#R.R. Reno

[ladysnowangel]

2024 nonfiction reading - completed all, but the Jackson biography.

[darkmaga-returns]

The Church Has the Answers for Those Seeking Freedom

The ancient question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” lingers over the Church and the current cultural milieu. In other words, if Jerusalem is the metaphorical spiritual center of the universe, what is its relationship with Athens, the rational center of the universe? What is the relationship between reason and revelation? Have we become so ‘mature’ and modern in our thinking that we have outgrown our need for revelatory religion? Isn’t all that is “really real” the material, the tangible, the subjective, the emotive? What then is left for the Church, for the believer in God, for Scripture, for the Lordship of Jesus Christ?

All of this leaves many with the unquenchable desire to be set free from ancient truths, taboos, beliefs, modes of thinking and, ultimately, free from God. The argument goes: “We used to need God, but now that science, modern medicine, and AI have emerged we don’t need God anymore. We have been set free from the need to believe in God. We believe in science, in self, in the State.” 

And what will take Christianity’s place? It’s not atheism. It is a new paganism. Or as R.R. Reno has argued, the return of the “strong gods” of antiquity—of mysticism, the dark arts, and scientism. It is a vision of the self as the center of all things: the ability to refashion human nature (e.g., make a biological boy into a girl), or even turn men into gods. This is to play God. 

As Christians, such questions leave us fearful, frustrated, confused, and angry. What are we to do if we are set free from the foundations that have undergirded Western civilization, including Christianity?

[godbeautyorder]

Multiculturalism teaches a superficial civic etiquette of ritualized affirmations and inclusions. It fails to encourage genuine solidarity, something that, given our fallen nature, always needs to be renewed, all the more so today when our economic system and new technologies atomize and isolate us.

R.R. Reno

[bobguz]

"We think it's a conspiracy, it's much worse. It's a consensus!" The Wes...

Theologian and First Things editor R.R. Reno joins The Winston Marshall Show for a sweeping intellectual conversation on nationalism, identity, and the postwar consensus that still haunts the West. Reno argues that the true crisis isn’t a conspiracy—but a consensus forged after WWII: a fear of nationalism, religion, and moral conviction, shaped by the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He calls this the age of “weak gods”—a culture hollowed out by relativism, therapeutic liberalism, and meaning without truth. From Karl Popper and the Open Society to the cult of DEI and the rise of populist rebellion, Reno makes the case that Western civilization is suffering from a kind of civilizational PTSD—and that only the return of “strong gods” like loyalty, love, and faith can offer redemption. All this—postwar ideology, the collapse of civic trust, mass migration, shared mythos, and the spiritual malaise of modern life…

[danhung]

American Strong Gods

Was recently shared a thought provoking if somewhat frustrating essay - American Strong Gods - by online essayist N.S. Lyons (pen name)

The article appears to be a distillation of theologian R.R. Reno's book Return of the Strong Gods. (I guess I'll have to add this to my reading list.)

Mr. Lyons' cops Reno's epochal analysis defining the "Long Twentieth Century" as a period after World War I and II where global leadership became consumed with a "never again" mentality that evolved into "an all-consuming obsession with negation". On this, I don't necessarily disagree even if I find Lyon's prose a bit distasteful. This observation largely embodies the same argument made by author Yascha Mounk in The Identity Trap. (A book I read early in 2024 that I think was prescient and cautionary.)

Mounk attempts less epochal analysis and instead gets more directly to the argument that social identity has become too dominant in political discourse and runs counter to liberal ideals and in fact adopts many of the tendencies of the fascistic tendencies it hopes to combat - skepticism of objective truth, intolerance of discourse, and identity sensitive legislation over "equal treatment". Mounk also proposes an alternative - a return to universalist values and a politics based on finding common ground. Basically, a political or even a national coalition built on identity sensitivity will always be fragile and that appeals to self-interest will generally win over purity tests on social sorting. Unfortunately, in 2024, it was Donald Trump that more closely embodied "No Red States, No Blue States, only the United States." That the messenger was either disingenuous or attaching a devil's bargain of oligharchy and kleptocracy only goes to further the point on how out of touch Democratic messaging has become.

To return to Mr. Lyons' lens on this observation, I can't help but find his 5,000 word essay timid. He his piece ends up more pretentious navel gazing or cowardly observational journalism. Let's take a look - quotes bolded and my thoughts below.

This doctrine of prevention grants enormous moral weight to ensuring that open society values triumph over those of the closed society in every circumstance.

Throughout the essay, Lyons' seems to want to define "closed society" as something distinct and separate from "fascism". He defines the distinction between open and closed society as a fight between "strong gods" - strong beliefs, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, and strong communal identities - and "weak gods" - notably tolerance, dialogue, equality and aspiration to a "vague universal humanitarianism." While strong collective beliefs sound good to me, what exactly is a closed society focused on "strong gods" if it cannot also accept tolerance, discourse, and equality?

Meanwhile, the development of the open society consensus went hand-in-hand with the universal growth of the managerial state and its occlusion of democratic self-governance.

Beneath the sesquipedalian (see I can do it too) text, Lyons' shows a near gleefulness over the dismantling of government apparatus without making an argument for whether it is desirable. He focuses on these "deep state" institutions being illiberal and unaccountable with the "objective being both to constrain democratic outcomes... and to suppress serious public discussion". Somehow Lyons makes the oxymoronic argument that society needs more discourse and democracy immediately after defining such characteristics as quintessential of "weak gods" universal humanitarianism.

Beyond these assertions, Lyons spends no time addressing why an administrative state may exist at all or how it would be replaced in the "strong gods" epoch he's expects we're returning to moving forward into.

This masculine-inflected spirit of thumotic vitalism was suppressed throughout the Long Twentieth Century, but now it’s back.

A simple quote cannot do justice to Lyons' argument for the Restoration of Gods (do read the section yourself). Lyons blames open society and the consensus aspiration of producing a world of peace and progress for leading us to civilizational dissolution and despair. He calls back Ancient Greek nation-states, describes society as heaving masses seeking "masculine" action, and describes Trump as an archetype for "doing battle against the destruction of masculine heroism". And this, he believes marks the end of the "Age of Hitler." No longer will the fear of a next Hitler grip our society!

Lyons alludes to "hysterical accusations of fascism" which never materialize and is either advocating for or observing society's return to embracing singular totems of power while dismissing its adjacency to fascism. His timorous qualifier "for better and worse" in describing the beginning of the end of the Age of Hitler speaks volumes.

The thing about strong gods is that they’re strong, meaning they can be fearsome and dangerous; which is precisely why they also have the strength to protect and defend. It remains an open question whether this necessary renewal of strength and vitality can be reintegrated harmoniously into our societies, or whether our world will again be plunged into a time of significantly greater strife, danger, and war.

This is precisely the kind of over-intellectual, "I'm just calling balls and strikes" observational "insightfulness" that I hate. Have the balls to say, "I think fascism is what mankind needs." Even there, in 5,000 words of analysis, Lyons' somehow identifies hundred-year cycles which generally ended in conflagration and yet has no view that a return to a "strong gods" epoch could have a predictable outcome even if a century later? I myself would take "listless, self-abnegation" to war and strife if I had a choice.

If one identifies real - in fact potentially catastrophic risk - then have the courage to state your view. Lyons' spends 5,000 carefully-plucked-from-a-thesaurus words making his biases wholly apparent. He even somehow manages to dismiss the threat of fascism while with a straight-face glazing Trumpism's "archetype" of heroic male leadership dismantling the managerial state and putting national interests first. (What again is the dictionary definition of fascism?) And his big takeaway is "this could be good or bad but it's happening." I'm glad that in 50 years Lyons' will be able to smugly point at his blog and say "See, I saw it all happening" regardless of the outcome.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

The Long Twentieth

The 125 years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of WWI in 1914 was later described as the “Long Nineteenth Century.” The phrase recognized that to speak of “the nineteenth century” was to describe far more than a specific hundred-year span on the calendar; it was to capture the whole spirit of an age: a rapturous epoch of expansion, empire, and Enlightenment, characterized by a triumphalist faith in human reason and progress. That lingering historical spirit, distinct from any before or after, was extinguished in the trenches of the Great War. After the cataclysm, an interregnum that ended only with the conclusion of WWII, everything about how the people of Western civilization perceived and engaged with the world – politically, psychologically, artistically, spiritually – had changed.

R.R. Reno opens his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods by quoting a young man who laments that “I am twenty-seven years old and hope to live to see the end of the twentieth century.” His paradoxical statement captures how the twentieth century has also extended well past its official sell-by date in the year 2000. Our Long Twentieth Century had a late start, fully solidifying only in 1945, but in the 80 years since its spirit has dominated our civilization’s whole understanding of how the world is and should be. It has set all of our society’s fears, values, and moral orthodoxies. And, through the globe-spanning power of the United States, it has shaped the political and cultural order of the rest of the world as well.

The spirit of the Long Twentieth could not be more different from that which preceded it. In the wake of the horrors inflicted by WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe understandably made “never again” the core of their ideational universe. They collectively resolved that fascism, war, and genocide must never again be allowed to threaten humanity. But this resolution, as reasonable and well-meaning as it seemed at the time, soon became an all-consuming obsession with negation.

Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the “closed society.” Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs “strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past – ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”

Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism. Adorno, who set the direction of post-war American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of a latent “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man to xenophobia and führer worship. Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community entirely, labeling it as disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who dared cherish as special his own homeland and history as a dangerous “racialist.” For such intellectuals, any definitive claim to authority or hierarchy, whether between men, morals, or metaphysical truths, seemed to stand as a mortal threat to peace on earth.

The great project of post-war establishment liberalism became to tear down the walls of the closed society and banish its gods forever. To be erected on its salted ground was an idyllic but exceptionally vague vision of an “open society” animated by peaceable weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality, and consumer comfort. This politically and culturally dominant “open society consensus” drew on theorists like Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, relativize truths, and weaken bonds.

As Reno catalogues in detail, new approaches to education, psychology, and management sought to relativize truths, elevate “critical thinking” over character, vilify collective loyalties, cast doubt on hierarchies, break down all boundaries and borders, and free individuals from the “repression” of all moral and relational duties. Aspiration to a vague universal humanitarianism soon became the only higher good that it was socially acceptable to aim for other than pure economic growth.

The anti-fascism of the twentieth century morphed into a great crusade – characterized, ironically, by a fiery zeal and fierce intolerance. By making “never again” its ultimate priority, the ideology of the open society put a summum malum (greatest evil) at its core rather than any summum bonum (highest good). The singular figure of Hitler didn’t just lurk in the back of the 20th century mind; he dominated its subconscious, becoming a sort of secular Satan, forever threatening to tempt mankind into new wickedness. This “second career of Adolf Hitler,” as Renaud Camus jokingly calls it, provided the parareligious raison d'etre for the open society consensus and the whole post-war liberal order: to prevent the resurrection of the undead Führer.

This doctrine of prevention grants enormous moral weight to ensuring that open society values triumph over those of the closed society in every circumstance. If it’s assumed that the only options are “the open society or Auschwitz” then maintaining zero tolerance for the perceived values of the closed society is functionally a moral commandment. To stand in the way of any possible aspect of societal opening and individual liberation – from secularization, to the sexual revolution and LGBTQ rights, to the free movement of migrants – was to do Hitler’s work and risk facilitating fascism’s return (no matter how far removed the subject concerned from actual fascism). It was established as the open society’s only inviolable rule that, as Reno puts it, it is “forbidden to forbid.” Thus a strict new cultural orthodoxy was consolidated, in which to utter any opinion contrary to the continuous project of further opening up societies became verboten as a moral evil. Complete inclusion required rigorous exclusion. We are familiar with this dogma today as political correctness.

The end of the Cold War then sent the open society consensus into overdrive. Far from moderating its zeal, the fall of Soviet communism (liberalism’s last real ideological competitor) seemed to validate the moral and practical superiority of the open society, and the post-Cold War establishment doubled down on the belief that the whole world could and should be rebuilt in its image, ushering in the end of history.

The crusade for openness took on for itself a great commission to go and deconstruct all nations in the name of peace, prosperity, and freedom. This conviction was only reinforced by the 9/11 attacks of 2001, which seemed to help demonstrate that the continued existence of closed-minded intolerance anywhere was a threat to tolerance everywhere. As one hawkish politician quoted in Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe put it not long afterwards, “We [now] live in a borderless world in which our new mission is defending the border not of our countries but civility and human rights.”

If you’ve been wondering why USAID was spending $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbian workplaces, $500,000 to “expand atheism” in Nepal, or $7.9 million to catechize Sri Lankan journalists in avoiding “binary-gendered language,” this is why. It’s the same reason the U.S. government was pouring millions into funding “charities” dedicated to breaking U.S. immigration law and facilitating open borders migration: they believed they were fighting the good fight against the closed society in order to stop zombie Hitler (while skimming a whole lot of cash on the side for their good deeds). It’s also why, for decades, anyone who’s objected has been automatically tarred as a literal fascist.

Meanwhile, the development of the open society consensus went hand-in-hand with the universal growth of the managerial state and its occlusion of democratic self-governance. There was a very direct and deliberate connection. As Carl Schmitt noted early in the twentieth century, an “elemental impulse” of liberalism is “neutralization” and “depoliticization” of the political – that is, the attempt to remove all fundamental contention from politics out of fear of conflict, shrinking “politics” to mere managerial administration. This excising of the political from politics was at the heart of the post-war project’s structural aims. Just as Schmitt had predicted, the goal became to achieve perpetual peace through an “age of technicity,” in which politics would be reduced to the safer, more predictable movements of a machine through the empowerment of supposedly-neutral mechanisms like bureaucratic processes, legal judgements, and expert technocratic commissions.

Actual public contention over genuinely political questions, especially by the dangerously fascism-prone democratic masses, was in contrast now judged to be too dangerous to permit. The post-war establishment of the open society dreamed instead of achieving governance via scientific management, of transforming the political sphere into “a social technology… whose results can be tested by social engineering,” as Popper put it. The operation of this machine could then be limited to a cadre of carefully selected and educated “institutional technologists,” in Popper’s phrasing. [...]

The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. [...]

That dream didn’t work out though, because the strong gods refused to die.

Restoration of the Gods

[...] Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance (though it is that too); it is a deep, suppressed thumotic desire for long-delayed action, to break free from the smothering lethargy imposed by proceduralist managerialism and fight passionately for collective survival and self-interest. It is the return of the political to politics. This demands a restoration of old virtues, including a vital sense of national and civilizational self-worth. And that in turn requires a rejection of the pathological “tyranny of guilt” (as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner once dubbed it) that has gripped the Western mind since 1945. As the power of endless hysterical accusations of “fascism” has gradually faded, we have – for better and worse – begun to witness the end of the Age of Hitler. [...]

Dawn of a New Century

Trump [...] is, in other words, neither cause nor mere symptom of populist upheaval but in a real sense an embodiment of the whole rebellious new world spirit that’s now overturning the old order. [...]

The very boldness of this action reflects more than just partisan political gamesmanship – in itself it represents the stasis of the old paradigm being upended; now “you can just do things” again. This mindset hasn’t been seen in America since FDR and his revolutionary government remade the country and established the modern managerial state; no one has dared to so much as jostle the machine he created since the end of WWII. Now Trump has.

Abroad and in Washington, this brash attitude has caused much consternation and confusion (“Why is Trump threatening to invade Mexico, bully Canada, and annex Greenland from a NATO ally? Wasn’t he supposed to be an isolationist?”) But the principle behind all Trump’s behavior here actually appears to be quite straightforward: he is willing to use American might however may benefit the nation, rather than caring very much about protecting the status quo liberal international order for its own sake or adhering to polite fictions like international law. Turns out “you can just do things” on the world stage too. Diplomacy and alliances are logically seen as of value only insofar as they benefit America. [...]

So while at a surface level the vibe of the Trump revolution might be mistaken as merely marking a return to circa-1990s libertarianism, with its individual freedom and “greed is good” free-market mindset, he represents a far more significant shift than that: back – or rather forward – more than a century. The globalist neoliberalism, interventionist one-world internationalism, and naive social progressivism of the 90s open society is dead and gone. Despite his political alliance with the Right-Wing Progressives of Silicon Valley, Trump’s new world is in a real sense distinctly post-liberal. [...]

A New World Opens

The traumas of the twentieth century made ideas like nationalism, or even any clear distinction between “us” and “them,” into taboos that were impossible to discuss seriously. That finding the proper balance between “closed’ and “open” values is necessary to maintain a healthy society was a fact carefully ignored for decades.

Now the strong gods are nonetheless being haphazardly called back into the world [...]. Their return brings real risks, or course – although the return of risk is kind of the point. [...] It remains an open question whether this necessary renewal of strength and vitality can be reintegrated harmoniously into our societies, or whether our world will again be plunged into a time of significantly greater strife, danger, and war.

But we no longer have much of a choice in the matter; the strong gods’ restoration has become inevitable, one way or another. We’re living in a whole new century now. The Long Twentieth Century has run its course.

[marshallsnyder1]

“In the popular imagination, the sexual was a spontaneous outburst. The “kids” weren’t going to take their repressive medicine any longer, and they hitchhiked to San Francisco for the Summer of Love. But, as [Matthew] Crawford documents, the sexual revolution was always intertwined with the anti-fascist [if you’re not an anti-fascist, then you’re a fascist] political agenda, which predates the 1960s.” Sexual Revolution by Design.” R.R. Reno. First Things.

As hippie molotov cocktail culture bears down on traditional American values, the four ancient cardinal virtues, and three theological virtues, life takes on barbaric dimensions.

It’s no coincidence the 1967 Summer of Love imbedded with free sex and drugs precedes, by only the scant margin of two years, the Manson Family murder spree.

[livinglibertytoday]

It is only through re-infusing the political order with Christian truths and reconnecting it to its transcendent sources that the renewal for which we hope can be achieved. Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, by R.R. Reno (256 pages, Salem Books, 2016)

[anarchistettin]

[c&vd from behind the paywall]: The lockdown has produced a disparity between the old script of grievance and a sickness that can wreak destruction on anyone.

By

MATTHEW SITMAN

May 21, 2020

Last week, First Things editor R.R. Reno, a prominent Catholic intellectual who backed Donald Trump for president, let the world know he’d had enough of the effete conformists following public-health guidelines in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Sharing a photo on Twitter of Trump saluting World War II veterans, none of them wearing masks, he declared, “They’re men, not cowards. Masks=enforced cowardice.”

The reaction from critics was swift and punishing, as they noted the emerging wisdom that masks may be one of the most effective measures in preventing the spread of Covid-19. But Reno decided to tweet through it in a typo-laden tirade. “The mask culture if fear driven. Masks+cowardice,” he wrote. “It’s a regime dominate by fear of infection and fear of causing of infection. Both are species of cowardice.” Other, similarly garbled tweets followed, but one of them serves as an especially telling summary of his position: “Now we know who want to cower in place. By all means rage against those who want to live.”

The outburst was no aberration. Since March, he’s produced a string of commentary doubting the severity of the pandemic and lamenting the measures taken to combat it—particularly the temporary closures of churches. It’s not as deadly as we feared, he’s said, and for those under 35, perhaps little more worrisome than the flu—a statement that blithely ignores all that we still don’t know about Covid-19, from the long-term effects it might cause in even healthy young adults to the sudden spike in a Kawasaki-like disease in children. No matter. Reno renders his verdict: “The science increasingly shows that the measures we have taken in the last few weeks have been both harmful—with freedoms lost, money spent, livelihoods destroyed—and pointless,” he wrote.

It’s not just that Reno can sound at times like a coronavirus truther. He is also convinced that our pandemic response stems from a deeper civilizational malaise, one that prioritizes the fleeting material world over the everlasting life that awaits our souls after death. In a missive published in March, Reno declared, “There are many things more precious than life,” and castigated political leaders, especially New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for leading “an ill-conceived crusade against human finitude and the dolorous reality of death.”

Reno is not alone on the Christian intellectual right in framing the shutdown as part of a grand narrative of spiritual decay. His colleague Matthew Schmitz wrote that, in valuing “health above all, we subordinate the spiritual to the temporal,” adding, “Unless religious leaders reopen the churches, they will appear to value earthly above eternal life.” National Review writer Alexandra DeSanctis caught flak on Twitter for writing, “It’s fascinating to see how the cultural loss of belief in God and eternity so often manifests in an outsized fear of death as the ultimate evil. Human life is beautiful and precious and good, but life on earth isn’t our ultimate end.”

The latter prompted a lot of jokes about the literal death cults forming on the right, but there is something more at work here. Writing in Providence magazine, Jason E. Vickers described this death-embracing cohort as possessing a “bitter remnant mindset,” and acting “as though they are the last Christians in America.” It’s a worldview shot through with grievances against the corrupt, decadent societies of the West, and it’s shared by otherwise very different factions on the right. Followers of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option might seek to build intentional communities and withdraw from modern society, while Christian nationalists long for the political power to defeat it—but they have the same enemies.

For all Reno’s paeans to courage, the pandemic has shown us, in starker terms than before, the extent to which modern conservatism is driven by resentment of a seemingly hostile, terrifying world. Not all conservatives have succumbed to this impulse during the pandemic, of course. But those who have reveal the ways in which the pandemic is being shoehorned into a familiar culture war.

Let’s return to the example of Reno, since he manages to encompass both the raging id of the anti-lockdown protesters and the philosophical justifications of their actions that have appeared in the conservative press. One of his “Coronavirus Diary” entries begins with him visiting an emergency room in an outer-borough hospital. He can’t say more, though, because “the present conditions of public health hysteria” mean his host “might lose his job if higher-ups found out I penetrated the ‘no visitors’ cordon sanitaire.” Reno notes that, after cases of COVID-19 flooded the hospital in late March and early April, the doctor says they had since plummeted—a development Reno passes over as a happy mystery, never connecting it to the stay-at-home orders and economic shutdown that he has called “pointless” and “cowering.”

Reno also mentions that he’s been worshipping at an “underground” church, borrowing the language Christians have used for those persecuted by Communist regimes in China or, during the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain. A sense of persecution hangs heavy over the article, as does the characterization of himself as a righteous dissenter.

Then the diary entry becomes surreal. Reno describes a long bike ride on a recent weekend, during which a Dunkin Donuts worker refuses to serve him because he isn’t wearing a mask. He ends up on Staten Island, and needs to take the ferry back—which also requires a mask. “Providentially,” he writes, “I found a mask in a gutter just before reaching the Staten Island Ferry, allowing me to board and steam back to Manhattan.”

What comes next comes as no surprise: Reno takes an antibody test, and the results show he had contracted the virus. Like the ending of certain novels, it transforms all that came before it. Was he wearing a mask in the hospital, or at his “underground” church? He doesn’t say. Reno doesn’t seem troubled that, even if he never had significant symptoms, he could have been spreading the virus to others. He doesn’t realize that wearing a mask is not a commentary on his own courage or virility, but a simple way to show concern and care for others who might be especially vulnerable to the ravages of Covid-19.

There’s little point in looking for sense or reason in Reno’s ramblings. The language of courage and cowardice can’t really be debated—it is pure emotion. The point is not to grapple with the reality of a complex, overwhelming situation that changes every day, about which there can be genuine debates, but to reinscribe it in affective terms. What becomes decisive is not the cogency or persuasiveness of a policy response to a public-health crisis, but whether or not you’re cowering in fear or bravely resisting the conformity imposed by dreaded, elite experts. Wearing a mask, or not, floats up to the realm of the purely symbolic. It is a way of brushing aside difficult questions for dramatic rhetoric about civilizational decline.

If Reno and others make this sort of argument in a religious key, others on the right render it in supposedly class terms. Patrick Deneen took to Twitter last month to say that the divide over the shutdown did not simply reflect your position on Trump, but might reveal “more fundamental differences between elites and masses,” sharing Christopher Lasch’s observation in Revolt of the Elites that “young professionals” are health-obsessed exercisers and dieters attempting to attain eternal beauty and live forever, while “ordinary people” just “accept the body’s decay.”

More recently, The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, citing no evidence, regretted the “class divide between those who are hard-line on lockdowns and those who are pushing back.” The former consist of the professionals who make up the “overclass,” with the latter are “normal people” who are fatalistic about life, and therefore itching to open up the economy—a “generalization” she offers “based on a lifetime of experience and observation.”

Once again, all this only serves to twist debates over when and how to reopen the economy into a battle between supposed elites and ordinary folks who have not only been ignored and left behind, but also ridiculed. This just hasn’t been the case so far, and Reno, Deneen, and Noonan are making it up as they go along. The latest polling continues to find, as described in a recent Washington Post article, “that there just aren’t meaningful divisions along class or education lines on these questions.” There certainly isn’t a rugged, death-defying, God-fearing working class straining against the complacency of prissy white-collar overlords. Imagining that’s the case, however, is less challenging than talking about what actually will help workers: hazard pay, paycheck protections, paid medical leave, proper safety equipment, and robust testing. It’s grievance-mongering all the way down.

The writer Sam Adler-Bell has described the “mutable dynamism” of conservative politics, a term that captures the way the search for fresh enemies can stoke these passions. It explains why conservatives respond to novel situations with a tried-and-true mash-up of elite bashing and performative victimhood. But Americans’ reserve of patience and good will so far shows the glaring mismatch between the old script of grievance and a sickness that can wreak destruction on anyone.

Reno’s embarrassing pandemic punditry is finally the predictable consequence of the way he compromised himself by endorsing Trump, then taking up the mantle of “national conservatism.” G.K. Chesterton, a writer well-known to First Things editors, once wrote, “When a man concludes that any stick is good enough to beat his foe with—that is when he picks up a boomerang.” To view Trump as a useful wrecking ball, or a flawed vessel for an otherwise sound nationalism, with his critics being the real problem, is to be set adrift morally and intellectually. You take your bearings less from what you believe than what you oppose; if it provokes cosmopolitan elites, then there must be some value to it.

On Monday, after having deleted both his tweets about masks and his Twitter account, Reno published an apology at First Things. “I used over-heated rhetoric and false analogies,” he wrote. “It was wrong for me to impugn the intentions and motives of others, for which I apologize.” He should be taken at his word—but what the episode reveals about the intellectual right isn’t limited to a few late-night tweets.

Matthew Sitman is an editor at Commonweal.

@MatthewSitman 

[ladysnowangel]

Recent reads (1 and 3) and currently reading (2 and 4)

[stoweboyd]

There are incontrovertible truths at the core of antiglobalist populism, as being pitched by Trump and Le Pen, as captured here by R.R. Reno:

Our country has dissolved to a far greater degree than those cloistered on the coasts allow themselves to realize. The once vast and unifying middle class has eroded over the last generation. Today we are increasingly divided into winners and losers. This division involves more than divergent economic prospects and income inequality. Globalism is an ideology of winners who stand astride our society as it is being remade by dramatic economic, demographic and cultural changes.

[...]

Globalism poses a threat to the future of democracy because it disenfranchises the vast majority and empowers a technocratic elite. It’s a telling paradox that the most ardent supporters of a “borderless world” live in gated communities and channel their children toward a narrow set of elite educational institutions with stiff admissions standards that do the work of “border control.” The airport executive lounges are not open and inclusive.

John Q. Public is not stupid. He senses that he no longer counts. And he resents the condescension of globalist elites, which is why Mr. Trump’s regular transgressions against elite-enforced political correctness evoke glee from his supporters.

But Reno’s title is wrong, because many Republicans -- elected officials, too -- are not America Firsters, they in fact form the conservative wing of the previously ruling unrepentant-neoliberal-globalists party.

Reno is also wrong in attempting to make a retreat to patriotic nationalism the only response to neoliberal globalism. The third alternative is mutualist commonsism.

And the grace note of the elitism inherent in airport executive lounges is a deft touch, suggesting globalist technocrats skirting flyover country. 

If there were an airline structured as a cooperative mutual organization -- owned by the employees and customers -- what would their airport lounges be like?

[quakerjoe]

American conservatism—the so-called “culture of life”—worships annihilation.

A decade ago, in my first public writing since leaving Capitol Hill, I warned that the Republican Party, in its evolution towards an extremist conservative movement allied with extremist Christian fundamentalism, was becoming like “one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.” After Donald Trump’s enthronement as the decider of our fate, I analyzed the GOP’s descent into a nihilism that belied every one of its supposed “values.” They value only absolute power or ruin.

It is now long past time to cast off highfalutin’ Latinisms and simply call the Republicans and their religious and secular conservative allies what they are, and in unadorned English: a death cult. As the country reels from the coronavirus pandemic, our national government might just as well be run by the infamous People’s Temple of Jonestown.

By now we are benumbed by the all-pervasive arguments over relaxing workplace shutdowns and stay-at-home orders due to coronavirus. In any sane society, the issue would be how to institute the most efficient measures to defeat the pandemic in the shortest time and with the lowest loss of life. Instead, Trump and his merry band of lunatics have hijacked the national debate into a faux-serious discussion of when, oh, please, how soon, can we “reopen the economy?” Naturally, the media gamely continue to play along with this calculated bit of dezinformatsiya.

This has led to extreme callousness, like that shown by Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who opined that grams and gramps should be eager to shuffle off this mortal coil for the sake of their grandchildren.

There is abundant empirical evidence against this notion: voters in Florida, known as “God’s waiting room” for its geriatric population, are notoriously averse to paying one cent in state income tax to fund education or child health, let alone lay down their lives. In any case, the 69-year-old Patrick, who claims he’s willing to die for his proposition, did not relinquish the burdens of his office to volunteer as an emergency room orderly.

The whole extremely well-funded edifice of “economic conservatism” is equally a death cult, worshiping Mammon so fervently that it is eager to make human sacrifice upon its altar, just like the Mayans and Carthaginians.

There’s also Congressman Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana, who put a patriotic gloss on his Malthusianism, decreeing that “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”

Then, striking the pose of the Serious Adult in the Room correcting mischievous children, he intoned: “It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils.” This encapsulates the stereotype of the economic conservative: Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, the rigid, condescending, and heartless pedagogue.

But some pronouncements from the Trump coalition offer more ethereal rationalizations than the mere pursuit of lucre. The news is replete with stories about evangelical ministers packing their megachurches like sardine cans in defiance of state orders for social distancing, as well as contempt for common sense.

We all know about that harebrained medicine man in Louisiana, Tony Spell, already arrested for violating the state’s prohibition of large gatherings, who continues his antics nonstop. Spell, who sounds as socially responsible as a blood tick, is proclaiming his parishioners ought to choose death: “Like any revolutionary, or like any zealot, or like any pure religious person, death looks to them like a welcome friend. True Christians do not mind dying. They fear living in fear.”

So much for fundamentalists’ vaunted “culture of life,” a slogan which the prestige media never presume to critique.

For a more socially upscale version of this sentiment, let us turn to First Things, a pretentious journal of alleged theology that dresses up its non-stop shilling for the GOP with high-toned words like “numinous” and references to the philosopher Erasmus.

Last month, its editor, R.R. Reno, wrote a piece called, “Say No to Death’s Dominion.” It is an extraordinary performance. Contrary to the title, he actually argues that death should be embraced. He does this by weaving an imbecilic theology that includes falsifying the history of the 1918 flu epidemic to make his basic point:

“In our simple-minded picture of things, we imagine a powerful fear of death arises because of the brutal deeds of cruel dictators and bloodthirsty executioners. But in truth, Satan prefers sentimental humanists. We resent the hard boot of oppression on our necks, and given a chance, most will resist. How much better, therefore, to spread fear of death under moralistic pretexts.”

Oh, I get it! So Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day were more depraved than Josef Stalin! Reno ends with this:

“Fear of death and causing death is pervasive—stoked by a materialistic view of survival at any price and unchecked by Christian leaders who in all likelihood secretly accept the materialist assumptions of our age. “

This insane rant against materialism would seem to contradict the crassly materialistic assumptions underlying economic conservatives’ advocacy for letting a deadly virus “wash over” the population, as Trump would say. But these views, at first sight blatantly opposed, can be reconciled.

And who better to reconcile God and Mammon than a grifter like Jerry Falwell, Jr., ringmaster of Liberty University and testifier to Donald Trump’s status as an emissary of the Almighty? Not only has Falwell continued the school year, virtually alone among American universities, and despite pleading from students and parents to close, he has now been sued for failing to refund fees for student activities that have been suspended.

Fundamentalist preachers’ love of money is no secret: it is only by packing churches that the collection plate will yield a bounteous harvest so that their missionary work can continue – perhaps logistically aided by the purchase of a $65-million Gulfstream executive jet. And why not? It would upstage Pat Robertson, who had a mere Learjet, and a rental at that.

Political observers often wonder about the bizarre conservative coalition of plutocrats and theocrats, believing it to be unstable. But the intersection of the heartless pecuniary motives of religious and economic conservatives is no coincidence. And beneath the Ebenezer Scrooge façade of economic conservatives is the same kind of perverted idealism that we see in Tony Spell or R.R. Reno.

The most cost-efficient industrial process is one that wastes the fewest resource inputs. Likewise, internal combustion engines have evolved to get better mileage even as they pollute less. And electric motors are even more fuel efficient and less polluting.

So how do we explain conservatives’ perverse hatred of the environment, even when there are no profits at stake, as well as their tenacious denial of climate change in the face of irrefutable data? Is it not much the same as the Bible thumper who bitterly condemns stewardship of the environment as Gaia worship?

There are other similarities. Since the 1970s oil shocks (and coincident with the rise of the New Right), an abiding feature on the American scene has been the survivalist, hoping for the national Götterdämmerung that will vindicate his having stockpiled 10,000 rounds of ammunition and a horde of Krugerrands. This dovetails with fundamentalists’ weird enthusiasm for the prospect of world annihilation that animates belief in the Rapture, the only difference being the technique by which the elect avoid the mass slaughter.

Firearms fetishism and a fascination with violence, war, and armed insurrection are also mainstays of right-wing ideology, hardly distinguishable from Jerry Falwell Sr.’s, proclamation that God is Pro-War. And how about the Ultimate Fighting Jesus? The NRA neatly intersects with “muscular Christianity,” revealing both ideological kinship and some very embarrassing gender insecurities that frequently irrupt in misogyny and homosexual panic.

There is no longer the slightest doubt in any sane person’s mind that not only are the GOP’s fundamentalist-extremist religious allies a death cult disguised as 501(c)3 tax-exempt charitable organizations. The whole extremely well-funded edifice of “economic conservatism” is equally a death cult, worshiping Mammon so fervently that it is eager to make human sacrifice upon its altar, just like the Mayans and Carthaginians.

“¡Viva la Muerte!”

“Long live death!” That was the defiant cry of José Millán-Astray y Terreros, a general in Francisco Franco’s fascist army during the Spanish civil war. It could just as well suit Trump’s foot soldiers.

- Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His books include: “The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government“ and “The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.”

[minnesotafollower]

More Thoughts on Commission on Unalienable Rights

More Thoughts on Commission on Unalienable Rights

Carol Giacomo, a member of the New York Times Editorial Board and a former diplomatic correspondent for Reuters, has expressed her concern over the State Department’s creation of the Commission on Unalienable Rights,[1] which was discussed in prior posts.[2]

She says the Department’s Human Rights Bureau and Congress were not included in the decision to establish this Commission. Instead it was a…

[settledthingsstrange]

The return of the strong gods will be a hopeful sign only if it involves a return to the God whose power is made perfect in weakness.

Ibid. (Ryszard Legutko, review of R.R. Reno’s Return of the Strong Gods)

[cultml]

Whereas the various hysterias of the Left are driven wholly by their self-referential imaginings, Churchill faced and Trump is facing the all too real threats generated by a pernicious and stubbornly persistent ideology, then and now.

In a recent issue of First Things, its editor R.R. Reno marked the passing of the Hungarian-American writer John Lukacs.  In his review of Lukacs’s life and works, Reno includes many of the writer’s memorable observations and ideas, among the most striking of which is this one: “’Intolerable’ is what people no longer want to tolerate: in other words, when they begin to think or say that this or that must not be tolerated.”  Reno goes on to note Lukacs’s admiration of Winston Churchill, a man who perhaps better than any other in the late twentieth century understood that simple truth.

Physical intimidation and subjugation over a society can be temporarily levied, but ultimately can only endure as an effective means of control if mental and spiritual subjugation (which can only be self-imposed) first takes hold of a society.  This willing acquiescence to evil is what Churchill in his day and Donald Trump in ours understands must be fought against; that any voluntary submission to the totalitarian ambitions of radical leftists must be always and everywhere intolerable to any people who consider themselves and wish to remain free.  

Not sure how many ways it can be said. It’s true as always. It’s a dead horse of understanding for me. I get it.... and now what?

The cultural trench war is lost. If your going to avoid a real one we need to figure out what changes will prevent the progressives from retaking the ground if defeated and do that, build that.

Reversion is not Reformation

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

By the end of a tumultuous 2020 I felt like I might be going a bit mad. It seemed to me that we were clearly living through revolutionary times: politically, ideologically, technologically, even geopolitically... everything seemed to have become unmoored. It felt like we were clearly approaching, or had already entered, a period of crisis—or rather the Greek krisis: a moment of radical decision and separation, a process of transformation where the old system can no longer be maintained and something new emerges. And yet nobody seemed to be talking about it openly or honestly; almost everyone I knew insisted everything was totally normal and would continue just as before, even as the ambient societal fear and anxiety grew so thick you could cut it with a knife. Gaslighting or simply ignoring reality seemed to be the new normal as coping mechanism. [...]

In trying to trace back the roots of the present madness, of our various ideological and cultural maladies, I found that each kept running to a level much deeper than I expected. To be honest in my investigation, I soon found it wasn’t enough to blame Foucault, or Marxism, or liberalism, or whatever; these ideas and ideologies were only responses to the same patterns stemming from human nature. Deep atomization and alienation. A rejection of higher authority, any authority, even the authority of reality. Boundless ego of the self. A void of higher meaning. Unmitigated fear of suffering and death. Existential anxiety. Nihilism. Anger at life, anger at all of creation. A desperate, limitless thirst for technological control as a reaction. Deluded hopes for utopia on earth and the end of all suffering. Relentlessly, every issue I was investigating began to converge on our modern society’s lack of ready answers to the same uncomfortably metaphysical questions: Why are we here? What is truth? What is real? How do we explain suffering? How do we justify existence? How do we live in the world? And so on.

We thought we had resolved or at least successfully set aside these questions in our modern, secular age. But it turns out this neutrality was always impossible; they are unavoidable and have to be answered. If they aren’t, something else will inevitably rush in to fill the void, no matter how crude, ill-considered, disordered, or dangerous that something is. That is what we are seeing everywhere now: “the return of the strong gods,” in the phrase of R.R. Reno.

So I’ve had to conclude that, at bottom, our civilization’s crisis is first and foremost a spiritual crisis. And that the great struggles underlying our present upheavals are really struggles over essentially theological questions, such as whether there is any inherent dignity in human life and the human body, or whether all matter is inherently evil and only pure spirit good. Most of all, at the core, there seems to be a great struggle between two competing visions about what it means to be human: whether Man exists as, in essence, machine or Imago Dei. As someone who previously thought theology was surely an irrelevant anachronism, having it turn out to still be the Queen of the Sciences has all been a bit of a shock. But here we are.

Now I’m still worried about the rise of totalitarianism, risk of destabilization and conflict, etc. Very worried. But for a bit different reasons. Most of my previous conceptions about modernity and its direction have been shattered, you could say. Now my real concern is that the spiritual causes of our present crisis are so fundamental, and that we’ve dug ourselves into such a deep hole, so to speak, that finding a way out on our own will be exceptionally difficult.

— Thoughts on Today's Upheaval and Its Implications