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Saturday, April 12, 2025

A Primer, Part 2. How did we reach this lowly, and dangerous state. Soap Poisoning and Grape Nuts. (Written before the election).

We left off the last edition with this:

A warning

And here we get, in a way, to where we are now.

Conservatives in the modern West, and always in the English-speaking West, have democracy as a primary virtue, in spite of being aware that they're never in the majority, although the National Conservative movement, which is reactionary in the true sense of the word (it's reacting to something) is weakening that and looking to a pre Second World War model of European conservatism.

Liberals are always in favor of democracy.

Progressives and Populists really aren't quite often. Sometimes they are, but often they are not.

And Progressives and Populists only are in the forefront of politics in odd, and dangerous, times.

We are in odd and dangerous times.

To put it another way, like Ralphie's dad in A Christmas Story asks about Ralphie's imagined blindness, how did we reach such a lowly state?

Do we have soap poisoning?

Well, sort of.

A little history

We've gone into this before, so we won't belabor it too much, but in large part what we're seeing now is the combined effect of ignoring what was going on in the country on a political and social level.  

As we already noted, populism only rises in strength during times of severe stress. The mere fact that its strong now, and has taken over one of the two parties, means something extremely stressful is going on.  Progressivism is always there in some form, but it rarely takes over either.  The fact that it too is so strong right now indicates something has occured that is fueling it. 

The fact that the two of them are vying for the country right now, and this is going on in other country's as well, means that we are really at some massive tipping point for global politics.

What happened?

Well, we should know. We've been here before.  More than that, Europe has been here before, and gone further down the road than we have.

An American Tale

If we go back to 1900 or so we'll see that Progressives, Populists, Conservatives and Liberals were all significant forces in the US, and in Europe as well.


The 1890s had been extremely strained economically in the 1890s.  Added to that, the late stages of the industrial revolution were taking people off of fields everywhere and putting them in factories, under grim conditions.  Agriculture, which had been the economic backbone of the US, was under severe strain.  Conservatives chalked everything up to the business cycle, which they did not believe should be tinkered with.

This gave rise to the first real liberal movement in the US since the Civil War, although there had been liberals all along.  Calling themselves "Progressives", even though they were not that as we've defined the term, they sought government intervention in the economy to address these ills.  Theodore Roosevelt, in his campaign of 1912, proposed something like Social Security for the first time.  He also proposed treating large corporations as public utilities, a radical, but liberal, proposition.

Progressives of that era were really basically the Socialists. We have a pretty good idea of what they stood for, so we probably don't need to dwell on it. Of note, Progressives of the GOP and Progressive Party, which we've defined as being liberal, campaigned partially on the concept that if they didn't prevail, the Socialist ultimately would.


The Populists, whom as we have noted had their own party at the time, campaigned in 1892 on graduated income tax, a radical proposition in a country that didn't have an established one, direct election of Senators, a shorter workweek, restrictions on immigration to the United States, and public ownership of railroads and communication lines.  As the country fell into a depression, "free silver" became a bid deal with them.  Some of them fell into radical Anti Catholicism, and some became virulently Anti-Semitic. . . sound familiar?

In 1896 the Populist Party united with the Democratic Party, giving us an example of a movement co-opting an established party which had sympathies with it. The Democrats indeed had a strong populist base in the American South, which had seen populist sympathies from before the Civil War and which retains them to this day. Populist William Jennings Bryan ran as the candidate for both parties, and lost.  He did so again in 1900, although by that time the Populist Party as an independent party was declining both because it had captured the Democratic Party, as because the economic crisis seemed to be passing.

Both parties had learned their lesson from two election in a row. The GOP lurched to the left in 1904 and ran Theodore Roosevelt, a liberal.  Alton Parker's campaign went nowhere.  By 1912, however, the Democrats were running a liberal of their own, Woodrow Wilson.  Populism, except in the South, disappeared in the US as a political force, the stress gone.  Progressivism remained, but very much on the back burner.

Both would be back during the Great Depression.  Populists rose up with figures like Huey P. Long and Fr. Charles Coughlin, both of whom posed a serious threat to Franklin Roosevelt's administration.  Long was ultimately assassinated and Coughlin was silenced by the Catholic Church, but the fact is that populist radicalism was alive and well in the 1930s.

So was Progressivism.

Radical progressives found roles in Roosevelt's Administration, demonstrating one of the weaknesses of both parties in believing that fellow travelers are pretty much just like you.  Mainline Communists, Trotskyites and Socialist all found homes in the numerous agencies created in the 1930s.  Attempts to warn the administration fell on deaf ears until really very late, when at least worried Democrats were able to remove Henry Wallace from FDR's final Presidential ticket.  It wasn't really until the late 1940s when it became clear how deep this had gone, at which time the Democratic Party undertook a monumental effort to hide it, something that they were so successful at that it remains largely unappreciated to this day.

Coming out of World War Two the US had the only industrial economy that hadn't been bombed, and accordingly the country had an extremely good economy from the end of the war into really the very early 1970.  It's interesting that in this period the liberals and conservatives moved very much towards a consensus on things, giving us pretty much what might be regarded as a second Era of Good Feelings.  It would be difficult, really, to hold that Eisenhower's administration was much at odds with Truman's, or Kennedy's.  There were difference, but in that era, which was one of low economic stress, the differences weren't large enough to cause severe distractions, in spite of the dangers of the Cold War.  Populism remained in the American South, but without much influence.  Progressives existed, but not until 1968 did they really start to emerge back to the forefront.

And then things fell apart.

It really started with the Courts, although it was not obvious at first.

American society, and politics, following 1945 moved towards the center, but it was a center left where it moved to.  The two Republican Presidents fo the era, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, would be regarded as being quite liberal today.  Interventions in the economy were accepted.  And brining civil rights to the South, and elsewhere, became a dominant feature of both parties.  Populists, mostly located in the South, were squashed.  Progressives were largely satisfied with the direction of things.   But it all took a lot of court intervention to get things done.

Conservatives and Liberals were fine with this throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and for good reason.  Progress on long dormant things they both agreed upon, such as Civil Rights, was really being made.  But the Courts were, without it really being noticed, drifting increasingly to the left.  At the same time the number of lawyers in the country exploded as the revolution in education following World War Two vastly increased the number of people with university degrees.  Courts, without people really noticing it, began to become effectively a second legislative and second executive branch, without being elected.

Thing began to really fly apart in 1968, as a result of the Vietnam War.  But they came off the rails in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision.  Conservatives suddenly realized that they couldn't be heard on social issues that really mattered anymore.  Liberals went asleep to a large degree because now the Courts were achieving for them tasks that they wanted to, without having to do any work for them.  The political consensus that had dominated the 1945 to 1973 era collapsed.  By 1976 Conservatives were moving steadily to the right, and railing against the courts.

At the same time, Southern Populists were a force in the South, but an ineffective one, throughout the 50s and 60s.  Southern Populism being part of the Democratic Party had initially made sense in the 19th Century, and even as late as Woodrow Wilson's Presidency, but it stopped being natural during the Liberal administration of Theodore Roosevelt.  It was kept together as a marriage of convenience as the Republican Party remained associated with the Southern defeat in the Civil War and the GOP, for its part, remained the party of civil rights into the 50s and 60s.  By 1968 Southern Populists were seething over desegregation and busing.

Rust Belt populism was just beginning to rise.  Solidly Democratic in the 40s, 50s and early 60s, as the economy became more strained in the late 60s and the Democrats moved increasingly to the left, they began to rebel against their party.  It'd grow much worse in the 1970s as the Great Recession started to change American heavy industry forever.

The now more conservative Republican Party was well aware that conservatism in and of itself, while increasingly popular to sections of the electorate, remained in the background enough not to be able to come into power on its own.  People were unhappy with the economy and the distress brought about by inflation, the loss of the Vietnam War and social changes brought about by court action, but they weren't so unhappy that they were willing to take a radically new direction, or they didn't' think they were.  The election of Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford was as much about competence, which Carter proved not to have, as anything else.  Conservative Ronald Reagan, however, saw an opportunity to recruit Rust Belt and Southern Populists into the Republican Party, and did so for his 1980 campaign.

Reagan had the first conservative US administration since Herbert Hoover, but it was never purely so.  Reagan was an actor and a compromiser, who brought in elements that he didn't really believe in so that htey could be used.  Hoover had never done anything like that.  The conservative Republicans thought they could control the imported populsits, and at first they proved correcdt.  Indeed, following Reagan the next two Republicans were more Nixon like than Reagan like.  But the populists having come over, did not leave.

Nor did their concerns get addressed.  By the 1980s the economy was fundamentally changing in the wake of the 70s.  Heavy industry was not returning, "good" blue collar jobs were evaporating.  Ethnic enclaves in urban areas were smashed.  The progressivism of the late 60s and 70s felt free to attack long standing social matters. The liberals in the Democratic Party went to sleep and Democratic politicians appealed increasing to Progressives the way that conservatives had to Populists.

The breaking point proved to be a court decision again, that being the Obergefell decision.  I warned it would have that impact at that time, but it was such a shock to core beliefs of conservatives and populist that a reaction by both was inevitable.  The populists reaction carried along with it rage over a host of issues they'd been ignored on, many of them essentially economic, but some of them social.  Because the social issues were there, conservatives did what they'd been doing since 1980, figure they could simply carry the populist along.  

The 2016 election proved that to be completely incorrect.  Two populists emerged, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.  Election controls built into the Democratic Party's' process kept Sanders from being the Democratic nominee.  No such controls existed in the GOP, and Trump ended up winning the election against Hillary Clinton, and incredibly poor choice for the Democrats, but only through the electoral college. Clinton carried the popular vote.

It was populists, particularly Rust Belt populist, who carried the day for Trump.

Enough of the conservatives remained in the party, and Trump was incompentent enough as a President, that conservatives kept the Trump Presidency from goign full bore populists.  He knows that and his supporters do as well.   A second Trump Presidency will not repeat that.

A European Tale

Giving the European story is more difficult than the American one, as Europe is of course a collection of countries, not one, and each country has its own story.  So we'll do broad generalizations.

Europe, going into the 20th Century, remained more traditional, and hence more conservative, than the United States.  Almost every European country, save for France, had some kind of monarch who at least represented tradition, but who had very limited, if any, powers, save for Austro Hungaria, Germany, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, whose monarchs held real power.  The Russian Czar actually held absolute power.  Many countries, however, such as Sweden, had monarchs who had a least some veto type power over their  parliaments.

In this system extremism was bound to rise, but underground.  The more substantial a European monarchy was, the more likely it was to have really radical underground movements which, in the way we are analyzing this, would be termed Progressive.  Imperial Russia had a host of far left Socialist parties.  Germany had a strong radically left Socialist Party.

Other more democratic countries had radical movements as well, but they tended to never get as strong, or they would see their radicalism dissipate if they received voter support.  So, for example, French socialist were elected to power, but they never behaved like a Communist Party once in power.

World War One smashed the old order in Europe.  Democratic countries became more democratic.  Countries with parliamentary democracies began to make their monarchs symbolic or eliminate them altogether.  Monarchs in Austro Hungary, Germany, Russia, Finland (which had just become independent) and Turkey were tossed out, with the Russian one and his family losing tehir lives.  

The 1920s accordingly saw struggles between liberalism and conservatism all over Europe, and in the most stressed countries, a type of populism and progressivism enter the mix as well, sometimes as arm contestants for the future of the country.  The Russian Revolution can be seen as a contest between liberals and conservatives as allies, against progressives as enemies, with the radical left winning.  The Russian Civil War can be seen as a contest between Progressives and Populists as allies, against Conservatives.  Weimar Germany saw endless contests between Liberals and Conservatives, with Populists being the allies of extremists on the right and the left, giving their support to the KDP and the NASDP.

All of that, of course, gave rise to Communism, Nazism, and FAscism, which in turn gave rise to the Second World War.  

World War Two, like World War One, smashed the existing order and saw the triumph of Liberalism in the West.  Communism, won in the East, of course, but not in the same fashion.  Like in the US, the post war free European states were very much consensus oriented and remained so even after the stress of 1968.  AFter the Cold WAr, however, all European states began to see some of the same economic issues, and cultural issues, that had arisen in the United STates rise in Europe.  Some of the state accordingly began to fall into extremism.  Russia retreated into a weird sort of conservative imperialism that recalled its pre World War One status, but without a Romanov.  Putin became the new imperial head.  Hungary outwardly abandoned liberal democracy in favor of illiberal democracy.  Poland teetered on the edge of liberal and illiberal democracy.  Ukraine went for the long pass of liberal democracy.

And now we have a war in the former Russian Empire over the question.

Grape Nuts.



And in the US, we're about to have an election over it.  

Unfortunately, that election will feature only two parties, and in one of them the ancient candidate feels he must take input from progressives in his party. The other party's candidate is an ancient narcissistic oddball who tells populists what they want to hear, and who feeds from them in an application of the Führerprinzip.  

This is not good, to say the least.

The Democrats, of course, retain liberals in their party still.  The progressives are few, but influential.  The Republicans retain conservatives, but hey'v ebeen largely silenced and castrated.  The GOP is the populist party.

Part of the reason we're where we are is due to a poverty of parties, and language.  Populists have never been conservatives, and they aren't now.  But they think they are.  Progressives aren't liberals, but liberals don't really understand the extent to which that's not true.

Grape Nuts aren't made of grapes. . . but there's probably a lot of people who think they are.

Last prior edition:

A Primer, Part I. Populists ain't Conservatives, and LIberals ain't Progressives. How inaccurate terminology is warping our political perceptions.

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

"Do not be led astray: 'Bad company corrupts good morals.' Trump, Putin and American Evangelicals.

Note:  This was originally drafted in February, 2024 and not posted.  In looking for something else, I can back across it.

It'll be timely for another post I'm working on. 

St. King Abgar V, an Arab, and the first Christian King.  He died approximatley in 50 A.D.  He adopted Christianity at a time it was a minorit religion and not exactly popular.  Putin and Trump are not like him.

Do not be led astray:

“Bad company corrupts good morals.”

St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 15.

Back in the AnteCovid days which now seem like a lost world, I'd sometimes run into neo monarchist on Reddit, usually due to participating on the Distributist Sub Reddit.  I quit participating there prior to the epidemic, as the discussions were really not worth participating in. Distributism is a modern economic system in its own right, but the sub tended to be populated by people who romanticized the Middle Ages, or who were Socialist trying to view everything as Socialism. An awful lot of the discussion looked like it was being conducted by 15-year-olds hiding in their parent's basements.

Emperor Charles I of Austria, who has been beatified.

Among the real goofball discussions were those by monarchist.  I didn't realize up until then that there are people today who long for a return of monarchy, but there are. Their typical logic was that monarchs are needed as they set the moral tone for the nation.

St. Stephen of Hungary, a Hungarian king from 1000 to 1038.  He outlived all of his children and died at about age 62.  His wife Gisela has been beatified, and one of his children is also canonized.

Hah.

Apparently these people know nothing of real monarchs, as plenty failed to live a moral life.  There are very notable exceptions, some of which appear here, but they are indeed the exception that proves the rule.  There's the entire problem of attacking your neighbor as you want his lands, of course, but beyond that monarchs tended to be pretty icky. It's hard to find an example of kings who didn't have mistresses, or worse. One early English king seems to have had a habit of basically sacking convents and raping nuns, which is really weird.  A joke about a later one is that when he went to Monaco on vacation, the children ran out and yelled "papa" as he was just that.  A Norman Christian king in Sicily kept Muslim women as concubines, to the extent that he was known as The Christian Sultan.  One French king was so randy as a teenage prince that concubines were acquired to satisfy his pre marital urges.

King Henry VIII who definitely was not a saint.

And of course there's King Henry VIII

Even really admired ones often were problematic this way.  King Charles the Great was accorded the title "blessed" for valid reasons, but Charles had at least fourteen mistresses during his lifetime and was rebuked by a noted churchman for still having an eye for the ladies well into old age.  He died, I'd note, at age 72.  King Cnut set his first wife aside to marry another when he became king, which was perhaps justified at the time by the fact that his first wife, a very able administrator, was a pagan and he was a Christian.  Harold Godwinson, whom some in the Orthodox faith regard as a saint, put aside his first wife, Edith the Fair, in favor of Edith of Mercia, for political reasons, although legend has it that Edith the Fair was present at Hastings and identified his body.  Czar Nicholas II who has been canonized in the Russian Orthodox Church for being a martyr shared, in his early years, the same mistress that his brother had.

The imperial household of Czar Nicholas II.

On the latter, I'm not meaning to cast stones at these people's virtues.  Czar Nicholas, for example, seems to have grown more devout after his marriage.  Charles the Great spent his last months fasting and contemplating King Harold Godwinson's first marriage was complicated by the means of its contracting, and his second may have been merely political.  I only note all of this as the silly devotion on Reddit to monarchy, with some of the silliness being extended to some academics, is just that, romantic silliness.

And then we have the bizarre ongoing devotion, in some Christian circles, to viewing Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump as saviors of Christian society.

What on earth?

This seems to have all started with the devotion that developed to Viktor Orbán in the same circles.  Orbán is the champion of illiberal democracy and is blunt in his concept that Hungary is a Hungarian nationality, Christian, nation.  Hungary has not collapsed into an authoritarian state as is sometimes claimed, but it's become one run by a far right nation under a party that espouses Christian Nationalism and Illiberal Democracy.  Orbán is a serious Christian, although interestingly he's a Hungarian Calvinist.  His wife is Catholic, as are most Hungarians, and their children were raised Catholic.  

Orbán is an authoritarian by nature, although democracy is still functioning in Hungary, and he's an admirer of Putin.  I think that's where the American Evangelical fascination with Putin came from.

Putin is effectively a murderer, which is widely known.  His murders come through the state, of course.  Before he rose up in post Communist Russia, he was an employee of the KGB.  His marriage to his only wife, Lyudmila Putin, ended in divorce in 2014.  His been carrying on an affair with retired Russian gymnast Alina Kabaeva since prior to the divorce date, by all indications, and seems to have borne two children through the union.

Putin is at least nominally Russian Orthodox, but its hard to see it being much more than that.  The Russian Orthodox Church as revived as a major Russian institution since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Putin has been careful to seem to be close to Metropolitan Kirill, its head.  The Metropolitan has his own checkered history, as he is rumored to have had a relationship with the KGB in the Soviet Union era.  Metropolitan Kirill is extremely conservative, which is not inappropriate for the head of an Apostolic Church, and Putin has been on at least some social issues as well.  This may simply be Putin's own views, or in part it may be an effort to keep the good graces of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Russia has been, for example, very restrictive in regard to homosexuality.

All of this leads some American Christians to believe that Putin is acting as the bulwark against the corruption of the decline of Western values, but if so, he's doing it in a very corrupt way which inclined killing people.  And Putin seems to have adopted the monarch's view that he can do no wrong, to include invading the territory of Russia's neighbors, assassinations, and sleeping with a woman who much junior than his former wife.

And for American Evangelicals, it might be noted that the Russian government is actually pretty repressive towards non-Orthodox religions, particularly those that depart significantly from the main line of their branches. This has included Evangelical Protestants and the Jehovah Witnesses.  This makes this one of those interesting areas in which some American Evangelicals have adopted as hero a culture which really doesn't have any sympathy for their views.

And then there's Donald Trump.

A large group of American Evangelicals have taken on the view that Donald Trump is their man, with some going much further than that.  Ironically, evidence of him every actually practicing his faith, Presbyterianism, is pretty hard to find.

Trump is a serial polygamist, for one thing.  In spite of American Protestantism and the American Civil Religion having come to fully accept divorce and remarriage, Christianity doesn't, and people who pretend otherwise are adopting something that's fully contrary to Christian tenants.  As the Stormy Daniel affair reveals, Trump isn't beyond some really base sexual conduct.  We won't even get into the allegations of other conduct. By Christian beliefs, bare minimum, Trump lives in a state of outward moral sin, which might be reduced by the doctrine of "invincible ignorance".

Trump is also a liar, cast aspersions against other people, and calls them degrading names.  Lying, at least in classic Christian theology, can rise to the level of a mortal sin.  

For years and years, the dominant Christian faith in the American South as been the Baptist. 

Why is that?

The American Civil War had a lot to do with it.

Prior to the Civil War, in much of the South, the dominant church was the Episcopal Church.  Its roots reached back to the Colonist and back to England.  Most Colonist, as colonization really got rolling, were members of the Anglican Church, although other Protestant denominations were included, most notably the Presbyterian Church, the Church of Scotland, which was the dominant faith for Scots immigrants.

Leonidas Polk, Confederate General and Episcopal Bishop.  He was killed by Union artillery in 1864 at age 58.

Going into the Civil War, the Episcopal Churchmen of the South largely backed the Confederacy.  One Confederate General was an Episcopal Bishop.

The South had always had a fair number of itinerant preachers who were not Episcopal Priest.  While the Episcopal Church seemed to be backing the Southern cause during the war, the itinerant preachers were warning of doom and God's judgment.  The result of the war seemed to prove them right.

The point is, the Southern cause was corrupt and disgusting from a moral prospective from the onset.  Backing corruption, in the end, corrupts.

Bad company corrupts good morals.

This will have a bad end for Evangelicals, and for those of other faiths following the same path.  But particularly for Evangelicals.  For one thing, they are the only religions denomination that's so heavily invested in Trump.  Not other religion, Christian or otherwise, is.

Secondly, the "mainline" Protestant denominations are not only not invested in Trump, they've already sustained their demographic blows by compromising with the leftward drift of culture.  That's split them in many instances, and where it has not, people have voted with their feet. The Episcopal Church, for example, once the Church of the economic elite, is in severe trouble.

The Catholic Church, by comparison, has actually remained stable in numbers in the US, but it should be growing.  The scandals of the earliest 21st Century served the accidental purpose, however, if making its younger adherants, including clerics, more orthodox and conservative, and more "other".  Younger clerics speak as if they're at a last stand, which they really are not, or as if they're the first missionairies into pagan culture.  Nobody is looks upon any current political leader as a Catholic standard bearor, most particularly Catholics.


No, it is some of the Evangelical and Culturally Christian Americans who have adopted Trump with zeal, seemingly thinking of him as a sort of Protectant Knights Templar out to do battle.

When he fails, and he will, as this time he will be unrestrained, they will share the failure, and the consequences of it.

Sunday, August 4, 2024

National Conservatism, Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and The Law of Unintended Consequences.* **

 


Trump is “like a couch, bears the impression of the last person who sat on him.”

Ann Coulter, far right commentator, and former supporter of Donald Trump.

The entire time that Donald Trump has been in the news as a political figure, I've had a hard time figuring him out.  I can tell what most political figures stand for, claim to stand for, and whether they are sincere or not.

And they are certainly not all sincere, as the gaggle of Republican office holders who remain from the pre Trump days now buying all in to Trump demonstrate.

But Trump's hard to figure.

I think I've come to the conclusion that Ann Coulter, whom I generally really dislike, is quite correct. As Coulter, no matter what you think of her, actually believes what she says, she grew disgusted with Trump really early, determining basically that he was a phony.


I can't tell if Trump is, or was, even smart.1 

That's hard to judge at a distance.  Two Republican Presidents who were really smart were often sort of assumed, while in office, not to be.  One was Ronald Reagan, and the other was Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom had perfected the art of acting like they weren't all that sharp in order to use it to their advantage.

Eisenhower, as one of his biographers Carlo D'Este noted, had learned in the Army that it was often better to not appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed but to hang back, taking in the opinions, and trust, of others.  By the Second World War it was obvious to all that he was in fact extremely intelligence, but part of the manifestation of that was that once he was President, he reengaged the act to his advantage.  If you ever hear a recording of Eisenhower in a private speech, such as when Kennedy called him up to get advice on Indo China, it's a shock.  He doesn't even seem like the same person.

That same shock has been noted by people who spoke to Reagan privately.  Reagan perfected as an actor an "ah shucks" one of the crowd personality, but in reality he was extremely intelligent.  People who came in to discuss a topic with him were often stunned that his grasp of it was vast, while the public, particularly the American left, wondered if he was a doddling old fool right from the onset.  His mental decline by the end of his second term was obvious, but it wasn't there from the first.  It served him well, however, as it was possible to believe on something like the Iran Contra Scandal that maybe he didn't really know it was happening.

Trump, on the other hand, seems to me to genuinely not have all that sharp of an intellect.  That would explain some of the outrageous and stupid things he says, of which there are a plethora.  Being a wealthy man his entire life, he's gotten through life being able to say stupid outrageous things and not draw rebuke from those around him, and in turn be encouraged in his own belief that he's really smart.  Just as the political and economic class of current China tends to assume that everyone at the top is really smart, as they've been weeded out that way, Trump probably believes he's a genius as everyone has always told him he's a real smart guy.

If Trump doesn't have a great intellect, what he does have is another type of intelligence.  He's a good salesman.

I wouldn't say a great salesman, as he's had a lot of business failures and his enterprises have been bankrupt more than once.  But he is a good salesman.  He knows how to sell. And like good salesmen, he can sell what he's selling.  He doesn't have to believe it.

Over the years I've known several people who were good salesmen, some of whom were really intelligent. Their hallmark, however, was the ability to sell.  They'd often move between one sales job and another.  If you know them well enough, you'd sometimes find that they really didn't have all that great of interest in what they were selling, whether that was cars, houses, basketballs or whatever.  Sometimes they personally had a massive disinterest in the product they were selling.  It was the selling that they were interested in.

I strongly suspect Trump is like that.

At some point, for some reason, Trump decided to enter politics and his selling sense was that rank and file rust belt and lower middle class Americans were unhappy and disgruntled, with some very good reasons existing for that, so he sold them what basically amounted to snake oil in 2016.  Once in, he needed people to run the government and they came in and did it, defeating his wildest and most dangerous ideas.  People didn't buy the snake oil in sufficient quantities in 2020, so now he's turned to a new improved product.

Populist Outrage.

Populist Outrage is a dangerous cocktail in the US right now.  It includes everything from the New Apostolic Movement to the Hawk Tuah Girl, all one brew.  You literally have Mike Johnson quoting the Bible and some TikTok Tart describing spitting on male sex organs all in the same group.  But snake oil cures what ails ya, and people are buying.

J. D. Vance, on the other hand, is the real deal.

I really haven't followed Vance until now and while his book Hillbilly Elegy sounded interesting when it was released, I didn't read it and I'm not going to.  When it was released, what the general reaction was, wat that it was a well written elegy to his roots, and to the hillbilly class, now in desperate straits, from somebody who had rising up out of that class into affluence.  That might in part be right, but like McMurtry's contemporarily set novels, they were not only reflecting the people he came out of, but were also a more intellectual reflection of their virtues in spite of their vices.

Vance is genuinely fairly remarkable.  He came out of a real blue collar, hillbilly background and became very well educated. What was missed is that as he moved along, through education and influence, he became something other than what American liberals simply assume that education does.  He didn't become an educated liberal, looking back on his drug fueled hillbilly ancestors, but rather became an educated National Conservative intellectual.

He's not a populist, and isn't even ballpark close to one.

For good or ill, he's more in the nature of a Beloocian. I.e, if you brought Hilaire Belloc back today, made him an American, and had him run for office, you'd get J.D. Vance.

That's why he comes across to many on the left, and not a few on the right, as "weird".  All along he's been saying the things that National Conservatives and Illiberal Democrats have been saying.  If he sounds like a Christian Nationalist, that's because all National Conservatives are Christian Nationalist, even if they aren't observant, whereas not all Christian Nationalist are National Conservatives by any means.

Vance has a lot more in common with Viktor Orbán,, Giorgia Meloni, Philippe Pétain, and Francisco Franco than he does with Trump or Mike Johnson.


                               More this                                              than this.

We've dealt with National Conservatism here before, but we didn't address is how smart they've really been since 2020.  Unlike the goofball hordes that go to Trump rallies wearing absurd red, white and blue costumes.  It's actually fairly deep, and it early on set out it goals in print, as we've noted here:

Its founder in American politics, if not its overall founder, is Patrick Deneen and its backers can be found in the pages of R. R. Reno's First Things.  Quite frankly, that puts it in the intellectual heavyweight category.  It's issued a manifesto, and the signers of it include some well known conservative thinkers.  Deneen has issued at least two well regarded books on the topic. Its central thesis is that liberalism has failed, in part due to its success, and is now consuming itself, and the entire culture of the West with it, by a frenzied orgy of libertine, mostly sexually focused, individualism.  What needs to be done, it holds, is the preservation of democracy, but Illiberal Democracy, with the boundary lines of the culture externally enforced.  It sets its manifesto out as follows:
1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression. 
2. Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism. We support a system of free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we reject imperialism in its various contemporary forms: We condemn the imperialism of China, Russia, and other authoritarian powers. But we also oppose the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image. 
3. National Government. The independent nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among the diverse communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values. We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.
4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes. 
5. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation. In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance. All agree that the repair and improvement of national legal traditions and institutions is at times necessary. But necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end. 
6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-taking by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed. 
7. Public Research. At a time when China is rapidly overtaking America and the Western nations in fields crucial for security and defense, a Cold War-type program modeled on DARPA, the “moon-shot,” and SDI is needed to focus large-scale public resources on scientific and technological research with military applications, on restoring and upgrading national manufacturing capacity, and on education in the physical sciences and engineering. On the other hand, we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs. 
8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order. 
9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration. 
10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.

And its been further developed since then, although Dinneen2  and Reno3 do not seem to be leading the charge any longer, nor is Rod Dreher4 , who for a while just urged societal retreat.  Now Kevin Roberts5, head of the Heritage Society, is, and he's taking the movement into a concrete action oriented direction.  He's written a book, Dawn's Early Light, on that very topic.  It's Amazon write up states:

America is on the brink of destruction. A corrupt and incompetent elite has uprooted our way of life and is brainwashing the next generation. Many so-called conservatives are as culpable as their progressive counterparts.

In this ambitious and provocative book, Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts announces the arrival of a New Conservative Movement. His message is simple: Global elites — your time is up.

Dawn’s Early Light blazes a promising path for the American people to take back their country. Chapter by chapter, it identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few.

All these need to be dissolved if the American way of life is to be passed down to future generations.

The good news is, we’re going to win.

The Swamp is so drunk on power that the elites don't realize the ground is moving beneath their feet. In Washington, they wear foreign flags on their lapels, but they don’t protect our border. They wave around the Constitution, but they don’t respect its wisdom. They appeal to Reagan, but Reagan would never put up with this non-sense.

Their decadence will be their downfall. A new day is here.

The forward to that book was written by one J. D. Vance.

That, National Conservatism in its most proactive form, is what J. D. Vance stands for.

Vance's biography really demonstrates this.  He didn't go from hillbilly poverty to populism.  He went from hillbilly poverty into the Marine Corps, and then into university where he met budding National Conservative type intellects and developed into one.  Along the way somewhere, he converted into Catholicism, which is the oldest and original Christian religion, and which has a deep sense of the existential and a profound tradition.  While its far from the case that all Catholics are National Conservatives or Illiberal Democrats, or anything like that, it is fair to say that observant Catholics are horrified by the cultural decay of the west and its unliking from an existential sense in a manner and way which protestants, including those in the New Apostolic Movement, are not, which is not to say that they are not.6 

So what's with all this "cat lady" and pro natalism stuff?

It ties right into the overall world view of much of National Conservatism in its recent most radical form, and indeed in some ways is an evolution away from its original intellectual corps.

It's an undercurrent in conservatism, but there's definitely a strain of it which is genuinely intellectual that emphasizes, perhaps hyper emphasizes, traditionalism in a very definite sense, including traditional male and female roles to an extremely strong degree. They're not romanticizing the 1950s, or indeed, romanticizing anything at all, but looking back, way back, to a time and way of thinking in which this was not questioned in any fashion.  Indeed, in the corners of the Internet where they hang out, you can find them discussing the social norms of the Middle Ages in comparison to those of the present, and they're serious about it.  I need not and indeed don't have the bandwidth to go into all of that now, but it touches on a lot of topics, not all of which I'm not completely sympathetic to.

So is this "weird"?

Well at least some of Project 2025 is downright weird, as for example the proposal to create "Freedom Cities" in "unoccupied" portions of the public domain in the west. That is, well, Bat Shit Crazy.  And its hard not to listen to the Dr. Taylor Marshall7 and the Simone and Malcolm Collins8 of the world and not thing, "well, that's weird".

Other stuff is more in the nature, however, of Bellocian Traditionalism and by any measure, it's certainly no weirder than the tranvestite genital organ obsessed "woke" view of much of the left, which indeed is deeply weird. And here's where, in fact, much of instinctive populism and National Conservatism meets.  The MAGA crowed don't have the faintest clue who Hilaire Belloc is, or even grasp that it doesn't matter what your local Evangelical Free pastor said, divorce and remarriage is barred by Christianity, but they do grasp that in the natural order of things the Hawk Tuah girl may be gross, but she's not gender confused and something odd is going on here that needs to be addressed.

Put another way, some if it is scary James Watt Weird  while some of it probably seems "weird" to you if the Mantilla Girls seem weird.  If they don't, it may make you uncomfortable depending on where on the social conservatism scale you fit, but its not really weird.  The fact that much of modern America and all of the left find it all weird is because of how far to the left hit needle has moved in the past forty years.

Trump, on the other hand, can be really weird.

The National Conservatives, unlike the populists, are pretty deep, and pretty smart.  Very smart, in fact.  And they've realized what the red, white and blue populist crowds have not.  Trump doesn't' really stand for anything.

They do.

They also know that they can't get a National Conservative elected into the Oval Office.

But what they've gambled on was two things.  One was that the populists are too dim, and Trump too lazy, to draft his own agenda.  They did that for him, through Project 2025.  They bet they can get a start on a National Conservative revolution, and that's how the chief of the Heritage Foundation has put it, through a lazy Trump.

They've placed a bet on a certainty, that being that Trump won't last an entire four year term.  He'll die within the next four years, assuming that old age and advancing intellectual decline doesn't get him before the election, and they gambled that they could get a Chief Executive into office who was one of their own through the Vice Presidency.

That figure is J. D. Vance.  And up until Joe Biden dropping out of the race, it looked like the bet was going to pay off for sure.

Vance has been willing to play the part, while never disavowing what he's always stood for.  He's sort of a National Conservatives Manchurian Candidate, with the National Conservatives waiting for age, disease, or senility to take out a sitting Donald Trump.  Trump, too shallow to really bother to care about it, was willing to go along with a seemingly fawning J. D. Vance, probably never realizing that Trump's merely a temporary vehicle for them to get into office, and start their revolution.

Now those plans seem to have been disrupted, maybe.

The problem, in part, is that they wrote a 900 page book.

Project 2025 was designed to be, as noted, a blueprint for a lazy President.  But once you publish a book, people start reading it, and they start asking questions about the people who wrote it.  Particularly if one of those authors has written a second book about his pending National Conservative revolution.

Now, when people are distracted due to mental fog and don't touch it, that's not much of a problem.  But once they do, if any of it is outside of the mainstream at all, and a lot of Project 2025 is, and if any of it is weird, which some of Project 2025 is, attention will start being paid in spades.

And that may very well spell the end of there being a chance that National Conservatives shall remake the nation via an electoral revolution.  Too confident in themselves, they seem to have shot their bolt.  Americans are now uncomfortable with the direction they want to take the country, which is in a direction the country's never really gone before.  

Footnotes

*  This thread was started several days ago, and its really worth noting that a lot of things have developed since I first started posting it, including a huge amount of attention on J. D. Vance, and discontent in Republican ranks regarding him.

**It'll be hard not to note all the references to various Catholic figures in National Conservatism, which may lead to the impression that National Conservatism is a Catholic thing.  It isn't.  Indeed, one of the primary figures in Illiberal Democracy is Viktor Orban, who is a Presbyterian.

What's probably notable here is that the deep intellectual history of Catholicism and Apostolic Christianity in general has lead some of those who realize how shallow modern Western Culture is into the Church.  That doesn't make it a movement of the Church, and as some Catholics have feared, these movements pose a risk to Catholicism at least in the US, where it is a minority religion.  Indeed, it's likely that some members of the New Apostolic Movement, thin theology that they have, do not even recognize Catholics as Christians when in fact they are the first Christians. 

1.  I'm hugely reluctant to opine on somebody's intelligence remotely, but at this point, it's hard not to. Some of the things Trump says are amazingly dumb.  So much so that it raises a lot of questions regarding a wide variety of topics.

It's notable that Trump fairly frequently brings up his own intelligence, which is something intelligent people rarely do.  

2.  Patrick Dineen is a professor at Notre Dame who has written on Illiberal Democracy and National Conservatism favorably.

3.  R. R. Reno is the editor of First Things, and a convert from the Episcopal Church to Catholicism.  He's also on the Dineen end of things, but not as pessimistic about democracy as Dineen is.

4. Rod Dreher is a writer who wrote The Byzantine Option.  He's moved to Hungary.  Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism, and then converted to Orthodoxy.

5.  Kevin Roberts is the main intellectual figure behind The Heritage Foundation and has a Wyoming connection, in that he was at one time the head of Wyoming Catholic College.

6.  It's worth noting here that members of this movement and those on the fringe of it, sometimes the very fringe, have seen some notable conversions to Catholicism in recent years.  These include Candace Owens, Tammy Roberts Peterson, wife of psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek.

7.  Dr. Taylor Marshall, also a convert to Catholicism, is an extreme traditionalist who has come to engage in conspiracy theories about the Vatican.  He's on the fringe right.

8.  Simone and Malcolm Collins come across as genuinely weird.  Their leaders of a pro natalist organization with Simone having indicated that she intends to have children until, basically, her uterus blows out.  The Collins are atheist and frankly have somewhat of a scary Social Darwinist view of the world.  They therefore fit into the really weird side of pro natalism, where Elon Musk can also be found, who have an incorrect feeling that but for massive procreation, society is going to fail, which is completely incorrect.

Showing, I suppose, how old school Neanderthal I am, Michael Collins looks so anemic, and Simone Collins so unattractive, that the thought of their fitting the bill in a basic way to create a lot of children is surprising.

Watt was Reagan's Secretary of the Interior and basically believed that as Christ was returning very soon, there was no reason not to use natural resources with a mind towards conserving them.

Related threads:

A Primer, Part I. Populists ain't Conservatives, and Liberals ain't Progressives. How inaccurate terminology is warping our political perceptions.




Monday, May 27, 2024

Memorial Day, a repeat.

 

A 2022 Memorial Day Reflection.

Today is Memorial Day.


I've done a Memorial Day reflection post a couple of times, and I did a short history of Memorial Day once on our companion blog here:

Memorial Day

Observers here may have noted that I failed to put up a post for Memorial Day when this post was first made, in 2012.


This is in part due to Memorial Day being one of those days that moves around as, in recent years, Congress has attempted to make national holidays into three day weekends. That's nice for people, but in some ways it also takes away from the holiday a bit.  At the same time, it sort of tells you that if a holiday hasn't been moved to the nearest Friday or Monday, next to its original location on the calendar, it means that the holiday is either hugely important, a religious holiday, or extremely minor.  The 4th of July and Flag Day, one major and one minor, do not get moved, for example.

Anyhow, Memorial Day commenced at some point either immediately after or even during the Civil War, depending upon how you reckon it, and if you are date dependent for the origin of the holiday.  In American terms, the day originally served to remember the dead of the then recent Civil War.  The holiday, in the form of "Decoration Day" was spreading by the late 1860s.  The name Memorial Day was introduced in the 1880s, but the Decoration Day name persisted until after World War Two.  The holiday became officially named Memorial Day by way of a Federal statute passed in 1967.  In 1971 the holiday was subject to the Uniform Monday Holiday Act which caused it to fall on the last Monday of May, as it does now.

The day, therefore, would have always been observed in Wyoming, which had Grand Army of the Republic lodges since prior to statehood. But, like many holidays of this type, observation of the holiday had changed over the years.  In the 1960s and 1970s, by my recollection, the day was generally observed by people visiting the grave sites of any deceased family member, and therefore it was more of a day to remember the dead, rather than a day to recall the war dead.  This, however, has changed in recent years to a very noticeable extent.  Presently, it tends to serve as a second Veterans Day, during which veterans in general are recalled.  This year, for example, Middle School children in Natrona County decorated the graves of servicemen in the county with poppies, strongly recalling the poppy campaigns of the VFW that existed for many years.

Wyoming has a strong military culture, even though the state has lost all but two of its military installations over the years. The state had the highest rate of volunteers for the service during World War Two, and it remained strongly in support of the Vietnam War even when it turned unpopular nationwide.  The state's National Guard has uniquely played a role in every US war since statehood, including Vietnam, so perhaps the state's subtle association with Memorial Day may be stronger than might be supposed.

On remembrance, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out our Some Gave All site.

It's worth remembering here that Memorial Day has its origin in a great act of national hatred, the Civil War.  That is, the day commenced here and there as an effort to remember the Civil War dead, which, at the end of the day, divide sharply into two groups; 1) those who gave their lives to keep their fellow human beings in cruel enslaved bondage, and those who fought to end it.

Now, no doubt, it can be pointed out that those who died for slavery by serving the South, and that is what they died for if they were killed fighting for the South, didn't always see their service that way.  It doesn't matter. That was the cause they were serving. And just as pointedly, many in the North who went as they had no choice were serving to "make men free", as the Battle Hymn of the Republic holds it, irrespective of how they thought of their own service.

And it's really that latter sort of sacrifice this day commemorates.

The first principal of democracy is democracy itself.

And because of that, it is inevitably the case that people will win elections whom you do not wish to.  Perhaps you may even detest what they stand for.

Democracy is a messy business and people, no matter what they claim to espouse, will often operate against democratic results if they don't like them.  In the 1950s through at least the 1990s, the American left abandoned democracy to a significant degree in favor of rule by the courts, taking up the concept that average people couldn't really be trusted to adopt a benighted view of the liberalism that they hoped for which would be free of anything, ultimately, liberally. An enforced libertine liberalism.

The results of that have come home to roost in our own era as a counter reaction, building since the 1980s, has now found expression in large parts of the GOP which have gone to populism and Illiberal Democracy.  

We have a draft thread on Illiberal Democracy, which is a term that most people aren't familiar with, but it's best expressed currently by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, to the horror of Buckeyite conservatives like George F. Will. 

Defining illiberal democracy isn't easy, in part because it's most commonly defined by its opponents.  Setting aside their definitions, which it probably would be best defined as is a system in which a set of beliefs and values are societally defined and adopted which are external to the government and constitution of a county, and a democracy can only exist within it.  The best historical example, if a good one can actually be found, might be Vichy France, which contrary to some assumptions was not a puppet of Nazi Germany so much as a species of near ally, but which had a right wing government, with elections, that operated only within the confines of the beliefs of the far right government.

Much of what we see going on now in the far right of the country, which is now the province of the GOP, is described in this fashion, although not without its ironies.  Viewed in that fashion, the January 6, insurrection actually makes sense, as the election was "stolen" because it produced the wrong results, culturally.  I.e., if you assume that the basic concepts of the Democratic Party fall outside of the cultural features which the far right populist wing of the GOP holds as legitimate, such an election would be illegitimate by definition.

The United States, however, has never viewed democracy that way.  Not even the Confederate South, which may be the American example that treads on being the closest to that concept, did.  The Southerners felt comfortable with human bondage, but they did not feel comfortable instituting an unwritten set of values into an unwritten constitution.  Slavery, the core value of the South, was presumed justified, but it was written into the law.

Much of the nation now does.

Indeed, in the Trump wing of the GOP, or the wing which came over to trump, and brought populist Democrats into the party, that is a strong central tenant.  When the far right in the current GOP speaks about being a "Constitutional Conservative", they don't mean being Constitutional Originalists.  Rather, they are speaking about interpreting the Constitution according to a second, unwritten, and vaguely defined "constitution".

The ironies this piles on are thick, as the unwritten social constitution this piles on looks back to an American of decades ago, much of which has indeed unfortunately changed, but much of which the current backers of this movement are not close to comporting with themselves.  The imagined perfect America that is looked back towards, the one that we wish to "Make Great Again", was culturally an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, or at least a European Christian one, with very strong traditional values in that area.  Those who now look at that past as an ideal age in part because social movements involving such things as homosexuality and the like need to appreciate that the original of the same set of beliefs and concerns would make heterosexual couples living outside of marriage and no fault divorce just as looked down upon.  Put another way, the personal traits of Donald F. Trump, in this world, would be just as abhorrent as those of Barney Frank.

This is not to discuss the pluses or minuses of social conservatism or of social liberalism in any form.  That's a different topic.  But American democracy, no matter how imperfect, has always rested on the absolute that its first principal of democracy is democracy.  Taken one step further, a central concept of democracy is that bad ideas die in the sunlight.  

That has always proven true in the past, and there's any number of movements that rose and fell in the United States not because they were suppressed, but because they simply proved themselves to be poor ideas.  In contrast, nations which tried to enforce a certain cultural norm upon their people by force, such as Vichy France or Francoist Spain, ended up doing damage to it, even where some of the core values they sought to enforce were not bad (which is not to excuse the many which were).

All of that may seem a long ways from Memorial Day, but it's not.  No matter how a person defines it, as the end of the day the lost lives being commemorated today were lost for that concept of democracy and no other.  Those who would honor them, from the left or the right, can only honor them in that context.

That means that those who would support insurrections as their side didn't win, aren't honoring the spirit of the day. And those who would impose rule by courts, as people can't be trusted to vote the right way, aren't either.

Related threads:

Tuesday, May 30, 1922. Lincoln Memorial Dedicated.Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,