Once again, for the sake of anyone wandering into these environs for the first time, they are, as articulated here,
But those who have been readers for a while may notice some equivocation on certain matters currently on the nation's radar screen, or even scant mention, if any at all.1.) Free-market economics, which begins with the premise that a good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth - period. No other party has any business being involved in that agreement - certainly not government.2.) An understanding that Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind. (Judeo-Christian morality, Greco-Roman model of representative democracy, the great scientific and artistic achievements.)3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature. This plays itself out as our allies knowing we have their backs, our adversaries respecting us, and our enemies fearing us.
Is LITD developing a soft spot for relativism?
No, what you see is an understanding that much of the current passing parade doesn't tell us much about whether immutable principles - such as the Three Pillars and any subsidiary principles falling under their rubrics - are being upheld or threatened. The urge to take an absolutist stance about, say, Robert Mueller, the Syria strike or Facebook's handling of user information is borne out of panicked tribalism, the perceived urgency of defending or attacking people and institutions that are in and of themselves muddles of conflicting motives none of which rise to the status of timeless principle.
Most of the people making news of late are scrambling to defend turf. Some are basically personally admirable, some are pretty distasteful. In any case, few if any seem to be carrying a banner of either of the great forces contending, as they have since the modern era got underway in the 1700s, for the soul of the nation, the West, and indeed the world.
Let's take Syria. We have there a civil war that started during the wider Arab Spring that brought tumult to Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and some other places with varying results. A number of forces opposed to the Baathist regime, now in its second generation, each with its own agenda, took up arms. You had Kurds of various stripes, jihadist groups, some of which collaborated and some of which didn't, and Iranian proxies. Russia pretty quickly gave the conflict - or rather, jumble of conflicts - and international flair by demonstrating support for the Assad regime. The US, under the Obama administration, felt the need to weigh in on atrocities coming from some of the warring factions - particularly the Assad government and ISIS. But ISIS is now marginalized, and the main question remains how to keep Iran from extending its influence to the Mediterranean, something Russia would like to see happen. Other than that, it's merely a complex civil war.
To specifically address last Friday's missile strike, an argument can be made that it was a necessary and effective measure, given the degree of evil involved in a gas attack on a town. But a Constitutional argument can be made that it should have been done through and act of Congress. A good argument can also be made that Assad, with the help of Russia and Iran, will have his chemical-weapons program repaired soon, thus leaving the status quo unchanged.
Or let's take James Comey. In fact, we can examine Robert Mueller in the same paragraph. That's because neither of them are heroes nor "deep-state" scoundrels. The treatment of them by both the Left and the slavish Trump devotees is cartoonishly focused on their recent behavior, with no examination of the overall arcs of their lives and careers. Each man has his longtime professional associates who will vouch for periods in which each served with distinction in the field of professional law enforcement.
That Comey waffled at the last minute at his July 5, 2016 presser, statiing that the FBI would not ask for prosecution of Hillary Clinton, after having just spent fifteen minutes listing reasons why that would be the advisable course does raise eyebrows, as does his current pop-celebrity behavior. LITD maintains what it has all along about this: He just buckled from the pressures of palace intrigue.
It would be the best course of action if Mueller just wrapped up his investigation, announcing that after nearly two years, his team has found no evidence that the Trump campaign team partnered with the Russian government to throw the 2016 presidential election. But, you see, in the course of determining that, said team has come across all kinds of eyebrow-raising occurrences by people with that classic Beltway ambition and nose for power-optimization and therefore feels compelled to keep digging.
The moral here? You can start in digging anywhere, and you're going to find a headache-inducing web of hotel-bar meetings, memos, emails, organizations in arcane lines of business, and debatable testimony before Congressional committees. That's the nature of the beast inside the Beltway. (The other day, I read a piece at Wealth 365 entitled "Facebook Fallout Deals Blow to Mercers' Political Clout." In the space of a 2,088-word article, no fewer than 14 organizations, ranging from businesses to political groups to a think tank, are mentioned. Here they are in order of appearance: Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Look Ahead America, Gotham Alpha, Palantir, Breitbart News, America First Policies, Making America, Renaissance Technologies, Heritage Foundation, Donors Trust, Emerdata, Frontier Services, and Culturecom. Is your head swimming yet?)
Speaking of Facebook, other than Ted Cruz getting to confront Jeff Zuckerberg about leftist bias (something that nearly all big post-American companies now have), his appearance on Capitol Hill last week didn't tell us much that we didn't already know - namely, that we, Facebook's users, are the product, and the information-gleaners are the true customers. Also, that cool ideas such as Facebook are inherently fraught with dangers to privacy.
How about identity politics, currently the reason why several developments around the nation have been in the news lately? We've cited several of these here at LITD: Corey Booker's questioning of Mike Pompeo, the New Yorker piece on Chick-fil-A, and the small Indiana city getting some national media attention because a high-school student got academic credit for organizing a LBGT "pride festival" and because, since said city is Mike Pence's hometown, everyone from the student to the media gets to poke him in the eye with it.
We could have included the no-whites pool party Scripps College is hosting, or The View's panelists, egged on by their guests Madeleine Albright, to examine the Trump cabinet through the lens of gender and race, and come to a mistaken conclusion in the course of doing so.
This kind of thing comes closest to bringing core principles into sharp relief, but LITD has concluded something lately: post-American society is so polarized that there is no hope of convincing anyone sitting on the fence - and one finds fence-sitters only after an exhaustive search - of one's position on this. For all intents and purposes, everyone is either so immersed in a demographics-colored worldview or so dismayed by it that all those in the second camp (that would include LITD) can really do is report on each new degree of toxicity. And that occasionally gets tiring.
Since it indeed does touch on core principles, we know that the Left sets up straw men ("structural racism," "systemic bigotry," "hate-driven business practices") and that that obliterates the prospects for the prevailing of clear thinking as well as consideration of transcendent implications, it becomes increasingly apparent that our most advisable course of action is to watch our leftist fellow human beings take their folly ever further toward its logical conclusion, even as we interact amiably with actual individuals of whatever classification as we always have. To be sure, if called upon to, say, state without reservation that Ferguson, Missouri was a local law-enforcement matter with no racial implications, or witness that Paul's letter to the Romans makes it clear that homosexuality is a sin, we must do so, but otherwise, we are drifting toward a state of affairs in which we will have ever less to do with those who find our stance abhorrent.
That's saddening in the extreme. It ought to be otherwise.
But a core tenet of conservatism is squarely facing what is before you, and proceeding from there.
No, LITD is getting neither sleepy nor squishy. It's just that a survey of the current landscape doesn't prod us to mount any of the hilltops we see.
I happened to read (most) of this piece almost immediately after watching the new movie "Hostiles", and it prompts me to ask what I usually do when you trot out the "three-legged dog" theory of regressivism.
ReplyDeleteWhat exactly can you see from your position as a white male Christian (as disadvangtaged as each of those demographics are in America) that suggests to you that "Western civilization has been a unique blessing" to American indigenous populations.
I'll wait here. Cheers. :o)
Well, of course, Holy Scripture and the understanding of God's nature it gives us. Then there is the concept of representative democracy we get from Athens during its Pericles period, as well as the Republic (pre-empire) period in Rome. Then there are the great scientific discoveries. And the highest peaks of literature ever achieved by humankind (think Shakespeare, Milton, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, William Blake). And the great art, much of it based on the revelations gleaned from the aforementioned Holy Scripture. Then there is the line of philosophical thinking which culminated in the founding documents of the US.
ReplyDeleteWhich of the tribes or nations that were here prior to the arrival of Europeans has contributed anything of such universally recognized value?
I do not accept some kind of generalized considerations of "American indigenous populations" as a whole. To use a leftist term, there was considerable diversity among them. Some had noble visions of societal organization and living with other societies, but quite a few were downright savage.
The problem with viewing this stuff through a demographic lens is that every individual who has ever existed (save one) has fallen short of the glory of God. Every last one of us is fallible.
I'm not an expert in anthropology, but I believe that Native Americans had their own religious beliefs long before being introduced to the Missionary Position, as evidenced, among other things, by the so-called "Indiana Mounds" found throughout the Ohio Valley.
ReplyDeleteLiterature and art are very subjective areas, but artistic artifacts were being crafted in materials such as copper on this continent a millennium before the Immaculate Conception.
While social stratification was not uncommon, most leadership positions were granted by the acquiescence of tribal members with many major decisions made arrived at by an egalitarian democracy that Indiana voter laws. Unless, of course, you were female, but Spanish Conquistadors were certainly not changing that discrimination, and I faintly recall -- without having given any time to verification -- that some tribes were leaps and bounds ahead of white men in that regard. I will happily stand corrected if that recollection is faulty.
Finally, the issue of "savagery". Do I even have to say it? Must I invoke "civilizing" practices of some of our tribes like George A Custer and Andrew Jackson?
I do appreciate you finally addressing this question, because this particular “pillar” has been grating to me for some unknown (and perhaps unreasonable) cause. And I doubt we have wrought movement in either of our positions. However, it is reassuring (to me, at least) that your assertion is based on pretty much exactly what I expected, and which in my own humble opinion falls well short of being conclusive. Perhaps, if I get my own blog launched, we can explore this argument in more depth.
That should be "Indian Mounds", not "Indiana Mounds"...though we have quite a few in the Hoosier state.
DeleteI'd be interested to see a post at that blog exploring it.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I do like the notion of setting a few principals to enumerate as a foundation in the beginning, and have outlined a few...such as the tension between those believing the founders intended the interpretation of their signature document to remain frozen in 18th Century concrete, and those (of us) who feel they knew they had to lay a foundation of bedrock to create a nation strong and unafraid to move forward and push our people toward justice. For them, the issue they needed future generations to be empowered to change was slavery, because at the time there were too many who failed to see the moral error of their practices, clinging to cherry-picked pieces of scripture to justify their inhumane indignities. It remains a popular tactic to this day.
ReplyDeleteSo, anyway, stuff like that. In the meantime, your infinite patience in allowing me to bicker constantly here is heroic and you have my deepest appreciation. Thanks again.
Cheers. :o)
Certainly. Venues for left and right to converse without it turning into Armageddon are a rarity these days. We mostly avoid that here in the LITD comment threads.
ReplyDeleteI'm sort of assuming that you look to the thinkers who shaped the original progressivism - Thorstein Veblen, Richard T. Ely, Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson - as where to find the distillation of your guiding principles. In a nutshell, they believed that as US and Western society generally had become urbanized and industrialized, the principles enshrined in the Constitution were no longer going to be enough to address modern problems, that Congress's role was going to be to put forth broad programs to be fleshed out by experts in various fields - health care, transportation, education, retirement, race relations, etc. - enlisted by the executive branch and ensconced in agencies to be created as needed.