Society

Quote of the Day

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Helen Pluckrose, quoted in Spiked:

Despite what the backing of prominent institutions might imply, I think these woke causes are supported by only a minority of people. It is not so uncommon for society to work this way. Look at theocracies, where perhaps only five per cent of people are theologians who teach the core values, but they are accepted by wider society as a benchmark for showing goodness and virtue. People either accept it without really understanding it, or just refrain from arguing with it. There are definitely parallels between that scenario and society today.

Nowadays non-leftists hesitate to express non-leftist views publicly, either from fear of retaliation or because they don’t think it’s worth the hassle. Leftists probably feel the same way. However, the situation is asymmetrical because so many prominent institutions and big businesses are controlled by leftists or by people who are afraid not to make at least a show of fealty to leftist ideas.

How Much Do Black Lives Matter?

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Ask Mr. Jones

Mr. Jones – the title of a movie released last year now playing on Amazon Prime – discovers that the New York Times’ Moscow Bureau and its Pulitzer writer Walter Duranty is covering up Stalin’s starvation of 4 million Ukrainians (16 million relative to today’s global population) to protect the gloss of socialism, later explaining “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs”. All the other journalists except Jones apparently go along for the same reason. The death toll of socialist ideology would reach 100 million (300 today) during the next several decades in the pursuit of Utopia. There were no omelets.

Only a few thousand (almost all black) deaths have as yet resulted from prior Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement protests, but this is only the beginning. The question is, what is their leaders’ version of Utopia and how many lives are they willing to sacrifice to achieve it?

Socialism, Fascism and Crony Capitalism are Sisters

Over the past several centuries two systems of political economy, socialism and capitalism, have competed. The distinguishing characteristic of all socialist variants is the authoritarian hand of politicians, whether or not “elected.” The distinguishing characteristic of capitalism is the invisible hand guiding the competitive market. Neither system promises “equal” outcomes: capitalism “fair” outcomes based on individual merit without eyesight to discriminate by color or sex, socialism in theory based on need as determined by politicians and bureaucrats.

Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism (2008) argues that fascism is a sister to Soviet socialism. What the U.S. has called “crony capitalism” has different features than the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, but includes authoritarian control over business and markets. Similarly, the welfare state democratic socialism has different features than Soviet socialism, but shares state control over income. The Progressive Movement in the U.S. has historically used the authoritarian political hand to benefit not just the rent-seeking cronies at the top (politicians, the intellectual elite, etc.) but also the working and under-class. The competitive market system that remained somewhat out of the state’s reach produced most of the income and wealth that funded this progressive largesse.

What is Racial and Social Justice?

Political power in the hands of the Democratic Party – was indisputably the source of racist oppression from its founding through the Great Society. The black/white wage gap has remained unchanged since for those employed. What has changed is black participation in the labor force. The old generation of eminent Black economists Tom Sowell (90), Walter Williams (84) and Shelby Steele (74) have, in hundreds of books and thousands of articles, many addressing the issue of race in America, argued that the Great Society has been the source of income and wealth disparities by creating dependence on the welfare state, massive penalties for marriage (raising the percent of live births outside of wedlock from 10% to over 70%) and work (a marginal tax rate over 100% on earned income), restrictive policies such as minimum wage, and opposition to charter schools.

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Lamar Alexander on Statues

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A few years ago I started considering fiction, non-fiction, speeches, movies in subjective terms: some made me simply “happy”; some didn’t. This is probably a function of sentimental aging; maybe I let my guard down to accept the hokey. But cynicism tops everything when we are rebels without a cause and perhaps I finally left that behind. Certainly, it is more difficult for me to appreciate a Bergman movie than in the sixties.

Of course happiness is part identification – in being an American (or Texan or Nebraskan or woman). But it also comes from a telling religious narrative. Warmth came from narratives or axioms or theories or gestures that seemed quintessentially human. We are aware of our broken nature – all of our broken natures – but we see an action prompted by our better angels – heroism, love, loyalty, generosity, nobility, strength. We are moved by the sailor at the gate at Corpus Christi, the generosity of music sung to the elderly during covid quarantines. Plenty of works seem inspired by our worse angels – cynical, bitter, moving into nihilism: paintings from the the thirties in Germany, harsh preachy modern art simmering with “Gramscian” arguments. In short, the ugly: graffiti on a statue, violent destruction of the great Shaw statue, the ignorance of the mob. But yesterday, I turned on the tv and paused at Lamar Alexander in mid-argument on the removing of statues.

I felt, well, happy & filled by the richness of human nature he described. I wonder about his effect. The objective, thoughtful rational comments, which make this blog so attractive, might be a bit subjective here. What does this and other moments in the last few weeks make you feel? Does he disgust you or do you feel warmth from it? What do our feelings mean? Some of the best lit crit begins with the feeling of the reader and then bores down on it, trying to analyze what prompted the feeling, what the feeling meant in a broader and deeper way than just one person’s response.

Thanks to Grurray, a link comes in below. I had found the transcrit and it lies below the fold; a border state statesman’s statement.

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Charlottesville Revisited – The Next American Rebellion Won’t Be a Black Swan

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The 2020 Presidential election is being tee’d up to foment racial animosity between Biden’s Blacks and Trump’s Deplorables.

The2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is far ahead of the incumbent Donald Trump in the polls, but two thirds of his supporters cite fear of Trump being re-elected, mostly due to perceptions of racism, rather than support for the candidate or his Party’s Platform. Biden’s core supporters are angry black protestors, Trump’s core are largely angry white “deplorables.”

The Charlottesville Premise

Bucolic Charlottesville is rich in political symbolism as home to the University of Virginia founded by Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and founder of the Democratic Republican Party. Virginia was the Capital of the South during the great Civil War, Charlottesville the site of the statue of the Confederate military leader Robert E. Lee. In 2017 riots broke out there between black groups led largely by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement leading protests of this and other statues. After strongly condemning the historically racist groups that a Charlottesville resident had invited to oppose the destruction, President Trump said that there were “good people” on both sides of the monument issue, then insisted that the racial hatred must stop.

Some conservatives would go along with tearing down Confederate statues. But predictably, the Founding Fathers were targeted next. Statues of George Washington have already been destroyed and the Washington Monument is on the chopping block. In New York, where the current governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Cuomo renamed the Tappan zee Bridge after himself (technically, his father), political leaders have voted to remove Thomas Jefferson’s statue, the Jefferson Memorial sure to follow. Even Lincoln isn’t safe.

The Charlottesville premise is that America was born to slavery and American racist oppression never ended, causing the current income and wealth gap with whites, and that the statues are symbols of this inborn oppression, The Democratic Party Platform to be finalized in August promises to eliminate racial income and wealth differences by doubling down on traditional socialist redistribution. The young party leaders correctly argue that this will require “fundamental change,” a political Jacobin revolution converting America from a failed meritocratic Republic to a “peoples’ democracy.”

I’ve argued elsewhere that the economic and social costs of this agenda pose an existential threat to America. However unrealistic, “moral imperatives” trump constitutional, institutional and resource constraints. Nations don’t choose suicide, they just stumble into it one step at a time.

Governor Cuomo responded to Trump’s 2016 campaign theme to Make America Great Again (MAGA) that “America was never that great” based on its racial history. The liberal main stream media labeled Trump, the Republican Party and anyone who might disagree with their Charlottesville premise – hence their platform – as racist. When the Democrats decided to shift attention from their platform by choosing as an interim “centrist” leader the soon to be 78 year old Joe Biden, it wasn’t surprising that when announcing his candidacy he chose to make Trump’s racism his central campaign issue by replaying a truncated clip of Trump’s Charlottesville “good people” quote.

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Saying “No”

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I lifted a graphic from last weekend’s Powerline Week in Pictures, and posted it on my Facebook feed (where I post only anodyne stuff and things to do with my books, home improvements, and social schedule) which pretty much sums up how I’m feeling this week. Kermit the Frog stares out a rain-drop-misted window, and says, “Sounds Like Thunder Outside But With the Way 2020 is Going, It Could Be Godzilla.”

Even before one could draw a breath of relief that the Chinese Commie Crud had not ravaged the US population anything like the 1918 Spanish Flu did, and that life was returning to something like normal, what with businesses slowly reopening here came the stomping behemoth of violent protests and race-riots, in the wake of the death (possibly caused by drugs rather than the apparent mistreatment) of a long-time violent criminal of color at the hands of a white police officer.

This entire brutal and grotesque encounter was on video and understandably condemned as unacceptable overreaction on the part of the officer by just about every reasonable person of any color who watched it. Serious concerns regarding the militarization of police have been raised for at least a decade among thoughtful citizens, what with so many instances of police barging into houses in no-knock and full SWAT mode (often the wrong house, and opening fire indiscriminately), of abusing civil forfeiture statutes and traffic fines as a means of making budget. This concern was exacerbated by resentment during the Chinese Commie Crud lockdown enforcing social distancing like pursuing a solitary paddle-boarder, all alone on the ocean, and going all-out on parents tossing a softball in a park with their kid.

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