The Democratic Caucuses in Iowa (or, as the ailing Rush Limbaugh calls them, the “Hawkeye Cauci”) are in embarrassing disarray, with a new report-resulting “app” (reportedly designed by Hillary Clinton campaign bigwig Robbie Mook) having apparently failed to work. Multiple candidates are claiming victory, but nobody knows. (Remember the rollout of the Obamacare website?)
Meanwhile, the party’s “impeachment” tantrum — the latest in a series of desperate and petulant attacks going back even to before the 2016 election — is about to be shut down in the Senate, a day after the unscathed Mr. Trump delivers, in what should be an entertaining spectacle, his annual State of the Union address.
With each passing day, the Democrats, by calling for the dismantling of every structural component of the traditional American nation — from the Bill of Rights, to the Electoral College, to the very idea of the nation itself, and of respect for its founding — alienate more and more of the dwindling number of “centrist” voters upon whom they must depend for any hope of victory in November. Their vision of America is a rootless, deracinated, atomized people, cut off from tradition, heritage, religion, and all reverence for the past; they seek to encourage this not only by reviling and denouncing America’s past in education and mass media, but also by flooding the country with uncountable millions of aliens who share none of America’s traditions, folklore, culture, byways, or mythos, thereby making any reliance upon such things for the preservation of social cohesion — and without such shared values and beliefs there can be no more social cohesion within a nation’s borders than there is in an airport lounge — an act of “bigotry”, “xenophobia”, and “exclusion”. The aim is to eliminate altogether the “civil society” and horizontal ligatures that have throughout all of human history bound people into organic and healthy communities, leaving behind a flattened and stifling two-level hierarchy: below, a solipsistic, radically individualized populace, stripped of everything but the appetites of the present moment, and severed from the extension in time, and thereby the deep sense of duty and connection to the dead and the unborn, that has been the hallmark of healthy societies always and everywhere; while above them squats a vast, tutelary, managerial bureaucracy.
Russell Kirk described the latter:
Trained at uniform state schools in the new orthodoxies of secular collectivism, arrogant with the presumption of those who rule without the restraining influences of tradition and reverence and family honor, such an elite must be no more than an administrative corps; they cannot become the guardians of culture, as were the old aristocracies.
This is the choice now on offer. It has been the choice on offer for several decades now, but sought always to conceal its real nature. What’s different in this election is that the mask has come off.
11 Comments
These folks drank too much of their welfare and bailouts coolaid. They internalized the special snowflake messages they keep feeding their weirdo base, and they expect something bigger and outside themselves to constantly indemnify and repair their mistakes.
It’s a serious derealization spiral, and it seems just as terminal as it was for the original Soviets.
Your third paragraph is a tour de force. And, unfortunately, accurate.
I concur: the third paragraph marvelously captures what is occurring and what it means to those that labored under the illusion that their country was actually theirs, and that it was something more than the Duty Free in Dubai. Who will man the ramparts to the rousing cry of “remember the food court!”?
I’ll be the third to praise that third paragraph. Truly a master stroke.
Unfortunately, what it describes cannot be limited to the Democratic party in the US, but can applied to nearly all institutions in the West, including some that profess to be on the right.
At the risk of being presumptuous, I have added a thought to the fine ideas you have expressed here. Link below if you are interested.
thought
Francis,
Thank you for the kind words. Contrary to what you say in your linked post, however, I have written for some time now about our present-day social predicament being the result of our destructive abandonment of belief in the transcendent under the withering assault of post-Enlightenment skepsis.
For example (2015):
Or this (2017):
There is much more. (See also this post from last year, “The Demotion Of The Supernatural“.)
In short, Man, by denying the transcendent and absolute, must still address the vacancy it leaves behind, and so is forced to locate it in nature, and therefore in himself — which is a self-evident contradiction. It is, as Gurdjieff liked to say, as if he is “trying to jump over his own knees”.
I can see I might have to gather up some of this material and reiterate it in a new post of its own.
One more, Francis — perhaps the clearest of all — from 2016:
Thank you for responding to my post, Malcolm. As I mentioned there, it was not my intention to level criticism at you for something your post did not contain.
Instead, your fine post inspired me to reflect on the bigger picture of what drives the evil you articulated so well. It also reminded my how few consider the bigger picture because it delves into metaphysics and religion, which, understandably, causes confusion and scorn among most modern people.
In any case, I appreciate what you have added here. The excerpts you have provided have helped me tremendously. They have also reassured me that there may be many more thinkers and bloggers out there contemplating ‘the why’ of evil than I had originally assumed.
Keep up the great work. I will take some time to delve a little deeper into your writings. And thanks again for this post. That third paragraph remains a profound masterstroke.
Thank you very much, Francis. That’s just the tip of the iceberg; it is in the nature of blogging, though, that posts get scattered about and often forgotten. I may have to write a book one of these days.
Thank you also for your own fine work.
By the way, I believe you are from Hungary; my lovely wife and I visited Budapest for the first time just last fall. What a beautiful city.
Ah, Buda-Pest. It’s been years for me. Communism was the order of the day.
Bertrand Russell’s ‘belief’:
“Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.”
A Free Man’s Worship
Russell is borrowing from Milton’s portrayal of Satan. Some of it is almost a paraphrase of Satan’s first speech upon awakening in Hell! Perhaps this is where the acid of radical doubt leads . . .
Jeffery Hodges
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