Sunday morning roundup

 At Carolina Journal, Andre Beliveau clearly articulates the case for a free-market component to conservatism, something that was taken as a given until a weird new notion of what conservatism is, or should be, infected the body politic:

The government should protect the space for capitalism to flourish, not engage as a venture capital firm. It should protect the public from unjustified and mischievous monopolies, not become one. The market should decide winners and losers in the private sector, not the government. The right using the power of the state to suppress woke corporations creates a dangerous precedent for when the pendulum of power shifts and the left sees it as part of the “common good” to suppress Christian small business owners.

Principles must prevail over partisanship and power.

We are in a serious cultural battle against the woke left; there is no denying it. However, conservatives have long known that these cultural battles are only won when virtue is self-actuated and chosen, not coerced and forced. Persuasion and evangelizing are our means, not the strong arm of the state. Virtue requires one to embrace it fully within their heart. Like Burke’s “little platoons,” we best do this locally and within our cultural institutions, especially in our families, neighborhoods, churches, and community organizations.

Economic freedom works much in the same way. Just as we cannot experience, as a citizenry, authentic virtue when it is coercive, we cannot experience true economic freedom when it is coerced through central planning.

We all pretty much knew this, but The Hill provides some data to support the observation that "Teens Are Spending Less Time Than Ever With Friends": 

The nation’s teens have traded face time for Facetime. Adolescents are spending less time gathering in shopping malls, movie theaters and rec rooms, and more time connecting on Instagram, TikTok and Discord.  

Some researchers see the retreat from social gatherings as key to explaining the wave of adolescent ennui that is sweeping the nation. Numerous studies have tracked rising rates of loneliness among adolescents before, during and since the COVID-19 pandemic. Last month, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared a national loneliness epidemic. And loneliness presages depression and other mental health maladies, which are also growing more prevalent among teens. 

“Teens are spending a lot more time communicating with each other electronically and a lot less time hanging out with each other face to face,” said Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and author of “Generations,” a new book about generational differences. 

“Going to the mall has gone down. Driving in the car for fun has gone down. Going to the movies has gone down,” she said. “We’re talking about kids who are spending five, six, seven hours a day on social media.” 

Public Discourse is running a series on fidelity, and installments have included essays on marital fidelity and fidelity to place, but the series began with this piece by Andrew T. Walker of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on fidelity to God:

Now, more than ever, we must assert that infidelity to God is what plagues Western man and that what stands as his greatest need is fidelity and right relationship to Him. Without that sure foundation provided by a divine guarantor, the value, responsibilities, and duties that attend to individuals are mere contrivances; they need to be secured to a divine ontology not subject to the vicissitudes of human passions. In other words, Christianity provides the social order with what someone like the non-Christian political theorist Vàclav Havel longed for but could not find—a “Cosmic Anchoring,” a foundation that orders existence, something that political orders hostile to God cannot supply on their own. Christian anthropology, and its emphasis on the human person bearing God’s image, forever changed the equation for the significance of the individual—the human became definitively suffused with moral meaning. With Christianity, as historian Larry Siedentop writes, “Individual agency acquires roots in divine agency.”

We must know God to know our relationship to our family, to our community, and our nation. Nothing made, including the virtues of political community, can be fully understood apart from their ultimate foundation in God. Individuals need God. So do the nations. Democratic virtues that we take for granted as necessary to the American project—among them respect for human dignity, human rights, and the rule of law—all find their origins in Christianity. Outside of Christianity, each concept exists as a vapor hanging in thin air.

Chloe Cole sets the record straight at Reality's Last Stand, a Substack focused on the madness of gender ideology:

Yesterday, New York Times reporter Maggie Astor published a hit piece about me in an attempt to undermine my story and the testimonies of other detransitioners. Now that I’ve had some time to process everything more completely, I’d like to address some of the inaccuracies and falsehoods that Astor wrote about me—beginning with the disingenuous title, “How a Few Stories of Regret Fuel the Push to Restrict Gender Transition Care.” 

I take issue with Astor’s flagrant use of the word “regret,” which implies a benign mistake like a bad tattoo—something I wasn’t even allowed to get until I turned 18 last year. No, I was a child when I was misinformed and misled by adults, who convinced me to permanently alter my body. 

I learned through social media when I was 11 about boys and girls being trapped in the “wrong body”—an impossibility that should never have been “affirmed” by doctors. I was told by health professionals whom I trusted that I had a medical condition that required medical treatment. Not only that, but my parents were emotionally manipulated by being presented with a false dilemma—“would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”—despite the fact that suicidality is routinely overexaggerated in trans-identified youth.

Astor relies on the euphemism “transition care” when she means “chemical and surgical sex change services.” This is neither medically necessary nor lifesaving, but rather elective, cosmetic, and experimental. 

Astor also flipplantly refers to my detransition as “changing course,” implying I merely took a wrong turn instead of having doctors affirm my confusion with experimental medicine. She says I “returned to my female identity,” but being female is not an identity. It is a biological reality that describes half the human population. It is something I never stopped being despite the fact that when I was 13-15, doctors prescribed me puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgically removed my breasts to try to mold me into something that superficially resembled a boy.

Astor neglects to mention the vocal European detransitioners and how European medical societies have backed off of “gender-affirming care” after conducting systematic reviews of evidence and finding that the risks outweigh any purported benefits. She also referred to outdated statistics on detransition which include studies on adults rather than the cohort I belong to—adolescents under the “gender-affirming” model of care. These studies also had serious methodological flaws and a high loss to follow up rate. 

Another statistic she likely referenced was from a study about detransitioners that specifically excluded detransitioners. Participation in the study was limited only to those who had detransitioned in the past but still identified as trans–in other words, not people like me.

At Ordinary Times, Ben Sears ponders the challenges of translating great poems: 

When I first decided to write a weekly series about poets and poetry I mapped out what I wanted to do and set a few parameters. One of the first rules was that there would be no translations. I’ve broken that rule a few times but I didn’t want to be caught in a situation where I was unsure if I enjoyed the work of the poet, the translator, or the combination. When I read Pound’s Cathay, or more specifically when I read about how Pound’s Cathay came to be, my conception of translations changed.

In my mind, a poet dusted off an old manuscript in a language he’d fluency in and transcribed literally, going back with a bag of synonyms in hand making changes necessary to reflect the original’s rhythm and rhyme. Admittedly simplistic, I know.

The reality is a mess. There are faithful scribes like I imagined them all to be, but there are also Robert Lowells. He called his translations “Impressions” and took the sense of what he read and wrote almost original works. Pound has been accused of playing ventriloquist with various foreign poets. Elizabeth Bishop translated the poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade from Portuguese. She was his first English translator and responsible for his popularity in the that-speaking world. Said Bishop, “I didn’t know him at all. He’s supposed to be very shy. I’m supposed to be very shy. We’ve met once—on the sidewalk at night. We had just come out of the same restaurant, and he kissed my hand politely when we were introduced.” Though they both lived in the state of Rio de Janeiro she never called for direction. There’s more expression in translation than I assumed.

As I wrote, it’s a mess. The more I look into it, the more convinced I become of the wisdom I displayed in the parameter setting stage, but it’s really interesting. Looking into the whys and wherefores of how a translation came about fascinates me enough that I’m revoking the prohibition. Let chaos reign. When considering translations, I’ll write about poets rather than poet.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an epic poem containing some two hundred and fifty plus myths, is one of the most important works to come down to us from antiussle quity, at least as far as we can be sure it did. There are pieces dated as far back as the 9^th century but the earliest known complete manuscript has been dated to the 11^th century, so we may be dealing with a game of telephone – albeit one tempered by comparison to Ovid’s other surviving works – to begin with. What is mentioned in almost every commentary I’ve come across is the depth of Ovid’s wit. I’ve discussed the vagaries of poetic wit and how the word has changed over time in regard to poetry at this site before but I don’t think we need to get into that other than to say that there is a quality of Ovid’s that Latin scholars agree exists in his entire original. It doesn’t sound like much, but the preservation of an original calling card is a handy barometer, hinting to us whether or not the translator intended to let the dead man speak or if he, as Pound occasionally did, played ventriloquist.

I've been productive over at Precipice. Here are some recent pieces:

 "Substitutes for Reality" looks at the fatal delusions each of America's two major political parties embrace.

"This Isn't Just A Tussle Between Human Constructs" deals with the spiritual dimension of the latest metastasizing of identity politics militancy:

That’s what all this talk of “community” and “allies” is really all about. People with unorthodox notions of human sexuality find validation for forms of identity that they’ve made up out of whole cloth. And it helps them to see themselves as a cohesive group to juxtapose themselves against a perceived power structure - you know, patriarchal, cisheteronormative, white, Judeo-Christian institutions - and raise their fists against it.

But on what basis are they going to find a sense of belonging in a deep, rich sense that will sustain them the way families have sustained people throughout times of travail and real danger? On what basis are human beings going to construct viable societies under this new arrangement? 

"I'm Thinking Maybe We Should Just Let The Trumpists Have The Term 'Conservative' Since They've Defiled It So Badly" has a pretty self-explanatory title, but looks at how ideological labels have evolved over the past couple of centuries:

deological labels don’t tell us much anymore. For a while, in the middle of the twentieth century, juxtaposing “liberal” and “conservative” served us well in establishing a spectrum one side of which was instinctively drawn to collectivist approaches to societal problem-solving, and the other emphasizing individual sovereignty. But even those applications of those terms was a distortion.

A classical liberal, in the nineteenth century, was someone who took to heart what Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat had had to say about how the free market was organic and spontaneous - that is, unplanned - and therefore the economic arrangement most conducive to freedom in human life’s other realms. As the twentieth century got underway, and Austrian-School thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek refined that strain of inquiry, they were deemed classical liberals as well.

Twentieth-century conservatism embraced the classical liberals, but also looked to the eighteenth century’s Edmund Burke as the father of a strain that upheld hierarchy and tradition. He hoped against hope that the king would act like a wise monarch and not an impulsive tyrant. He hated slavery and wanted to see it ended, and thought the way to assimilate freed slaves into the Western societies in which they found themselves was to make sure they got a good grounding in Christianity. This strain was developed by thinkers such as Richard M. Weaver and Russell Kirk. 

These two strains were joined by a concern about totalitarian collectivism as that became a threat to both tradition and freedom unique to the modern era.

All of this was converging, and Frank S. Meyer, one of the original editors of National Review, proposed what he called fusionism as a way for adherents of these strains to not only work together, but do so guided by a coherent view of what made human life valuable. 

It’s not as if the conservatism that has come to serve as shorthand for opposition to the collectivism and the disdain for tradition on the left popped onto the scene fully formed. All this took a great deal of hammering out, and ill-fitting movements that wanted in on the action, such as Ayn Rand and the Objectivists and the John Birch Society, had to be shown the door.

Conservatism enjoyed a swelling of the ranks as formerly left-leaning figures at journals such as Commentary and Partisan Review crossed the spectrum’s center line. This roughly coincided with the rise of Ronald Reagan on the political level.

I used to try to reduce conservatism to the three pillars of fusionism / Reaganism - free-market economics, an understanding of why Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind, and resolute resistance to world-stage forces unfriendly to the first two - but now I don’t know that such bullet-point framing does it justice.

How’s this for a workable foundation on which to build a definition? Conservatism is concerned with that which is immutable and transcendent. It is preoccupied with the higher things enumerated in the excerpt above - beauty, nobility, loyalty, humility, wisdom - but also things that the Left has claimed it champions as well: fairness, connectedness, deliverance of society’s lower rungs from lives of drudgery and discomfort. 

There. That should keep you out of trouble on this (finally!) rainy June Sunday. 

 

The West's current decline fits a historical pattern

A most thought-provoking essay at Quillette by Benedict Beckeld. 

He sets the table - somewhat literally - with his recollection of a scene in Rome:

It was an Italian evening in late summer at the end of the previous decade, and I was having dinner outside in the shade of the Roman Colosseum—the emblem of a decadent Empire whose ruins were everywhere to be seen. One of my fellow diners, a young graduate student of Ancient History, suddenly made the disquieting observation that she could never speak ill of another culture. Not only was she unable to do so, but in fact she emphasized that she did not even have the right to do so. When I asked her, alluding to her own Austrian roots, what she might say of a culture that produced, say, Adolf Hitler, she replied that she as an Austrian European may criticize European and Austrian culture, and consequently that brutal dictator.

My follow-up question, whether then by her logic a non-Austrian or non-European should not be allowed to criticize Nazism, did not receive a clear reply. But my fellow diner continued to insist that we should only criticize our own cultures, never others. I thus had one of my frequent meetings with the intellectually bankrupt posture of oikophobia, the hatred or dislike of one’s own cultural home. Significantly, my interlocutor was a part, or at least a future part, of our social elite: a Ph.D. in the making, generally quick-witted, and with a mastery of several languages, both modern and ancient. I looked up at the Colosseum, whose dark and gaping ruin reminds us that all things will perish: our own civilization is heading your way.

This exchange was similar to many that I have had in countries all around the Western world. They reveal a civilization that has stopped believing in itself, that hates itself, and that is therefore unwilling to defend the values of individual freedom, democracy, and scientific and scholarly skepticism that have been handed down to us since antiquity. We are all familiar with this phenomenon, and every single day brings news stories in which oikophobia is involved. To mention just a couple among literally thousands of clearly oikophobic incidents of recent times: this past July the San Francisco School Board voted to remove a mural of George Washington from one of its public schools because of its purported racism; the group leader of American volunteer teachers in Africa some years ago informed the volunteers that residing in a foreign culture had taught her that the United States deserved the 9/11 terrorist attacks because of U.S. foreign policy (I know this because I was one of the volunteers). Actions and statements of this kind have become perfectly commonplace by now, and we all know about them, but most people cannot explain why things are this way. How can it have come to such cultural self-hatred? The answer lies in an oft-repeated historical process that takes a society from naïve and self-promoting beginnings to self-contempt and decline.

He then traces the etymology of the term "oikophpbia" back to a 2003 book by Roger Sruton entitled England and the Need for Nations. Oikos is the ancient Greek term for house or home.

The pattern he describes by which a nation rises to greatness, becomes predominant on the world stage, and then turns inward as its citizens, enjoying an unprecedented standard of living, begin to turn to unproductive preoccupations and to turn on each other.

He says that oikophobia and xenophobia are, generally speaking, recognizably concentrated within the left and right within our culture:

As has been the case in other civilizations, insofar as the political terms of “left” and “right” may have been applicable to them (“progressive” and “conservative” are often more appropriate for ancient civilizations), the oikophobes dominate in left-wing areas, while non-oikophobes and, in some cases, xenophobes and anti-oikophobic reactionaries dominate in right-wing areas. The increased hostility between these two sides in the United States comes at the expected time, since the country has already slipped from its peak and is slowly descending on the other side. The historical development of oikophobia has had a debilitating effect on many aspects of our society, on its culture, politics, and military. It is a nation so fixated by internal squabbles that it is no longer capable of effectively projecting outward, unified force.

That's going to be most unhelpful the next time a hostile foreign power poses an undeniably existential threat  - and that is going to happen at some point.

In the meantime, our biggest danger is going to be that all this civilizational self-hatred is going to remove us ever farther from the West's foundations. Before long - maybe we are already there - we won't even know what it is we need to return to.

That's the challenge: to keep the candle flickering, even though it is so very late in the day.

It was Western civilization that introduced the idea that slavery was an abomination

Hard leftists have a few stock generalizations they trot out when attempting to defend their position that America and the West in general are fatally flawed on a moral level. Probably the most frequently used is slavery.

I'm excerpting generously from today's Townhall column by Larry Elder because it puts the lie to the idea that slavery is some kind of unique mar on this nation and culture.

A man I have known since grade school changed his name, years ago, to an Arabic one. He told me he rejected Christianity as "the white man's religion that justified slavery." He argued Africans taken out of that continent were owed reparations. "From whom?" I asked.

Arab slavers took more Africans out of Africa and transported them to the Middle East and to South America than European slavers took out of Africa and brought to North America. Arab slavers began taking slaves out of Africa beginning in the ninth century -- centuries before the European slave trade -- and continued well after.

In "Prisons & Slavery," John Dewar Gleissner writes: "The Arabs' treatment of black Africans can aptly be termed an African Holocaust. Arabs killed more Africans in transit, especially when crossing the Sahara Desert, than Europeans and Americans, and over more centuries, both before and after the years of the Atlantic slave trade. Arab Muslims began extracting millions of black African slaves centuries before Christian nations did. Arab slave traders removed slaves from Africa for about 13 centuries, compared to three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves transported by Arabs across the Sahara Desert died more often than slaves making the Middle Passage to the New World by ship. Slaves invariably died within five years if they worked in the Ottoman Empire's Sahara salt mines."

My name-changing friend did not know that slavery occurred on every continent except Antarctica. Europeans enslaved other Europeans. Asians enslaved Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans. Arabs enslaved other Arabs. Native Americans even enslaved other Native Americans.

He accused me of "relying on white historians" who, he insisted, had a "vested interest to lie."

What about Thomas Sowell, the brilliant economist/historian/philosopher, who happens to be black? Sowell writes: "Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century. 

"People of every race and color were enslaved -- and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed."

Sowell also wrote: "The region of West Africa ... was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent -- before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere. ... Arabs were the leading slave raiders in East Africa, ranging over an area larger than all of Europe." 

Consider this figure that Elder cites: between 1525 and 1866, about 388,000 slaves were shipped directly to North America. To Brazil? 4.86 million.

He then quotes Sowell again:

"While slavery was common to all civilizations," writes Sowell, "...only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history -- Western civilization. ... Not even the leading moralists in other civilizations rejected slavery at all." 

Don't you think this begs the question, what in the intellectual and moral lineage that produced Britain and the United States allowed the spark of the idea that all human beings had a right to freedom to turn into an ongoing flame?

Why we call them Western civilization-haters

Ben Shapiro succinctly yet incisively nails it. This is exactly why the hard Left, radical Palestinians, and jihadists of both the Sunni and Iran-bloc stripe cannot stand the fact that the US recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel:

What drives the leftist press's coverage? Simply put, antipathy to the West. Israel is seen as an outpost of colonialism by leftists, and has been since the 1967 war. Then-President Barack Obama expressed the view well in his 2009 speech in Cairo, suggesting that Israel's rationale relied on its "tragic history" that "culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust." In this view, the Palestinians were shunted aside in favor of providing national reparations to Jews; the Jews took their Western ways into the heart of a foreign region.

This isn't true. The living proof of that is Israel's eternal connection to Jerusalem. That's why both radical Muslims (including the Palestinian leadership) and the far left deny Israel's historic bond with its homeland and hope desperately to stop public recognition of that bond. If Israel exists because Jewish connection pre-existed everything else, then Israel isn't a new outpost of the West; it's the oldest center of the West. That's why Trump's announcement is important: It's a recognition that the West was founded on Jerusalem, rather than the other way around.

Peace will come when everyone recognizes what Trump has recognized: The Jewish connection to Jerusalem is unbreakable. And peace will come when Israel's enemies realize that violence can't change that underlying fact.

It's not just the capital of the Jewish state. It's the oldest center of the West. It predates Athens and Rome.

And it signifies the foundation for the representative-democracy concepts, and beginnings of philosophy, science and Western art that Athens and Rome bestowed on us.

That foundation is God's covenant with humankind. The rest stems from that.

And that's why, to Leftists and radical Muslims, the fact that it remains a Western city is intolerable.

Is Eastern Europe the most Western place in the West?

Giulio Meotti, writing at the Gatestone Institute's website, says it probably was no coincidence that Trump gave his speech in Poland:

There has been a growing tendency of Visegrad [Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary] leaders to depict Islam as a civilizational threatto Christian Europe. If, in Western Europe, Christianity has been dramatically cast aside by public opinion and severely restricted by EU official rules, in Eastern Europe new polls revealthat Christianity is as robust and patriotic as ever. That is why Trump called Poland "the faithful nation". That is why US Catholic magazines are openly asking if there is a "Christian reawakening" in Eastern Europe. Slovakia approved a law to prevent Islam from becoming an official state religion.

These Central- and Eastern European countries know that Western Europe's multiculturalism has been a recipe for terror attacks, for a start. As Ed West of The Spectator noted:

"Not all of Europe, of course. Central Europe, chiefly Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, remain largely safe from the terror threat, despite the former in particular being a Nato player in the Middle East. It is precisely because the reasons for this are so obvious that they cannot be mentioned. Poland is 0.1 percent Muslim, most of whom are from a long-settled Tartar community, Britain is 5 percent, France 9 percent and Brussels 25 percent, and those numbers are growing".

What is presumably "obvious" here is that Poland and Hungary are not hit by Islamic terror attacks because they have very few Muslims, while Belgium and UK it is the reverse. Europe would probably have been safer if it had followed Eastern Europe's example.

Eastern Europe not only shows a greater understanding of Western culture than Western Europe does; these Eastern countries have also been far more generous to NATO, the bulwark of their independence and security. Culture and security go hand-in-hand: if you take your own culture and civilization seriously, you will be ready to defend them.

A brief look at the NATO's members' military spending as a percentage of GDP shows that Poland meets the 2% target, unlike all the Western European countries. Only five of NATO's 28 members -- the U.S., Greece, Poland, Estonia and the U.K. -- meet the 2% target. Where is France? And Belgium? And Germany? And The Netherlands?

"Unlike most of its NATO and European peers," Agnia Grigas, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, explained, "Poland has for the past two decades consistently viewed defense as a priority issue, and as a result, has been slowly but steadily emerging as the bedrock of European security". Poland -- unlike Belgium, Italy and other European countries -- is not a "free rider" but a trustworthy partner to its US ally. Poland showed loyal support to the United States both in Afghanistan and Iraq, where its troops fought the Taliban and helped to topple Saddam Hussein.

It's one thing to evolve and advance, which Western nations have shown the world how to do, but it's of supreme importance for those of us in the West to remember our identity, what it consists of, why it's supremely valuable, and what is entailed in preserving it.

Now the Left is going to try to make the term "the West" into some kind of code for bigotry

I'd seen Peter Beinart's Atlantic piece about Trump's speech in Poland in my first round of news-and-opinion perusal this morning, and had resolved to blog about it when I got the opportunity. Now, at 12:30, I'm ready, and I see that it has come to the attention of some others as well.

Noah Rothman at Commentary makes a number of points I was going to put forth:

“The West is not an ideological or economic term,” wrote the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “The West is a racial and religious term.” “The ‘south’ and ‘east’ only threaten the West’s ‘survival’ if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders,” Beinart insisted. “They only threaten the West’s ‘survival’ if by ‘West’ you mean white, Christian hegemony.” This is true only if we accept Beinart’s premise; that the West is only a racial and religious affiliation and not a set of political traditions. If we see the West as a champion of individual liberty, freedom of worship, reason and rationality, and republican governance—not to mention a bulwark against the forces of reaction, totalitarianism, and theocracy—Beinart’s definition is both narrow and incoherent.

Notice how disingenuous Beinart is in formulation his position. For one thing, he makes a point of using a couple of George W. Bush speeches as points of comparison, and then tries to say that just because Trump couched his remarks in geographical terms, he was somehow minimizing Christianity's universal message, or speaking of some different definition altogether:

To grasp how different that rhetoric was from Trump’s, look at how the last Republican President, George W. Bush, spoke when he visited Poland. In his first presidential visit, in 2001, Bush never referred to “the West.” He did tell Poles that “We share a civilization.” But in the next sentence he insisted that “Its values are universal.” Because they are, he declared, “our trans-Atlantic community must have priorities beyond the consolidation of European peace. We must bring peace and health to Africa. … We must work toward a world that trades in freedom … a world of cooperation to enhance prosperity, protect the environment, and lift the quality of life for all.”

In 2003, Bush returned, and in his main speech didn’t use the terms “West” or “civilization” at all. After celebrating Poland’s achievements, he said America and Europe “must help men and women around the world to build lives of purpose and dignity” so they don’t turn to terrorism. He boasted that America was increasing its funding to fight global poverty and AIDS because “we add to our security by helping to spread freedom and alleviate suffering.” And he said “America and Europe must work closely to develop and apply new technologies that will improve our air and water quality, and protect the health of the world’s people.”

Bush’s vision echoed Francis Fukuyama’s. America and Europe may have been further along the road to prosperity, liberty, capitalism, and peace than other parts of the world, but all countries could follow their path. And the more each did, the more America and Europe would benefit. In deeply Catholic Poland, Bush sprinkled his speeches with religious references, but they were about Christianity as a universal creed, a moral imperative that knew no civilizational bounds. By contrast, when Trump warned Poles about forces “from the south or the east, that threaten … to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition,” he was talking not about Christianity but about Christendom: a particular religious civilization that must protect itself from outsiders.

Beinart employs the baggage of Trump's protectionist bluster in previous speeches to say that in this speech, his use of the word "defend" is fraught with paranoia:

When Bush spoke in Poland, America’s leaders still mostly discussed globalization as a process by which America improved the rest of the world. Trump generally discusses globalization—the movement of both goods and people—as a process by which the rest of the world cheats, weakens, and threatens America. In his two speeches in Poland combined, Bush used variations of the word “defend” five times. Trump used them 21 times in a single speech.

But the point here is not tariffs or intellectual property theft, it's a maniacal ideology enshrouded in a particular religion. A little further on, Beinart realizes he has to cover that base, and says this:

Jihadist terrorists can kill people in the West, but unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, they cannot topple even the weakest European government. Jihadists control no great armies. Their ideologies have limited appeal even among the Muslims they target with their propaganda. ISIS has all but lost Mosul and could lose Raqqa later this year.

Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. The “south” and “east” only threaten the West’s “survival” if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West’s “survival” if by “West” you mean white, Christian hegemony. 

Well, no, Peter, the jihadists don't have the resources to storm the meeting places of Western legislatures and declare coups d'etat, but we are already seeing a mindset spread that posits that frequent terrorist attacks are just something we're going to have to live with. There's a one-word encapsulation for that: demoralization. And it goes hand-in-hand with the acquiescence that accommodates sharia law and the performing of genital mutilation in doctors' clinics in Western nations.

The reason Trump mentioned the geographic angle is that it is from the south and east that immigrants, including no small number of individuals sympathetic to jihad, are poring into European nations.

Islam is not a Western religion, and making a high priority of "inclusivity" does not serve the cause of preserving Western values.

And let's add this fact to the mix: there are Western nations far removed from the geographic concentration of such countries. Israel is a Western nation. Japan, while by no means completely Western, has a great number of Western features: a basically free-market economy, a representative democracy form of government, and a balance between fealty to tradition and openness to advancement that ensures societal stability.

The extent to which Trump has thought any of this out is something we can't ascertain to any appreciable degree. Steven Miller wrote the speech. But neither is Trump some kind of white supremacist who secretly signals supremacist designs through his public remarks.

Rest assured, the way the term "the West" was used in the Poland speech is the way it's used by all serious people who understand that, yes, it must be defended: A body of thought distilled from a centuries-old conversation whose participants indeed did come from geographically Western nations, such as Greece, Italy, France, England, Germany, The United States, and Poland.

A requiem for the United States of America

Unless almighty God directly intervenes, Donald Trump will clean up in tonight's Super Tuesday's results, probably winning everything except Texas.

And God may well not intervene. After all, this nation has completely turned its back on Him.

No, our choices this fall are likely to be between

• a woman who enabled her sex-fiend husband because he was her ticket to her own power, who got a Senate seat on the basis of her name and then did nothing to distinguish her term, who made a complete mess of her stint as Secretary of State - up to and including the reckless and criminal mishandling of classified information, whose resume is a trail of corruption going back to her lawyer days, and is known as a mean, nasty person who puts the word out that aides are not to make eye contact with her, and, insofar as she is driven by anything beyond all-consuming ambition, is informed by a hard-left worldview. and 
• a man of the same age who is utterly inarticulate and incoherent, who has taken contradictory positions on issues ranging from health care to Mideast policy to abortion to immigration, who is on record praising his likely opponent - and, indeed, paid her and her sex-fiend husband to be guests at the wedding at which he married his third wife (whose portfolio from her modeling days is at least mildly pornographic), who is on record saying things about working with Democrat legislators that would get any conventional Republican branded as an unacceptable squish by the very frenzied mob that loves him, who is the only candidate to use four-letter words in his speeches, who is so full of himself that he has his name emblazoned in gold on his private jet, who threatens to sue any individual or news organization that dares to point any of this out, who made much of his money (such as he's made any; he has gone bankrupt four times and is constantly in debt) building casinos, and who has publicly stated that he never asks God for forgiveness.

I actually see a little validity to the mostly loathsome argument put forth by the likes of the loathsome Laura Ingraham that castigating Squirrel-Hair supporters does as much and possibly more to divide the Republican party as any other kinds of internecine attacks. But it's too late. The evidence is in. His supporters almost to a person are guilty of shoddy thinking, reflexive and rigid conclusion-drawing, vulgarity, and utter disregard for the true American spirit. Peruse any comment thread in which this debate comes up. A pundit can write the most cogent, compelling, fact-rich piece that appeals to the humanity and depth that any reader hopefully has, and the Squirrel-Hair-bots will completely ignore both tone and specifics and either digress into Marco Rubio's Gand of Eight involvement and the weakness of Boehner and McConnell as Congressional leaders, or harp obsessively on immigration and trade.

And this nightmare scenario is being played out against a backdrop of a rotten culture that produces no art (and has turned its awards ceremonies for the pretend-art it does churn out into  Sodom-and-Gommorah spectacles that make a mockery of basic human dignity) and provides no one with the kind of properly rounded education that prepares one for humane living, but rather indoctrinates and, at best, imparts knowledge in some arcane specialization, a media that prioritizes personality over principle, a stagnant economy, and an array of dire world-stage threats including Russia, Turkey, Syria, Lybia, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Iran, North Korea and China.

If you were God, would you bother with such a stiff-necked and decrepit nation? Of course, He is God and not us, and His love is immeasurable, and he showed mercy to the Israelites on several occasions when they were at least as wayward.

But there was at least some kind of remnant that was not on board with the turning away, that saw that the people must turn their eyes once again to Him.

I don't know if there are enough such people in post-America to save it from the gathering darkness.

What it means to be a Westerner

Conrad Black speaks plainly in today's National Post:

the forgotten fact is that Christianity is a much greater force in the world than Islam. It has 50% more nominal adherents, hundreds of millions more communicants, 600 years more history, and an infinitely greater intellectual and cultural basis. Although it has been used as a pretext for group violence in recent memory, as in Ireland, no serious Christian authority counsels or condones violence other than in personal or societal self-defence. Islam lifted the monotheistic concept from the Judeo-Christians and even claim that none other than that frequent flyer Gabriel imparted the divine message to the Prophet, Muhammad.

Militant Islam had a spirited try at routing Christianity, and when it was repulsed from France and Spain, it returned in strength 800 years later as a largely secular Turkish force under Sulieman the Magnificent. It laid siege to Vienna in 1529, and again in 1683, but was repulsed on both occasions, the latter by Poland’s King Jan Sobieski. Turkey lost its bid for control of the Mediterranean at Lepanto in 1571.

No sane or civilized Westerner would dispute Islam’s historic significance or the right of anyone to practice that or any other religion. But many sane Westerners have together achieved the startling and unfortunate feat of establishing the politically correct fiction that the West is not Christian, and that it is the duty of all to avoid disparagement of extreme Islam, even after decades of endless provocations. The real problem of Western Islam is the failure of the Islamic peoples at self-government and the recourse, not uncommon for people who have been unsuccessful, to pious fervour and a nostalgic yearning for the days of triumphant militancy. But that is not a valid answer to Islam’s problems. As an entire and tolerant civilization, it is our duty to ourselves, and even to the Islamists who fancy themselves to be our enemies, to crush and exterminate this malignant and evil force as soon and thoroughly as possible.

We must stop hiding our Christian light under a bushel, and end this imbecilic fantasy that indulgence of those who would kill or subjugate all of us and anyone else deemed ambivalent in their hydra-headed jihad will achieve anything except the encouragement of their violent contempt. The two most populous Western countries, the United States and Brazil, are overwhelmingly Christian. A very inquisitive person would ransack the Western media to discover this, but a bone-crushing majority in both countries embrace the principal tenets of Christianity.

The moral relativism  that the Left would impose upon us eats away at the core of our worldview.  It leads to a nihilistic apathy that permits our conquest.

I hope that the 700,000 souls gathered in Paris yesterday were fueled by an understanding of this.  If it was merely a plea for "tolerance" and "peace" rather than an assertion of not only what is right but why (that that which is right was authored by the Lord of right), we are no more prepared for the next attack, and the one after that, than we were upon being shocked by what happened at the Charlie Hebdo offices.