#this is inspired by yesterday when i argued with a conservative so hard that he did a one-eighty and asked for my number
Link
Two years ago, when reviewing “The Benedict Option”, I wrote, “Almost all Dreher’s critics accuse him of crying wolf or being a Chicken Little at best … Meanwhile, I’m saying that Dreher is underestimating his enemy, painting an overly rosy picture, and not being nearly alarmist enough.”
This is still true.
“Wait, what? Totalitarianism! Gulags!”
I know!
Let me explain; I promise hope, this will be shorter than last time.
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First, Dreher’s critics, while still far too blasé and insouciant about the end-game-level crisis racing straight for them, have at least started to acknowledge that something’s happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear, but that some greater degree of consternation and freak-out is now warranted.
But they are still far, far behind the power curve on this one.
As a friend of mine put it, “The single biggest problem is lag-seriousness. We are always just at best about grim enough for yesterday’s battle.”
That is where “Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility” comes from. “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.” If it were possible, despite denials, and by pointing out a clear logical implication of progressive ideology – and even going so far as to supplement with the early appearances of those explicit proposals – to scare conservatives enough, early enough, to do whatever it takes to avoid it, then the impossible wouldn’t keep happening to them, over and over again.
But it’s almost never feasible to do this. It turns out this is the one impossibility. The frogs never jump out of the pot in time to avoid another scalding. The need is not to be grim enough for yesterday, but for today, so that tomorrow won’t bring your final sunset.
That puts Dreher in the position of a Cassandra.
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In “Live Not By Lies”, Dreher seems to assume that something like faithful Christianity as we know it today is going to go through a profoundly difficult era of persecution, but still, its adherents having prepared for it, it will persist at some level despite intense suffering until, well, ‘deliverance’. Perhaps not in the Acts 12:3 sense, but then again, maybe so. How else?
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That’s why even Dreher isn’t radicalized enough yet, because he doesn’t seem to fully grapple with the gloomy prospects for his tradition that is the clear implication of his own arguments about the overwhelming magnitude of the problem. That is: termination. Slow and steady and (mostly) gentle evaporation under the relentless heat of the sun until the last drop of water finally evaporates and the spiritual desert goes completely dry.
It would be like Travis telling the defenders of the Alamo that Santa Anna was sending a force in the morning that outnumbered them ten to one, that supplies were nearly exhausted, and reinforcements too far away to help. But with a tone of brutal optimism, “It’s going to be really rough boys, but if we’re tough enough, we’ll make it.” – “Um, rough? Well Travis, come hell or high water, I’m happy to make a stand and fight by your side. No rendirse! But to be frank, from the way you put it, I reckon it sounds like we’re all going to die.”
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Now, before I explain why, let me get to the second piece of good news and commend Dreher for a wonderful second half of the book, which contained the inspiring and gut-wrenching stories of what it was like for people of faith behind the Iron Curtain to be the subjects of Communist anti-Christian oppression.
As I look over my notes, I see almost no comments or criticisms in that half. The testimonies speak for themselves. These harrowing and moving tales of triumphs of fidelity and perseverance in the face of the hardships and miseries of hard totalitarianism don’t need any gloss. The stories of these brave people deserve your study, and their memories your honor.
However.
What is both terrible and true is that a month later you are probably going to forget all their names, forget the details of their persecution, and come away with the same rough impression and vague understanding you already have. This is that Christians had it really bad in a place where Christianity was once all of life but had been evicted, that some of them nevertheless stayed devoted, and others gave the last full measure of devotion. Others resisted, and some of them even lasted long enough on the road through hell to make it through to the other side.
Though, in a way, it was lucky for them there was the other side: that didn’t happen everywhere. If the Soviets had then what the Chinese have now, likely there would have been no interviews or happy endings. You can’t even forget a martyr’s name if you never got the chance to hear about his martyrdom in the first place.
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Alas, this is not really a manual at all, and regardless of whether Dreher is dropping some kind of Straussian signal with that, it’s surprising that few of his critics have noticed the problem.
An actual manual is more than just general rough guidelines; it has clear, specific, step-by-step instructions for how to accomplish some identified, well-defined task or troubleshoot typical problems. It cannot be a bunch of personal narratives, and, “Follow their lead; just be like them. Refuse to bend, like Benda.”
If one picked up, say, a survival manual, one would expect to emerge knowing how to start a fire and build a shelter. A beginner’s cookbook will at least tell you precisely how long to boil an egg.
What does Dreher tell us to do in an age of persecution? “Embrace Suffering.” “Choose a Life Apart from the Crowd.” “Reject Doublethink and Fight for Free Speech.” “Cherish Truth-Telling but Be Prudent.” “Cultivate Cultural Memory.” “See, Judge, Act.”
He doesn’t get much more specific. I think he believes he got more specific – “form small cells … read other books,” and the recitation of Solzhenitsyn’s Six Hard Rules on page 18 – but it’s not actually the case. “See, Judge, Act” is just a description of any rational decision-making process, and “Yeah, but this is Persecuted Christian decision-making,” doesn’t actually put meat on the bones. These are mostly motivation stimulants and abstract encouragements of the right general attitudes, but those do no a ‘manual’ make.
These are like ordering the military to “Be able to fight and win wars,” and then someone else develops the *actual* doctrine and writes the field manuals. These commandments, like the Decalogue itself, just raise a host of questions, “How much suffering? How far apart from the crowd? Which crowd? How do I identify doublethink? Fight for free speech how? Fight for hate speech too? Where is the line between prudence and paying so much lip-service I lose my soul?”
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But how is some ordinary person who needs an actual manual supposed to live not by lies, if the famous, influential guy writing the admonition feels just as compelled by circumstances and prudence to live by omitting the lies?
There should have been at least one page that went like this:
You as a Christian are going to be strongly pressured to “wear the ribbon” and to say the following things which do not accord with the truths of our faith, and in order to live not by lies, you must be willing to sacrifice, suffer if necessary, and never say …
Never say what, exactly? Yes, integrity in general is a virtue, but obviously Dreher is talking about the Big Lies.
But in his book, there is a surprising paucity of actual lies. Isn’t that something? First it’s strange, then it’s puzzling, and then when you solve the puzzle, demoralizing.
My take is the answer to the puzzle of absence is Dreher’s actual manual, the one you are supposed to figure out. The most critically strategic task is to preserve precisely this kind of room for maneuver: the freedom to speak the truth and to condemn the lies. If you still can, if there is still some crack open in the window of opportunity, then you must band together and stop your opponents from being able to impose their rival orthodoxy on you, which forces that absence and omission and uses that dominance to call your lies truth and your love hate.
If you can’t do that, if you missed your chance to make that stand, then like the Alamo, it’s only a matter of time.
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Otherwise, without the list of lies one lacks a clear idea of the threat one faces, and so vague guidelines are all that are left and there is no possibility of a manual with precise instructions. But with the lies, the enemy hears his own name like the aliens hear a scream in “A Quiet Place”, and then come down on you like a ton of bricks.
VI. From whence the cascade
Well, look, no sense getting some bricks in the face if one can avoid it, that’s just being smart and prudent. Though, inconveniently, it’s Dreher himself who quotes Milosz to argue against this kind of seductive logic.
Better logic would be to say that one can reason that the intended audience probably knows the lies already, and knows that they have been weak, acquiesced, and lived by them. They know what they are supposed to stand up for already, and they know they have failed to do so. They know who their enemies are, and they know they have failed to resist them. You don’t need to list the lies to send a signal to all these people that, by the very fact of this book existing, knowing that it is being digested by so many other people, they are not alone, and they can act differently.
But what the audience still doesn’t know is what to do about it. Dreher may not know either. Notice: a thousand Benedict Option startups have not bloomed. The Benedict Option was criticized as crazy and alarmist, but again, the ugly, gloomy truth is that it’s actually the hopeful, optimistic, and practically wishful-thinking take on things. Most likely, there is no such option.
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The anti-audience already believes Dreher is far more of a kook and Chicken Little than his Christian critics do, and just a continuation of “The Paranoid Style In American Politics.” To them, Dreher can get in the back of the line behind the McCarthyists, “Eisenhower was a Commie!” John Birchers, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and low-status judgment-day-is-just-around-the-corner-all-the-signs-are-actually-happening prepper types. They are once again proclaiming the first half of the law, “It will never happen.”
And without the list of lies, their argument wins the day. It seems fully plausible and convincing. It sounds like this:
Oh look at these idiots going off again. Here we are, just trying to make sure love wins and hate loses. Our ‘radical ideology’ amounts to “Don’t be a bigot, help your fellow man, and keep your toxic hatefulness to yourself.” Everybody should be included, and nobody ought to be unjustly discriminated against. Simple, self-evident, human universals, really, do real, loving Christians really disagree so much with any of those? And because the white supremacist homophobes can’t think of anything else to say in response, the hide behind ‘Christianity’ as a pathetic rationalization for their simple irrational animus, and resort to inventing fantasies like gulags and torture rooms and KGB agents. Like *they’re* the victims! Delusional! What kind of creepy psychological problems do they have to really imagine that with all their wealth, comfort, freedom, privilege, and petty first world problems, that they are remotely spiritual kin with people who endured the worst suffering possible? Crazy!
Do you see the problem? It’s the ‘merited’ part of the law. Dreher wants to respond with the simple truth, “We’re not bigots, and we don’t deserve it.” The response would be, “Ok, let’s find out. What is it exactly that you are going to insist on believing or doing, that we would possibly think was worth throwing you into a gulag?”
He can’t beat around the bush with something general and evasive, “For being devout Christians.”
The response (at least from the rare one who knows anything about Christianity) would be as follows:
Look, we just think your religion is mostly a collection of mythological fantasies and superstitious prohibitions, but combined with a salvageable core of a worthy moral perspective that, like almost all ancient and traditional lines of philosophy, represents an incomplete and imperfect grasping toward the same ethical framework we now hold dear. That’s why Jefferson rewrote the bible, removing all those superfluous distractions. Following the actual bible seems kind of nutty and backward to us, but now that it’s in clear political retreat in terms of numbers and influence, and since most self-identified Christians don’t really seem to live like they take most of it seriously, we regard it as mostly harmless. So long as you keep it to yourselves.
So, nobody is going to throw you in the gulag for going to church. Or for believing Jesus is Lord, that he is the Savior of humanity and God’s only son, that he was born in Bethlehem of the Virgin Mary who in turn was immaculately conceived, that he performed miracles, made water into wine, multiplied bread and fishes, walked upon water, healed the sick, raised the dead, died for our sins, and was resurrected. That he saves his people by means of their repentance and confession to sin and commanded his followers to love each other and their neighbors and their enemies, and to spread his word and the gospel of the good news of their salvation to every soul.
Seriously now, is that not Christian enough or you? Are these not the central claims of Christianity? Is that not enough freedom to be a Christian?
And we aren’t going to do a single thing to anyone for any of that. Why would we even care? Maybe if proselytizing is done obnoxiously in an imposing manner and makes people feel unsafe and not included. But let’s face it, 99.99% of American Christians aren’t ever doing that anymore, so it’s kind of absurd to spook them, right? Now we will insist that you not discriminate against LGBTs, and not to teach people to hate them, and yes, you will indeed get merited punishment if you persist in doing so. But seriously, is Hate the hill you are choosing to die on?
As another friend of mine put it, “We do not want you to subtract from your faith, only to add to it. Just don’t be a jerk and you’ll be just fine.”
One simply cannot give this line of argument anything like an adequate response without getting right into the contrasts between what one believes and what one’s opponents believe, that is, between the truth and the lies. It’s a no-win situation. Without naming the lies, the progressives will suspect Dreher’s audience are closeted bigots. Naming the lies, open bigots. C’est la guerre.
Unlike in the Soviet Union, the progressives don’t see mere belief and worship as inherently threatening, and so aren’t interested in prison and torture for merely belonging to a faith, going to church, being a priest, and so forth. They look at ‘worship’ in “freedom of worship” in the same ’boutique’ manner that Fish explained as the way they look at culture in “multiculturalism”. That is, by definition, non-threatening to the imperialist program of imposing progressive orthodoxy on everyone, everywhere.
In other words, Fake Religious Tolerance, and Fake Multiculturalism. Fake, because it is precisely at the important friction points that the freedom or the multi ends. Now, as Winnifred Sullivan explained, whether genuine religious freedom is even possible in anything like our system is an interesting question, but the point is that one can’t have any coherent discourse on the subject real or fake tolerance, without identifying those points of difference.
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Now, the approach Dreher has taken has been to say that, of course it won’t actually be ‘hard’ torture and gulags, it will be ‘soft’ totalitarianism. Dreher would have given his argument much more punch had he marshaled the parade of horribles of all the “never going to happen”s that are definitely going to happen, probably soon. Without getting into the lies, he could still have collected in one place the likely sequence of escalation of oppressive state policies and mob pressures which will be brought to bear against Christian (and other) holdouts in the mopping-up operations.
They’ll penalize or dis-accredit private school, take away homeschooling, have child protective services yank your kids away if you try, mandate offensively heretical curriculum on core moral issues, kick your kids out of athletic competitions and related chances for scholarships, boycott your businesses, commercially excommunicate you as unhireable, and ineligible to use the internet or transactions system, give your kids abortions or sex hormones behind your back, take away your guns, allow the mob to walk right up to your front door and smash your windows with impunity, and if you try to defend yourself, you’ll be the one who gets arrested.
To his Christian readers, that parade of horribles will feel closer and more plausible and real, thus helping to raise their alarm to more accurate levels. Some may reject these claims at first, but as they start coming true, one after the other, he will seem nothing less than, well, prophetic. Cassandra was cursed, but Dreher can build a track record.
The trouble is, while all these things will happen, unlike in the Soviet system, they will never need to be ubiquitous or even common, so they can always be rhetorically dismissed as rare aberrations. No one is going to publish a ‘study’ with some nice scatter plots showing the increase in the persecution index. In the contemporary media environment, one hanged admiral – a pizza shop, a cake decorator, an expelled student, a heterodox professor – encourages millions of the others, to just give in and side with the strong horse, the cool horse. You only have to hang one or two admirals a year, (only after groveling apologies of course) and soon enough, the whole Navy has surrendered, concludes that those admirals had it coming, and that they “weren’t being smart.”
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The thing about hard totalitarianism is the fact of brutal oppression is inescapably clear to everyone. Sure, it will be rationalized and justified, but that people know it’s there if they step out of line is half the point. And if one is not enjoying being on the delivering end, the common human psychological instinct is to resent such domination.
‘Soft’ is totally different. People will still have choices, but if they choose ‘wrong’ in the eyes of the elites, then they will just be seen as weirdo losers and low-status pariahs, not martyrs. The flip-side of resenting domination is admiring, conspicuously affiliating with, and imitating the prestigious. People – your own fellow Christians too – will look at the refusal to pinch incense for Caesar the same way they look at a hermit’s refusal of all society. When you think about it, the hermit who could fit in if he wanted to is just persecuting himself.
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The perception of dual loyalty would mean that you would be spied on, that your closest friends would be recruited to inform against you, and that you would hit an unacknowledged but hard glass ceiling in your career path, “Performance Assessment: A highly competent and reliable professional with unlimited leadership potential, but … does not adequately demonstrate he fully shares our values and commitment to progress. Pass over for promotion absent a critical personnel shortage in his field.”
And of course, you would never be told: a breeding ground for paranoia and self-doubt. Nevertheless, if you kept your head down otherwise, you could enjoy a normal life and even some measure of personal success and respect.
Sometimes, to remind people who’s boss, an ‘informant’ would be told to make up some baloney accusations and the local priest would get arrested and interrogated, maybe leaned on to make more false accusations of his colleagues. No one would hear about him for days. Then, usually, he was released with a stern warning to watch his back.
When he showed up again at services, what happened? His whole congregation would weep for joy and relief, hugs and handshakes for hours, invitations and offers of support. He would be a kind of minor hero, a kind of minor martyr, honored and dignified. There were thousands of such events in the second half the 20th century. That’s worthy suffering; inspiring, socially productive suffering.
XI. Live Hard
But what about someone who gets ‘canceled’ today? Most of the time, it’s the Big Meh, no welcoming arms and no heroic status in one’s reference social group. Without that, there is no utility in withstanding the suffering, because there is no power of example or remembrance. Today, if you are accused of ‘hate’, things are such that most of your fellows will feel obliged to act like they believe it, dump you like a bag of dirt, and avoid you like the roof over reactor number three.
Dreher and Benda like to use the example of “High Noon”. But try to imagine “Low Noon”, where, at the end, all the townspeople ganged up on the sheriff saying, “What the heck did you do that for, you psycho? Those guys didn’t deserve that! Now you’ve just gone and made trouble for the rest of us. Get the heck out of our town, monster!”
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To throw this into even sharper relief, and to demonstrate the absence of a true ‘manual’, instead of ‘Christianity’, imagine that one is trying to preserve and propagate some even more unpopular views that, while one believes them to be perfectly true, are deeply hated by just about everyone. Any manual for dissidents necessarily works in general for any strain of persecuted dissent, and if it speaks to a particular kind of dissident, it is only because is it written in the language they are best able to comprehend.
Now, imagine a group of scattered people who were trying not to propagate Christianity and persevere as Christians, but as Confederates. Some kind of secret society that saw it all coming since Calhoun and had, against all odds, continued for two centuries to the present day, who believed in the lost cause as the right cause, hereditary racial slavery, and all the rest. What concrete advice does Dreher give that these people could use? What advice could anyone give them?
There isn’t any.
This hypothetical makes it easy for everyone to immediately grasp, at this stage in the game, that it’s an impossible task. The powers that be and 99% of society are fully committed and determined to thoroughly eradicating any remaining trace of those ideas and traditions. They can do it, they will, they are, they are almost done. Either the hypothetical Secret Confederates get nukes, or the protection of someone who has them, or (if they weren’t already extinct), their days are numbered. That’s it, game over.
XIII. Other Feet
The point is, the Soviet context is simply not the proper analogy for our situation. That ideas makes it seem like the familiar image of the Romans throwing Christians to wild beasts in some arena. But the right way to look at it is the other way around, once the Christians had won the upper hand.
The right context is something like Watts’ “The Final Pagan Generation”.
In late antiquity there were still sincere worshipers of Minerva and Apollo and Jupiter, continuing a religious tradition that went back, as it happens, about two thousand years. And then it ended. It’s a long story, and yes there was a fair amount of actual persecution as the shoe gradually moved to the other foot, but it wasn’t the key factor.
Gradually, there were fewer and fewer of these people, until there really was a last one. And when he died, the faith died with him; the chain linking 100 generations was broken, and the line went completely extinct. The last drop of water evaporated and the ground was dry. Now, no one praises Jupiter, because their great-grandparents praised Jupiter.
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Dreher’s “Why Communism Appealed to Russians” is, unfortunately, typical progressive mythological narrative (i.e., widely-swallowed propaganda) and mushy-headed nonsense drawing a line from “poverty and oppression” to the allure of Socialism. The material circumstances of various populations simply do not constitute the proper explanation for how that particular idea – or any idea – spread and came to dominate.
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If our own past is a foreign country, the past of foreign countries is too weird and alien to grasp without extensive immersion in its particular history. We are taught to think of tsarist-era exile in Siberia as a retroactive extension of the Soviet gulags, but it wasn’t like that. Siberia was like their Australia: a far away place you could send prisoners of all kinds with minimal supervision and the understanding that it was really hard to get back. You might even hope they would try to take a go at making a life for themselves out there like colonists, because you needed to populate the vast, mostly unpeopled wilderness.
So “exile” at that time was mockable as a kind of Siberian summer camp. Many of the Bolsheviks who experienced it were practically unguarded and made many successful and attempted escapes. Stalin wrote of his enjoyment fishing with Tunguses, horseback riding, and of fornication (and procreation!) with 13 year old locals like Lidia Pereprygia. Brutal, I tell you.
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By page 41, Dreher admits that “Intellectuals are the Revolutionary Class,” but he might have just said ‘elites’. Major historical events and struggles between groups are always and everywhere a phenomenon of disputes between classes of elites.
But then a few pages later he goes off course, “To be sure, neither loneliness, not social atomization, not the rise of social justice radicalism among power-holding elites – none of these and other factors discussed here meant that totalitarianism is inevitable.”
Unfortunately, when you are dealing with a replacement religion on the rise, and all the elites believe either in the latest edition of it or the version of it from ten years ago, yes it does.
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With Chapter Three Dreher gets into Progressivism as Religion, but instead of accurate anthropology, we get the enemy’s version of the story about themselves, which is, as in all similar cases, slightly less than perfectly reliable.
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If one looks under the hood, one sees that what leftism is mostly about is “redistribution of stuff and status.” The political formula is a tacitly understood bargain to clients that offers, in exchange for political support, the use of state power to take from the enviable and give to those who envy.
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Here’s another example of bad history:
The original American dream – the one held by the seventeenth century Puritan settles – was religion: to establish liberty as the condition that allowed them to worship and to service God as dictated by their consciences.
Actually, the Puritans immediately established a suffocatingly strict theocracy that did not tolerate heretics except by necessity, and in which ministers were public officials. Nathaniel Ward’s or Winthrop’s ‘liberty’ was the liberty to be a pious Puritan, and the lack of liberty to be anything else. If you were not a member of the church, you were officially a second-class citizen, and they would throw you out for anything. The Puritans did not give people freedom to make choices according to their consciences about living virtuously or not, see, e.g., Platform of Church Discipline (1648).
Most of this ‘liberty’ story was retconned in the late 18th century during the establishment of the popular mythology of American History. Once upon a time people like Rothbard thought that perhaps one day American society would come to be so confident and mature that it could replace the white lie mythology with the reality. No such luck. Instead we got a new religion that is just replacing it with a much more sinister and malevolent mythology. That’s how it goes. There is always a de facto state religion, and it will spread the myths it finds most useful.
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Dreher does a good job in summarizing some of the claims of progressivism and “critical theory”, but he presents them as if they are to be taken at face value.
There is no such thing as objective truth, there is only power
Yes, you will hear this kind of rhetoric mindlessly parroted all the time, but it is by no means some kind of metaphysical principle consistently applied. It is little more than an opportunistic tactical pose and a weapon to be deployed only when convenient, just like any double standard. “Out truths are real, whereas your ‘truths’ are just useful lies you can shove down people’s throats and get them to repeat because you can intimidate and bully them into it.” The fact that one can’t tell which side is making that statement about the other is what gives that perspective its robustness.
Progressives believe in rule by (credentialed, prestigious) experts, a rule that is legitimated by appeal to superior knowledge of objective truth. Consider: “Reality-based community” or “Climate change is real. The science is settled.” None of that is compatible with the “no such thing” claim.
What about the “Myth of Progress”
It seems to flow naturally from the Myth of Progress as it has been lived out in our mass consumerist democracy, which has for generations defined progress as the liberation of human desire from limits.
No, just Christian limits. This is an important point, and I think one that Dreher resists or finds hard to appreciate, mostly because progressives usually want mandatory toleration for everything Christianity prohibits.
But progressives are not libertines and have their own comprehensive sexual morality that is in some ways even more restrictive than that of traditional religions. Is it not actually based on “live and let live,” “different strokes for different folks,” or the “anything goes with consenting adults” principle of volenti non fit iniuria, because in the progressive conception ‘true’ voluntariness and consent can only be valid in the absence of a whole host of pressures, undue influences, and power imbalances. Contra Dreher, this imposes all manner of limits on human desire, as one can witness watching any tribunal of sex bureaucrats on any American college campus.
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XX. Woke Capitalism
At the same time, Big Business has moved steadily leftward on social issues. Standard business practice long required staying out of controversial issues on the grounds that taking sides in the culture war would be bad for business” – now not taking sides is bad for business. … A powerful coalition of corporate leaders … threatened economic retaliation against [Indiana] if it did not reverse course.
Somehow I missed the reporting about all the progressives who screamed in outrage at this corporate interference in our democracy.
Still, the reason they were able to make these threats is pretty obvious: no one was credibly threatening back. In a ‘manual’, Dreher would tell his readers what to do about this, but he presents it as a fait accompli and new normal Borg against which all resistance is futile.
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The real issue is the surveillance, and the power of modern capabilities. Without going full ‘technological determinism’, my impression is that the reality of software eating the world coupled with the constant tracking and surveillance by all entities with the wherewithal and reach is inevitable and unavoidable. It is in the basic nature of technological change that once the capability is there, Pandora’s Box cannot remain shut for long. We are already well past the tipping point on that one.
Yes, all the big institutions constantly spying on everything you do for the rest of time is very creepy and disturbing. But if one is worried not so much about privacy in general but about persecution in particular, then from a more abstract perspective, there is really no reason to implicate ‘capitalism’ except as yet another mechanism by which powerful social coalitions can apply extralegal coercive pressure while circumventing the rules limiting direct state action.
If the state tolerates this, it is allowing an effectively collateral state to fill the power vacuum by abandoning the field of certain sovereign prerogatives. This is the real “parallel polis”, much like the mafia is a parallel government on its own turf when the official state is unable or unwilling to take it on. If the state does not protect its claim to a monopoly on all coercion, hard or soft, then someone else is going to pick up the coercion left lying around.
Then again, sometimes the state wants it that way. If the mayor needs an inconvenient opponent to disappear, he probably can’t ask his chief of police to get it done for him. But if he tolerates a Don, he can go to the Don. If the state is not technically allowed to persecute you directly, if it tolerates some persecutors, it can have them do the persecuting. In either case, when you pierce the veil, the rectified name for it is conspiracy. The tragedy is that the veil has countless defenders who will insist that if it didn’t come from behind the veil, no harm no foul.
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Two decades ago, when we started to become aware of this problem, people guessed that a combination of (1) new cultural adaptations to avoid these hazards, (2) new generations being raised from birth to be familiar with the risks of the internet, and (3) an increasingly long track record of lots of people having their lives publicly ruined, would encourage people to “adjust trim” and be much more cautious and prudent.
Some people did just that, but, in general, it hasn’t turned out that way. It seems that psychological effect of the way we interface online – when it seems as if it’s just you and your screen in your own little virtual secret world – makes people feel too “alone and private” to keep their guard up. Unfortunately, if one assumes this isn’t going to get better any time soon, then one can only conclude that in a time of Christian persecution, ordinary people are going to slip up sooner or later if they touch networked devices at all, and if they refuse to do so, they will out themselves all the same. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
What that means is that there is no longer any possibility whatsoever of evading the notice of powerful people who are out to get you. From the perspective of any serious, capable, and determined state (cough, China) this is now a solved problem. There can be no secret meetings or clandestine samizdat printing operations or anything like that. Near the end of the book, Dreher advises, “Christians should educate themselves about the mechanics of running underground cells and networks while they are still free to do so.” As the Uyghurs would tell you, if they could, that ship has already sailed. The old mechanics are obsolete and no longer work, and there are no new mechanics.
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Hard cases make bad law, but there is nothing but a hard choice to make about this undeniable situation. Either one embraces the principle of “they are private companies so they are free to do whatever they like and the state has nothing to do with it,” and accept, well, ‘extinction’. Or one says no, undermines the principles of free enterprise and private property, but creates a terrible state power that, eventually, can and will be used by ones enemies too.
On the other hand, all the undermining and regulation has already been done in every other possible way in every other industry and sector, especially all those rules insisting on equal treatment. Frankly, it’s bizarre to watch advocates insist on straining out the gnat of just this one thing that apparently crosses the line though it threatens half the country with political neutralization, when they are unable to summon up ten percent as much passion for having swallowed as many camels as there are pages in the Code of Federal Regulations.
Speech Is Special. You can’t argue to get it back once it’s gone. There can be genuinely free platform companies, or universally safe platform companies, but if companies are only free to the extent it is safe for our enemies to use the platforms to crush us, then crushed we will be.
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“The essence of modernity is to deny that there are any transcendent stories, structures, habits, or beliefs to which individuals must submit and that should bind our conduct”
He says ‘modernity’ but my impression is that he means modern, secular, leftist progressivism. But if you are not a progressive, ask yourself, do they seem like they aren’t interested in making you submit and binding your conduct? Do they lack for stories with unfalsifiable elements that explain why they are entitled to do this?
The progressives imagine that they’ve solved for objective morality. There is no “dictatorship of relativism.” The Jacobins are not libertarians “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” They have a perfectly well-defined concept, and it applies to you too, without any right to define a different one, because error has no rights.
XXV. Velvet Samizdat:
Perhaps nothing helps to highlight the contrast between Soviet-era or North Korean-style Communist oppression and the current circumstances in America than the irrelevance of ‘samizdat’. Yes, there is certainly a fair bit of purging and memory-holing, removal of items from curriculum as well as chilling, suppression, and intimidation out there for present-day writers and publishers who wish to go off-narrative.
But all of it has a mostly prospective, deterrent character. The robust strength of the current system of opinion management is perhaps in no way better demonstrated than by the fact that there is mostly no problem with actual eliminative censorship of the past, with preserving cultural memory, archives, records, and so forth. Because none of that makes any difference.
All the old books are still out there, accessible to anyone, instantaneously, in their own language, and free, and one doesn’t have to go back very far before most of them have the “currently regarded as problematic” volume knob pegged to eleven. Don’t even get me started on Greek philosophy! But almost nobody cares, and it goes unread, and even more unread than one would figure correcting for our increasingly post-literate society. The ‘soft’ system is so much stronger than the ‘hard’, it is nigh invulnerably, such that brazen, obvious, and easily-disproven falsehoods can be printed without any concern on the part of the authors or publishers whatsoever, who know they’ll win prizes anyway.
The counterarguments will be allowed to exist, just not allowed to make a difference. They will never get any attention, buzz, or amplification from prestigious, cool people, and so can be ignored just as if they had been censored. This is deeply demotivating; why even bother? In a way, it’s actually better when your enemies know you’re lying and know you can get away with it. Show’s everyone who’s boss. No need for samizdat, no point.
…
Dreher is particularly inspired by the Bendas and their commitment to turning their home into a sanctuary, place of refuge, and the ‘parallel polis’ of an alternative community.
But Vaclav Benda had advantages. The Communist takeover of his country was recent and had been widely predicted. That meant there was still a large population of people who had grown up in the old days and were formed by that previous order to be loyal to pre-existing commitments, traditions, habits, institutions, and, most importantly, to each other. That includes Benda himself. His activities depended on being able to rely on the remnants of that inheritance, along with the nationalistic perception of a brutally oppressive *foreign* occupation.
But pressure and time wears down all things, and another generation or two of persecution, combined with the psychological enervation from a fully indigenous phenomenon such as that in America, and it would have been impossible.
Benda also lived in a time and place where physical proximity was essential and common. Today it is like herding cats to bring people together, and so the internet is now where all the “private home” discussions are had. There are plenty of virtual Bendas and little digital salons out there. They are a great source of consolation and solidarity for dissidents, and the quality of gallows humor is top notch. But mostly these venues have proven to be impotent and incompetent for any other purpose. Probably the last old pagans gathered around to drink and talk about their plight, and to joke and complain about those darn Christians as they tried to figure out if there was anything else to be done. There wasn’t.
XXVII: Man and SuperBenda
If one doesn’t have a manual, perhaps one can imitate a model. But can the Bendas be models? A model provides an example that an ordinary person can feasibly replicate. But the Bendas put the extra in extraordinary. Inspiring cases of astonishing and, frankly, naturally elite people with incredibly strength of will who are one out of ten thousand are wonderful to hear. But if that’s what it takes, then any project which relies on typical people following in their footsteps is altogether hopeless. Consider:
The Benda family model requires parents to exercise discernment. For example, the Bendas didn’t ops out of popular culture but rather chose intelligently which parts of it they wanted their children to absorb.
I am somewhat less than perfectly confident in the capacity of most ordinary Christians to exercise anything approaching this level of judicious discernment, including the abilities to both choose wisely and intelligently and also to maintain the strict discipline and constant overwatch needed to keep it going, day in, day out. “Be Like Benda” is a tall order, and if we’re being honest, too tall for too many.
This is a different context from the one in which one would encourage sinners to try to live more like saints, or to imitate the lives of the holy family, as every little step in that direction is an improvement. As it is in horseshoes and hand-grenades, so it is in holiness: getting closer counts.
But when it comes to resisting overwhelming social pressures, one has to clear tall hurdles, and if one can’t, one cannot move forward. Imagine you are in the ocean near the beach and someone spots a man-eating shark. Michael Phelps is there and can out-swim the shark to shore, because he is an extraordinary man. We all admire his prowess and we can try to imitate what he does, but in our cases it won’t be enough. Phelps is going to make it, but we will be shark food.
…
Near the end of the book, Dreher writes, “The culture war is largely over— and we lost. The Grand March is, for the time being, a victory parade.”
Dreher has repeated this over many years, and I have been reading a similar lines for two decades at least, and it probably goes back long before that. In a way it’s true, and, depending how you define terms, it’s been true before any of us were born. But in a way it’s not true, because there is a great deal of ruin in a culture. As much as has already been taken, there remains so much more territory left to conquer, and it’s odd to say one has lost a war when the battles never end and new fronts keep opening up all the time.
It’s more precise to say that if non-progressives keep doing what they are doing now, following the conventional rules of the game, then like the Pagan, what they are giving up is the capacity to hold ground. That means the best they can do is slow down the advance and retreat and retreat and retreat until, one day, they are on the beach, backs against the ocean.
The real trouble with “Live Not By Lies” is that the encouragement of the stories (which are inspiring) and the instructions of the manual (such as they are), are simply not remotely adequate to arrest the trend of the progressive progression, which ends in The End.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to end like that, and it is still not too late to choose a different destiny. The bad news is that it would require measures far more radical than 99.99% of Christians and other non-progressives are currently prepared to accept. The proper task of a prophet is to expand that acceptance by making them understand they don’t have any better options. At least, not if they don’t want to end up like the Pagans.
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Mark Levin: 'The NRA Doesn't Kill People. That's Planned Parenthood!' | Trending
On his radio show yesterday, conservative talker Mark Levin crushed the Democratic candidates for president who want to take away Americans' guns. He first played audio of Beto O'Rourke, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren, who can be heard saying that guns pose a major threat to America's safety. And then? Well, then Mark Levin did what Mark Levin does best: destroyed them all.
First up is Beto O'Rourke, the Irish-Texan with the inexplicably Hispanic sounding name. O'Rourke can be heard saying that he wants to take away Americans' semi-automatic firearms. If elected president, "that's exactly what we're going to do," he added, after which he goes on the need to protect Americans from mass shootings in churches, synagogues, and malls.
"No amount of logic and facts will change an emotional appeal like this," Levin responded. The vast majority of people who are murdered in this country are murdered with pistols, not AR15s and not AK47s. They're murdered with pistols. Pistols."
Additionally, Levin added, study after study finds that the push for lighter cars has made its inhabitants extremely unsafe. Far more people die because their cars are lighter now than a few decades ago than from guns. Strangely, however, there is "never any talk about that. Ever."
"And this guy [O'Rourke], he has no constitutional basis for this, but he's hoping to get a few courts, Obama judges, cobble together five justices on the Supreme Court. Not that hard, really. You've got the four hardliners on the left, and you can probably pick off a Roberts or even Kavanaugh quite frankly."
"I want to be really clear," Levin said, "This is a man I bet who has never read the Constitution from beginning to the end. It doesn't matter."
Next is Joe Biden, the former vice president who, when he was the second-most powerful man in the country, did absolutely nothing to combat the supposed threat he now rages on and on about. According to Biden, it is "totally irrational" that Texas wants to make it easier for law-abiding citizens to carry guns. The only reason Texas authorities want to do that, he argued, is that they're owned by... special interests. "It has to stop," he said. "The idea that we don't have a limitation of assault-type weapons, magazines that can hold multiple bullets in them, is absolutely mindless. It is no violation of the Second Amendment. It's just a bow to the special interests of the gun manufacturers and the NRA."
"Multiple things here," Levin responded. "Number one, how do you have a magazine that doesn't hold more than one bullet?" Point well taken. "But let's move on. The elimination of assault-type weapons. What's an assault-type weapon? It's any weapon that these politicians in government decide they want to ban. There is no such thing as an assault weapon. What if I use a weapon for just target practice? What if you use a weapon to hunt? What if you use a weapon just because you want to have it to protect your family and your household in case some thugs try to break in and kill your family members and maybe rape your wife? Is that an assault weapon? No, that's a defense weapon. So there is no such thing as an assault weapon."
In fact, Levin correctly said, a baseball bat can even be deemed an "assault weapon" if it's used as such. Why? Simple. "Assault is an action," Levin explained. "So if you hit someone with a frying pan, that's an assault. If you punch someone with your fist in the nose, that's assault. If you throw a pool stick at somebody, that's assault. If you try to hit them with your car, that's an assault. So is your car an assault weapon? Is your pool stick an assault weapon? It depends on what you do with it. And the same applies to a gun."
"And why is it," Levin went on, "if you believe in the Second Amendment, that you must be part of a special interest conspiracy with gun manufacturers and the NRA? Tell me! When the Second Amendment was proposed by the first Congress and ratified by the states, there was no NRA. And the gun manufacturers didn't have any special interests or whatever."
"This was a deeply-held belief, a value, that you must be able to protect yourselves, you must be able to have a weapon. It has nothing to do with special interests, nothing whatsoever. And yet there they go again, dismissing us because you must be, you know, you must support the gun manufacturers and the NRA."
"The only reason the NRA exists is because five million people decided they needed to protect their constitutional rights," Levin then stepped it up a notch. "The NRA doesn't exist to kill people, that's Planned Parenthood. That exists to kill people, little babies in the womb. But Joe Biden doesn't have a problem with that. And that's not a special interest, of course, that's a choice, don't you know? It's a deeply held view! And only women can have a view on that, men can't! So we have groups like Planned Parenthood that exist to destroy human babies in the womb. The NRA doesn't believe in that, the NRA doesn't do that."
"We must stop allowing the left, the media, the Democrats to define us. Define our society. We must define them and we must push back!" he finished his awe-inspiring rant against Biden.
Finally, Levin directed his ire at Elizabeth Warren, who breathlessly told reporters that "we have to get assault weapons off our streets. Get rid of bump stocks and the ability to fire weapons in a short period of time. There are a lot of things we could be doing."
Levin's only possible correct response was:
Sadly, after that, we had to listen to another audio clip from Warren. I say sadly because it's truly a challenge to listen to this woman talk. "So why doesn't it happen?" she can be heard asking rhetorically. "And the answer is corruption. It's corruption."
"So if you believe in the Bill of Rights, you believe in the Second Amendment, but she doesn't and you disagree with her, you must be corrupt. For Joe Biden, you must be on the take, you see, but for her, you must be corrupt," Levin interjected.
"Now we have a Washington that is held hostage by the gun industry and the NRA," Warren then said. "And then one more part I want to add to this. We have to treat this as the public health emergency that it is. We cannot think of it as one and done. Or two and done."
"Yes, this, you see," Levin reacted, "it's a public health issue. That's right. Now is abortion a public health issue that has to stop because of the public health of the baby? No, no, no, no, no. That's a choice, you see. You can't interfere with a choice."
After also spending some time and attention to MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, Levin said that "you can thank the framers of the Constitution, the first Congress, the ratifiers in the states, for your liberties. Because I'll tell you what: If we didn't have this Constitution, if we didn't have this Bill of Rights, even though they're chipping away at it constantly, we'd have nothing."
Truer words were never spoken. If the current crop of Democrats was in charge of writing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Americans would soon suffer under the yoke of an American Soviet Union.
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Death and Testing – The New York Times
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Good morning. The son of a federal judge has been killed. Canada says no to Major League Baseball. And Trump tells multiple virus falsehoods in a T.V. interview.
President Trump gave a confrontational interview to Chris Wallace of Fox News yesterday that included numerous untruths about the coronavirus. Trump claimed that the United States had the lowest death rate in the world; that new cases were surging here mostly because of the large number of tests; and that his virus response had saved “millions of lives.”
So I thought it was worth offering a quick overview of the actual situation with the virus, with help from a couple of charts:
The virus has still been deadlier in several European countries than in the U.S., after adjusting for population. But the total death rate in the U.S. is among the worst for any country in the world:
And the U.S. may continue to climb this ranking. Most high-income countries now have a relatively small number of new cases and deaths each day, while the U.S. does not:
The U.S. is conducting a large number of tests — but that isn’t why the virus statistics look so much worse here. According to Johns Hopkins University, the U.S. has now conducted more tests per capita than any other country.
That high test rate obviously leads to a greater number of official cases. If some other countries with major outbreaks, like Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria, were conducting more tests, they would likely be reporting many more cases. Some would probably show worse per capita outbreaks than the U.S.
But the U.S. is still an outlier, especially among rich countries. A higher percentage of its tests are coming back positive than in many other countries, and the death toll continues to mount, which are both signs that the main issue in the U.S. is a failure to control the virus.
Related: One sign of Trump’s unsuccessful strategy is that other top Republican officials are increasingly willing to defy him about the virus.
In Europe: A new Times story examines Europe’s early failure to control the virus. And Ruchir Sharma, an investor and contributing Opinion writer, argues that Germany’s success in controlling the virus has made it “the large economy most likely to thrive in the post-pandemic world.”
FOUR MORE BIG STORIES
1. The virus rips through Texas
In the Rio Grande Valley, on Texas’ southern border, more than a third of families live in poverty. Nearly half of the residents have no health insurance, and obesity and heart disease are widespread.
Now coronavirus cases there are surging, threatening to overwhelm hospitals and create a public-health disaster. “Our curve is a straight up trajectory right now,” one hospital official said. “There’s no relief.” A photo essay accompanies our story from the region.
In other virus developments:
As companies across China rush to produce personal protective equipment, some are using Uighur labor that puts members of the ethnic minority to work against their will.
More than six million people in the U.S. enrolled in food stamps in the first three months of the pandemic, an unprecedented rise.
The Canadian government will not allow the Toronto Blue Jays to stage home games when the baseball season starts this week, saying cross-border travel poses a health risk. The team is likely to play at a minor-league stadium in Buffalo instead.
2. How Roberts has shaped voting rights
John Roberts solidified his reputation during this past Supreme Court term as an idiosyncratic justice willing to vote with his liberal colleagues on some major issues. But one subject on which he has remained a stalwart conservative is also one that’s likely to matter a great deal in 2020: voting rights.
In its recent term, the Supreme Court issued four rulings to restrict voting rights. All of the rulings were decided quickly, in response to emergency applications asking the justices to take action in pending cases, as The Times’s Adam Liptak explains. Those rulings indicate that the court may choose not to act this fall to make sure people can vote during a pandemic.
3. Federal forces roil Portland
Protests against racism and police brutality have endured in Portland, Ore., with peaceful marches during the day and more confrontational, and occasionally violent, demonstrations at night. And the recent deployment of federal officers to quash the protests seems to have had the opposite effect.
Demonstrations over the weekend drew the largest crowds in weeks, uniting a diverse group of activists in outrage. “I wasn’t even paying attention to the protests at all until the feds came in,” said Christopher David, a former Navy civil engineering corps officer.
4. Pain for businesses big and small
They survived the Great Depression, a world war and the 2008 financial crisis — but not the pandemic. Small businesses that have stood for a century are shutting down, ending generations of family ownership.
And at big businesses: C.E.O.s of some major companies say they are increasingly worried about a prolonged economic disruption. “I’m less optimistic today than I was 30 days ago,” the chief executive of Marriott International said.
Here’s what else is happening
A gunman shot and killed the 20-year-old son of a federal judge as he answered the door of the family home in New Jersey yesterday and wounded the judge’s husband. The judge, Esther Salas, was home but was not injured.
Roger Stone, the Trump ally whose prison sentence the president commuted, denied he uttered a racial slur during an interview with a Black radio host. The audio suggests otherwise.
Trader Joe’s said it would rebrand international food items with names like Trader Ming’s, Trader José and Trader Giotto’s. An online petition had asked the company to remove packaging that reflects “a narrative of exoticism that perpetuates harmful stereotypes.”
Lives Lived: Nakotah LaRance’s skill as a hoop dancer — a tradition in some Native American cultures — carried him to world titles, late-night TV, the Brooklyn Ballet and Cirque du Soleil. LaRance died last week at 30.
Subscribers help make Times journalism possible. To support our efforts, please consider subscribing today.
IDEA OF THE DAY: Should Biden go big?
Joe Biden’s polling lead has grown large enough that some Democrats are debating whether he should spend resources in traditionally Republican states in an effort to win a landslide victory. Here are the cases that each side is making:
No, don’t you remember 2016? Four years ago, Hillary Clinton campaigned in North Carolina, Texas and other states she didn’t need to win, while paying relatively little attention to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — which she did need. Biden must avoid that same trap, some people argue.
“Lock down the states you MUST have by making sure your operations and ads are funded there for duration. THEN you expand to more ambitious targets,” tweeted David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former strategist. For now, the Biden campaign is largely taking this path.
Yes, 2020 is a chance for realignment. Trump doesn’t just trail by almost 10 percentage points. He is also facing the prospect of a summer and a fall with a raging pandemic and a deep recession. Given all this, some people are urging Biden to flip states that Democrats have long dreamed of winning — and to help flip the Senate.
Unless the Democrats also win the Senate, they have little chance of passing major legislation. To win the Senate, they will need to win seats in some Republican-leaning states, like North Carolina, Montana, Georgia and Texas.
“When reliable polling has you tied or winning in Texas, you expand the map well beyond the six ‘battleground’ states,” the Democratic strategist Christy Setzer has said. Added Stacey Abrams, the Georgia politician: “The Sun Belt expansion is what will drive the next 30 years of elections.”
PLAY, WATCH, EAT, BINGE
A fresh summer salad
Our original recipe for chickpea salad with fresh herbs and scallions says the dish “deserves a spot at your next picnic.” While festive picnics may be hard to come by this summer, don’t let that stop you from making this lighter take on a potato salad. Odds are, it tastes just as good from the couch.
Making orchestras more inclusive
American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions: Of the 106 full-time players in the New York Philharmonic, only one is Black.
Anthony Tommasini, The Times’s classical music critic, argues that the so-called blind audition — in which musicians try out for an orchestra behind a screen — is impeding progress. How? There is little difference in skill among the top-tier players competing for these jobs, Tommasini argues. Without blind auditions, ensembles would be able to seek out elite musicians of color.
A TV show like no other
My colleague Sanam Yar recommends tuning into the drama “I May Destroy You”:
Fans of Michaela Coel’s award-winning sitcom “Chewing Gum” — which she wrote and starred in at the age of 28 — already knew she was a singular talent. But her new series, which is airing on HBO in the U.S., cements that status. There are no other shows like “I May Destroy You,” in part because it’s such a specific, personal story, inspired by Coel’s life and her experience with sexual assault.
The series follows a London-based writer and her circle of friends in the aftermath of her assault, and its characters feel exceptionally real. As the show’s writer, co-director and star, Coel displays genius throughout. Some lines of dialogue will catch you off guard and rattle around in your brain for days. And the show’s clever soundtrack feels like its own character.
“I May Destroy You” is a heavy watch, but it also has spots of brightness and beauty. The show gives no easy answers. That’s kind of the point.
Diversions
You can catch Comet NEOWISE — one of the brightest comets in a generation — without a telescope. Here’s how.
Artists like Edwin Birdsong and Ballin’ Jack aren’t household names, but their music is instantly recognizable as the samples behind hit pop songs. Listen to these 15 tracks.
Games
Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: One of two planets in the solar system that lacks a moon (five letters).
You can find all of our puzzles here.
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David
P.S. The words “rematador,” “cortador,” “apeleador” and “planchador” — all titles for artisan makers of Panama hats — appeared in The Times for the first time today, as noted by the Twitter bot @NYT_first_said.
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Yesterday, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders officially dropped out of the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Despite early successes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Sanders failed to put up much of a fight against Joe Biden after the latter convincingly won South Carolina. And so, for the second campaign in a row, he has come up short against a weak but well-known presumptive front-runner.In the not-too-distant past, this would have depressed me. When Sanders announced his 2016 presidential campaign, I had never heard of him, but he didn't take too long to figure out. On economic questions, he was among the left-most political figures ever to achieve prominence in America, and was clearly proud of it. On other issues, he strayed from left-wing orthodoxy in some interesting ways. He evinced a skepticism of open borders and increased immigration that occasionally made him sound downright Trumpy. He had a surprisingly decent record on gun rights. And above all, he actually seemed to believe what he said, which I found a breath of fresh air when juxtaposed with the obfuscation and opportunism of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.Four years later, my view of the Sanders phenomenon has changed completely. I do not now mourn the end of Sanders's candidacy, because in his second run for the White House he proved himself to be just another politician: He deemphasized or outright jettisoned his politically inconvenient stances in pursuit of power, while remaining true to a core far-left agenda that, in the absence of that aura of integrity, seems far scarier than it did four years ago.It was always one of the more striking aspects of Sanders's rhetoric that he could sound like an immigration hawk. In a 2015 interview with Vox, he famously called open borders a “Koch brothers proposal”:> It would make everybody in America poorer — you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation-state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.To be fair, Sanders wasn't necessarily getting immigration-policy advice from Mark Krikorian. He represented an older strain of left-wing thought that argued against immigration from the perspective of labor unions concerned about multinational corporations and undercut wages. But nevertheless, when he spoke of the issue, he could sound surprisingly like Donald Trump, then rampaging his way through the Republican primaries.That Bernie Sanders is gone now. His 2020 platform called for “breaking up ICE and CBP and redistributing their functions to their proper authorities,” unilaterally reinstating President Obama’s DACA and DAPA programs, and decriminalizing illegal immigration, among other things. For the most part, he became difficult to distinguish from his Democratic opponents on immigration, except insofar as some of them chased after him as he moved left in the hope of capturing more votes. Thus did this unconventional aspect of his public persona recede.The story on gun rights is much the same. Vermont is caricatured as a semi-socialist state, and maybe the caricature is accurate. But it also has relatively loose gun laws, and a high rate of per capita firearm ownership. As a representative of the state in various capacities, Sanders has compiled a record that reflects this. The National Rifle Association helped him first win election to the House in 1990, where he would vote against the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. As a senator, he has supported bills that would allow firearms in checked bags on Amtrak trains. And after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, Sanders said, “If you passed the strongest gun-control legislation tomorrow, I don’t think it will have a profound effect on the tragedies we have seen.” Though this record was a source of consternation for an otherwise adoring left in 2016, and was fodder for Hillary Clinton's campaign, he didn’t run away from it then.Four years later, the story was very different. A watershed moment came during a February Democratic primary debate, when he was asked about his past vote to protect gun manufacturers from lawsuits pertaining to the use of guns in shootings. “I’ve cast thousands of votes, including bad votes,” Sanders said. “That was a bad vote.” His 2020 platform proposed a buyback program for guns and a ban on assault weapons. In a fitting bookend to his elective career, it also demanded that Democrats “take on the NRA and its corrupting effect on Washington.” Once again, Sanders had tacked left under pressure in search of votes, willingly abandoning a unique part of his persona to the political needs of the moment.Shorn of the ideological heterodoxies that made him appealing, Sanders was reduced to his essence as a crusader for hard-left economics. When, in 2015, he argued that, “You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm-spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country,” I still regarded his economic platform as a quirk that might inspire him to join with fiscally conservative Republicans to, say, cut corporate welfare. But it wasn’t a quirk at all: He recently expressed disgust at the idea that someone might make money developing drugs to fight the novel coronavirus.Meanwhile, in his second campaign certain aspects of Sanders’s record that were always there for those who wanted to see them became impossible to ignore. We knew in 2016 that, as mayor of Burlington, the just-married Sanders had visited the Soviet Union on a mission to procure a Soviet sister city that doubled as his honeymoon. Those facts would be more forgivable if he had not offered unqualified praise for Cuban “literacy programs” and the economic progress of Communist China in 2020.In 2016, smitten with the heterodox left-populist gadfly I thought I’d found, I either did not realize the currency that Sanders's economic views had in the Democratic Party or did not anticipate the extent of the foothold they would gain in it. This is due mostly to young voters, who in a 2019 Gallup survey thought almost equally well of capitalism and socialism (51 percent to 49 percent). Sanders consistently garnered more support than Clinton from this group in 2016. In 2020, he maintained that support to a certain extent, though it didn’t translate into actual votes as easily as it had before. Both times around, the center of the Democratic Party, such as it is, held. But the young democratic socialists uncovered by his campaigns continue to maintain that they are the future of the party’s politics, and of the country’s.If they are right, we can be sure that they won’t remember the Bernie Sanders whom I, as an outside conservative observer, once found somewhat compelling. For that Sanders held certain views they would abhor, views that he changed or abandoned when it became politically expedient. And that may be the most disappointing thing about Sanders: In the end, he stands revealed as just another guy all too happy to tell people what they wanted to hear.
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Bernie Sanders, Sellout
Yesterday, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders officially dropped out of the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Despite early successes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Sanders failed to put up much of a fight against Joe Biden after the latter convincingly won South Carolina. And so, for the second campaign in a row, he has come up short against a weak but well-known presumptive front-runner.In the not-too-distant past, this would have depressed me. When Sanders announced his 2016 presidential campaign, I had never heard of him, but he didn't take too long to figure out. On economic questions, he was among the left-most political figures ever to achieve prominence in America, and was clearly proud of it. On other issues, he strayed from left-wing orthodoxy in some interesting ways. He evinced a skepticism of open borders and increased immigration that occasionally made him sound downright Trumpy. He had a surprisingly decent record on gun rights. And above all, he actually seemed to believe what he said, which I found a breath of fresh air when juxtaposed with the obfuscation and opportunism of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.Four years later, my view of the Sanders phenomenon has changed completely. I do not now mourn the end of Sanders's candidacy, because in his second run for the White House he proved himself to be just another politician: He deemphasized or outright jettisoned his politically inconvenient stances in pursuit of power, while remaining true to a core far-left agenda that, in the absence of that aura of integrity, seems far scarier than it did four years ago.It was always one of the more striking aspects of Sanders's rhetoric that he could sound like an immigration hawk. In a 2015 interview with Vox, he famously called open borders a “Koch brothers proposal”:> It would make everybody in America poorer — you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation-state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.To be fair, Sanders wasn't necessarily getting immigration-policy advice from Mark Krikorian. He represented an older strain of left-wing thought that argued against immigration from the perspective of labor unions concerned about multinational corporations and undercut wages. But nevertheless, when he spoke of the issue, he could sound surprisingly like Donald Trump, then rampaging his way through the Republican primaries.That Bernie Sanders is gone now. His 2020 platform called for “breaking up ICE and CBP and redistributing their functions to their proper authorities,” unilaterally reinstating President Obama’s DACA and DAPA programs, and decriminalizing illegal immigration, among other things. For the most part, he became difficult to distinguish from his Democratic opponents on immigration, except insofar as some of them chased after him as he moved left in the hope of capturing more votes. Thus did this unconventional aspect of his public persona recede.The story on gun rights is much the same. Vermont is caricatured as a semi-socialist state, and maybe the caricature is accurate. But it also has relatively loose gun laws, and a high rate of per capita firearm ownership. As a representative of the state in various capacities, Sanders has compiled a record that reflects this. The National Rifle Association helped him first win election to the House in 1990, where he would vote against the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. As a senator, he has supported bills that would allow firearms in checked bags on Amtrak trains. And after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, Sanders said, “If you passed the strongest gun-control legislation tomorrow, I don’t think it will have a profound effect on the tragedies we have seen.” Though this record was a source of consternation for an otherwise adoring left in 2016, and was fodder for Hillary Clinton's campaign, he didn’t run away from it then.Four years later, the story was very different. A watershed moment came during a February Democratic primary debate, when he was asked about his past vote to protect gun manufacturers from lawsuits pertaining to the use of guns in shootings. “I’ve cast thousands of votes, including bad votes,” Sanders said. “That was a bad vote.” His 2020 platform proposed a buyback program for guns and a ban on assault weapons. In a fitting bookend to his elective career, it also demanded that Democrats “take on the NRA and its corrupting effect on Washington.” Once again, Sanders had tacked left under pressure in search of votes, willingly abandoning a unique part of his persona to the political needs of the moment.Shorn of the ideological heterodoxies that made him appealing, Sanders was reduced to his essence as a crusader for hard-left economics. When, in 2015, he argued that, “You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm-spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country,” I still regarded his economic platform as a quirk that might inspire him to join with fiscally conservative Republicans to, say, cut corporate welfare. But it wasn’t a quirk at all: He recently expressed disgust at the idea that someone might make money developing drugs to fight the novel coronavirus.Meanwhile, in his second campaign certain aspects of Sanders’s record that were always there for those who wanted to see them became impossible to ignore. We knew in 2016 that, as mayor of Burlington, the just-married Sanders had visited the Soviet Union on a mission to procure a Soviet sister city that doubled as his honeymoon. Those facts would be more forgivable if he had not offered unqualified praise for Cuban “literacy programs” and the economic progress of Communist China in 2020.In 2016, smitten with the heterodox left-populist gadfly I thought I’d found, I either did not realize the currency that Sanders's economic views had in the Democratic Party or did not anticipate the extent of the foothold they would gain in it. This is due mostly to young voters, who in a 2019 Gallup survey thought almost equally well of capitalism and socialism (51 percent to 49 percent). Sanders consistently garnered more support than Clinton from this group in 2016. In 2020, he maintained that support to a certain extent, though it didn’t translate into actual votes as easily as it had before. Both times around, the center of the Democratic Party, such as it is, held. But the young democratic socialists uncovered by his campaigns continue to maintain that they are the future of the party’s politics, and of the country’s.If they are right, we can be sure that they won’t remember the Bernie Sanders whom I, as an outside conservative observer, once found somewhat compelling. For that Sanders held certain views they would abhor, views that he changed or abandoned when it became politically expedient. And that may be the most disappointing thing about Sanders: In the end, he stands revealed as just another guy all too happy to tell people what they wanted to hear.
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Yesterday, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders officially dropped out of the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Despite early successes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Sanders failed to put up much of a fight against Joe Biden after the latter convincingly won South Carolina. And so, for the second campaign in a row, he has come up short against a weak but well-known presumptive front-runner.In the not-too-distant past, this would have depressed me. When Sanders announced his 2016 presidential campaign, I had never heard of him, but he didn't take too long to figure out. On economic questions, he was among the left-most political figures ever to achieve prominence in America, and was clearly proud of it. On other issues, he strayed from left-wing orthodoxy in some interesting ways. He evinced a skepticism of open borders and increased immigration that occasionally made him sound downright Trumpy. He had a surprisingly decent record on gun rights. And above all, he actually seemed to believe what he said, which I found a breath of fresh air when juxtaposed with the obfuscation and opportunism of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.Four years later, my view of the Sanders phenomenon has changed completely. I do not now mourn the end of Sanders's candidacy, because in his second run for the White House he proved himself to be just another politician: He deemphasized or outright jettisoned his politically inconvenient stances in pursuit of power, while remaining true to a core far-left agenda that, in the absence of that aura of integrity, seems far scarier than it did four years ago.It was always one of the more striking aspects of Sanders's rhetoric that he could sound like an immigration hawk. In a 2015 interview with Vox, he famously called open borders a “Koch brothers proposal”:> It would make everybody in America poorer — you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation-state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.To be fair, Sanders wasn't necessarily getting immigration-policy advice from Mark Krikorian. He represented an older strain of left-wing thought that argued against immigration from the perspective of labor unions concerned about multinational corporations and undercut wages. But nevertheless, when he spoke of the issue, he could sound surprisingly like Donald Trump, then rampaging his way through the Republican primaries.That Bernie Sanders is gone now. His 2020 platform called for “breaking up ICE and CBP and redistributing their functions to their proper authorities,” unilaterally reinstating President Obama’s DACA and DAPA programs, and decriminalizing illegal immigration, among other things. For the most part, he became difficult to distinguish from his Democratic opponents on immigration, except insofar as some of them chased after him as he moved left in the hope of capturing more votes. Thus did this unconventional aspect of his public persona recede.The story on gun rights is much the same. Vermont is caricatured as a semi-socialist state, and maybe the caricature is accurate. But it also has relatively loose gun laws, and a high rate of per capita firearm ownership. As a representative of the state in various capacities, Sanders has compiled a record that reflects this. The National Rifle Association helped him first win election to the House in 1990, where he would vote against the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. As a senator, he has supported bills that would allow firearms in checked bags on Amtrak trains. And after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, Sanders said, “If you passed the strongest gun-control legislation tomorrow, I don’t think it will have a profound effect on the tragedies we have seen.” Though this record was a source of consternation for an otherwise adoring left in 2016, and was fodder for Hillary Clinton's campaign, he didn’t run away from it then.Four years later, the story was very different. A watershed moment came during a February Democratic primary debate, when he was asked about his past vote to protect gun manufacturers from lawsuits pertaining to the use of guns in shootings. “I’ve cast thousands of votes, including bad votes,” Sanders said. “That was a bad vote.” His 2020 platform proposed a buyback program for guns and a ban on assault weapons. In a fitting bookend to his elective career, it also demanded that Democrats “take on the NRA and its corrupting effect on Washington.” Once again, Sanders had tacked left under pressure in search of votes, willingly abandoning a unique part of his persona to the political needs of the moment.Shorn of the ideological heterodoxies that made him appealing, Sanders was reduced to his essence as a crusader for hard-left economics. When, in 2015, he argued that, “You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm-spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country,” I still regarded his economic platform as a quirk that might inspire him to join with fiscally conservative Republicans to, say, cut corporate welfare. But it wasn’t a quirk at all: He recently expressed disgust at the idea that someone might make money developing drugs to fight the novel coronavirus.Meanwhile, in his second campaign certain aspects of Sanders’s record that were always there for those who wanted to see them became impossible to ignore. We knew in 2016 that, as mayor of Burlington, the just-married Sanders had visited the Soviet Union on a mission to procure a Soviet sister city that doubled as his honeymoon. Those facts would be more forgivable if he had not offered unqualified praise for Cuban “literacy programs” and the economic progress of Communist China in 2020.In 2016, smitten with the heterodox left-populist gadfly I thought I’d found, I either did not realize the currency that Sanders's economic views had in the Democratic Party or did not anticipate the extent of the foothold they would gain in it. This is due mostly to young voters, who in a 2019 Gallup survey thought almost equally well of capitalism and socialism (51 percent to 49 percent). Sanders consistently garnered more support than Clinton from this group in 2016. In 2020, he maintained that support to a certain extent, though it didn’t translate into actual votes as easily as it had before. Both times around, the center of the Democratic Party, such as it is, held. But the young democratic socialists uncovered by his campaigns continue to maintain that they are the future of the party’s politics, and of the country’s.If they are right, we can be sure that they won’t remember the Bernie Sanders whom I, as an outside conservative observer, once found somewhat compelling. For that Sanders held certain views they would abhor, views that he changed or abandoned when it became politically expedient. And that may be the most disappointing thing about Sanders: In the end, he stands revealed as just another guy all too happy to tell people what they wanted to hear.
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Boris Johnson says Brexit divorce must not exceed £20bn
Boris Johnson is blocking plans to increase the £20billion divorce offer to the EU.
The Foreign Secretary has warned Theresa May that he cannot accept a further 'unilateral' increase in the size of the divorce payment without written guarantees from Brussels on a future trade deal.
The EU is demanding agreement on a £53billion divorce bill by next Friday as a condition for starting trade negotiations this year.
Boris Johnson (pictured with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres) is blocking plans to increase the £20billion divorce offer to the EU
During talks in the Swedish city of Gothenburg today, EU Council president Donald Tusk will warn Mrs May that it is 'not a given' that Brussels will give the green light to trade talks next month unless there is 'progress' on the divorce bill.
Prominent German MEP Hans-Olaf Henkel yesterday said the UK would have to agree to 'unconditional surrender' to make progress.
Chancellor Philip Hammond and Business Secretary Greg Clark are urging the Prime Minister to increase her offer, arguing that it is essential for business to get trade talks started and secure agreement on a two-year transition deal.
Mrs May is sympathetic to the idea, and appears to have told an ally of German chancellor Angela Merkel that she will increase the UK's offer in the coming weeks.
But Mr Johnson is now digging in against the idea of handing over more cash. He is backed by Environment Secretary Michael Gove and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox.
Brexit Secretary David Davis is also said to harbour doubts about the idea of handing over more money without 'cast-iron assurances' that a comprehensive trade deal will be forthcoming.
A Cabinet source told the Daily Mail that discussions on the issue had reached an 'impasse'. The source added: 'Time is running out and there is no agreement.'
Mr Johnson was reluctant to back the initial £20billion offer made by the Prime Minister in her Florence speech in September. In July, he said the EU could 'go whistle' if it continued to table excessive demands for payment.
A close ally of the Foreign Secretary last night confirmed that he was resisting any increase in the offer. 'His feeling, along with that of others, is that once we have conceded the money we have lost any residual leverage we have in terms of the trading relationship,' the friend said.
British Prime Minister Theresa May, left, speaks with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven during a bilateral meeting prior to an EU summit in Gothenburg, Sweden on Wednesday
'He is not opposed to making a payment but you cannot make that unilaterally before you know what you are getting in return.'
Next month's EU summit is seen by both sides as the 'deadline' for beginning trade talks in time for Britain's departure in March 2019. Failure to make progress will significantly increase the risk of the UK leaving without a deal.
Downing Street sources last night dismissed reports of a row as 'speculation'.
But Mr Johnson's determination to hold firm on the financial offer will be strengthened by evidence yesterday that the EU is proposing only a modest trade deal with the UK which would hit the City.
Pro-EU 'big band' that WE pay for
Taxpayers’ money is being given to an opponent of Brexit – so he can compose a bizarre piece of music in support of the European Union.
The Government is giving experimental musician Matthew Herbert a share of a £182,000 grant to produce music with his Brexit Big Band.
His handout, which could total £50,000, comes from the Department for International Trade, which is headed by pro-Brexit campaigner Liam Fox.
Mr Herbert will work on the project for the next two years, releasing an album on the day in 2019 when Britain leaves the EU. His project is now at the start of its taxpayer-funded ‘collaborative project right across Europe celebrating artistic and musical collaboration and communities across national borders’.
Taxpayers’ money is being given to an opponent of Brexit – so he can compose a bizarre piece of music in support of the European Union
He will accept any types of ‘found sound’ and at a recent Brexit-inspired concert at London’s Barbican theatre, the percussion for one of his pieces was provided by ripping up a pile of copies of the Daily Mail.
He said his project is designed to strike back against the idea of Britain ‘retreating into an absurd little enclave’. The musician, who once burnt a cello to see what it sounded like, suggested the Referendum ‘leave’ vote was motivated by ‘hate’.
He also wants to create ‘something that’s the opposite of Brexit – about collaboration, about creativity’.
Last year he was commissioned by the BBC to deconstruct Beethoven, which involved using a cutting machine to destroy a violin and other string instruments.
Last night pro-Brexit Conservative MP Peter Bone said: ‘This is not a good use of money. I think most taxpayers, whether Remainers or Leavers, will find it extraordinary that we are giving money to someone whose principal activity seems to be to campaign against the decision of the British people to come out of the European Union. If he is so anti what the Government’s doing perhaps he might like to consider giving the money back.’
A spokesman for the international trade department said: ‘Grants are awarded after being scrutinised and reviewed by a panel of industry experts who judge each application on artistic and commercial merits.’
Leaked documents prepared for the EU's chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, revealed an uncompromising stance.
While Mrs May has called for a 'deep and special' future relationship, Brussels negotiators are warning that a basic trade deal similar to that agreed with Canada last year is the only option available to the UK.
Such a deal would infuriate the City because it would mean that financial instituions could lose 'passporting' rights which allow them to operate across the EU.
Paul Drechsler, president of the Confederation of British Industry, said earlier this month that it would be insufficient because the deal only covers goods and not service industries.
The EU's stance emerged during internal discussion on the shape of a future trade deal between Mr Barnier and member states earlier this week. The so-called 'scoping' document, said that the UK's desire to break free from wide-ranging Brussels regulations meant that a broad free trade deal mirroring current trade ties with the bloc is 'not compatible'.
Last night MEP Mr Henkel, former head of the Federation of German Industry (BDI), said Mrs Merkel was in close alignment with Brussels on the need to drive the hardest of bargains.
'I think what the German government wants is identical to what Michel Barnier and (Guy) Verhofstadt want,' he said referring to the European parliament's lead Brexit co-ordinator. 'The BDI has consistently followed the line of the German government on this, so if I were to use a military term, what they want is unconditional surrender.'
But Mr Davis warned Germany not to put 'politics above prosperity'. Speaking at an economic conference in Berlin last night, the Brexit Secretary said Germany industry had much to lose if the EU failed to agree a comprehensive free trade deal before the UK leaves in March 2019.
Trade between the two countries is worth £160billion a year, while 220,000 Germans work for 1,200 British firms in Germany, Mr Davis said. 'In the face of those facts I know that no one would allow short-term interests to risk those hard-earned gains because putting politics above prosperity is never a smart choice,' he added.
Source
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5091365/Boris-vs-Cabinet-war-Brexit-bill.html
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