Anyone who has bothered to read Ludwig von Mises immediately knows that the answer is no. However, because of a few out of context quotations from his book, Liberalism, every few years he is attacked as one. The most recent offender is Michael Lind, making such ridiculous arguments I wonder if Poe’s law applies to Salon.
He quotes Mises:
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.
Now this quotation looks bad. Mises literally writes that fascism has saved European civilization. However, it is important to consider the context within which Mises was writing. The Soviet Union was about a decade old and had already starved 3-10 million people under war communism. The output of heavy industry had fallen to 20 percent of 1913. Communist parties were all over Europe and close to power.
Mises, out of all people, stood to be most horrified by this. He wrote the most penetrating critique of communism, warning of the impossibility of rationally allocating resources without prices. Prices were only meaningful with private property and market transactions. Fascism, on the other hand, was a new phenomenon. Hitler hadn’t taken power in Europe. Fascists had not started any wars. They had not yet committed genocide.
Hindsight is 20-20. Perhaps it is too much to expect Mises to be knowledgeable about the future evils of fascism — wait, no it isn’t. Mises was a genius. Let’s quote the entire passage rather than the two sentences Michael Lind does.
So much for the domestic policy of Fascism. That its foreign policy, based as it is on the avowed principle of force in international relations, cannot fail to give rise to an endless series of wars that must destroy all of modern civilization requires no further discussion. To maintain and further raise our present level of economic development, peace among nations must be assured. But they cannot live together in peace if the basic tenet of the ideology by which they are governed is the belief that one’s own nation can secure its place in the community of nations by force alone.
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.
So, not only does Mises dislike fascism in 1927, he also fully realizes the threat to European peace that it is. He takes the likelihood of what fascism will lead to as so obvious it “requires no further discussion.” Viewing fascism as anything more than an “emergency makeshift” would be a “fatal error.”
Reading the full passage it is clear that Mises had a nuanced and amazingly prescient understanding of fascism. Forced to choose between two of the greatest evils of the 20th century, he chose the fascists, fully recognizing where they would lead if they retained power and warning against it.
Now, unlike Michael Lind I try to be reasonable. I read passages in full, and do not selectively quote to obscure meaning. That being said, based on my reading of Liberalism I am forced to conclude Mises was a time traveler. It is the only possible explanation of such brilliance.
As a bonus, if you’re interested in what Mises wrote about the domestic policy of fascism:
Many people approve of the methods of Fascism, even though its economic program is altogether antiliberal and its policy completely interventionist, because it is far from practicing the senseless and unrestrained destructionism that has stamped the Communists as the archenemies of civilization. Still others, in full knowledge of the evil that Fascist economic policy brings with it, view Fascism, in comparison with Bolshevism and Sovietism, as at least the lesser evil.
This sort of thing has a lot to do with why, if I could do it over again, I wouldn’t have bothered with anthropology. Reading a review like Jon Marks on A Troublesome Inheritance, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that refusing to consider the implications of Wade’s argument has everything to do with protecting the academic turf anthropologists have carved out, and nothing to do with scientific inquiry or truth.
It would be one thing if Marks just thought Wade was wrong; he’s a geneticist (as is Greg Cochran, who was also unnerved by some of the sources), Wade isn’t. But he doesn’t even bother to argue with the thing, he just calls it “idiocy,” “fundamentally anti-intellectual,” and “as crassly anti-science as any work of climate-change denial or creationism.”
If you’re paying attention, Marks tells us what this is actually about: “Wade’s book is of a piece with a long tradition of disreputable attempts to rationalize visible class distinctions by recourse to invisible natural properties.”
What really chaps the good professor’s ass is that Wade has violated political dogmas, not scientific ones — because genetics itself, to Marks, is a political dogma. I’m not exaggerating.
Note that the review also appears in a labor rag. And that he once tried to get someone fired over Wade’s invitation to speak at a Leakey Foundation audience on one of his earlier books. And that Savage Minds has declared war on A Troublesome Inheritance, in between unbelievably stupid posts about anthropologists as “scholarly hipsters.”
Further Reading
The AAA debate between Wade and Agustín Fuentes is online, and can be streamed here. It’s worth a watch. More debate here, and here’s Steve Sailer’s old piece on reading Marks’ Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History.
I also can’t resist linking to this epic rant from A.J. West back in January on why he regrets studying socio-cultural anthropology:
I want to emphasise that I am not in any way a political conservative and I don’t oppose the social and political aims that have become entrenched parts of anthropology departments. But I don’t think those aims are what anthropology is about, I don’t think obscurantist pseudo-philosophy is a good way to achieve them, and I don’t think writing obscure academic texts about how humans are now trans-human feminist cyborgs empowers minority groups or the working class, or achieves any worthwhile aim in any sphere of human activity.
In his brief 2008 review of George McKenna’s Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, Walter Russell Mead juxtaposes two interpretations of America’s Puritan inheritance; McKenna’s and that laid out by Robert Kagan in Dangerous Nation:
In Dangerous Nation, Robert Kagan argues that the influence of Puritan New England in subsequent U.S. national development has been greatly exaggerated. McKenna has a very different take, and this thoughtful and well-written book makes a powerful case that Puritan values and ideas continue to shape American identity and politics down to the present day.
Well, sort of. What Kagan argues is not that the Puritans lacked influence, it’s that they were not isolationists. They “helped unleash liberal, materialist forces within Protestantism that overwhelmed the Puritan fathers’ original godly vision and brought New England onto the path … toward individualism, progress, and modernity.”
Now, adherents of Moldbuggian historiography — “We don’t just live in something vaguely like a Puritan theocracy. We live in an actual, genuine, functioning if hardly healthy, 21st-century Puritan theocracy” — might find it amusing that Mead would even find something dichotomous about Puritan values and acquisitive universalism. At the very least, it’s splitting hairs. (Mead is Episcopalian, and his criticisms of the church are excellent — bishops should shut up about their social justice crusading when their church is falling apart, “the blue social model is not the Kingdom of God”)
That narrative is rhetorically appealing — Harvard rules the world, the War of Secession was the “conquest of America by Massachusetts” — but there are significant flaws. Southern Democrats were often the loudest voices for expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it was Jefferson himself who coined the phrase “empire of liberty.” Nevertheless, the general point, accepted by Kagan, McKenna, Moldbug, and Mead is that as a revolutionary protestant country, we still behave like revolutionary protestants. This should concern today’s conservatives; it definitely concerns Yuval Levin.
Yet as Justin Logan points out, this is not an argument typically associated with thinkers of Kagan’s ideological stripe:
Kagan presents the history of American foreign policy since 1898 [and also since 1789] as one of almost constant foreign intervention and implies that America’s “wars of choice” are its destiny.
Wars can be either choices or destiny, but they cannot be both. Still, this is a tantalizingly provocative argument, one that brings Kagan close to revisionist diplomatic historians like Charles Beard, William Appleman Williams, William O. Walker III, and Richard Immerman. (Of course, these scholars see America’s tendency to intervene as a bug; Kagan views it as a feature.)
*****
On the way from Fredericksburg to Williamsburg last Saturday I caught a bit of Tom Wallace’s “Fortress of Faith” show (the 5/3 edition entitled “Should Christians Be Involved in Politics” at the link). Most of it was nauseating Islamophobic claptrap, about how Andre Carson and Keith Ellison’s swearing-ins were illegitimate because they used Qur’ans, Sharia is on the way, and that sort of thing.
The more interesting segment was about the role of radical protestantism in the American founding. The hosts related stories about the “Black Robe Regiment” — which is all over the internet and conservative talk radio, by the way, in part thanks to Glenn Beck, a devotee of the anticlerical Thomas Paine. They talked about the Mayflower Compact and quoted mullah Charles G. Finney.
This is an extremely attractive worldview for the sort of person who is moved by slogans like, “praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” But how conservative is it, really?
*****
Rhys Isaac’s Pulitzer-winning Transformation of Virginia contrasted the Anglican gentry-led patriot movement prior to the revolution with the contemporaneous evangelical revival:
… the most important distinction between the two movements lay in the relationship of each to the old way of life. Where evangelicalism began as a rejection and inversion of customary practices, the patriot movement initially tended toward a revitalization of ancient forms of comunity. The mobilization to defy Parliament — the meetings at courthouses, the elections, the committees and their resolutions — coincided with, and for a short-lived moment reinforced, the traditional structures of local authority. The independent companies were a barely popularized form of the old militia, while the ceremonies of the toasts and the feting were but adaptations of customary conviviality. With aggressions for the moment turned outward, all of these forms featured and intensified the style and values of pride and self-assertion that evangelicalism so sternly condemned.
The political enthusiasts experienced no equivalent of the isolated anguish of the awakened who were awaiting conversion. Fundamental shifts in values and organization that occur outside and against existing structures are highly subversive of established authority. The spread of concern for vital religion challenged the hegemony of the gentry; the patriot leaders, on the contrary, vigorously reasserted the cultural dominance of the elite. A view of the diametrically opposed social tendencies of the two movements raises the question of whether the patriot ideology did not gain appeal among the Virginia gentry partly because it served as a defensive response to the open rejection of deference that was increasingly manifested in the spread of evangelicalism.
*****
By all of the above, I hope I’ve sketched the outline of what amounts to an identity crisis in the lumpenconservative movement. An evangelical Tea Partier claims to want to conserve America’s institutions, but inherits a theological doctrine and rhetorical style that was built to overthrow them (both colonial and royal, as the Isaac passage shows). The implications are nontrivial. It suggests, for one thing, that populist conservative politics are a mistake, and that the conservative movement differs from our international diplomatic establishment over a mere few particulars about how we might build the Kingdom of Heaven. Perhaps there is a clue here to help explain conservatives’ relatively consistent support for war and empire, despite their morally, fiscally, and civilly destructive qualities.
Southerners and Catholics were the two stones rejected by the builders of American patriotism. The first was rejected because the Southern narrative–a pastiche of legend, fancied genealogies, and the dreamy tales of Sir Walter Scott–ran counter to fiercely dynamic, progressive story which the sons and daughters of the Puritans had absorbed from childhood. The second stone, Catholicism, was rejected for the more obvious reason that it was the stone that had to be smashed, ground into powder, before the final trumpet could sound. …
All that changed with Vietnam, Watergate, and long national Lenten period that followed. The Northeast, the birthplace of the Puritan narrative of an American “mission,” was now the region most hospitable to doubters. It was all just a facade, they claimed, for American capitalism’s global ambitions. New England, the birthplace of American providentialism, was abandoning the whole idea of Providence in American life, while Southerners, the outsiders in the Puritan-told story of America, and the Roman Catholics, once considered un-American because of their allegiance to a “foreign prince,” were now the most fervent believers in the Puritans’ patriotic account of America’s glorious mission. The wild olives, the church-going Catholics and Southerners, were now grafted to the main stem of American patriotism.
I think McKenna is putting a rather positive gloss on the modern history here — very recent events have proven that anti-Catholic persecution is alive and well. And if you’re feeling down on Dixie, just read Salon.
Unfortunately the modern conservative movement has operated under the false premise that economic self-interest will provide the necessary internal check. In an effort to counter so-called “liberalism,” postwar conservatives such as William F. Buckley substituted religion for the classical ideas of republican virtue and civic responsibility that are the foundation of earlier 19th and 20th century conservatism. By fusing a diffuse and undefined concept of religion with extreme libertarianism and its worship of free markets, postwar conservatives created a political philosophy that supports market competition as a good unto itself without any moral constraints based on a concept of the “common good” that transcends tribal preferences based on religion, culture, or race.
This philosophy is inconsistent with the Constitution in word and in spirit. It is inconsistent in word because it denies the competitive plurality of beliefs and ideas that is explicitly protected by the Bill of Rights. It is inconsistent in spirit because it not only denies our duty to pursue happiness together as citizens of the same republic, but also redefines “happiness” as the selfish pursuit of wealth, fame, and power in a manner incompatible with the moral principles of our founders. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle defines happiness as acts in pursuit of the highest virtue, carried out in the context of a complete life. Steeped in classical ideas, and particularly Stoic conceptions of virtue (Washington had his soldiers perform Addison’s Cato at Valley Forge), our founders would have understood, appreciated and internalized Aristotle’s definition.
It can be very interesting to track what sort of religious people the media finds useful or worthy of promoting. In the midst of the Episcopal Church’s crack-up, the Daily Beast gave a weekly column to gay bishop and Center for American Progress fellow Gene Robinson, who has used his column space to harangue the Archbishop of Canterbury for not going fast enough on gay marriage.
The converse, of a conservative Anglican cleric being given a column to warn that the Episcopal Church’s radicalism, for which it stands alone (breaking the moratorium on the ordination of gay clergy time and time again, suing dissenters for everything down to their choir robes, etc), is causing such a rift that other parts of the Anglican Communion are sending missionary bishops to America to undermine it, is utterly unthinkable.
Sally Quinn, “On Faith” correspondent for the Washington Post, is a fairly good proxy for what fashionable people think about religion. Her Easter/Passover column is an absolute horror, insulting to any Jew or Christian of sincere faith. “All that matters is the sense of community that Easter and Passover rituals inspire,” reads the subhead. Sort of the spiritual-but-not-religious version of “government is just the name for the things we choose to do together.”
To Quinn, remembering the deliverance of the Jewish people, or the resurrection of the King of the Universe, are of secondary importance to the sociality rituals facilitate, which is a perspective you’d expect from someone who’s been covering elite culture for decades. She treats religion like hors d’oeurves at a Georgetown cocktail party, complete with a nod to the secular-seders trend, an acknowledgment that her equanimity between Judaism and Christianity has “nothing to do with” something so trivial as belief, and the reassurance, just in case you were wondering, that “I have been an atheist most of my life, although I don’t consider myself one now.”
That elite opinion holds religion to be merely a vessel into which we can pour all sorts of emotions and social goals should fill us with the fear of God, because our ruling class has far more ambitious designs than “inspiring community,” and He is not mocked.
Consider the religious views of right-leaning opinion columnists at the Post:
Notice that every religious person is a neocon, and the more sober voices are the less religious ones. It’s almost as if they’d like to convey the impression that American hegemony is an article of faith.
Now, watching neocons interpret history can be almost as amusing as reading their interpretations of poetry. Consider this bit from one of Jennifer Rubin’s — who functions at the Washington Post as the tattletale to the slightly less hawkish editorial board — dozens of attacks on Rand Paul, which David Harsanyi called “amazingly dishonest“:
A foreign policy expert at a center-left think tank puts it simply, saying Paul sounds like the “unreconstructed Taft-Lindbergh-Buchanan wing of party, ”referring to isolationist Republican Sen. Robert Taft, America Firster Charles Lindbergh and Pat Buchanan (who has opined that WWII need not have been fought).
Good heavens, the Taft-Lindbergh-Buchanan wing?! It’s truly strange that ‘Rand Paul comes from a wing of the party with a long history,’ is an insight Rubin finds worthy of granting anonymity to a liberal foreign policy analyst for. She means it to sound scary, because she adheres to a tendentious historiography in which Buchanan is a fascist, Lindbergh supported those proto-brownshirts in America First, and Taft was a Nazi symp. It’s as if Rubin gets her history from Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America.
Paul’s great transgression is his belief that there are some evils in the world that aren’t worth filling body bags with young Americans to eradicate, which is why he refuses to rule out containment of Iran. Rubin says this means that “he listens to no competent adviser.”
But we already know that the only competent advisors are Rubin’s friends. After Sarah Palin parted ways in 2011 with neoconservative foreign policy advisors Michael Goldfarb and Randy Scheunemann, Rubin wrote that, “Her about-face in foreign policy tells us a couple of things. First, her views then and perhaps now don’t spring from a well-grounded understanding of foreign policy but from briefing cards.”
Earlier that year, the Emergency Committee for Israel, of which Goldfarb is an advisor and which is registered to the same address as he and Scheunemann’s lobbying shop, paid for Rubin to go to Israel to attend a conference. Her criticisms take on a rather different cast in that light: ‘Sarah Palin is stupid because she’s not listening to the people who gave me a vacation to Israel anymore.’
Now, let’s have a look at who Rubin turned to to correct Paul’s mild World War II revisionism:
As for the allegation about Germany, [David] Adesnik expresses incredulity, “Sen. Paul’s comments on Germany are so eccentric that it’s hard to be sure what he’s even talking about. He refers to a U.S. blockade on Germany after World War One ‘which may have encouraged some of their anger.’ There is extensive debate about whether German resentment of the Versailles Treaty helped bring Hitler to power. …
David is a gentleman, he’s written a few things for me, and is far more intellectually honest than many in his camp. But this is rather strategically understated, and I get the feeling he knows that. There really isn’t “extensive debate,” at least among people worth reading. Peter Viereck’s Metapolitics (1941) and Freda Utley’s The High Cost of Vengeance (1948) are both great resources from the period, which simply take it as a given that post-Versailles grievances contributed to the rise of national socialism. I’ll leave the Pearl Harbor stuff alone because that’s a considerably knottier matter.
These sorts of insinuations, selective sourcing, and historiographical policing are typical of neoconservative journalism, in part because the ideology is fragile and on the defensive. Why else would ECI need to spend six figures bashing one of the handful of pro-peace Republican congressmen? If a half-dozen reporters stopped quoting maybe two dozen politicians and experts, the neocon echo chamber would effectively cease to exist. It’s a Potemkin movement.
Paul’s comments about Dick Cheney’s alleged war profiteering set off reliably bellicose columnists Rich Lowry and Bret Stephens, with Stephens sarcastically writing that the party should nominate him and be duly chastised, and Lowry saying his foreign policy sounds like it came out of a dorm room.
The facts are that Cheney, a strong proponent of privatizing military services, received a severance package from Halliburton worth tens of millions of dollars, mostly in stock options, when he joined the presidential ticket. He sold most of those, but some remained in 2003 when the Congressional Research Service looked into it. At the time, Halliburton had a number of contracts in Iraq. Whether that’s significant enough to impugn the Vice President’s decision-making, it’s hard to say, but if we were talking about a solar farm receiving a DOE loan guarantee, it undoubtedly would be. His warning last month against the “strain of isolationism” in the GOP, is something like Tom Steyer talking about why the Keystone pipeline must be stopped. Paul may not have been right about the cui bono of the second Iraq invasion and its subsequent occupation, but the general problem is one that Lowry and Stephens have never addressed, which makes me think they don’t think it exists.
I like to pickon Lowry (who started off as a researcher for Krauthammer) because we’re both Arlingtonians, though he went to Yorktown then UVA — a sure path to perpetual adolescence — and I went to H-B Woodlawn then William and Mary. We probably shoulder-tapped for beer at the same 7-11s. But he’s been in New York for years, and missed out on the post-9/11 defense contracting boom. That’s the most charitable reason I can think of for why he dismisses military cronyism as Alex Jones-ian nonsense but seems very concerned about other types.
Watching this transformation occur has made me much more of a get-the-hell-off-my-lawn Republican than an invade-the-world, invite-the-world type. As bureaucracies exist, first and foremost, to acquire and justify resources, so too do the diplomatic and defense contracting establishments depend on proving how useful they are — that’s just how incentives work. It seems to me that an awareness of this sort of creep is somewhere close to the heart of what it means to be conservative. You probably wouldn’t get that impression reading the Washington Post, but given their readership, who could blame them?
Joel Achenbach didn’t want to come back from his Iberian vacation:
Time used to be something we used to our advantage. … We revered our elders and put them at the zenith of our culture. The sun rose and the sun set, and the stars wheeled across the heavens at night in a clockwork universe. We could feel the seasons in our bones. We were masters of time. Then someone invented a sundial, and it’s been all downhill ever since.
Everyone I know is too busy and too rushed. If we ever do feel completely serene, centered and at peace with the world we know, that’s a harbinger of certain doom. It’s not simply that we have too much to do, it’s that we are expected to produce at an extraordinary pace. … Your “spare time” has become a slush fund for those who wish to extract from you ever more units of production.
He goes on to quote an older, rather luddite-ish column of his about the “paradox” of technology making us more productive. It’s the sort of complaint that Thomas Piketty dismisses as the “caprices of technology” in the new book Achenbach’s peers can’t stop raving about.
To my ear, Achenbach’s complaint is the sound of the bourgeois newspaperman realizing that his profession — and his country — is slipping away from him, and that time is just a town in Illinois.
One could go on about Marshall McLuhan, Burroughs’ word virus, and Jacques Attali — or the odd pedagogical techniques of the former CCRU — but Thomas Wolfe said it better anyway:
‘Summer has come and gone, has come and gone. And now –?’ But they will say no more, they will have no more to say; they will wait listening, silent and brooding as the frost, to time, strange ticking time, dark time that haunts us with the briefness of our days. They will think of men long dead, of men now buried in the earth, of frost and silence long ago, of a forgotten face and moment of lost time, and they will think of things they have no words to utter.
“And in the night, in the dark, in the living sleeping silence of the towns, the million streets, they will hear the thunder of the fast express, the whistles of great ships upon the river.
“What will they say then? What will they say?”
Only the darkness moved about him as he lay there thinking, feeling in the darkness: a door creaked softly in the house.
“October is the season for returning: the bowels of youth are yearning with lost love. Their mouths are dry and bitter with desire: their hearts are torn with the thorns of spring. For lovely April, cruel and flowerful, will tear them with sharp joy and wordless lust. Spring has no language but a cry; but crueller than April is the asp of time.
So happy spring, and if you’re into sharp joy and wordless lust, you have a week. The bit above is from Of Time and the River, book three, Telemachus, in which the young man returns from Harvard to find his father dead.
Reading the Odyssey growing up the character after whom the book is named was one I’d always identified with. I had naval officers for parents, and the sense that the only wars worth fighting had already been fought. We even lived in Ithaca for a while.
Anyway, we’ll never know how or if the Homeric character ruled, since what we know of the Telegony is extremely limited. But he made peace with the man who killed his father, his half-brother, and they went on to marry each other’s mothers.
Despite the undeniable sense that we live in a city of Buck Mulligans, I’ve always thought the character was a decent representation of some of Washington’s pathologies as well. Telemachus got his licks in slaughtering his mother’s suitors; politicians expropriate and transfer for The Cause, an NGO globocrat might dig a well in Africa. The most representative person in the swamp we call home is not a corrupt politician, but the unpaid intern who thinks “you haven’t really lived unless you’ve traveled” and is moved by The Perks of Being a Wallflower. We are strong, naive, dependent on our patrimony, and not fighting the real battle. Imagine Odysseus in the Joseph Brodsky poem spoken by Donald Rumsfeld to a young Republican national security analyst, and you’ll get a sense of what I mean.
If pride shall be in Paradise
I never can decide;
Of their imperial conduct,
No person testified.
Average ages of Capitol Hill staffers continue to drop, while the administrative state, America’s true sovereign, harasses political opponents and claims the authority to kill citizens without meaningful judicial oversight. Politics is something inconsequential people do while daddy’s off fighting wars.
If that’s too pessimistic a picture for you, try Reagan’s tribute to the eponymous martyr on for size. At the National Prayer Breakfast 1984:
[A]s the games began, he made his way down through the crowd and climbed over the wall and dropped to the floor of the arena. Suddenly the crowds saw this scrawny little figure making his way out to the gladiators and saying, over and over again, “In the name of Christ, stop.” And they thought it was part of the entertainment, and at first they were amused. But then, when they realized it wasn’t, they grew belligerent and angry. And as he was pleading with the gladiators, “In the name of Christ, stop,” one of them plunged his sword into his body. And as he fell to the sand of the arena in death, his last words were, “In the name of Christ, stop.”
And suddenly, a strange thing happened. The gladiators stood looking at this tiny form lying in the sand. A silence fell over the Colosseum. And then, someplace up in the upper tiers, an individual made his way to an exit and left, and others began to follow. And in the dead silence, everyone left the Colosseum. That was the last battle to the death between gladiators in the Roman Colosseum. Never again did anyone kill or did men kill each other for the entertainment of the crowd.
Assume for a moment that Frank Zappa is right, and government is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex, then this is quite the rich little tale as well.
For the time being, the crowd is as bloodthirsty as ever, and as journalists are quick to point out, no shortage of targets for their satisfaction. Yet the unease of the progressive pundit class over Brendan Eich’s purging was palpable — Andrew Sullivan came out swinging, and Bill Maher even used the phrase “gay mafia.” John Aravosis, while pointing out that the bastard deserved it because he also donated to the “anti-everything bigot” Pat Buchanan (and Ron Paul), seems to think he may find himself in the Colosseum someday:
[T]he problem isn’t just limited to [Suey] Park. Anyone who works in progressive politics is familiar with the never-ending (and of-late growing) Twitter mobs accusing them of being racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, biphobic, transphobic, ableist, and my personal favorite from just last year: that I apparently hate all animals, especially cats…
Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius.
Two of the best conservative writers working today have built careers on the premise that it’s possible to go home, to reject the preening Internet puritans and build a life of meaningful connection; Rod Dreher and Bill Kauffman. It’s a vision that holds a lot of appeal, but for a person who grew up in the loving arms of the U.S. Navy before settling in DC, strikes me as rather unrealistic. The desolating lesson of Wolfe and Homer is there’s no going back (and not just them either). “‘Past orientation’ is an impressively defensible value,” Nick Land says, “Retro-directed action, in contrast, is sheer error.” “Home also I cannot go,” as Joyce put it.
But we live in an age when it’s not easy to tell what’s past orientation and what’s “retro-directed action.” Narendra Modi or the Benedict Option seem to qualify as both. A Marxist would probably say — and in fact has said — charter cities are the latter. (This piece was my attempt to deal with the problem.)
What seems clear is the creeping fear that the “mobs” of Aravosis’ nightmares are after “no less a work than the overthrowing of Creation itself” will continue to grow:
Just in case you missed it, the line from Benson before he’s turned into a dog is “We can make beans into peas!” So far Cowen has only been pepper-sprayed for his legume-related lack of vision, but clearly we’re dealing with unstable people here, and his status in the Koch-funded impediment to Democracy makes him a target. We already know inter-species transformation cannot be ruled out.
