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.

Those betting that post-America can work out its problems smoothly do not have the more convincing argument

 Something felt real off to me about this piece by David Masci at Discourse, the culture-and-ideas journal of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The title, "A Biden-Trump Rematch Is No Reason To Panic." 

Get the idea?

But he does a pretty lame job of selling the message. He spends the first nine paragraphs going over the current horse-race stuff, and the approaches of both camps. Then, in the last two paragraphs, he tries to convince us of his point, laying out two reasons. 

Reason one:

First, while partisans on both sides talk about dictatorial and criminal behavior on the part of both men and others in their orbit, America’s institutions, while themselves flawed, remain strong enough to keep our democracy secure. Recall that the Jan. 6 riot delayed but did not stop Congress from certifying the election results, leading to the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to Biden. Likewise, President Biden’s unauthorized effort to forgive student loans was overturned in the courts. 

Well, it wasn't for lack of trying that the MAGA hordes didn't prevent certification on January 6. The Very Stable Genius told them in person that he'd be "very disappointed" if Pence didn't "do the right thing" and when they got to the Capitol they were within seconds of getting hod of the Vice President. And, yes, that was a nice court slap down of a bad Biden policy, but it's overwhelmed by all the, um, successes he's had elsewhere advancing climate alarmism, militant identity politics, wealth redistribution, and running up the national debt.

Reason two:

But a more important cause for hope is the presence of what my mother used to call “horse sense”—in this case, the horse sense of the American people. Yes, Trump’s and Biden’s grip on their parties mean that, despite what most people say they want, we may soon be faced with a choice between two deeply unpopular, uninspiring candidates. But history shows us that the electorate has a tendency to eventually correct its mistakes. After all, following the ineffective tenures of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, the American people elected Abraham Lincoln. And the post-Watergate malaise of the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter years was followed by the two-term presidency of Ronald Reagan.

"The American people elected Abraham Lincoln. To preside over a friggin' civil war. And America's cultural rot proceeded apace even through the undeniably great-on-many-levels Reagan years, and we all know the statistics we are now living with for marriage rate and family formation collapse, the collapse of acknowledgement of a transcendent order (as evidenced by church attendance statistics, among other metrics), teen depression rates and declines in academic performance. And then there's the polarization.

Am I being overly doom-focused?

Let's ask some folks around the world:

When I asked the European ambassador to talk to me about America’s deepening partisan divide, I expected a polite brushoff at best. Foreign diplomats are usually loath to discuss domestic U.S. politics.

Instead, the ambassador unloaded for an hour, warning that America’s poisonous politics are hurting its security, its economy, its friends and its standing as a pillar of democracy and global stability.

The U.S. is a “fat buffalo trying to take a nap” as hungry wolves approach, the envoy mused. “I can hear those Champagne bottle corks popping in Moscow — like it’s Christmas every fucking day.”

As voters cast ballots in the Iowa caucuses Monday, many in the United States see this year’s presidential election as a test of American democracy. But, in a series of conversations with a dozen current and former diplomats, I sensed that to many of our friends abroad, the U.S. is already failing that test.

The diplomats are aghast that so many U.S. leaders let their zeal for partisan politics prevent the basic functions of government. It’s a major topic of conversations at their private dinners and gatherings. Many of those I talked to were granted anonymity to be as candid with me as they are with each other.

For example, one former Arab ambassador who was posted in the U.S. during both Republican and Democratic administrations told me American politics have become so unhealthy that he’d turn down a chance to return.

“I don’t know if in the coming years people will be looking at the United States as a model for democracy,” a second Arab diplomat warned.

Many of these conversations wouldn’t have happened a few months ago. There are rules, traditions and pragmatic concerns that discourage foreign diplomats from commenting on the internal politics of another country, even as they closely watch events such as the Iowa caucuses. (One rare exception: some spoke out on America’s astonishing 2016 election.)

But the contours of this year’s presidential campaign, a Congress that can barely choose a House speaker or keep the government open, and, perhaps above all, the U.S. debate on military aid for Ukraine have led some diplomats to drop their inhibitions. And while they were often hesitant to name one party as the bigger culprit, many of the examples they pointed to involved Republican members of Congress.

These foreign diplomats have a better understanding of how to make distinctions between domestic and world-stage policy concerns than a whole lot of post-American lawmakers:

In particular, they criticized the decision to connect the issue of Ukrainian aid and Israeli aid to U.S. border security. Not only did the move tangle a foreign policy issue with a largely domestic one, but border security and immigration also are topics about which the partisan fever runs unusually high, making it harder to get a deal. Immigration issues in particular are a problem many U.S. lawmakers have little incentive to actually solve because it robs them of a rallying cry on the campaign trail.

So now, “Ukraine might not get aid, Israel might not get aid, because of pure polarization politics,” said Francisco Santos Calderón, a former Colombian ambassador to the United States.

They're starting to get proactive as a result of their concern:

So the world’s envoys are reconsidering how their governments can deal with this America for many years and presidents to come.

Some predicted that a Republican win in November would mean their countries would have to become more transactional in their relationship with the United States instead of counting on it as a partner who’ll be there no matter what. Embassies already are beefing up their contacts among Republicans in case they win back the White House.

“Most countries will be in defensive positions, because the asymmetry of power between them and the United States is such that there’s little proactively or offensively that you can do to impact that,” said Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States.

When I asked diplomats what advice they’d offer America’s politicians if they were free to do so, several said the same thing: Find a way to overcome your divisions, at least when it comes to issues that reverberate beyond U.S. borders.

We'd do well to heed the more sober voices beyond our borders. There is much to turn around in post-America, and it's not guaranteed that there's time to do it.

 

 

 

 

Mike Lee is dead to me

 So the Utah Senator, for the second time, is endorsing the Very Stable Genius for president. 

It's interesting that he couches it in such a way to make him look savvy enough to acknowledge that at least a significant number of post-Americans - maybe including himself, but not necessarily - have problems with the former occupant of the Oval Office:

“Look, whether you like Donald Trump or not, whether you agree with everything he says or not, he is our one opportunity to choose order over chaos and putting America first over America last,” Lee said during an appearance on Fox News’ Ingraham Angle on Friday.

A bit more cautious than the way he went about it in 2020, likening the VSG to Captain Moroni, a figure from the Book of Mormon's elaborate and unverifiable cosmology, who supposedly was the general of one of four tribes that supposedly peopled North America around the time of Christ. (Look, I don't want to get too far into looking sniffingly at American denominations with weird theologies. There are many fine Mormons, Brigham Young is a rightly respected university, I have friends who are happy, stable family people who are Moonies, and a dear, now-departed aunt and uncle of mine were devout Christian Scientists. The point is that Lee chose a brave-commander type as a comparison for Trump. He did later have to walk it back a bit. Although the whole matter of denominations with weird theologies may raise questions about whether there's something in the American character that makes us susceptible to signing onto devotions that run counter to what our better judgements are telling us.)

And it's a far cry from where Lee was coming from in 2016:

“Hey look, Steve, I get it. You want me to endorse Trump,” Lee (R-Utah) told NewsMaxTV host Steve Malzberg. “We can get into that if you want. We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK. We can go through the fact that he’s made statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant. We can get into the fact that he’s wildly unpopular in my state, in part because my state consists of people who are members of a religious minority church. A people who were ordered exterminated by the governor of Missouri in 1838. And, statements like that make them nervous.”

Lee wound up voting for Evan McMullen that year (as did I). 

Lee comes from a family of legal heavy-hitters, and his own clerkships are indicative of a guy with a sound Constitutional grounding. 

But consider the moral deterioration of the "best friend" Lee mentions above. That would be Ted Cruz.

I loved Cruz's determination to roll back the "Affordable" Care Act, although in retrospect I can see that my loathing of this further governmental incursion into health care clouded my ability to see how quixotic Cruz's efforts were. And Cruz's proposal to eliminate the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce and Housing were precisely why I was enthused about him as a possible president. I met him at a campaign stop in an ice cream parlor in Columbus, Indiana days before the fateful May 2016 night when he lost the Indiana primary, sealing the dynamics of that year's race.

But Cruz, like so many with impeccable conservative bona fides (think Rick Perry, who called the VSG a "cancer on conservatism" and went on to be his Energy Secretary), decided to set having been humiliated aside and get on the Squirrel Hair Express. My esteem for him went from admiration to contempt.

But at this late date, what is the excuse, besides the morally evasive "binary choice" argument, for getting behind a candidate who is on record saying "a Massive Fraud [sic] of this type allows for the termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution"? Who characterizes his opponent as a "stark raving lunatic . . . who is leading this country to hell"?

I'm going to try to trot out the following exhortation as sparingly as I can in the next ten months, so that it doesn't lose its gravity: I'm staying home the first Tuesday in November, and you should, too.

In a Mideast already brimming with malevolent players, ISIS returns to the mix

 Katherine Zimmerman of the American Enterprise Institute says the recent bombings at the memorial service for General Suleiman in Iran should be a bracing heads up for the West:

The Islamic State claimed the Kerman bombings as part of a new campaign dubbed, “Kill Them Wherever You Find Them,” launched in support of Palestinian Muslims. Within a 24-hour period, the Islamic State had claimed more than 30 different operations globally—from the Middle East to Africa to the Philippines—as part of this campaign, reanimating a seemingly dormant network. Few of the arguments made in the announcement itself are new. Pointing to the events in Gaza, the Islamic State called for supporters to target “Jews, Christians, and their allies” in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. 

One of the key distinctions between the Islamic State and other major jihadist groups is its focus on Iran. Unlike al-Qaeda, the Islamic State has actively targeted Iran and Shiites worldwide as perfidious enemies of Islam and ruthlessly condemned Sunni collaborators such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This announcement was no different, emphasizing again the danger of the Shiites and their threat to Sunni Muslims. No doubt, the Kerman bombings were aimed in part at driving a wedge of suspicion between Shiite Iran and the Sunni jihadists it backs. As it has previously, the Islamic State is seeking to exploit regional tensions and moments of instability to create opportunities to advance its own cause, still pursuing reestablishing the Caliphate.

These bombings are simply another notch in the belt of Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K). What senior U.S. officials warned of in the aftermath of the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan—IS-K’s development of external attack capabilities to match its intent—has sadly been realized. And while the Kerman bombings are shocking given the terrorist outfit’s penetration of the tightly controlled Iranian society, they are part of a concerning trend. The group now threatens states neighboring Afghanistan and has extended its reach to include Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka. Reports from Kyrgyzstan of a foiled terror attack in late December reveal the outward progression of the Islamic State’s threat from Afghanistan.

Western states, particularly European ones, have felt much-needed relief from the Islamic State terror threat in recent years, especially after the collapse of the founding group in Iraq and Syria. But that lull in activity seems to be ending. Most  concerning is how IS-K has transformed into its primary operational node using tradecraft developed to support terrorism attacks as far afield as Europe. Like al-Qaeda, which experienced significant counterterrorism pressure in Afghanistan and focused instead on developing a threat node based in Yemen, the Islamic State has adapted. The difference is that the Islamic State seems to be mastering a remote management of its cells, including online recruitment, guidance, and training. It’s not clear yet from Iranian statements regarding the detained individuals whether the network behind the Kerman bombings was built remotely or not.

And this is occurring as other Mideast players are weighing in - and not supportively - on US and British airstrikes on, per the US Air Force's Mideast command, "command and control nodes, munitions depots, production facilities and air defense radar systems" of the Houthis in Yemen:

Russia . . .  requested an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on the strikes. France, the current council president, said it will take place Friday afternoon.

Rather rich in irony that Russia would be concerned about the use of force. 

Saudi Arabia is likewise voicing such a view:

Saudi Arabia is following US and British air strikes on neighbouring Yemen with "great concern", a foreign ministry statement said on Friday, urging against escalation.

"The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is following with great concern the military operations taking place in the Red Sea region and the air strikes on a number of sites in the Republic of Yemen," the statement said, calling for "self-restraint and avoiding escalation".

You may notice the I haven't done any posting of a follow-the-horse-race-in-granular-detail nature about stuff like how Haley and DeSantis are positioned going into Iowa. For one thing, the Very Stable Genius still looks poised to run the table on the entire primary season - a prospect with bad enough implications for Mideast policy - but also, the lay of the land in that region is likely to look even more volatile by November. The current US administration has its hands full right now, what with the mysterious way Lloyd Austin's prostate cancer has been handled, and the implications for the functionality of the chain of command. 

So the most immediate demand on US focus is not in Des Moines, but a bit further away. 

Saturday roundup

 Paul Kingsnorth has become one of my favorite Christian writers to check out on a regular basis. I think I've mentioned his journey here at LITD before: from atheism through Buddhism to Eastern Orthodox faith. One of his recurrent themes is how, in the process of achieving material advancement, we have mechanized out souls. 

I'm here linking to a piece that he wrote for his Substack The Abbey of Misrule, in May of 2022, but its point remains at least as timely as it was when he published it.

It's titled "What Progress Wants," and, in the course of arriving at his crescendo, he cites the observations of some figures who share his concern about this mechanization. It's an eclectic bunch, and by no means exclusively Christian. He includes René Guénon (1886-1951), a Frenchman who searched for a unifying principle in Hinduism, Taoism, Sufism and Christianity, Catholic priest and theologian Ivan Illich, and Beat poet Allen Ginsburg.

But it's the final figure whose disturbance about humanity's course provides the framework that Kingsnorth requires to make his own point:

The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce saw the modern era as a thorough and permanent revolution - a radical break with the human past. He defined a modern person as ‘someone who thinks that “today it is no longer possible…”’ We do not tend to see our time as continuous with what has gone before. Instead, we believe we live after what Del Noce called a ‘violent break with history’: a move from the ‘kingdom of necessity’ to the ‘kingdom of freedom.’ In the story of Progress which informs our view of history and society, the revolutions of the modern age - industrial, political and intellectual - are assumed to have radically changed the world. By sweeping away old ways of thinking, seeing and living, modernity has produced ‘a type of violence capable of breaking the continuum of history.’ 

What Progress wants is the end of history.

Del Noce seems to be having something of a moment at present, provoked by a recent collection of his essays and lectures, translated into English as The Crisis of Modernity. This crisis, in Del Noce’s seeing, is one of exclusion: it is what the modern way of seeing leaves out that matters. What is it, asks Del Noce that ‘is no longer possible’?

The answer … is simple: what is excluded is the “supernatural,” religious transcendence … For rationalists, certainty about an irreversible historical process towards radical immanentism has replaced what for medieval thinkers was faith in revelation.

Del Noce’s ideas are complex, but this claim gets to the heart of the matter. The modern epoch, guided by science, reason and the self, rejects the notion of anything ‘unseen’ or ‘beyond’. From the eighteenth century onwards, philosophy sweeps away religion: the world is now understood in purely human terms, and managed with purely human notions. Everything becomes immanent: literally down-to-Earth. There are no principalities or powers, and so everything is potentially transformable and explicable through human might. This is another way of framing Guénon’s ‘Western deviation’: a ‘progressive materialisation’ that leads us into a ‘reign of quantity,’ in which we take on the role of the Creator for ourselves. 

What Progress wants is the end of transcendence.

All of this, said Del Noce, marks a radical transformation in human seeing. It is, for example, a ‘sharp break with respect to the Greek and medieval periods.’ Both the followers of Plato and the followers of Christ (not to mention every other old culture on Earth, in their own particular way) believed that truth was transcendent, eternal and uncreated, and could be known through some combination of faith, practice and reason. No longer, said Del Noce: the only ‘transcendence’ that our age will permit is that which we create ourselves :

Modernity marks a major break by fully developing the anthropological theme, so that transcendence pictured as ‘beyond’ is replaced by transcendence within the world. 

‘Transcendence within the world’ can also be translated as ‘Progress’. With no ultimate truth or higher story, there is nothing to stop us bending the universe to our desires: indeed, to do so is our duty. This, in Del Noce’s telling, explained twentieth century history. Having replaced religion with philosophy, we then tried putting philosophy into practice on a grand scale, with terrible results. 

How do we shape the universe in the age of immanence? ‘The spiritual power that in the Middle Ages had been exercised by the Church … today can be exercised only by science’, writes Del Noce. A ‘totalitarian conception of science’ sees

… science regarded as the only true form of knowledge. According to this view, every other type of knowledge - metaphysical or religious - expresses only ‘subjective reactions’, which we are able, or will be able, to explain by extending science to the human sphere through psychological and sociological research.

But the rise of science did not lead to the end of religion, however much Richard Dawkins might like it to be so. Instead - as noted by Illich - religion responded to the challenge by becoming immanent itself. Western Christianity progressively abandoned its commitment to transcendence and was ‘resolved into philosophy’, allowing itself to be brought down to Earth, into the realm of social activism, politics and ideas. ‘The conversion of a large part of the religious world to the idea of modernity’, said Del Noce, ‘accelerated the process of disintegration’ that the modern revolution had unleashed.

What Progress wants is the death of God.

But Man cannot live by immanence alone. Religion meets a human need, and when it is gone, or corrupted, the hole it leaves will have to be filled by something else. What will that be? Del Noce’s answer is: revolution. 

Modernity, he suggests, could be defined as a permanent, ongoing revolution. The desire to build Utopia on the bones of the old world has been the consuming fire of Western thought for 300 years. Jacobins, Bolsheviks, communists, socialists, Fascists, Nazis, neoliberals and many more have all attempted to scour the ground clean and start again, and we are not done yet. ‘The revolutionary attitude of creative violence’, writes Del Noce, ‘has replaced the ascetic attitude of seeking liberation from the world.’ If once society’s refuseniks imitated St Anthony, now they copy Che Guevara. All that is solid melts into air: this, in the words of its most consequential revolutionary mind, is the best description of the age of immanence that we have ever had. 

What Progress wants is permanent revolution.

The two world wars of the twentieth century - which Del Noce prefers to view as a single European conflict, lasting from 1914 until 1945 - spread this revolution against transcendence and tradition all around the world. After 1945, America, the most immanent nation in history, unchallenged monarch of the reign of quantity, took on the global responsibility for waging ‘the Enlightenment’s war against their own past.’ America, said Del Noce, was now ‘the wellspring of the principle of disintegration’, which, along with its European allies and mentors, it was spreading around the world through the globalisation of its institutions and worldview. 

Del Noce agreed with the prophetic Simone Weil that ‘the Americanisation of Europe would lead to the Americanisation of the whole world’ - and so it has proven. But Europe, by pursuing the path of pure immanence, had in any case already doomed itself, by turning on itself the weapons it had long used on others: 

Colonisation can be achieved by only one method: by uprooting a people from its traditions. Europeans have a long history of extensively practising this method (and this was Europe’s greatest historical fault). Now - oh, wonder! - in order to feign regret they are applying the same method to themselves.

What Progress wants is colonisation.

Where would all this lead? The ultimate result of the revolution of modernity, predicted Del Noce, would be fragmentation, nihilism, and ‘the death of the sacred.’ The twin revolutionary engines of the postwar era, he suggested, were scientism and sex. The first usurped the role of religion and culture, reducing all life to the level of the measurable and controllable. The second, via the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the resulting ‘permissive society’, unleashed a radical individualism cored around sexual desire, which would lead to the fragmentation of everything from nationhood to the family - but leave capitalism and its attendant class, the bourgeoisie, intact: 

It is now clear how the process of criticism of authority, which originally was directed against conservatism, against false consciousness, against mystification, etc, ends up reaching the greatest degree of conservatism and linguistic falsification ever known in history. It would be easy to illustrate from this perspective the new features displayed by the contemporary crisis: the collapse of faith in all ideals, to a degree never seen before; the resulting loss of hope; the falsification of love, almost always bestowed on something ‘far’ in order to justify indifference or hostility towards what is near.

What Progress wants is the uprooting of everything

Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. Del Noce’s prediction, made decades ago, was that the end result of modernity’s revolutions would be the rise of a ‘new totalitarianism’. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth:

The age of the revolution gave up on searching for unity, and accepted a sharp opposition. The ideal endpoint is identified with liberation from authority, from the reign of force and necessity. However, what has happened so far suggests, rather, that the rejection of authority, understood in its metaphysical-religious foundation, leads instead to the fullness of ‘power.’

Create a void, in other words, and into it will rush monsters. 

The new totalitarianism, suggested Del Noce, would ‘absolutely deny traditional morality and religion’, basing its worldview instead on ‘scientistic dogmatism.’ It would negate all ‘spiritual forces’, including those which, in the 1930s, had been used to resist the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin: ‘the Christian tradition, liberalism, and humanitarian socialism.’ It would be a ‘totalitarianism of disintegration’, even more so than Russian communism, which had presented itself to some degree as a continuation of national tradition. This time around though, ‘the complete negation of all tradition’, including that of ‘fatherlands’ - nations - would lead to rule by the only large institutions still standing: global corporations. 

Faced with this challenge, Del Noce insisted that ‘current political formulas are completely inadequate’. Neither left nor right were equipped to understand what was going on: both, instead, would typically retreat to their historic comfort zones, with the left blaming ‘fascists’ and the right blaming ‘communists’ for the ongoing disintegration. The real source of the disintegration, though, was not partisan: it was the Machine. 

What Progress wants is liberation from everything.

Progress. The Machine. Moloch. Anti-Christ. The Technium. We are all grasping here, trying to name something we cannot see, but whose impacts we can feel undermining the foundations of everything we have known. Augusto Del Noce’s analysis of the modern revolution, and the rootless, spiritless, immanent world it had produced, pointed to the ultimate destination as both totalitarianism and nihilism. 

Kevin Kelly, of course, would disagree. For him and his fellow tech idealists, the clearing away of the transcendent realm is only a precursor to building another one - and getting it right this time:

Technology’s dominance ultimately stems not from its birth in human minds but from its origin in the same self-organisation that brought galaxies, planets, life, and minds into existence. It is part of a great asymmetrical arc that begins at the big bang and extends into ever more abstract and immaterial forms over time. The arc is the slow yet irreversible liberation from the ancient imperative of matter and energy.

What Progress wants is to move beyond nature

Del Noce is often referred to as a conservative or even a reactionary thinker, but he didn’t accept either label. Simple ‘reaction’, he said, was no solution to what was unfolding. Both nostalgia and utopia were ultimately fruitless as tools of resistance. If permanent revolution, and the consequent disintegration, is the baseline state of a world that denies transcendence, then the alternative is clear: a return to the spiritual centre. A rediscovery, or a reclamation, of the transcendent realm and its place in our lives. This, and only this, is the alternative to the reign of quantity and its attendant cast of gods, demons and machines. 

What Moloch wants - Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks - is sacrifice. We must sacrifice ourselves and our children to the robot apartments and stunned governments. What Anti-Christ wants is the opposite of transcendence. If the coming of Christ represents the transcendent breaking into the temporal in order to change it, then His opponent will herald a world of pure matter, uninterrupted by anything beyond human reach. Everything in that world is up for grabs. Anything, from rainforests to the human body, can be claimed and reshaped in the interests of advancing the realm of the human will. It is the oldest story.

The rushing power that runs beneath the age of Progress, the energy of the modern world, the river that carries us onwards - where is it taking us? We know the answer. Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here. This imperfect world, these imperfect people - they must be superseded, improved, remade. Flawed matter is in our hands now. We know what to do.

What Progress wants is to replace us. 

Perhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.

Mary Harrington fleshes out, in a piece for UnHerd that also dates from last spring, what the concrete fruits of this "progress" are. She asserts that the Judeo-Chrisitanity which shaped the West for centuries, which has as its premise the fairly self-evident fact that we did not create ourselves, has been supplanted by the exact opposite of that premise:

State power across the Anglosphere is ever more explicitly ordered to religious beliefs; it’s just that these beliefs aren’t Roman Catholic. Instead, what’s now granted state backing is a belief in the absolute moral sanctity of bodily self-creation. 

In Canada, legislation has just been proposed that would ban protests within 100 metres of a Drag Queen Story Hour. This proposal echoes an existing provision in the UK that bans even silent prayer in the vicinity of abortion clinics. And over in the USA, a Christian mother is suing the state of Oregon, which has barred her from adoption for saying she wouldn’t accept a putative adoptee’s self-declared pronouns or permit them to take puberty blockers. 

What, then, is the sacred value being enforced here? In the words of one supporter of both abortion and gender ideology, the common thread is “bodily autonomy and attempts to define the futures of others”. From this perspective, power should be ordered to the sacred value of self-creation, even over normal aspects of our organism such as puberty, pregnancy, or sex dimorphism. There is no sense in which our bodies should be accepted as a given, and anything we don’t like about them is a problem we’re entitled to solve as we see fit. 

She foresees "increasingly bitter political and religious schisms over what (if anything) is sacred about the human organism."

In a December piece at The Catholic World Report, Christopher R. Altieri notes the difference in the way the recent Fiducia supplicans (the Vatican document on administering blessings to "couples" with unorthodox bonds) has been received in the global north and global south:

Fiducia supplicans is crowded with caveats and brimming with qualifications, many very carefully drawn, over 5,000 words. It is evident that the declaration’s author and his commissioning principal both knew it would make waves. But it is unlikely either Fernandez or Pope Francis expected the tsunami of reaction that came in short order.

Some dioceses—mainly though not exclusively in western Europe—made a show of enthusiastically embracing the business, even though a facial reading of Fiducia would require many of them to halt plans for para-ritual blessings of gay unions or even roll back policies already articulated, for the implementation of which blessing formulae have already received at least preliminary local approval.

From other jurisdictions—many of them geographically located in the global south—the reception ranged from frigid to actively hostile, with several national bishops’ conferences flatly refusing to implement the declaration at all.

The cardinal-president of the Symposium of Episcopal Conference of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), Fridolin Ambongo, issued a call mid-week for talks among African bishops with a view to preparing a unified “continental” response.

That is a politically fascinating development, since it came from a fellow who is a member of Pope Francis’s C9 “small council” of cardinal advisors. It raises the question whether Ambongo has deployed a temporizing measure in hope of allowing Francis to walk things back. Alternatively, he may have thrown in with his continental confreres in the episcopate, many of whom have already balked at Fiducia supplicans.

Document author Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez is going to have some difficulty putting some teeth behind his insistence that all of Catholicism get on board:

Fernández, for his part, has staked a long and rocky row to hoe, insisting in the interview that bishops may not prohibit what the pope has permitted with Fiducia supplicans, especially since at least one national conference—Malawi—has already issued an explicit prohibition, in addition to the dioceses and conferences that have said they won’t be implementing it.

At Very Serious, Josh Barro looks at the atmosphere on university campuses that made possible the recent Claudine Gay debacle:

Matt Yglesias wrote a few weeks ago about a paper by Jenny Bulstrode, a historian of science at the University of London, who alleges that a moderately-notable metallurgical technique patented in England in the late 1700s was in fact stolen from the black Jamaican metallurgists who really developed it. The problem with Bulstrode’s paper is that it marshals no real evidence for its allegation — not only failing to show that Englishman Henry Cort was aware of a Jamaican metallurgical technique similar to the one he patented, but failing to show even that such a technique was ever used in Jamaica.

The paper, because it fit into the fashionable category of Historian Finds Yet Another Thing That Is Racist, garnered a lot of credulous press coverage. And when people pointed out that the paper didn’t have the goods, the editors of the journal who published it came out with a What Is Truth, Anyway-type word salad in defense of the article, including this:

We by no means hold that ‘fiction’ is a meaningless category – dishonesty and fabrication in academic scholarship are ethically unacceptable. But we do believe that what counts as accountability to our historical subjects, our readers and our own communities is not singular or to be dictated prior to engaging in historical study. If we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions, as those have been explicated over the last century by DuBois, Fanon, and scholars of the subsequent generations we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. To do otherwise is to reinstate older forms of profoundly selective historicism that support white domination.

These ideology-first, activism-oriented, the-truth-depends-on-who’s-looking approaches also extend into the soft social sciences — see, for example, the theme of the 2024 American Anthropological Association annual meeting, which declares an intention to “reimagine” anthropology in a way that breaks down the barrier between theory and practice to make more room for more social activism, so that anthropology better serves as a tool to respond to “systemic oppression.”

People (including me) look at papers and statements like this and conclude that a lot of what’s happening at universities isn’t really research — it’s social activism dressed up as research . . . 

At Honest to Goodness, Kaely Triller Harms asks, just what is it that those outraged by Beth Moore claim to be her violation of basic doctrine?

. . . in the Protestant church, one of the women who has cared the very most [about the Church turning a blind eye to various forms of corruption] and done the lion’s share of the heavy lifting is Beth Moore, who has stood bravely in the gap and said, “Church! We must learn to bind these wounds and pursue justice for the hurting.”

But the church keeps kicking her in the teeth for saying it. I’ve honestly never seen another Christian endure so much mudslinging, vitriol, and contempt from her own camp in my entire life. They call her a Jezebel, a false teacher, a harlot, a cancer. The relentlessly vicious blowhard William Wolfe just used his massive platform this past week to invite other Christians to call her demonic. Other influencers like Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry joined the pile-on. They make cartoon caricatures of her. They put her name in headlines like “The Moore of Babylon.” They claim she’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, though half the people making these claims can’t even tell you exactly what she’s done that’s this horrific. Some dude on Twitter today told me the Bible commands us to drive women like her out of the church. I asked why.

“Women shouldn’t preach” came the triumphant reply. I didn’t even have the bandwidth to explain to him that Beth does not inhabit a pulpit, nor did she ever set out to preach to men. Her target audience has always been women, and enough men found value in her words that some of them stuck around to hear what she was saying. Should she have kicked them out? Returned their man cards to them and diminutively encouraged them to only listen to male wisdom? 

And let’s be honest; even if you DO think this constitutes preaching, and even if you are of the conviction that the pulpit is reserved for men, this is a tertiary issue, and there are a great many faithful, orthodox Christians who disagree about it. I don’t see any of these guys chasing NT Wright down with a pitchfork on Twitter just because he thinks women should be able to preach. 

So far Beth’s crimes seem to be that she’s a woman with a voice, she said true things about Donald Trump, and she thinks we need to improve our communications about racism. And these are damnable offenses apparently. Remember, according to Wolfe, the woman is downright demonic.

Andrew Willard Jones, director of the Catholic Studies program at Franciscan University, writing at The Hedgehog Review, demonstrates how friendship is essential to any kind of subsidiarity we can achieve:

. . . families should control the majority of productive property and massive corporations little of it. This is not some novel notion. Aristotle asserted that the most just regime would have a large, politically dominant middle class, while Thomas Jefferson famously said that the backbone of a just republic was the property-owning small farmer.

But scale is not the only consideration. Most of our work should not be paid. This is another way of saying that in a healthy society, most of our social activity would not be commercialized. Activities that used to have nothing to do with money and which now do—sports, entertainment, socializing, family time, childcare, cooking, holidays and celebrations, caring for the elderly, education, home maintenance, even agriculture—are now dominated by commercial interests. Our world increasingly appears to be a giant marketplace. Instead, when we look out at our world, we should see mostly a shared space, a socially constructed world within which private spaces have a limited but important place and commercial spaces are relatively rare. This would, no doubt, mean getting poorer according to the metrics of economists, but the common good is measured in happiness, not wealth.

As for wealth, the pursuit of money as an end should be looked down upon. When kids talk about getting rich, we should correct them, not praise them. When grownups talk about their investment returns, we should shake our heads at their faux pas, not ask about their financial adviser. We should, rather, praise a person who displays a love of family, city, region, country, and humanity—in that order. The ancients called this piety; we might call it patriotism. The point is that an honorable person knows the proper importance of levels of order for the attainment of the common good, knows where he stands in that order, and directs his powers accordingly. This is the ethical posture which produces the distribution of power that corresponds to an order of subsidiarity. In such a distribution, authorities toward the top of the social order are appropriately obeyed by, even as they are appropriately afraid of, persons toward the bottom, where the power really lies.

Finally, ideological thinking should be treated as repugnant and, well, sometimes a bit silly. When it comes to appropriate political action in pursuit of the common good, almost everything is on the table because politics is a prudential art. Aristotle asserted that you could identify a free man because he is the one who will not endure tyranny—he will not serve it and he will not betray his friends to it. We should be a society of free people, whose freedom is secured, in the end, by friendship. Friendship is the reason for our lives. Nothing is more important.

This next one's real recent, as in two days ago. Public Discourse interviews Tara Isabella Burton, author of Self-Made, Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. A taste:

. . . increasingly we see, especially over the nineteenth century, the shift from “become a more virtuous person, live industriously, and have a moral life.” There are a whole bunch of nineteenth-century texts by Charles Seymour, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, that teach about the lives of self-made men in order to become like secular hagiographies. And that started to switch in the late 19th century to a much more individualistic sense of “read these books and learn to focus on what you want, what you need” in a semi-spiritual way, influenced by a quasi-religious movement known as New Thought, where you can manifest wealth, health, success, by meditating upon it.

In the late nineteenth century, in what’s known as the Gilded Age, this became a huge publishing boon, it became a huge phenomenon, and it ultimately set the stage for modern self-help, which became less about “how do I conform myself to religious or secular virtues in order to be a better person?” and much more about “how do I harness the energy of the universe to get what I want?” There is a very spiritual dimension there, even if it is not traditionally religious in nature. There is this implicit metaphysic that the “vibes,” the energy, the forces out there in the universe govern us, and that we can affect those forces by getting in touch with them in our own internal selves.

She calls this shift a "relocation of enchantment":

I’m less likely to want to speak of disenchantment than of a relocation of enchantment, which is to say that I think the “traditional,” roughly speaking, medieval pre-modern Christian worldview is enchanted in the sense that it sees the world, the universe, as a holistic whole, where our social selves, our biological selves, our natural selves, are all bound up in it. There’s a synthesis in the purpose of all creation, of all telos. That vision of the universe as not just fundamentally rational, but fundamentally with a divine purpose, really started changing in the Enlightenment. 

But in the nineteenth century, what ended up happening in slightly different ways in Europe and America was that that sense of the sacred became identified in slightly different ways with the human will and human desire. And the European model, which perhaps is more explicitly nihilistic, more explicitly influenced by Nietzche in particular, was the sense that nothing is real, nothing is meaningful, except what we decide it is. And the figure of the Dandy, who always has this slightly nihilistic streak, evolves into the figure of the Übermensch and the person who can create reality according to his will, precisely because reality itself is only ever about perception . . . whatever magic, sacredness, sanctity, whatever you want to call it, there is in the world, it comes from the self and our desires.

There's a common theme discernible in several of these pieces, is there not?

We Western humans have fully given ourselves over to the arrogance that sets us up as masters of our own destinies. 

It doesn't seem to be working out well.