But then we'll be alright, won't we? - today's edition
I have doubts
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We’re experiencing a fleeting moment of national consensus this morning. No one across the ideological spectrum is denying that Joe Biden turned in an appalling performance at last night’s debate.
Democrats are understandably in panic mode, because in their hearts of hearts, they know they’re stuck with him:
he already has 99 percent of the pledged delegates at the Democratic National Convention required to vote for him on the first ballot. There is no mechanism by which to remove him as nominee.
But the Biden situation is merely a symptom of our nation’s flatlining spiritual health. There are layers and layers of symptoms that are outward expressions of the actual cause of our dire circumstances.
This eats at me. There are compelling arguments for the moral imperative of accepting the binary-choice lens and voting. One of the two parties is going to prevail at the presidential level and probably set the tone for the national “conversation” down the ballot.
But the binary-choice way of viewing the political landscape strikes me as itself being a form of panic. Take Adam Kinzinger’s recent public declaration of his intent to vote for Biden. Adam Kinzinger is of the breed that becomes more rare by the day: an actual conservative with a determination to affect public policy. He says that that is exactly why he so declared. How does he feel this morning?
But even if Biden were robust and clear-thinking, we’d still be a gravely spiritually sick country.
The Democrat party, to reiterate something I’m compelled to say often here, has three driving agendas: militant identity politics, climate alarmism, and wealth redistribution.
I very much applaud what the New Reagan Caucus, a nascent but vitality-filled network that in a few short months has established viable chapters in several states and can point to some primary successes in Utah, is doing.
But consider what it’s up against. Since I discussed two recent examples of boneheadedly alienating moves by state Republican parties - the Colorado party’s burn-all-Pride-flags response to Pride month and the Louisiana party’s mandating of the displaying of the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom - Oklahoma has entered the fray with an executive-branch decree that the Bible be taught in grades 5 though 12. “Strict compliance is expected.”
What’s wrong with that? After all, as state school superintendent Ryan Walters says, it’s the cornerstone of Western civilization.
But come on. It’s a stunt. The purpose is obviously to “own the libs,” to get up in the face of the Left.
That’s where the action is on the Right.
N.S. Lyons, whose Substack The Upheaval I started reading because I resonated with his assertion that
[w]e are living through an era of epochal change. At few times in history have so many currents of civilizational transformation coalesced and crashed into us at once, and at such speed. To say that we are being unmoored by massive technological, economic, environmental, geopolitical, and socio-cultural shifts would be to insufficiently limit our description of what is occurring. Vast new ideational, epistemological, and arguably even theological frameworks for how to understand and interact with reality have emerged and are now spreading across the world.
Overwhelmed, and with no contemporary experience with which to easily contextualize and comprehend what is happening, our natural tendency is to ignore it, to dismiss, excuse, and normalize. Today is much like yesterday, this week much like last week. The economy continues to grow. Besides, we think, change is normal; political games and cultural fads come and go, life will remain much the same. But in our bones many of us can feel the rumbling of the earthquake, and intuit the terrible truth: we are experiencing a tectonic upheaval, a rending, uprooting, cataclysmic shift from one era of history to another. And in such times there will, inevitably, be blood.
The world is being forcibly reconfigured by at least three concurrent revolutions: a geopolitical revolution driven by the rise of China; an ideological revolution consuming the Western world; and a technological revolution exacerbating both of the former.
I became uneasy with what he was up to when he signed onto the National Conservatism project, and now it seems he’s gone full Kurt “new rules, bitch” Schlichter in his latest post, “Cast Away All Illusions and Prepare For Struggle.” In it he speaks disparagingly of actual conservatism, saying it’s “utterly failed to conserve much of anything, republic included. And none of their habitually muttered invocations of the Constitution’s sacred text have turned the tide in the least. Sadly, theirs is a god that failed” and “[t]he Constitution was a very fine document, successfully codifying the unique character of the young Anglo-American nation. Many of us dearly hope it can yet be restored and re-enforced, in spirit and law. But the time for conservatives’ hubristic habit of quibbling over American exceptionalism or the precise meaning of America’s founding has well and truly passed.”
Disturbing, toxic stuff. But it’s the Republican impetus now.
Stomp ‘em into the dust. Brandish your knife and get in the mud.
I’m hard pressed to see how that moves us to a more desirable national environment.
And there’s the matter of the world in which the United States of America exists. I realize most post-Americans aren’t very interested in foreign policy, but the international scene becomes more dangerous by the day.
There’s the fact that nations both friendly and hostile saw last night’s debacle.
We’re now at the point at which speaking of a “Ukraine conflict” doesn’t provide a complete picture of a continent in distress. Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia are spending 2.2 billion euros on a 1,500-mile defense line, calling the need of it “dire and urgent.” 300 French nuclear missiles are going to be spread across Europe.
Iran is abandoning talk of only wanting nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, with many top officials openly talking of acquiring nuclear bombs.
Putin recently went to Pyongyang and inked a formal mutual defense alliance with Kim. He’s now proud to be leading a pariah state and basking in the brotherhood of other such rogue regimes.
Neither of the presidential candidates we saw onstage last night is capable of the requisite serious the moment demands.
Biden has dribbled out the materiel Ukraine needs to resolutely defeat Russia, and has only grudgingly allowed Ukraine to use US weapons to attack targets inside Russia. Regarding Israel, he and Antony Blinken still talk of ceasefires and a two-state solution, even as Hamas skims off most humanitarian aid meant for Gaza civilians and stashes fighters and weapons caches in schools and hospitals.
Trump wasted everybody’s time with his three summits with Kim and his talk of a love affair and beautiful letters. Even prior to that, he made it clear he thought the North Korean threat was a big joke when he sent Kim a copy of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” record.
He has repeatedly expressed admiration for what he views as Xi’s and Putin’s strong leadership. Then there’s the “do whatever the hell they want” remark.
So I hope the likes of Adam Kinzinger and Heath Mayo will excuse me if, after giving their binary-choice argument careful consideration that involves no small amount of heartache, I come to a different conclusion.
So, what is to be done?
I’m praying about that.
I subscribed to Lyons’ Substack too (free version not paid) for the same reasons you did. Maybe you found him for the same reason I did: Real Clear Politics featured one of his early essays which I found highly intriguing. As he went on, he became less interesting and more conspiratorial. He made up for thinner and shallower analysis with grandiosity (a common trait on the New Right).
I’m no fan of Charles Kesler. He’s platformed enough Red Caesar weirdos that I seriously question his leadership at Claremont. But I read his essay on the NatCons back in the fall and he was very fair to them, but also tore them apart at an intellectual level, exposing the holes and weaknesses in their thinking, especially Hazony. I haven’t read all of their responses, but it seemed to me that Lyons failed to address the logic of his arguments at all, preferring some version of the “you’re just the establishment and we’re the true right wing” crap. Like many, Lyons overpromised and under-delivered. He is not nearly as smart or insightful as he perceives himself to be, and unfortunately this is true for much of the New Right.
I would be more open to some of their arguments if the nationalists were more straightforward and clear and ditched the sophistry. Some version of, “Traditionalists lost out when combining their forces with libertarians and the right needs a rediscovery of traditionalism-for-traditionalism’s sake,” and “there is a sizable section of voters who are socially conservative and fiscally liberal and we believe this is because these two things go together, so therefore we will offer an alternative to right-left politics based on cultural right-wingery and economical leftism” would have sufficed. I would have disagreed with them, but we could have had a real argument.
Instead we got a bunch of pseudointellectual psychobabble. Every time I try to engage with this stuff with an open mind, I hear or read something that makes me go, “Is this person a fool or have they really not read what they claim to have read or are they lying because they think their audiences won’t know the difference?”