Esotericism in the Classroom

 

As someone who works in the American educational system, I find that I need to avoid openly stating my beliefs. Students ask me what I think of Donald Trump and I tell them that I do not discuss politics on school grounds. It may very well be that my students have as low an opinion of Trump as I do. If I agree to talk about the issues where I agree with them then I will be trapped in those situations where I disagree with them. Not talking about politics in school is a matter of principle. I honestly believe that it is not appropriate for adults to use the platform they have been given as teachers to advocate for their own political preferences. Kids deserve the space to be ignorant and not know how to solve the big issues of the day without someone trying to recruit them to some cause. 

The fact is, though, that I have another incentive to keep my politics to myself. Unlike the many teachers who can afford to openly plaster their leftwing politics on their classroom walls, I know that I risk my job if I were to ever openly talk about my politics in front of students. This reality has helped me appreciate the esotericism of Leo Strauss. Central to Strauss' narrative of intellectual history is the idea that pre-modern philosophers hid their views from the masses. One did not want to end up like Socrates, executed for challenging the gods of Athens. Of particular interest to Strauss was Maimonides, who openly admits, in The Guide to the Perplexed, that he contradicts himself in order to conceal things from certain readers.    

Having to be careful about saying my opinions has taught me something else about esotericism, it helps you become a better teacher and thinker. Part of the danger of having strongly held beliefs is that they become a form of identity. You believe less in the idea and more in the community of people who hold them. The idea becomes a password to show that you are a good person. For those who have started reading my dissertation posts, this is an essential feature of the military model with its social ideology. If you cannot simply pontificate your beliefs wherever you want but have to limit yourself to a personal blog, it gives you a space to examine your own ideas. Clearly, your ideas are not obviously true otherwise there would not be people who want to silence you. Are your opponents bad people; maybe, even if you are right, there really is something dangerous about what you believe?

In truth, arguing with students will not win them over to my side. As Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay argue, if your goal is to convince people that they are wrong, perhaps the most counterproductive thing you can do is argue with them. Whatever arguments you make are almost certain to simply demonstrate that you are on a different team and cause your interlocuter to become defensive. They will then respond with their own tribalistic reasoning and all meaningful discussion will break down. 

Recognizing that you are not going to be able to convince people that they are wrong, it is far more productive to let other people simply talk. This has the advantage of developing a relationship with the person as they do not perceive you as a threat. Furthermore, while you may not be able to convince them that they are wrong, there is still one person who can. However resistant people might be to outsiders telling them that they are wrong, they are perfectly capable of converting themselves if given the chance. Most people do not get much opportunity to really listen to themselves talk about what they believe so give them the chance. 

The proper setting for someone to change their own minds is while sitting by themselves reading a book. This was something that Protestants understood very well. It is the Bible that has the power to convince people that they are totally depraved sinners who can rely on Jesus and not anything else, including their own good deeds. After listening to people's arguments, rather than arguing, it is more productive to suggest a book (or a blog) for them to read. 

Being by yourself with a book has the advantage of not having to worry that the author is right. The author very well might live on the other side of the world or even be dead. Furthermore, disagreeing with the author does not break the connection. You can continue to read the book and the arguments might stick around in your head for years until you wake up and realize that you do not have the same opinions as you once did. The more this process is simply going on in your head the better as there will be less social pressure to conform to whatever your group tells you that good people believe. 

As a teacher working in a system in which just about everyone is to the left of me, I have had no choice but to follow the advice of Aaron Burr in the Hamilton musical: "Talk less. Smile more. Don't let them know what you're against or what you're for." 

It turns out that this is good advice and if I did not fear for my job, I would not have the discipline to keep to it. Students should feel free to talk about their beliefs and not worry about whether I think that they are right. As kids, they are most certainly wrong about nearly everything and that is fine. They do not need to hear my slightly less ignorant views. Instead, I can then serve as a librarian to suggest books for them to read. Who knows how they might be affected years down the road by an idea that has been bouncing around in their heads.   

What I wish to give over to my students, above all, is the spirit of skeptical inquiry. This is not a system of belief that I can ever argue them into. To be a skeptic means to be willing to attack your own ideas as vigorously as your opponent's. You become a skeptic by experiencing having your own mind being changed in subtle ways over many years of thinking and reading. Skepticism also has the virtue of helping people become more tolerant. Maybe that person I disagree with is actually right? Let me listen to them. If nothing else, I am honestly curious as to what they actually believe and how they came to their conclusions.

 

Toward a Locke-Burke Theory of Conservative Libertarian Secessionist Government

 

The father of Anglo-conservative thought Edmund Burke famously criticized John Locke for his belief in universal human rights. It was not that Burke believed in tyranny. On the contrary, Burke believed that liberty was best protected within a particular tradition. As such he believed that Englishmen had rights that came not from nature but from the particular development of English institutions. This served as the foundation for one of his major objections to the French Revolution. The French had good reason to object to the government of Louis XVI in 1789. Following the model of the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, what the French should have done was turn to French history, recognizing that French monarchial absolutism was really an invention of the seventeenth century, and reformed French political institutions to bring them back in line with French tradition. What the French did instead was claim to be acting in the name of the universal principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, things that only existed in their philosophy books. Because universal rights are imaginary constructs in people's heads, the French, unwittingly, unleashed chaos among themselves. Now everyone was licensed to engage in violence in the name of protecting their rights as they understood them. This led to the Reign of Terror and ultimately to the dictatorship of Napoleon.  

As a product of the American conservative tradition, I have been raised with the paradox that my political tradition is John Locke as mediated through the American Revolution. This means that I have the right to overthrow my government if it violates my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This doctrine is kept in check from turning into the French Revolution by a "Burkean" reverence for the Constitution. One thinks of the example of Sen. Barry Goldwater, whose conservatism did not mean going back to the Hanoverian dynasty but the Constitution. This marriage between Locke and Burke, while it has its tensions, is far more workable than it might first appear. For me, this is possible because I am also a libertarian, who believes that government is inherently illegitimate.      

I confess to being agnostic about the nature of rights and their origins, but I am an ethical individualist. My starting point for ethics is that of individuals and not groups. It is individuals who negotiate social contracts where we agree not to do bad things to other people in return for those people not doing bad things against us. This is simply an empirical fact. Every child on a playground learns fairly quickly that other children will hurt them if they pick a fight. As such, it is best not to go around picking fights. That being said, there are going to be bullies who will attack you no matter what so, therefore, you have no choice but to fight back.  

Following this logic, I have the right to shoot the person who comes to my door to collect taxes. I never agreed to pay taxes. As such, the tax person is a bullying thief, who should be resisted. It is here that my inner Burke, recognizing how truly monstrous such a conclusion is, applies the breaks. One, while it might be my right to fight a rebellion rather than pay taxes, it is hardly in my self-interest to do so. I have no desire to declare to a bombed-out civilization that I was in the right. (Admittedly, part of me would take great pleasure in doing this, but the sane part of me would honestly be horrified at the thought.) Second, I assume that the tax person is actually a decent fellow at heart. They probably do not want to initiate violence. They did not create our political system. They are simply doing their best with the system that they are given. It is hardly obvious to me that they are wrong so I should give them the benefit of the doubt in assuming that they at least doing what they think is right. As such, while I am not saying that it is ok to be a tax collector, I am willing to grant them absolution for their actions. 

This leads to the conclusion that, while, in theory, I may have the right to rebel against any government that is not of my choosing, essentially all governments that have ever existed, I accept that this right is trumped by any government founded upon conservative principles. By this, I mean the notion that there are institutions that have evolved among humans even though they are likely not of human design. These institutions facilitate human flourishing even if they are incredibly flawed. As such, one does not have the right to tear these institutions down, causing great harm to the public, simply in the name of abstract principles. If a traditional hereditary monarch were to come to my door and ask me to pay taxes as my ancestors paid to their ancestors, I would bend a knee and pay. How much more so, if I were to be asked by a president acting to honestly hold up the Constitution, such as an alternative universe Barry Goldwater?

It is here that not only does my Burke make me a conservative, but so does my Locke. While my Burke forces me to quiet my Locke in obedience to a conservative government, it is that quiet but still essential Locke inside of me that allows me to resist revolutionary or progressive governments. By this, I mean governments that gain their authority from the belief that their leaders have the right to refashion society based on their preferred theory that they learned about from a philosophy book. Such a person has no absolution for their actions. They believe that their actions are not merely making the best of an imperfect situation but are achieving justice. As such they must be held accountable for every act of violence they cause to be committed. If revolutionary progressives are going to force their version of justice on me, I have the right to strike back by insisting upon my justice, which declares them to be thieves or even murderers and grants me the right to secede and create my own government.   

It should be noted that Burke himself supported the American Revolution. As Yuval Levine argues, this was not because Burke believed in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as universally valid principles. For Burke, it was Parliament that had violated traditional norms by trying to directly tax the colonies. As such, the colonists were the ones trying to defend their traditional rights as Englishmen as best they could. In essence, while most people today focus on the first part of the Declaration of Independence and ignore the rest, Burke ignored the first part but accepted the rest.      

Blogging My Dissertation

Having written about my ill-fated attempt to write a doctoral dissertation, a deeply painful topic even after all these years, I find myself returning to that dissertation on the politics of Jewish messianism. I am going to attempt to edit selections from the dissertation, stripped of their footnotes, to be used as blog posts. I readily acknowledge that this was not a suitable topic for a dissertation. That being said, I still strongly believe in the ideas presented in the dissertation. As such, I wish to present them to my readers. Hopefully, you will find what I have to say useful for understanding the underlying logic of messianism in its political and spiritual forms. Perhaps one of my readers will turn out to be a university administrator, who is so impressed with me as to wish to offer me a doctorate. This is a dissertation about messianism, the willingness to hope against all evidence that history will suddenly and miraculously turn out in one's favor so a failed doctoral student has the right to dream. 

The problem that drew me to this topic of political messianism is that there are two basic kinds of messianism, the political and the spiritual and they are fundamentally at odds with each other. What is the Messiah supposed to accomplish when he comes? Perhaps he is supposed to bring back the not so golden biblical age of David and Solomon on the assumption that this time we are going to get things right. In this political messianism, the natural order of things, particularly the existence of politics remains intact. This is essential as this will finally allow us Jews to rule over the gentiles as we were always "meant" to. Alternatively, we can imagine the Messiah ushering in a spiritual era that will transcend the physical world, leaving no room for politics. When Jews, for thousands of years have prayed for the Messiah, it seems that they were simultaneously asking for political power and for the end of politics. Keep in mind that political power is something deeply materialistic, the sort of thing that pious people should abhor. How could such contradictory impulses have survived in one religion without tearing it into factions?  

My essential argument is that both political and spiritual messianisms should be understood as the product of a discourse between three different models for a religion to relate to the political. The military model relies on community and ritual. Opposing the military model are two anti-community models, which rely on doctrine instead of ritual. The missionary model outright rejects the community and seeks to create a new religion by seeking outside converts to create a new purer community. The esoteric model remains more closely tied to the community and either seeks to take it over from within or form its own competing sect. One thinks of Leo Strauss style philosophers, but this can apply to conventional believers as well. Understand that most people, operating within the military model with its focus on lived experience, do not even think in terms of trying to put together a coherent theology. 

Judaism is primarily military in its orientation. That being said, it has taken on the esoteric and missionary models, despite the theological difficulties, as a response to certain political realities. This mixture created a certain level of tension as the different models contain contradictory principles. Messianic doctrines serve both as a reflection of this tension within Judaism and as an attempted solution. Messianism has thus served an important role in Judaism in that it is precisely its contradictory political and spiritual poles that have allowed Judaism to mediate the conflict between the three ideological factions. 

All Conquests After 1928 are Illegitimate: A Review of the Internationalists

 

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro is a book I learned a lot from even as I disagree with its premises. The authors consider our current system of international law to be mostly a positive thing, which they attribute to the 1928 Pact of Paris (also known as Kellogg-Briand). The basic idea of this agreement was to outlaw offensive warfare by declaring that countries needed to refer their disputes to arbitration and that all conquests done after 1928 were not to be recognized by the international community. (By declaring that only future conquests were illegitimate, the pact bypassed the issue of the British and French empires, which were created precisely through the sorts of actions that were now supposed to be illegal.) By implication, the pact granted relevance to international opinion. Now all wars involved the international community as other countries needed to decide whether the agreement had been violated and whether they could recognize new realities on the ground.

The practical implications of this agreement could be seen in the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. U. S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson refused to recognize Japan's control over Manchuria or the newly proclaimed State of Manchukuo. This struck the Japanese as rather hypocritical as it was hardly obvious how Japan's behavior in Manchuria was any worse than what European imperialists had been doing as a matter of course. Furthermore, Japan still bore bitter memories of Commodore Matthew Perry's diplomacy at gunpoint. Japan's mistake was that they invaded Manchuria three years too late; now there was a new set of rules. 

To be clear, as the authors note, the Pact of Paris did not stop Japan nor any of the other acts of Fascist aggression leading up to World War II. Furthermore, even the judges at Nuremberg ignored an attempt to use the Pact of Paris as a basis for prosecuting Nazi defendants. The idea was that since the actions of Nazi Germany were illegal according to the Pact of Paris, the defendants had no immunity against prosecution. What the authors want to argue is that, despite spending years as mostly a dead letter, in the post-war world, the logic of the Pact of Paris was taken up and became the basis for modern international law. For example, the pact's rejection of territorial expansion meant that, with the notable exception of Poland, international borders changed remarkably little after World War II, particularly if you compare it to World War I. Since World War II, borders have been rather stable and there have been few wars of territorial conquest. It is no longer worth it to conquer territory if the international community will not recognize it.   

For a book that is supposed to be about twentieth-century legal thought, the authors spend quite a lot of time on early modern history. As a foil to modern international law, they set up the seventeenth-century scholar Hugo Grotius. I have long considered Grotius to be one of those proto-Enlightenment thinkers who have been unfairly ignored by the general public. In reading this book, I found myself agreeing with Grotius and thinking that the world would be a much better place if we rejected modern international law and went back to something more along the lines of early modern international law as embodied by Grotius. 

Grotius' seventeenth-century Europe saw the emergence of states as distinct from Christendom or a personal monarchy, with Grotius' native Dutch Republic taking the lead, even as we are still a long way from secular democracies in the modern sense. For Grotius, the state was its own moral entity, distinct from its leaders or population. As such, while Grotius believed that states needed to justify their decisions to go to war, its leaders, population, and even the international community were exempted and even, in practice forbidden, from considering whether the state's justifications were valid. Soldiers fighting a war still had to obey the laws of war and refrain from committing war crimes as these did nothing to bring the war to a conclusion. That being said, they were not asked to be lawyers and historians qualified to evaluate whether their government was in the right. Furthermore, Grotius' version of international law had no third-party enforcement. States that allowed their soldiers to commit atrocities invited retaliation by the opposing army. Finally, since other countries were not expected to be knowledgeable enough to have an opinion about the morality of any particular foreign war, once a treaty was signed, that was the end of the matter. If a country managed to win a war and forced the defeated country to sign away territory in a peace treaty, the new borders must now be accepted by all.

What Hathaway and Shapiro dislike about Grotius is that his type of international law opened the door for all kinds of wars of expansion, with states coming up with factitious reasons to go to war without any oversight and then holding on to their ill-gotten gains. The authors point to the young Grotius working as a lawyer for the Dutch East India Company and defending the seizure of a Portuguese ship, seeing in this the foundation for his later work on international law. 

One of the examples the authors give of countries fighting according to Grotius' international law was the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. President Polk could declare war against Mexico over claims of unpaid debts that few people took seriously even at the time. American soldiers were required to obey their orders and not consult their consciouses. Similarly, the international community had no mandate to consider whether this was a war of aggression and if they had an obligation to intervene. Finally, the morality of Polk's declaration was forever placed beyond challenge by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave the American Southwest to the United States. Whether or not the United States had the right to conquer this territory, it now belonged to the United States and attempting to take it away would violate international law. 

Surprisingly enough, Grotius had a direct influence on Japan and its justifications for imperialism. In the nineteenth century, Japanese scholars started reading Grotius as a blueprint for how to operate in the world. Japan was emerging into a world dominated by European countries who had certain understandings between themselves. If Japan was going to be a great power they needed to know what these rules were. Grotius, as the father of international law, seemed to offer them the key. This seemed to work until they invaded Manchuria and they discovered that the rules had changed.  

For all their criticism of Grotius, Hathaway and Shapiro fail to consider the practical benefit of Grotius' willingness to place the question of whether a state was right to go to war in a kind of moral black box. By not demanding that citizens have the right answer as to the morality of their country's war, we protect those citizens. Their country might be in the wrong, but we are still going to grant rights to the soldiers fighting this immoral war and even the politicians. This facilitates limiting the scope of the war and working toward a peace treaty. Allowing even immoral treaties forced upon a weaker power to stand also helps to support peace. We do not want to be refighting every morally questionable war, whether the Mexican-American War or any other war. 

Considering the amount of knowledge required to settle historically based disagreements between countries, modern international law seems designed to promote a regime of international elites, who are simply going to confirm their prejudices as to which country is right in any given dispute. The use of the International Criminal Court against Israel is a good example of this. Those making the case seem willfully blind to the question of what Israel needs to do in order to avoid another October 7th. The moment we consider military necessity, the whole trial would have to be postponed until after the war when Israeli generals would be free to answer questions about their decisions without compromising ongoing military operations.

Hathaway and Shapiro actually discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example of the limits of the Paris Peace Pact. Neither the State of Israel nor Palestine existed in 1928 so the pact is useless for deciding borders. Worse, because the pact does not allow for conquest, it leaves us without a framework for a treaty. Any borders agreed to would be open to future challenges as the product of a forced treaty and, therefore, illegitimate. Having Grotius as our model for international law would allow the Palestinians to say that Israel wronged us but we lost the war and now need to move on and make peace.    

Daniel Boyarin's No-State Non-Solution

 

It is easy to dismiss most anti-Zionist Jewish activists as having little connection to Judaism. If your main involvement in Judaism comes when you say "as a Jew" before launching into a tirade against Israel, I feel perfectly comfortable in ignoring both the "as a Jew" and whatever follows about Israel. A notable exception among the anti-Zionists is Prof. Daniel Boyarin. Boyarin is a significant contemporary Jewish thinker, whose work on the Talmud and the origins of the Jewish-Christian split I take seriously. As such, there is reason not to simply dismiss his anti-Zionism, particularly as his anti-Zionism is clearly connected to his understanding of Judaism as a people that transcends politics. 

In reading Boyarin's No-State Solution, I find it fairly unobjectionable in terms of what it says. I agree with him that it is important for Judaism to transcend crude ethno-nationalism. Jews living outside the land of Israel have an important role to play within Judaism and it is deeply problematic to claim that Judaism can only function within the borders of a political state ruled by Jews. Judaism is not merely a religion in the Protestant sense of a collection of beliefs held by an individual nor is Judaism simply a national group bound by blood. A properly functioning Judaism is one that can deal with the complexity that goes into the various ways that people live out a Jewish identity. 

If I were reading Boyarin in 1924, I would have few disagreements with him. If I had lived back in the 1920s, political Zionism would not have been one of my goals. I would have been trying to strengthen Jewish life wherever Jews lived. Granted, recognizing the value of Israel as a spiritual center as well as a physical refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, I would have had a particular interest in promoting Jewish non-political life in Israel. In pursuit of this aim, I would have been attempting to cooperate with the British and the local Arab population. The deal I would have been trying to make with the Arabs would have been that they should allow mass immigration to Palestine along with some measure of local Jewish autonomy with the assurance that Palestine would eventually become part of a larger Arab federation. (I recommend Oren Kessler's Palestine 1936, which argues that this position was very much part of the mainline of Zionism during this period.) 

My main objection to Boyarin is what is left out in his book. We are not living in 1924 but in 2024. This means that the Holocaust has happened. We know that there are people who wield the power of modern states who believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and that Judaism is a menace that must be exterminated. Whether Israel should have been established in 1948, the fact is that nearly half of world Jewry currently lives in the State of Israel. This state is surrounded by hostile Arab armies and terrorist groups, who have been influenced by the Protocols and desire to murder Jews. Saying that this is the result of the actions of Zionists does not help as it only makes it easier to believe that our opponents are serious about carrying out the mass murder of Jews. Back in 1924, it was easy to dismiss European anti-Semites as being delusional; what did the Jews ever do to them? If the Nazis could carry out the Holocaust based on pure fantasy, what might Hamas be willing to do if ever given the chance. 

To be fair to Boyarin, his book was written before October 7th. That being said, I have no reason to assume that this past year has caused him to adapt his views. Far more problematic than anything he says is how he completely ignores what should be the primary question regarding the State of Israel as if it does not matter at all. Boyarin's unwillingness to even entertain the question of Jewish safety in the contemporary world, in Israel or anywhere else, collapses his entire argument. Once we begin to consider Jewish safety then one has to consider whether a Jewish willingness to break the limbs of Palestinian children throwing rocks is merely the manifestation of a macho fantasy of Jewish toughness or whether it is a pragmatic solution to save Jewish lives.  

It is almost as if the lives of regular people do not matter to Boyarin. Even Palestinian lives only matter to him in the abstract sense of being victims of Zionism. He gets to live as an academic using trite truths that one should have no need of saying to hide moral monstrosities that no one should have the gall to defend. All this while claiming to care about human lives.  

In Search of the People (Part II)

(Part I)

The problem for classical Marxists was that workers in the West proved not to be particularly revolutionary at all. They were easily bought off with modest progressive reforms such as shorter hours and better working conditions. They did not suffer alienation in the sense that the very idea of being under the authority of a capitalist did not bother them as long as that capitalist could provide them with ever greater prosperity.

One solution to this problem was Fascism. While we tend to think of Fascism as a right-wing movement, it is important to keep in mind that Mussolini started as a socialist. He then made the perfectly reasonable assumption that he could make socialism palatable in a country like Italy by embracing nationalism and using it to show that the Italian people, as Italians, really did have a revolutionary consciousness. This then led to the acceptance of the Catholic Church as part of the consciousness of the Italian People and even of the bourgeoise, who willingly embraced state control once it was made clear to them that, as Italians, they were not being placed as the villains and their property was not going to be expropriated. (It should be noted that the early Mussolini was not particularly anti-Semitic. Jews had been Italians since the Roman Empire so they were welcomed into the Fascist Party.) From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that Mousellini maintained a high degree of acceptability within leftist circles during his early years. He offered a plausible model for achieving socialist aims by avoiding conflict with the right.  

Marxism's only success in the early twentieth century was Russia, a country that was still transitioning out of an absolute monarchy and still trying to figure out the Industrial Revolution. On top of this, the Czar had managed to bring the entire country to ruin through his disastrous involvement in World War I. So the Bolsheviks managed to seize power by promising basic land reforms to improve the lot of citizens. In the 1920s, it was still plausible to imagine that Marxism would allow the Soviet Union to leapfrog the West and give workers more of the cars and electric appliances that Western workers were beginning to take for granted.

The problem for the Soviet Union was that it was unable to deliver on these economic promises. Furthermore, even trying to outproduce the West in consumer goods would betray the revolution. A worker with a truly revolutionary consciousness would rather labor under the worst horrors of the nineteenth-century factory system as long as it was an agent of the party who was his boss than to enjoy the blessings of Western capitalism if it meant being subjected to a capitalist boss. As such, one had to conclude that the vast majority of Soviet citizens were counterrevolutionaries. Even the seemingly loyal Soviet citizens who honestly believed that the Communist Party could deliver the full abundance of consumer goods had already betrayed the revolution in their hearts. They demonstrated that they did not believe in Communism as a matter of principle. If tomorrow they could be convinced that capitalism could offer more benefits, they would gladly betray the revolution and replace it with capitalism. (Note that this is what essentially happened to the Soviet Union in 1991.)   

This Soviet dilemma explains the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The attempt to collectivize farms was a failure and led to the deaths of millions, mainly in Ukraine. If you are a good Communist, the explanation for this was that the Ukrainian Kulaks were greedy and sabotaged the plan so they deserved to die. Furthermore, now that we have established that the move toward actual socialism cannot happen unless the population truly develops a socialist consciousness, something most of them lack, the only solution is to declare war on the non-socialist masses in the name of the People. It should be emphasized that, under Stalin, to be guilty of treason, did not require malicious intent. Everyone, particularly those born before 1917, was, by definition, a traitor in spirit. How could it be otherwise if you were born into a capitalist world and instinctually thought in terms of personal benefit? The mark of a traitor was, upon being accused of treason, to deny guilt. Such a person demonstrated that they lacked the proper socialist mindset and still thought in terms of individual actions instead of accepting that they cannot be anything but guilty. The mark of a true socialist believer was to confess and accept any punishment in the hope that this will lead the next generation to develop the necessary socialist consciousness.

Mid and late twentieth-century leftist revolutionaries faced a dilemma. As knowledge of Stalinist atrocities became more widespread, it became harder to openly defend the Soviet Union as any kind of ideal. (This was distinct from taking money from the Soviet Union and working for Soviet interests during the Cold War.) At the same time, Western economic successes made it less likely that urban workers would be willing to risk their unions, pension plans, and welfare benefits on some revolution. As such, leftist revolutionary thought developed along two streams that looked to different groups of discontented individuals to serve as revolutionary classes. These were third-world peasants and members of minority groups in the West.

While classical Marxism had rejected the peasant as a revolutionary class, in the twentieth century they came to be reevaluated. Peasants had the advantage of never being seduced by a capitalist consciousness of individual striving and still maintained a group ethos. Furthermore, while peasants maintained traditional beliefs, outside of Europe and the United States, these were not Orthodox Christian beliefs. Even in Latin America, the Christianity on the ground could assumed to be far enough from Orthodox Christianity that such beliefs could be held up as manifestations of a revolutionary consciousness.

Much as religion suddenly became acceptable when taken out of its Western context, so did nationalism. For example, the nationalism of the North Vietnamese was acceptable as it manifested itself as opposition to imperial powers such as the French and later the Americans. As such, the North Vietnamese demonstrated a revolutionary consciousness and could be counted as a manifestation of the People. Obviously, nationalist movements that were not hostile to the West such as in Poland or Zionism remained illegitimate. Their existence demonstrated that Poles and Israelis lacked a revolutionary consciousness and did not count as part of the People.   

This embrace of nationalism and even religion, despite the fact that these were the things that were supposed to mark someone as a Fascist, eventually led Western leftists to embrace the Arab cause. This started by accepting Arab nationalists such as Nassar but then eventually came to include Islamic fundamentalists such as Khomeini in Iran. From this perspective, the Palestinians became the ultimate “oppressed people.” They combined Arab nationalism with Islam and struggled against Western "Imperialism" by opposing the State of Israel. The destruction and its replacement with Palestine would be the elimination of the Jewish false consciousness of itself as a people and allow for the manifestation of the true Peoplehood of the Palestinians.  

Ground Rules for a Discourse With Me

 

In an earlier post, I explored why I felt I had an easier time reading conservative Christians than woke leftists. The practical implication of this is that I recognize that I struggle to engage people on the left. I am open to the possibility that this is a failure on my part that I need to rectify. Readers should feel free to offer book recommendations or to attempt to engage me in dialogue. For a fruitful conversation to happen, I suspect that there are going to need to be ground rules. 

1. People on the mainstream right today are not responsible for racism: 

We can still acknowledge that there are real problems today facing various minority communities and, recognizing the historical sources of these problems as well as a need for Americans to come together, there may be a need for government solutions; this may even include direct reparation payments. That being said, the very act of reaching out to conservatives to help in solving the problem means that you are not blaming them for racism. This would apply even if we are mainly asking conservatives to write a check. Even asking conservatives for money is distinct from trying to punish conservatives by making them pay. With punishment, there is no dialogue, just a demand and a threat of what might happen if that demand is not met. 

2. There will be no tearing down of present-day systems: 

We may acknowledge that the political and social systems we have inherited contain deeply problematic elements that need to be reformed. Furthermore, an important aspect of how we teach history should be an open and honest exploration of the skeletons in our collective closet. That being said, it should be acknowledged that any attempt to completely tear these systems down is likely to bring about extreme bloodshed and what is likely to arise will be more authoritarian than anything we have today. It may still be possible to argue that those people unfairly victimized by the system should be compensated in order that they do not harm the rest of society by turning toward revolution.  

3. As a general principle, capitalism/free markets should be acknowledged as superior to government action on both moral and practical grounds: 

There can still be room for government action under specific circumstances such as providing public goods or compensating people for past iniquities. That being said, there is going to be no unwritten constitution where the government is deemed as "people coming together" and markets as mere greed. Government must be acknowledged as a literal act of physical violence, leaving us with the question only of how much can we minimize its use without causing the collapse of civilization.   

4. There must be red lines on the left:

Historically, as Jordan Peterson has argued, the mainstream right has understood that there were lines, mainly Nazism/racism, that should not be crossed. This has not been the case with the left. Consider the example of Che Guevera. It is not socially acceptable, within polite society, to wear a Himmler t-shirt; how is it ok to wear a Che Guevara shirt? Underlying such social rules is a double standard regarding Communism. Communists get a pass for their ideals and are not held responsible for the millions of deaths they have caused. The fact that Nazis also were idealists gets ignored. We can talk about where to draw these lines to the left, just as we can talk about where the right needs to draw its lines, but such lines must still exist.    

For a meaningful dialogue to happen, I need to believe that you are not planning to kill me. As such, I need to feel confident that you are not going to demand something that I must refuse even at the risk of my life. The reality is that there are going to be people (such as Nazis and Communists) that I am unlikely to be able to live with and having me live in the same country as them is likely to lead to Hobbesian Civil War. I do wish to be able to live with others, even those I disagree with, and to do so I am willing to make compromises but compromise needs to be a two-way street.   

Legalizing Discrimination: A Liberal Solution to the Recent Supreme Court Rulings

 

Last week, the Supreme Court offered two rulings along 6-3 ideological lines that upset many liberals, which I would like to discuss here. In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the court ruled against the affirmative action programs of Harvard and North Carolina, arguing that they discriminated against Asian students. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the court ruled that a Christian website designer could refuse to design same-sex wedding websites. I empathize with liberals and recognize that liberals deserve to live in states and have institutions that reflect their values. I would like to propose a solution that would give liberals the opportunity to rule parts of America according to their desires without interference from conservatives; we should eliminate the 1964 Civil Rights Act and limit the power of the Fourteenth Amendment so that it does not mean that constitutional rights apply to states. 

At first glance, liberals may be horrified by the thought of eliminating the legal foundations of modern civil rights law and suspect that I am trying to bring back segregation. This is not my intention. I honestly want to help liberals on the principle that people should be able to come together to form social and political institutions based on their particular values. By definition, such institutions must discriminate against someone. In the name of intellectual consistency, I am willing to defend the right to freedom of association even for my political opponents and even for those people who intend to use that right to discriminate against me. 

Eliminate laws that prohibit the federal government from funding institutions that practice discrimination and Harvard will be able to practice "affirmative action" to its heart's content. There will be no need to find clever workarounds. Harvard will be able to openly put a cap on the number of Asian students they will accept. If Harvard also decides that there are too many Jews, well that was why Brandeis University was created in the first place. To be clear, I do not support any government funding for universities or any kind of education. In fact, it is my hope that allowing universities to engage in discrimination will serve as a valuable step toward abolishing federal funding for education. If my proposal leads to federal funds going to whites-only colleges then hopefully liberals will join me in working to establish a wall between government and education. If they do not then they will be the ones propping up discrimination.   

Similarly, the First Amendment should not apply to states. Were it not for an expansionist reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, only Congress would be forbidden from establishing a religion. Liberal states like Colorado should be allowed to establish a tax-payer-funded LGBTQ+ Church, with inquisitors to hunt down and arrest anyone who fails to actively affirm the Sparkle Creed. 

It should be understood that while it is possible for there to be a wall separating education and state, there can be no consistent wall between church and state. Religions do not require any beliefs regarding gods or the supernatural. Any group that comes together will be motivated by a set of values and those values will be a religion of some kind. Anyone who says otherwise can be assumed to be attempting to force their values on the rest of society by pretending that their values are not really a religion. I prefer to deal with honest theocrats.  

Part of bringing back actual federalism is to recognize that different states are going to operate as different social and political experiments. Different states are going to establish different kinds of religions. It may be that they will also make different judgments about which groups have been oppressed and which groups have been privileged. They will then attempt to make their state more "equitable" by creating affirmative action programs to help those groups deemed to be historically oppressed. Some states might decide to focus on helping Jamaican immigrants while other states might focus on people who fled Red China. Finally, other states might want to help rural Appalachian whites. Those who belong to the wrong religion or to a group deemed to have unfairly benefited from privilege can either continue to live under a dhimmi status or they can emigrate to a state where their god is not a symbol of hate and where their skin color does not mark them as systemic oppressors.  

The Protestant Balance for Religious Liberty

 

Historically, there have been few principled defenders of religious liberty and, in truth, there are few today. To appreciate this, it is useful to consider the various factors needed to render religious liberty as something sensible. There is a balancing act here. One needs to believe that religion is important but that, at the same time, there is a value to having a personal conscious.

The obvious threat to religious liberty has been traditional religions themselves. If you believe in capital T TRUTH and that you are in possession of it, then why should you tolerate people who are in error? Worse, what if these people are not only obstinate in their heathen and heretical beliefs, but insist on passing their errors on to their innocent children or uneducated neighbors? From this perspective, working for the Spanish Inquisition can be seen as a humanitarian gesture. Your main job is to explain to people how they are in error. The only people who are going to be tortured or killed are those obstinate heretics who refuse to admit that they are wrong and have, therefore, brought their calamity upon themselves. 

To say that religion has often been a threat to religious liberty does not mean that secularism offers any protection. Keep in mind that to desire to protect religious liberty, one needs to still assume that religious beliefs and practices are actually important. One thinks of the example of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was a materialist if not an outright atheist. This did not mean that he supported religious liberty for atheists or anyone else. On the contrary, it was precisely because Hobbes rejected all religious dogma that he had no problem allowing the king of his Leviathan state to enforce whatever religion he chose. Since no religion is true, the only legitimate purpose for a religion is as a signaling device to demonstrate one’s loyalty to the regime. The king should make an official religion, the more ridiculous the better. The people who are willing to say that they believe this nonsense show that they understand the importance of everyone submitting themselves to the authority of one person as the only solution to the war of all against all. Those people who insist on maintaining their loyalty to some other absurdity, presumably because they actually believe it, are a threat to public order and need to be killed. For example, Charles I had to deal with English Puritans who cared about priestly vestments as well as incense and candles in church. Before long, these Puritans were also objecting to Charles’ right to tax. They then plunged the country into a civil war and chopped Charles' head off. All of this could have been avoided if Charles had been willing to properly crack down on religious dissent.

The confused association between secularism and religious liberty comes about because secularists have hijacked the term “religious liberty” in an Orwellian fashion and have used it to mean something quite different. The secularist version of religious liberty is a rigged “heads I win, tails you lose” game in which the State is not neutral regarding religion but actively secular. Religion is then banned from the public sphere to the privacy of the home. Parents may be allowed to personally be religious but with few resources to prevent their children from exercising their “religious liberty” and leaving the faith. If the metaphysics of gender ideology can be supported with public funds more easily than the metaphysics of the Trinity then you do not have religious liberty. 

In truth, religious liberty is an accidental outgrowth of the Protestant Reformation. While Luther and Calvin were not proponents of religious liberty and in fact were, in many respects, worse than their Catholic opponents, Protestantism personalized the process of salvation. Either one needed to affirm that only Jesus (and not the works of the Church) can save or be one of the Elect, chosen from before creation for salvation. If people are saved as individuals and not as members of any established church then forcing people to follow the dictates of even the “right” church is useless for actually saving souls.

The Protestant focus on individual salvation is crucial here because it allows for both components of religious liberty to simultaneously exist. Clearly, religion is important and people need to be allowed to practice the “right” kind in order to save their souls. That being said, since God has his own highly circuitous route to how people might come to believe the right things, people should be allowed to persist in their false beliefs until God, and not the State, shows them the light. To be clear, one does not have to be a Protestant, to be a friend of religious liberty. That being said, there are grounds to suspect the religious liberty bona fides of anyone who has not been influenced by Protestant thought.     

Racism or Confession as a Social/Political Skill

 

The beginning of Home Alone 2 offers us an excellent example of a well-handled confession on the part of Kevin's older brother, Buzz. One would think that Kevin has the moral high ground against Buzz, who instigated the fight during the staged Christmas pageant. What Buzz understands, though, is that this is not about what either he or Kevin actually did but about the legitimacy of the McCallister family as a social unit. What the rest of the family cares about is the fact that they were humiliated by Kevin and Buzz fighting, which showed everyone in the theater that the McCallisters are not a real family but a collection of individuals who place their petty egos over the common good. As such, the point of Buzz's speech is to acknowledge the authority of the family and apologize primarily to them. The fact that Buzz is insincere actually benefits his cause as it demonstrates his willingness to follow the rules of the family game and place them above any personal morality. 

Kevin makes the mistake of thinking that this is about personal morality. Buzz wronged him so he had the right to respond. Buzz was insincere with his apology so he is not obligated to apologize to Buzz. Since the family, is not about to punish Buzz, they are all in league with Buzz to humiliate him so he has no obligation to apologize to them. To bow to the authority of the family would mean giving up his moral claim of being wronged by Buzz. Kevin cannot place the family's interest over his personal hurt and, therefore, falls into Buzz's trap. It is Kevin ends up being seen as the wrongdoer in the incident and is sent to bed. In the end, Buzz, despite his dubious morality, wins because he has superior social skills. One might even say that his lack of morality has helped him develop superior social skills in the sense of making the Machiavellian jump of recognizing the existence of a political mindset that is distinct and often contrary to conventional morality. 

In defense of the McCallister family, one could argue that they are right to punish Kevin. As a kid, Kevin is incredibly self-centered and focuses on his personal dignity. He needs to learn the importance of family. (This is Kevin's emotional arc that is crudely shoehorned into both movies, in between having the Wet Bandits comically walking into his booby traps.)   

Let us now move to a scenario inspired by Bill Cosby. Imagine two students caught smoking in the bathroom. Both students are brought before the school administrator and asked to confess and apologize. It would seem that, as the students have both committed the exact same action, they should receive the same punishment with the confessional and apology being mere incidental parts of the story. In truth, the response of the student to being caught is actually more important than the infraction itself. As such, even minor differences in how students respond to being caught will have a greater effect on how they are punished than even their actual deeds.  

As we have seen with the case of Kevin and Buzz, when someone commits an infraction there are two wrongs committed. There is the action itself (whether fighting during a public recital, smoking in the bathroom, or first-degree homicide) and then there is the challenge to the legitimacy of the social unit (whether the family or larger units such as a school or even a country). The implication here is that the transgressor does not accept the right of the social unit to impose obligations. Since societies tend to rely more on the soft power of people not being able to even conceive of rebellion in order to function than on actual coercion, the belief that one is allowed to break the rules is an even graver threat than the actual rule-breaking itself. This is one of the reasons why it is so important for courts to get defendants to plead guilty. The convict who admits that they were wrong and throws themselves at the mercy of the court, affirms the court's and, by extension, society's legitimate authority to punish. The crime that initially struck at the authority of society now comes to strengthen that authority.  

What happens when one of the students has a better instinctual understanding of the social theory of crime and punishment particularly as applied to white middle-class people perhaps because they are themselves white middle-class kids? As such, they are able to assume the proper contrite pose and tone that the white middle-class administrators expect. Now, what if the other student is an inner-city black kid who lacks the training to handle white middle-class administrators? (Alternatively, what if the student is on the autism spectrum and struggles, in general, to strike the right tone with neurotypicals?) 

If the white middle-class kid gets away with a slap on the wrist and the poor black kid gets the book thrown at him, is that racism? the skin color of the students would not offer decisive proof as the school could point to a subtle but real distinction in how the students behaved. Furthermore, the fact that we are dealing with subtleties traps us into having to give the administration a lot of leeway to call things as they instinctually see fit. To say that administrators should not be attempting to force middle-class "white" values on students and to do so is racism is also far from obvious as the administrators can argue that part of their job is to teach students to function within a society run by middle-class white people. Even if we disagree with them, the fact that they sincerely believe this and see themselves acting for the benefit of the black students makes it rather difficult to say that they are racists. 

E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s Cultural Literacy: A Secessionist Response

 

E. D. Hirsch Jr. is one of my favorite education theorists. I find that cultural literacy makes intuitive sense to me with its emphasis on things that children should know. While Hirsch often gets accused of trying to promote "white education," his goal has been to help children of color. If you live in a society founded upon European culture and you wish to function within it then you are going to need to know the things that members of the dominant culture take for granted. This does not mean that there is anything superior about European culture nor does it mean that American culture cannot or should not change to reflect the greater diversity of its people. One adapts to the world around oneself.  

Having a common set of cultural references functions in much the same way as language in allowing for a functional democratic country. A monarchy can function and even benefit from the fact that the peasants in different parts of the country speak different dialects and would not understand each other even if they were to meet. A democracy, on the other hand, needs a population capable of deliberation to at least come to the belief that they are one people with a mutually understood common good that all parties can be trusted to sacrifice themselves for. In practice, this requires that people have a common language that allows them to understand each other. 

In truth, it is not enough that people speak a common language; to avoid people simply speaking past each other, it is important that people also have a common set of cultural references. For example, being familiar with Star Wars to the point that you take being called "rebel scum" as a compliment, shows me that you have a deeply ingrained sense that it can be legitimate to oppose certain kinds of authority. This can serve as a useful foundation for political cooperation. From this perspective, it makes sense to teach Star Wars in school in much the same way that we teach Shakespeare. (Schools can even use Ian Doescher's Shakespearian adaptations of Star Wars.)     

Following Hirsch, I am skeptical of claims to be able to teach critical thinking as it is difficult to evaluate. If students are unable to say who the American Revolution was fought against, I am inclined to assume, barring evidence to the contrary, that they are incapable of coming up with coherent arguments in favor of democracy or monarchy. Furthermore, my cynical self suspects that the push by schools to teach critical thinking is a cover for their failure to actually teach. If schools can pretend that they are teaching critical thinking (and there is no easy to prove that they are not teaching it) then the fact that they objectively fail to teach basic facts about the American Revolution cannot be used to reach the obvious conclusion that the school is a waste of the students' time as well as the tax payers' money and should be dismantled.

Similarly, it is a dead end to try to teach reading in the abstract. Students can never become good readers in general but only good readers of specific subjects from which they have mastered the necessary vocabulary and references. To do this, students need to do extensive reading in those subjects. Along the way, they should be aided by teachers who are themselves well-read in the particular subject and understand the particular vocabulary and references that are necessary to make sense of the material.  

An area where I disagree with Hirsch is that Hirsch favors a highly centralized school system with a set curriculum that does not change from teacher to teacher and school to school. To be fair to Hirsch, he is not a libertarian and has no prior commitments to limiting government authority. Furthermore, there are practical reasons to support top-down curriculums. It simply is not workable to expect teachers to design their own curriculums that are going to effectively teach state standards. It is one thing if teachers are simply expected to offer courses on their eccentric selves (not necessarily a bad method of teaching) to allow them the liberty of teaching whatever they think is worthwhile. If we expect teachers to fulfill specific goals then they should be given PowerPoints, videos, and assignments to teach that information. 

From a social or political perspective, it makes sense to not only insist that teachers in the same school teach a common curriculum but that all schools in a city, state, or even country teach the same curriculum. If you want a unified society or country then students are going to need a common set of things that they can assume that everyone else knows as well such as the English language or Star Wars.

As a secessionist, I believe that the diverse people currently living in the United States would be better served if the country were to be divided. This would end the culture wars and allow everyone to live in a country designed to suit their particular tastes. As such, I believe in the importance of cultural literacy but it serves a different purpose for me. Instead of using cultural literacy as a normative claim that everyone should have a set of common cultural references to allow them to function as part of one country, I see cultural literacy in positive terms. Where should we draw the lines for the different "un-United States?" A useful place to start a discussion would be to privatize education and see what kinds of curricula different schools would create. Those schools that developed similar curricula based on similar cultural references should likely remain as part of the same country. Those populations that clearly have different cultural references to the extent that they would not want their children taught in the other group's school system should split up. 

It is obvious to me that the Hasidim of New Square or Kiryas Joel should be given their own country. One can see this simply from the fact that they want a different kind of school curriculum for their children based on making sure that these children grow up without cultural references like Star Wars. I am also willing to accept that people who want their children taught a 1619 Project or a Howard Zinn version of the American Revolution should also belong to a different country from me. All of this can be done peacefully and would actually help different groups live with each other. I can be perfectly tolerant of people with radically different political values from mine when they live in a different country. It is when we have to share a country that we are at risk of conflict.      

         

Are You a Fuehrerphobe?

 

As I mentioned in the previous post, you can win any debate if you are allowed to control the language used to describe things. Imagine that you had to debate a Nazi but the Nazi got to decide what the two of you had to call things during the debate. How well do you think you can do?

The Nazi gives the following opening: I believe in national democracy. The people express their will as a nation by gathering in stadiums to shout their adulation for the Fuehrer. This objectively proves that the Fuehrer embodies the collective will of the people. It is only through the Fuehrer that the people’s will can be expressed, allowing them to exist as a nation instead of a collection of squabbling individuals who will easily be conquered and enslaved by cosmopolitans, neoliberals, and Zionists. To oppose the Fuehrer is to oppress the people by robbing them of their voice and their ability to assert their nationhood.   

Essential to national democracy are the principles of freedom of speech and tolerance. The people have the right to express their will as embodied in the Fuehrer when he speaks the nation's truth. The nation is made up of many different kinds of individuals who, when left to their own devices, will inevitably disagree with each other over art, economics, and their non-Zionist religions. As the embodiment of the nation, the Fuehrer, through his person, resolves all contradictions among the people. This allows all members of the nation to tolerate each other, despite their surface disagreements, as they recognize that they have been made one through the Fuehrer.    

The elitist cosmopolitan neoliberal Zionist Fuehrerphobes seek to maintain their grip over the people and deny them their rights. They wish to replace the genuine democracy of the people with an Orwellian democracy with sham elections for politicians who do not embody the will of the people as only the Fuehrer can. National democracy is built on love for the people. Fuehrerphobes hate the Fuehrer because they hate the people. By trying to rob the people of their nationhood, they are essentially committing genocide. If you truly loved someone, you would respect them for who they genuinely are and not try to commit genocide against them.

Just as it is important not to be misled by the Orwellian democracy of the Fuehrerphobes, one should not fall for their Orwellian claims of tolerance. As we know from the Popper Paradox, it is not possible for a free society to tolerate people who reject tolerance and use the democratic process as a cover to impose tyranny. Since support for the Fuehrer is what makes someone part of the nation, Fuehrerphobes, who have separated themselves from the people in their attempt to overthrow democracy, cannot legally enjoy the rights of citizenship. They do not have the right to interfere in elections to fake the results to pretend that the Fuehrer does not have the full support of the people either by voting or by promoting fake news. 

It should be understood that underneath all of this rhetoric, lies a serious argument about the nature and purpose of democracy and liberty that liberals need to be able to effectively respond to. To understand Fascism, it is essential not to underestimate the lengths to which the common man will go to stick it to the liberal elitist intellectuals that he knows have nothing but contempt for him. That being said, liberals will never be in a position to storm this citadel unless they are first able to take the outer trench of language.

To add a further twist on this debate idea, imagine that you have a class of students raised on “national democracy.” These are genuinely good kids. They believe in freedom, tolerance, and social justice. They are eager to work for the greater good of the people by demonstrating their commitment to these principles to the administrators of elite schools. They like you but there is something a little off about you as you are different from every other teacher they have had. One day, a student asks you if you are a Fuehrerphobe. 

A hush immediately falls on the class. The students all know, with the surety that smoking is bad, that Fuehrerphobia is something simultaneously disgusting and absurd that should appeal to no reasonable person and yet is so deeply widespread in society that the Fuehrer is required to take emergency measures to protect the people against it. Fuehrerphobia is so dangerous because, unless you actively work to ally yourself with marginalized people and fill yourself with the Fuehrer's love, becoming an anti-Fuehrerphobe, it is inevitable that you will fall into Fuehrerphobic thinking. Most Fuehrerphobes do not even realize that they are Fuehrerphobes and will even deny the charge when accused. This is, of course, the ultimate proof of Fuehrerphobia.      

It would be useless to argue with these kids even if you were not threatened by secret police or with the loss of your job. National democracy honestly contains many noble ideals even as it serves to cover literal Nazism. These kids lack the language even for describing the Nazism that they are being raised with let alone for comprehending how someone might honestly be a Fuehrerphobe without being a hook-nosed villain trying to murder babies to use their blood for crackers. These kids need an alternative language where liberty, freedom, and rights have been restored to their classical liberal meanings. Alternatively, new terms for classical liberal concepts may need to be invented. 

The Buckeye Christian Political Club

 

Zayid and Umar live in Columbus, OH. They hear that on Saturdays in the Fall, a group of cool people meet in their secret club to drink beer and yell at a television screen. These cool people are keen to make sure that only other cool people join their club. As such, they only allow people who wear the right kind of clothes and say the correct password to enter. Zayid wears scarlet and grey and says something very ungentlemanly about a woman named Ann Arbor. As such, Zayid is deemed to be cool enough to enter. Umar wears blue and maize and sings "Hail to the Victors." He is chased away.  

It turns out that the cool people also have a meeting on Sundays where they sing songs and listen to a sermon, followed by cake and socializing. Zayid makes sure to wear a cross and tells the people that Jesus is his Lord and Savior. Umar wears a turban and says "Allah Akbar." Once again, things go well for Zayid and poorly for Umar. 

The following Tuesday, these cool people have their biannual go into a booth and fill in the circle next to some politician get-together. Zayid wears red again and tells the people that we need to ban critical race theory. Umar wears blue again and declares that the year 1619 was the true founding of America. Perhaps Umar's luck finally turns around.

It is clear that the cool people hanging out in the first instance are simply fans of Buckeye football. There is nothing ideological about their opposition to Michigan. Even if Umar was the world's greatest expert on football and could talk for hours with charts about the superiority of Wolverine football, it would do little good. If anything, Umar's intellectual defense of Michigan would backfire and convince the Ohio State fans that Michigan represents empty intellectualism rather than the instinctual embrace of the "soul" of football. 

If pressed, the Ohio State fans would likely concede that there is nothing intellectual about their choosing of Ohio State over Michigan. It is equally reasonable for Michigan people to choose Michigan. That being said, they will still want Michigan people to stay in their place "up north" and not force Ohio State fans to hang out with them. Michigan people may only be pretend stink but that pretend stink still carries a whiff to it. 

Once we understand that fandom exists as something real where people are incredibly passionate about something completely vacuous, it is hardly obvious that the fandom model is not in operation in areas that make intellectual claims that sound like they should be taken seriously such as religion and politics. Do the Buckeye Christians really have a well-thought-out theology that allows them to reject Islam or does their clubhouse serve the same function as a church on Sunday as it did as a Buckeye hangout on Saturday? It is hardly obvious that there is a meaningful difference between the claims “Jesus is Lord” and “Ann Arbor is a Whore.” The fact that people around the world might proclaim the former with enthusiasm and without the benefit of alcohol should matter little. If the Buckeye Christians do not talk about Jesus with a greater level of enthusiasm than their denunciation of Ann Arbor, why should we not assume that both of them are equally meaningful to them?     

The same goes for politics even though politics deals with objective facts as opposed to metaphysics and there are real-world consequences to politicians of one party or the other winning elections. (This is distinct from whether your vote actually matters.) Despite the fact that people regularly make statements in politics that should be subject to refutation, we should not take these claims seriously as something the people actually believe. Their claims likely function not as truth statements but as signaling devices to show what team they root for.

From this perspective, the more a claim is clearly false, the more politically useful it becomes as a signaling device. Claiming that Trump really won the election or that American police are the moral equivalent of the Gestapo are both ridiculous. But the fact that they are ridiculous makes them good signaling devices. Only a true-believing Trumpist or leftist, who had no interest in being accepted by mainstream society, would ever say such things. 

Peter Boghossian engages in a useful exercise where he has people line up along a spectrum indicating not whether they support a statement or not but how strong their position is. One of the things that comes out strongly from these exercises is that people who take the most extreme positions are not there because they really have done significant research into the topic. Instead, their positions are marks of their identity. This causes them to take challenges to their positions very personally and lash out when someone questions them. It is almost as if they were sports fans confronting fans of the opposing team.  

Voting Rights for Racists: The Case for Legalized Discrimination in Government Jobs

 

In the past, I have argued that discrimination on the part of private businesses should be a legally protected right. How could an educated person such as myself, who is part of a racially mixed family, support "hate?" I believe that opponents of Israel should be allowed to use BDS despite the fact that it is an anti-Semitic conspiracy designed to discriminate against Jews and ultimately to offer moral cover to people who wish to murder Jews. Universities should be allowed to accept black students over white ones regardless of qualifications. For that matter, schools should be allowed to operate programs and create spaces solely for people of color. I may find these practices to be morally repellent but then again I am morally opposed to Aryan coffee shops and strip clubs. These are examples of social crimes where patrons of a business do not cause anyone physical harm but are encouraged to inculcate values that I believe are ultimately detrimental to a well-functioning society and yet I still believe that they should be legal.  

As a classical liberal, I accept the horrific doctrine that people should be allowed to openly support socially destructive ideas to the point that they cause actual harm. The reason for this is that I assume that the tradeoff is going to be even worse. For example, while strip clubs teach men to objectify women and not get married, they are not going to cause nearly as much harm as government-licensed Puritans armed with a modesty checklist who rely on government power as opposed to articulating a case to society (as well as themselves) why specific modes of dress (or the lack of which) should be opposed. If I can defend the right of businessmen to operate strip clubs, I fail to see how I can reject the notion that businessmen have the right to be racists and openly discriminate in their hiring. 

For a long time, I have accepted a distinction between discrimination carried out by private businesses and that of the government. This distinction increasingly seems strained to my mind. Imagine an election between evil billionaire Monty Burns and Lieutenant Uhura (may the memory of Nichelle Nichols be a blessing). Burns wins the election by openly appealing to the racism of voters. Furthermore, we are able to find enough voters to cover the margin of victory who confess that they voted for Burns not because they supported tax cuts for billionaires and the elimination of government oversight over nuclear power plants over more funding for linguistics and space travel but only because they refused to vote for blacks. As such, it is an objective fact that Uhura was discriminated against based on her skin color. Does this mean that what the voters did was illegal and the election should be overturned?

It is important to keep in mind that voters have the right to be idiots. Democracy is not about giving voters the best leaders. It is about giving them the leaders they deserve and giving it to them "good and hard." The racists who voted for Burns deserve whatever Burns will do to them and the liberals who voted for Uhura do not deserve much better as they agreed to be part of the same country as the Burns voters and have not tried to secede. 

Once we acknowledge that voters have the right to discriminate against political candidates, why not allow their racist elected officials to fulfill the wishes of their racist electorate by discriminating who is hired for government jobs? Why should Burns not have the right to fulfill his campaign pledge of paying for his billionaire tax cut by firing black teachers if that is what his voters elected him to do?

It should be noted that there are limits to this line of thinking. For example, it would not apply to the criminal justice system. If the district attorney would, as his closing argument, choose to lead the jury in a round of singing "kill the n-word," the conviction of the black defendant could be overturned. There is a difference between voters and jurors, mainly that jurors do not have the right to be irresponsible and follow their own bad judgment; they are required to follow a clear set of legal instructions given to them by the judge who in turn is bound by a code of legal ethics. Attorneys, unlike political candidates, are not allowed to use a wide variety of dishonest tactics to manipulate jurors. Defendants, regardless of their skin color, have a right to a fair trial and the burden of proof is on the prosecution and the judge to make sure they get one. Similarly, blacks cannot be kept from voting as they have a right to vote. 

All of this is distinct from a job, whether in the private or government sectors, as no one has a right to a job. By contrast, people have the right to discriminate and hand jobs to people for reasons that have nothing to do with qualifications or actual life choices. Your height and looks are based on your genetics. You never got to choose them and they are unlikely to be connected to your job performance. That being said, the reality is that people are discriminated against due to being short and ugly. It is certainly unfair but that is life. Why should we treat discrimination based on skin color any differently?                

Civil War, Surrender, or Secession

 

I am often criticized for being a secessionist. I believe that states should be allowed to leave the United States. For that matter, I think it is a person's right to stand on their roof, raise their flag and declare that their house is now an independent country with the right to not pay taxes or obey regulations on the gambling, drug, and medieval surgery den in operation inside. Granted, there are all sorts of practical problems with actually doing this. I am talking about what a person has the right to do, not whether this is really a good idea. 

What most people miss is the extreme moral price to be paid for not accepting the moral and legal right to secede. Mississippi and California are both states that greatly differ from the rest of the country. Take the state that you sympathize least with. Imagine that the governor of that state got on national TV and declared that unless the Constitution was rewritten to suit them, they will secede from the United States. This would leave us with three options; we could fight a civil war, surrender to their demands, or accept their secession. 

The civil war option becomes deeply problematic if the secessionists have managed to seize military bases, gained the backing of elements of the military, or even the recognition of foreign countries. It is important to keep in mind that the American Civil War was made possible because the South had three months from December 1860, when South Carolina voted to secede, to March 1861 when Lincoln became president, where they could act with complete impunity. Not only did the lame-duck Buchanan administration not begin to call up troops to invade the South but they allowed the South to seize federal forts and armories. This would become important for the coming war as the South lacked the industrial capacity to manufacture the weapons it needed. 

Even if the state had no weapons with which to fight but simply blocked the roads with kindergarteners, could such a one-sided civil war be justified? Are we prepared to call a soldier who ran over a kid with a tank, an American hero who saved the Union? Note that if our opponents know that we have moral qualms about killing children then they will not hesitate to put their kids in danger with the confidence that we will back down and they will win even though they are outgunned. One thinks of the example of the Palestinians, who offer a master class on how to cynically put children in danger in the hope of a propaganda win. 

If we are not prepared to commit mass murder, we can surrender and give the states what they demand in order to remain in the Union. Mississippi might want an end to gay marriage and for abortion to be made a federal crime. California might want to make it a federal crime to misgender someone or impose a green plan on the rest of the country. Are you willing to consent to whichever one you find most distasteful? 

At a practical level, it is absurd to hear liberals and conservatives complaining about what the other side has just done. Take the example of the Dobbs decision. You liberals knew for years that conservatives were the kinds of people who would do such a thing and yet you agreed to be part of the same country as them. By not seceding, you signed a Faustian bargain in which you agreed to allow for the end of Roe in exchange for conservatives not breaking up the Union. If you had threatened conservatives to either pass an amendment to protect abortion or you would leave, would you have been confident that conservatives would have given in? 

By not openly demanding secession, you supporters of abortion demonstrate that your protests are nothing more than political theater. You do not really believe that women are going to be turned into baby-making slaves. If you honestly thought this was the case, you would be demanding secession and threatening total Hobbesian civil war if your demands were not met. 

Extreme anti-abortion antics, while insincere, pose their own risks as conservatives might come to take them seriously as opposed to merely an opportunity to raise money and allow activists to feel good about themselves. If conservatives conclude that civil war with the left is inevitable, they might decide that their best chance of winning lies with starting the war with a preemptive first strike.    

If you find it implausible that states would threaten secession as a weapon to blackmail the rest of the country with in order to get their preferred policies enacted, it is important to recognize that early American history was dominated by the widely recognized fact that the South would only stay in the Union as long as slavery was protected. As such abolitionists operated under the limitation that they could not deny the fact that, if they ever were able to come close to turning their ideals into actual policy, the South would simply secede.

As the North and South developed very different trajectories regarding slavery, the South started demanding that the federal government not only refrain from eliminating slavery but actively work to advance it. For example, the Fugitive Slave Act made a mockery of state's rights when it came to the right of states to not tolerate slavery. Finally, with the victory of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party in 1860, the South decided that they would not even accept being subject to a party that merely claimed to oppose slavery in the territories and they seceded.

The United States was founded on a Faustian bargain to tolerate slavery in the South. Considering this, what is so implausible about imagining that either allowing red states to ban abortion or allowing blue states to protect it might be a modern version of such a Faustian bargain that is necessary to keep this country together? If you are not willing to openly support secession then you cannot play innocent as to the price you have to be willing to pay in order for there to be a United States. The only America you can expect to have is one run according to the values of your opponents. Any attempt to balk on this reality leads, in practice, to secession if not the truly nightmarish possibility of civil war.     

Once we recognize that the options of civil war and surrender are so morally reprehensible, we are left with only one option, secession. I am not saying that secession is going to be easy. To be clear, my ideal situation would be for the country to remain whole under my terms. As a matter of pragmatism, I am willing to make some concessions to my opponents. That being said, there are people out there whose vision for society is so markedly different from mine that we can make no pretense that they ever will be able to make the necessary concessions to have a united country that would be mutually acceptable. This would leave, as the only options, fighting a civil war or allowing for the United States to be divided into a collection of new countries from the diverse groups, from the left to the right, that currently make up this deeply divided nation. 

Why Conservatism Needs a Classical Liberal Foundation: A Response to Yoram Hazony

 

Yoram Hazony provides a useful example of the importance of the unwritten texts by which we read an author. On paper, there is much that I agree with Hazony. We are both traditionally observant Jews, who have been heavily influenced by Christian thought and therefore greatly respect serious Christians. We believe that religion of some sort will inevitably form the background of any political system and that any claims to be able to completely separate Church and State will prove unworkable or a cynical ploy to bring someone's preferred religion through the backdoor under a different name. (It is important to keep in mind that the various forms of leftism that have evolved since the Enlightenment down to modern Wokism are religions with their own metaphysics and a metanarrative about the interplay of good and evil throughout history and should be held to the same First Amendment standards as any traditional religion.) Both of us wish to protect small traditional communities from the larger forces of modernity. 

One difference between us is that Hazony is clearly more willing to use the power of government against corporations that choose to pursue a leftist agenda. Even here my opposition is somewhat muted. I am torn as to how conservatives should respond to a left that no longer accepts traditional classical liberal norms. If leftists are willing to use government when they win elections to reshape culture in their image, it is only fair that conservatives respond in kind. 

It is the issue of classical liberalism, though, that highlights the key problem I have with Hazony. His recent book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, is an attack on fusionist conservatives like me who presuppose a commitment to a classical liberal unwritten constitution. Hazony blames the mainstream American conservative movement as embodied by William F. Buckley and Frank Meyer for not being willing to take a harder line in defense of religious values, having already conceded to the left the premise that religion was a private matter with no role in the public sphere. This turned the culture wars into a decades-long negotiated surrender where only the timeline for the secularization of society was ever in question. If conservatism is about preserving something, it would seem that the only thing conservatives have been able to conserve is the power of big business. This might have been a reasonable strategy at a time when it could be assumed that businessmen could be counted upon to support a socially conservative agenda in return for conservatives voting for free-market policies. Today, this is clearly no longer the case as it is corporate America that is the main force pushing for Woke policies. 

To respond to Hazony, it is important to state why a classical liberal framework is necessary particularly for conservatives. For better or worse, we live in a pluralistic society, full of decent people who have a right to live and vote in this country but are far from being conservatives even by the standards of National Review let alone Hazony. Assuming that we are not planning secession (a solution that I would support but Hazony would not) or civil war (which I hope that Hazony would not support), it is necessary to convince such people to vote for the Republican Party or at least not object too strongly when the Republican Party wins an election or a Supreme Court vote. Conservatives need to be able to offer such people certain guarantees that they will be able to live their non-conservative lives in peace. To operate within the classical liberal unwritten constitution is to have a set of values ingrained into you to such a degree that violating the legitimate rights of your opponents becomes unthinkable.   

Rod Dreher provides a good example of this sort of thinking when he challenges Catholic Integralists with what might be called the Edgardo Mortara question. If Integralists, somehow, were to take power, what, in their philosophy, would make it unthinkable for something like the Mortara case to ever happen? For those unfamiliar, Edgardo Mortara was a Jewish kid kidnapped by the Vatican in the 1850s because he had been baptized by a maid. This is a scenario that fills me with fear coming from the left. If you are on the left and you cannot explain to me why it is inconceivable that police will come to my house tonight or in five years to take my boys away because one of them told a teacher that they felt like they were really a girl but I refused to let them wear a dress then you can assume that political cooperation is off. Consistency demands that I respect the right of leftists to think along the same lines. If a political party animated by Hazony's ideals ever came to power what guarantees could he make to homosexuals that police will not come in the night and seize their children?

Democracies are inherently plagued with a variation of the prisoner's dilemma every time a new party wins an election. If Republicans win in November 2024, what is to stop Joe Biden from declaring the election a fraud and having Republicans shot before they can take power in January? This could even be declared a "defense of democracy" on the assumption that the Republicans would do the same thing if they lost in 2028. For democracy to work, not only is it necessary that all major factions respect the results of elections, it needs to be inconceivable to both sides that their opponents, whom they honestly dislike and think are bad for the country, would ever stoop so low as to overthrow an election. (Because of the events of January 6, this assumption can no longer be made about the United States.) 

The same logic applies to Supreme Court decisions. Will leftists, in response to the overturning of Roe, content themselves with mouthing off, marching, and trying to turn out voters for November or will they, instead, send out execution squads with proscription lists against conservatives? Make no mistake; this is the only reasonable option for anyone who truly believes that this country is in imminent danger of turning into the Handmaiden's Tale. Leftists have a plausible incentive to do so now that they can still rely on the protection of the Biden administration as opposed to a Republican administration that might come to power in 2025. What if the Court were to overturn Obergefell? 

It is the responsibility of conservatives like me to talk to the decent liberals in my life like my mother and mother-in-law to convince them that, contrary to what they might be hearing on NPR or MSNBC, there is no plot to establish a Christian theocracy. For good reason, they might not like conservative policies but that is the price of living in a country that has the GOP. For this to work, I need to be able to argue that there are certain lines that would be inconceivable for conservatives to cross. 

Here is where classical liberalism becomes important. It provides a collection of assumed red lines that can be built into the collective political consciousness of a society to never cross even at the cost of some short-term gain. Some hack writer is producing smut. That is their right. It does not matter if it has no social redeeming importance and may even be harmful. By tolerating indefensible junk, I signal to my opponents that I have no intention of coming after them even when they write books attacking me.  

As Hazony recognizes, part of being a conservative is the acceptance of norms, the most important ones being unwritten, that govern a society. One does not attempt to refashion society with a gun in one hand and a philosophy book in the other.  In the United States, a central part of our political norms is classical liberalism. This is an advantage of American conservativism. As Hayek argued, to be a conservative in America still means to be a supporter of liberty. The United States has no living tradition of crown and altar conservatism. Thankfully, the closest American equivalent, the slavocracy tradition of John C. Calhoun, lost all political plausibility in the 1960s with the defeat of George Wallace. When Hazony talks about the Anglo-American conservative tradition, he means Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Marshall. Even as Hazony denounces the "Puritan theocrats" of the English Civil War, he never suggests that Americans should return to absolute monarchy along the lines of Charles I.   

The United States is a large and complicated country, one that I personally think should be broken up. If I, somehow, was ever elected president here would be my message to my mother, mother-in-law, and all the decent liberals out there who profoundly disagree with me. There will be no more pride flags on federal buildings but the police will not be charging into homes to arrest adults engaged in consensual activities. I may be willing to allow states to ban abortion but I will protect abortion in those states where it is legal. As a guarantee of my sincerity, I will respect the right of every individual property owner to secede from the United States to create LGBTQ/abortion sanctuaries as they wish. 

As a classical liberal, I am willing to make serious good-faith guarantees to my liberal opponents. What can Hazony promise? What lines will he not cross even though it will cost him the chance to build his conservative society?