While We’re At It

♦ Pope Francis generates pronouncements—and, more often than not, denunciations—like a verbal semi-automatic weapon. Years ago I learned to cleave to the spiritual discipline of Ignatian indifference, which urges us to take up only those things that help us to praise, reverence, and serve God, while setting aside that which tends the other way. In practice this has meant ignoring most of what the Holy Father says. There are moments, however, for detached amusement. One arose when a friend sent me a portion of the transcript of Pope Francis’s discussion with the Portuguese Jesuits after World Youth Day in Lisbon. The topic of the American church came up. Pope Francis allows that in our troublesome country, “the situation is not easy: there is a very strong reactionary attitude.” Too many American Catholics are indietrismo (“backward-looking”), and this leads to “a climate of closure” in which “ideology replaces faith.” A mentality that is “all rigid and contorted” destroys the faith. It’s nice to hear from the pope how wicked I am.

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♦ Recent testing produced depressing results in Baltimore City public schools. In a number of schools, not a single student was doing math at grade level. In the system overall, only 7 percent of third through eighth graders were proficient. Meanwhile, at the July convention of the National Education Association, delegates committed the organization to working against legislation that limits LGBT propaganda in school. The kids can’t do long division, but rest assured, they’re fully catechized in the finer points of sexual liberation, learning to say “birthing parent” and “non-birthing parent” rather than “mother” and “father.”

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♦ The foundations of our political consensus are eroding. The establishment is noticing. Writing in The Atlantic, Graeme Wood dwells on the influence of Bronze Age Pervert, a transgressive internet personality. For a moment, though, Wood surveys a wider scene. He recognizes that Bronze Age Pervert’s antics can so transfix us that we fail to see something real happening among bright and normal young people. Here’s what Wood observes on the basis of an exchange between Yale professor Bryan Garsten and First Things contributor Matthew Rose:

Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues [in response to a paper by Rose, later published in First Things as “Leo Strauss and the Closed Society,” December 2022] that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. Liberalism is the view that individuals have rights and beliefs, and that politics involves safeguarding rights and making compromises when beliefs conflict. It has existed for only a few centuries and is by some measures the most successful idea in history. Just look where people want to live: the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all liberal places that people will risk their life to reach.

But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected.

In my experience, the choices are not so stark. Most young people whom I meet are not interested in protofascist or quasi-theocratic options. But they do express doubts about the present regime. This is because they are not stupid. They can see that the regime is quick to speak of “our democracy,” but works to censor and control our lives, even our use of pronouns. I regard Bronze Age Pervert as a symptom (a minor one), not a cause. The source of growing dissent from our illiberal liberal regime rests in its failures, which are masked by self-serving propaganda and tactics of intimidation.

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♦ There’s good reason to applaud the recent Supreme Court decision concerning racial discrimination in college admissions. Yet for all the worries about “illiberalism” and grave talk of the “rule of law” emanating from our establishment, does anyone think elite universities won’t move heaven and earth to avoid compliance with new strictures concerning race-based admissions—and that they’ll succeed? After all, it’s what our regime wants.

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♦ Les Murray’s “An Era” (1990):

The poor were fat and the rich were lean.
Nearly all could preach, very few could sing.
The fashionable were all one age, and to them
a church picnic was the very worst thing.

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♦ On a number of occasions I’ve lamented that our leaders have done nothing to stem the surging tide of pornography on the web. A friend recently told me that I’m behind the times. In 2022 Louisiana State Representative Laurie Schlegel introduced legislation requiring websites that host pornography to “perform reasonable age verification methods.” In effect, those wishing to access pornography need to show government-issued ID in one or another electronic form. The bill passed the Louisiana House by a vote of 96–1 and the State Senate by a vote of 34–0. Similar legislation has been enacted in Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia, and Texas. The effects have been dramatic, and not only where underage users are concerned. Not surprisingly, adults who are legally entitled to view pornography aren’t keen to upload screenshots of their driver’s licenses onto pornography websites. One source reports that Pornhub, the biggest global company in the porn industry, has suffered an 80-percent drop in traffic in Louisiana. Pornhub has stopped operating in Utah, Mississippi, and Virginia. As an industry representative observed, age verification requirements are “business-killing.” More states have legislation pending.

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♦ Katherine Stewart is ringing alarm bells in the New Republic, a zombie publication that specializes in the slightly upscale propaganda of the sort I’ve come to associate with Timothy Snyder (who indeed has written for the New Republic). Her target is the “fascist enthusiasts” at the Claremont Institute. Among many others, Stewart lines up First Things contributor Nathan Pinkoski for reputational assassination. His crime: “He published a review in First Things of a key text in the white supremacist canon: Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints.” Why write about Raspail? One might observe that Raspail is a major figure in postwar French literature. Why publish such an essay? One might further observe that the suicide of the West, the central theme of The Camp of the Saints, has been a much-­discussed topic in our pages. But according to Stewart, the essay and its publication can only be for the purpose of reviving white supremacy.

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♦ Matthew Crawford pens a superb analysis of America’s political culture. His three-part series of essays in his Substack newsletter, Archedelia, begins:

We are watching an ongoing transformation of our political regime, in which sovereignty (that is, the authority to decide) has gradually been relocated from its constitutionally prescribed setting, which granted a presumptive deference to the majority, to a set of mutually supporting technical and moral clerisies. These staff a state-like entity that expands its dominion on two fronts: the “woke” revolution and the colonization of ordinary life by technical expertise.

The rest is required reading for anyone who wants a reality-based understanding of our increasingly post-democratic regime. Here’s a taste of his analysis:

The premise of white supremacism underwrites an ESG-enforced system of DEI rents that are the price of gaining access to capital in the United States. Diversity really is an asset for firms operating in the U.S. corporate-state nexus, in the same way that being Party-aligned is a strength for Chinese firms.

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♦ Gigantic foundations and university endowments funded by trillions of dollars of private wealth play an important role in the “state-like entity” that is superseding the old regime of elected officials as the governing power in the West. If we want to reverse the trend toward a post-democratic system, we need to restrain the power and scope of the super-sized foundations and NGOs that have erected a para-government of experts and activists. To that end, I propose a lifetime limit on charitable deductions pegged at $250 million. Crawford’s analysis highlights the urgency of limiting the ability of America’s oligarchs to translate their vast wealth into unaccountable political power.

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♦ Crawford’s Archedelia is one of three Substack newsletters I read regularly. The others are N. S. Lyons’s The Upheaval and Paul Kingsnorth’s The Abbey of Misrule. These voices of dissent help us think rather than blindly rage; they bring us back to what is enduringly human.

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♦ I’m not the sort of person who’s up on popular culture. But even I became aware of Oliver Anthony, a YouTube phenomenon whose song, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” received a staggering number of views over the course of just a few days. Anthony’s voice is resonant in its anger, and his litany of accusation fits nicely into the American tradition of working-class protest songs. Left-wing commentators rushed to explain away the song’s popularity, arguing that its rise had been cleverly engineered by right-wing dark money. Others tut-tutted that the song’s message is confused, or worse, that it thinly veils racism. Or is it fascism? It can be hard to keep up. This listener found “Rich Men North of Richmond” a moving cri de coeur. And the cultural critic in me marveled that the spirit of Woody Guthrie now moves on the populist right. (Oliver Anthony describes himself as neither left nor right, but the left’s hostility to the song speaks volumes.) The American left, now tenured, funded, and corporate-sponsored, is creatively kaput.

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♦ I’m happy to report that the trustees of New College of Florida (one of whom is my colleague, Mark Bauerlein) voted to abolish that school’s gender studies program. No calls for dialogue, no faculty committee to study the matter, no consultants consulted on “best practices”—just simple elimination. Which is what we need. When you are going in the wrong direction, it’s essential to stop, turn around, and go back the way you came.

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♦ The scene in late August: White folks were at a standoff in Nevada. One cohort occupied a line of cars trying to get to Burning Man. The other had erected a “climate blockade” on the roadway, stopping traffic. In stormed Rangers from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribal Police. (The blockade was on tribal land.) A video on Twitter (I meant to say X) shows the Rangers’ pickup smashing through the blockade and officers jumping out to arrest the protesters. As a Twitter wag put it, these days we need Native Americans to enforce the rule of law when white tribes are at loggerheads.

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♦ ROFTERS stands for Readers of First Things, who band together for monthly discussions of their favorite journal of religion and public life. I’m delighted to report that four noble souls wish to expand our network by establishing new ROFTERS groups:

Douglas Mock is in the Morehead-Ashland, Kentucky, area. Contact him at douglasmock[at]hotmail.com.

Herb Guyton is in Little Rock, Arkansas. His contact is 0387thud[at]gmail.com.

Kathi Lehr is in Bellevue, Washington. She can be reached at kathilehr[at]comcast.net.

Rich Trzupek wishes to gather folks from the Lincoln and Omaha areas in Nebraska. Contact him at richard.trzupek[at]gmail.com.

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♦ In early August, we welcomed Jacob Adams to our staff as a junior fellow. A graduate of Georgetown University, Jacob is an outstanding addition to a long line of dedicated and talented young people who have done a great deal over the years to maintain the excellence of this publication.