws, Anton articulated the bedrock principle that has driven the right the last [eight] years: The Democratic Party is so terrifying and all-powerful that literally any measures, however unwise, are justifiable to block them from winning an election. That is the power of Anton’s chosen analogy, which urges his audience to overlook all of Trump’s complete unfitness to handle the job (“You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane,” he concedes) on the grounds that the alternative means imminent national death. 

Now, in summer 2024, former radio host and Bulwark cofounder Charlie Sykes has employed the same quickening-of-the-senses tactic, but from the opposite end of the spectrum:

 My latest in The Atlantic:

When the Never Trump movement emerged, in 2016, it wasn’t always clear what never meant. For some anti-Trump Republicans, it simply meant a short, shameful interval before falling back in line with their party. Others couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton and sat out the election. But a notable remnant meant never as in “absolutely never.” As the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency grows more imminent, that remnant seems to have hardened its resolve to do whatever it needs to do to keep him out of office—including planning to support the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris.

For some observers, the idea of conservative-leaning Americans voting for Harris is unthinkable. “For Never Trump or Trump reluctant conservatives the Harris nomination is a catastrophic development,” the American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen declared in a post on X. “At least Biden pretended to be a moderate,” he wrote. But now, he argued, Never Trump Republicans have to choose between Trump and Harris, whom Thiessen described as the “most left wing Democratic presidential nominee in modern times,” adding, bizarrely, that she was “a Democratic Socialist who is to the left of Bernie Sanders.”

There's nothing bizarre about that characterization, Charlie. She's on the record as, prior to this week's flip-flops, supporting the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a path to citizenship for pretty much anybody coming over the border, pretty much unrestricted abortion, creating of a federal Office of Paid Family Leave, and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which conferred legitimacy on Iran's toxic regime.

He enlists the help of fellow Atlantic writer Tom Nichols in his disingenuous attempt to paint Never-Trumpers as looking for an excuse to vote for the Very Stable Genius:

It’s important to understand what’s going on here. Theissen leans on this sort of crude caricature because it’s useful for anti-anti-Trump Republicans who have been scrabbling desperately for an excuse — almost any excuse — to vote for Trump. For the anti-anti-Trump pundit, whatever the allegation against Trump, whatever his crimes or his frauds, the other side is always worse. As Damon Linker once wrote, anti-anti-Trumpism “allows the right to indulge its hatred of liberals and liberalism while sidestepping the need for a reckoning with the disaster of the Trump administration itself.”

But the gravamen of Thiessen’s argument was that Harris also posed an impossible dilemma for Never Trump conservatives. 

“Even the pretense of a benign alternative has been eliminated,” he claimed.

But, as it turns out, the choice of Trump vs. Harris is proving to be a remarkably easy choice for Never Trumpers, who have moved far beyond searching for a “benign alternative.”

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols posted a quick answer to Thiessen: “Yes, I have to pick between a normal person who is going to have some policies I won’t like and an unhinged, deranged wannabe dictator sociopath surrounded by goons.”

In other words, not really that hard at all.

On paper, Thiessen might once have had a point. Before Trump, the ideological divide between Harris and conservative Republicans might have been too large to bridge. But this is not a normal campaign. For most Never Trump Republicans, the 2024 election is not primarily about the divide between the left and the right; it’s about preserving our liberal constitutional order. For years, Never Trumpers have been split between those who have remained conservative at the policy level and those who more or less transformed themselves into progressives. There were also differences of opinion within the movement about whether Joe Biden should step aside, but there was never any doubt about the existential threat Trump posed to the body politic.

Of course, many conservatives have their own issues with Harris’s policies—and, for that matter, have their issues with Biden’s. In an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Geoff Duncan, the conservative Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, acknowledged that endorsing Harris “wasn’t easy. Through my conservative lens, I see very few policy areas where we agree.” But, he wrote, his “current north star is ridding” the GOP of Trump, and Harris is “the best vehicle toward preventing another stained Trump presidency.”

The trauma of the last month also made the choice somewhat easier. 

Trump’s July surge focused the mind of anti-Trump voters, perhaps usefully, on the very real prospect that he was about to return to power. 

Trump had been leading the polls for months, but the attempted assassination and the Republican National Convention boosted him into the most dominant political position of his lifetime. Meanwhile, the one candidate who stood between him and his future presidency of retribution was visibly floundering. 

For anti-Trump progressives, July felt like a near-death experience. Now the relief is staggering—for Never Trumpers too.

There are, however, still bumps ahead, and not every Never Trumper will be able to reconcile themselves to Harris’s style of progressivism.

That would be me.

But according to Sykes, this makes me a poseur, wishing to appear aloof:

Some Republicans may sit out the race in a cloud of above-it-all righteous irrelevance.

Irrelevance. Interesting framing. Just what sets the standard for relevance? A seat at the table for the food fight over which presidential candidate and political party will achieve the victory of clinging to power by its fingernails while being pelted with investigations, lawsuits and inevitably disillusioned purists of either stripe? Count me out. I'm interested in something with some lasting power, the immutable stuff.

I realize that identity and power are a lot sexier to the 2024 post-Westerner than the quest for truth, justice, beauty and wisdom. But that's what is. I'm interested in what should be. And I'm so damn interested in it that I can't abide by what Kamala Harris is about any more than I can what the VSG is about.

So, yeah, I still plan to stay home in November. For a reason I've laid out here before: I don't want to have the eternal record book show that I signed onto either form of American ruination. 

It is the right thing to do to stand on this narrow sliver of terrain. 

Charlie, why are you so eager to write us off? Do you maybe harbor occasional thoughts that ours is the honorable stance?

A columnist's sly manner of mixing Trumpist incoherence with actual conservative principles

 Last November, I wrote a piece for The Freemen News-letter titled "The Conflation Problem." I was expressing a concern I've addressed here at LITD as well as at Precipice, namely, the increasing inclination of the general American public to associate populist positions that Trumpism came up with by winging it with long-established and deeplycontemplated conservative principles. 

I launched my observation from the then-current development shaping the dynamic on Capitol Hill, namely, Mike Johnson's ascension to the speakership:

The current speaker could make the case for embracing the most consistent conservative set of principles of any of them, were it not for his wholesale enthusiasm for Donald Trump. But the fact that he has so vocally espoused those principles, and mixed them thoroughly with that enthusiasm, has had mainstream media outlets and Democratic politicians licking their chops from the moment he passed the 217-vote threshold.

That enthusiasm has led a lamentable number of right-of-center figures to succumb to the temptation to see "the times" as calling for the core's situational tweaking. We've seen such developments as "national conservatism," which is basically gussied up protectionism, and, more recently, a clouded understanding of the stakes involved in Ukraine. 

This provides a ready-made heyday for the left to conflate these positions—and, more importantly, the election denialism that has poisoned the stances of all Republican Speaker aspirants in the past several months, to one degree or another—with solidly conservative positions that Never Trump conservatives get behind: unborn Americans' right to life, the understanding of what marriage is common to all cultures throughout all human history until five minutes ago, the understanding that cheap, dense and readily available energy sources have made for the quantum boost in human advancement over the last two centuries, and the principle that government ought to have to puke all over itself to take the first red cent of any citizen's money.

I thought about that when I read Batya Ungar-Sargon's piece at The Free Press this morning titled "Why the Average Republican Voter Hates the GOP."  Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek. She was on staff at Forward prior to that, and has contributed to a wide variety of publications. I confess that I'm having to bring myself up to speed on where she's coming from; I feel like I owe it to her before I draw any conclusions about her latest work. A cursory glance at the kinds of subjects she chooses to write about seems to indicate kind of a dichotomy. When writing about antisemitism or wokeness, she infuses her work with a lot of viewpoint, but when she writes about Trump and the role of class in the changes of recent years in the Republican Party, she seems to wear - or want to wear - more of an objective-journalist hat. The Free Press piece certainly has a just-giving-you-the-facts tone. 

And her facts do paint a picture of a class-based bifurcation:

According to MSNBC’s early entrance polls, Trump won voters without a college degree by 65 percent, to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s 17 percent and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s scant 8 percent. Trump won college grads, too, but by a much slimmer margin—just 35 percent caucused for Trump. Haley, meanwhile, got nearly as many—33 percent, with DeSantis trailing at 23 percent. The AP had a similar breakdown.

 

That’s a 30-point gap in support for Trump—and a 25-point gap for Haley. It’s the gulf separating the college-educated from the working-class, who don’t just have different candidates of choice but different concerns, different struggles, and different priorities. 

 

Working-class Americans are worried about the economy, immigration, our foreign entanglements, and the disappearing American Dream—all issues Donald Trump not only talks about but has a solid record on. Haley represents the GOP that Trump replaced—the free-market, chamber-of-commerce, nation-building version of the party that is dominated by a donor class whose interests are completely at odds with those of the working class.

 

Unfortunately for Haley, her party is now the party of the working class. In 2020, Bloomberg found that truckers, plumbers, machinists, painters, corrections officers, and maintenance employees were among the occupations most likely to donate to Trump (Biden got the lion’s share of writers and authors, editors, therapists, business analysts, HR department staff, and bankers.) As much as the Republican donor class wishes Haley were the party’s nominee, there’s no going back for your average corrections officer. 

 

The thing liberals don’t understand about the average Republican voter in 2024 is that they hate the Republican Party. The average liberal feels well-represented by the Democratic Party because the Democrats’ base, like the party leadership, are college-educated elites. They share the same list of priorities. But the average Republican voter is working class and truly loathes the Bush-era version of the Republican Party, which meant tax cuts for the rich, failed wars, and an economic agenda that outsourced jobs to China.

What I'd like to know is how she feels about this. Is this a good thing in her estimation?

She makes no distinction between the Trumpist elements of the working-class sentiment and the actually conservative ones.

I think her following the mention of the free market with  mention of the Chamber of Commerce is a tell. The one is not necessarily connected to the other. The Chamber of Commerce represents a certain kind of person engaged in what we broadly term business, but the free market is merely the natural manner in which two people or organizations come to an agreement about the value of a good or service to be exchanged. And is she really sure that her blue-collar types resent tax cuts for the rich? I know Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes and Bernie Sanders do. But is it really a preoccupation of the painters and plumbers? 

Look, as reportage goes, she gives us a pretty sound analysis of where the Republican Party is now. But the fact that, for someone with pretty strong opinions about DEI and Hamas, she hedges her bets on this matter makes me wonder if she isn't genuinely excited about the Trumpist conquest of the GOP.

If so, she does no favors to the actual conservative principles she's forthrightly championed in lot of her work.

Is racism, to whatever degree it exists in contemporary America, "structural" or "systemic"?

 David French is a national treasure. He brings a record of depth, heart and personal character to his self-identification as a real conservative in an age when so many have lost sight, in one way or another, of what that might mean. He'd finished his law education and embarked on a career when he decided, at age 37, to enlist in the Army Reserve, which led to a tour in Iraq. He has logged stints as senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice and Alliance Defending Freedom, both Christian organizations on the front lines of the effort to stem the cultural rot and persecution of the innocent in which identity politics militancy all too often manifests itself.

Given that, and the fact that his credentials as a pundit are an astronomical number of tiers above mine, it's not without hesitancy that I speak of him having a blind spot. It must be discussed, however. I saw it as least as far back as the spring of 2020, when he asked in a piece about George Floyd whether a white person being arrested would have been allowed to die with a cop's knee on his neck. I found such an indulgence in speculation unhelpful given the volatile moment.

Perhaps there were signs earlier. New York Post op-ed page editor Sohrab Amari, after all, penned an essay published at First Things a year earlier entitled "Against David French-ism," the gist of which was a complaint that French lacked a sufficient sense of urgency about signs of assault on bedrock institutions and conventions. The example of reading-hour drag queens in public libraries was Amari's immediate example.

The discussion has been sparked anew by the latest Sunday French Press at The Dispatch. The title, "Structural Racism Isn't Wokeness, It's Reality," makes pretty plain the point French is going to flesh out. 

As a master polemicist who prizes clarity, he is able to make a case worth grappling with. He uses the position taken by a couple of McLean Bible Church pastors to launch his argument:

[Congregants complained] that [David] Platt and his MBC colleague pastor Mike Kelsey marched in a Christian black lives matter march and that Kelsey has endorsed the “CRT concepts” of “systemic racism” and “white privilege.” They also condemn Platt for this comment, which argues that the absence of overt prejudice doesn’t absolve one of the problems of racism and racialization: 

A disparity exists. We can’t deny this. These are not opinions—they’re facts. It matters in our country whether one is white or black. Now, we don’t want it to matter, which is why I think we try to convince ourselves it doesn’t matter. We think to ourselves, “I don’t hold prejudices toward black or white people, so racism is not my problem.” But this is where we need to see that racialization is our problem. It’s all of our problem. We subtly, almost unknowingly, contribute to it.

The dissenters argue that the “solution to the ‘race’ problem in America is more Bible, not more sociology books. It is not the Bible plus a secular reading list, but sola scriptura.” It’s not just unwise to rely on secular scholarship to address American racism, they argue: It’s unbiblical.

This argument echoes tenets of the secular right-wing consensus on race—that racism exists only when there is individual malign intent, that remedies for racism should be limited to imposing consequences on individual racists, and that there is no intergenerational obligation to remedy historic injustice (“I’m not responsible for my ancestors’ sins”). 

Under this mode of thinking, the concept of “equality under the law”—as mandated by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act—is both necessary and largely sufficient to address the causes and consequences of centuries of slavery followed by generations of Jim Crow.   

But on the core issues of American racism, Platt is biblically and historically right, and it’s his detractors who are biblically and historically wrong. These “conservatives” have placed a secular political frame around an issue with profound religious significance. They’ve thus not just abandoned the whole counsel of scripture, they’ve even contradicted a core component of the secular conservatism they claim to uphold. 

Where he goes next will hopefully get an airing in the conversation that has ensued over this essay. He cites the scriptural books of 2 Samuel, Nehemiah and Leviticus to bolster his case that a reckoning before God is not only an individual matter but one that spans generations when a society (at least a chosen one) has collectively sinned against a demographic group within it. 

Again, as with pretty much any conservative-thinker bona fides, my grasp of theology is undoubtedly dwarfed by French's, but something in me insists that there is more to this than what is presented here. After all, individual responsibility is a cornerstone of the modern conservative movement. There's a basis for the resentment opponents of, say, reparations, feel when exhorted to pony up for long-dead people who may or may not have been ancestors, but share a melanin level.

French makes his most cogent case when he argues that the long-since-discontinued practice of redlining had much to do with neighborhoods and indeed communities being sequestered by race into our present day:

I’ll turn to perhaps the most commonly cited example (because it’s so significant) of how racism can be truly “structural” or “systemic” and thus linger for years even when the surrounding society over time loses much of its malign intent. 

Residential segregation, through redlining and other means—especially when combined with profound employment discrimination and educational disparities—resulted in the creation of large communities of dramatically disadvantaged Americans. Because of centuries of systematic, de jure (by law) oppression, they possessed fewer resources and less education than those who didn’t suffer equivalent discrimination.

While the passing of the Civil Rights Act meant that black Americans had the right to live elsewhere, they often lacked the resources to purchase homes or rent apartments in wealthier neighborhoods with better schools. Indeed, to this day, the median net worth of a black family ($17,150) is roughly one-tenth the median net worth of a white family ($171,000). That means less money for down payments, less money for security deposits, and overall fewer resources that enable social mobility.

The phrase "lacked the resources" strikes me as veering uncomfortably close to the denial of agency on the part of black Americans, and maybe even an indulgence in pity. After all, from whence did our black middle class and professional class come? The notion that most blacks are consigned to these communities is exactly why black conservative commentators have used the term "plantation" to describe the effect of dependency resulting from decades of public policy designed to provide material aid without an attendant assumption that it would lead to a more integrated American social fabric. 

French makes glancing reference to "conservative solutions" but ends the piece by steadfastly asserting that structural racism is a given that society must deal with. 

I encountered into a Twitter exchange about this via two tweets from the Washington Examiner's Kaylee McGhee White, which I was gratified to come across:

Kaylee McGhee White

@KayleeDMcGhee

·

19h

I have some thoughts on this, which I’ll probably write about. But for now I’ll just say this: if my pastor got up on Sunday morning and told me I needed to check my white privilege, I would leave that church.

Kaylee McGhee White

@KayleeDMcGhee

Replying to 

@KayleeDMcGhee

There is a huge difference between acknowledging racism as it exists today and catering to the narrative of systemic racism, which is toxic, false, and destructive. Any church pushing that narrative is not doing itself or its members any favors.

Her Examiner colleague Quin Hilyer chimed in with a useful elaboration:

Quin Hillyer

@QuinHillyer

Replying to 

@KayleeDMcGhee

I don't agree w/the definition of "racism" that French seems to use here. "Racism" is not power or results. Racism is an attitude. Current "inequity" may RESULT from past racism, but it isn't in itself racism, & the fix should thus be far more subtle than French seems to suggest.

If one is not extremely careful about the use of the term "racism," one invites the danger of the blind spot I mentioned above. While Trumpists and Neo-Trumpists have to an unfortunate degree boneheadedly co-opted the backlash against the encroachment of Critical Race Theory (and, yes, it is appropriate to use that term even as its definition has expanded beyond the original parameters set in the 1970s), that encroachment's reality is undeniable. Kids are being indoctrinated with it in your local school system. The idea that a post-racial society not only still eludes us but that to aspire to it is somehow pernicious has been mainstreamed. 

Then this morning I found a piece by Lee Siegal at City Journal which makes an important contribution to this conversation:

The curious thing is that, even with tens of thousands of Internet public prosecutors working night and day, very few examples of genuinely racist language surface in this turbulent, chaotic country of 330 million people. Excepting the tiny minority of people who belong to organized right-wing hate groups, anyone even fractionally socialized has known for decades that the N-word, to take the worst racist term, is taboo, along with most other pernicious slurs. And anyone with the slightest bit of emotional intelligence understands that people who do use the word when quoting other people or texts—as clueless or maybe arrogant as that may be in our current climate—do so because they themselves are not racists and have no fear of being perceived as such.

Siegel fleshes out the consequence of letting racialist wokeness cloud one's perception of the reality of one's own living circumstances:

Empty forms bespeak empty hearts. Cries of racism are the new white racism. Now, to use a hypothetical example, if a modestly middle-class white male resident of Montclair meets a wealthy black neighbor who makes more in six months than the white male has made in his whole working life, or if he runs into the jazz great who lives in town and who has won no fewer than seven Grammys, then the average white guy doesn’t have to feel that twinge of lower economic or social status in comparison with theirs. On the contrary: thanks to the 1619 Project and the totalizing framework of systemic white racism, he can regard these elevated figures with condescending pity. It turns out that they are, and always will be, dependent on his status as master of their fates.

I'll be on the lookout for further conversation about this. I'd be gratified indeed to see French clarify or modify his stance in the French Press essay. It just doesn't ring true, and several of his kindred spirits think so. 

Replying to 

@KayleeDMcGhee

There is a huge difference between acknowledging racism as it exists today and catering to the narrative of systemic racism, which is toxic, false, and destructive. Any church pushing that narrative is not doing itself or its m