RUTHFULLY YOURS

Reprinted from Hoover.org.

The hyper-emotional reactions to Donald Trump’s election occasioned much commentary about the state of America’s millennials. On college campuses across the country there were “cry-ins,” group “primal screams,” and designated “healing spaces.” The general mood was captured in a tweet from the student body president at American University: “For those who viewed [the election outcome] as unfavorable, anger, sadness, grief, and frustration were brought to the fore. It’s important to note that those feelings are valid and justified. People are scared and people are worried about their futures and their lives.”

Critics derided these displays as the childish outbursts of pampered “snowflakes.” But such traumatized responses to the outcome of an election reflect a much larger cultural shift that has happened over many decades: the change from a tragic view of human life to a therapeutic one. This shift has troubling implications for our political and economic order.

Until the nineteenth century, the tragic understanding of existence was dominant. The ancient Greeks invented a literary genre to express this belief. Like the flawed heroes of Greek tragedy, humans are defined by the permanent, unchanging conditions of life. They are hostages to time, sickness, want, and death; to unforeseen changes and disasters; to a capricious, harsh natural world; and, most importantly, to their own destructive impulses and passions that their minds can only sporadically control.

A classic expression of the tragic vision can be found in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Describing the horrors of the revolutions the war sparked throughout the Greek world, he writes, “The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same,” for war confronts people with “imperious necessities” and “so proves a rough master that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.”

Similarly, Christianity put a flawed humanity at the center of its theology. Because of the Fall, we are all born prone to sin, incapable on our own of renewing our lost spiritual connection to God. As the most influential theologian of eighteenth-century America, Jonathan Edwards, put it, “the innate sinful depravity of the heart” and the “state of man’s nature, that disposition of the mind, is to be looked upon as evil and pernicious” and “tends to extremely pernicious consequences.” Only salvation through Christ can create true happiness, that of the soul reunited with God. In the fallen world, however, the same tragic conditions of existence will continue until the second coming of Christ and the final judgment.

This belief began to weaken with the rise of science and the spectacular improvements of human life it occasioned, beginning in the nineteenth century. Advances in medicine, transportation, sanitation, and the production of food lessened and in some cases eliminated the perennial physical miseries of human existence like disease and malnutrition. This encouraged a belief that new knowledge and technologies could likewise be discovered to improve minds and social institutions as well. Human misery was now believed to spring not from our flawed human nature and choices, but from harmful beliefs embedded in religion, tradition, and unjust social and political orders.

Thus the therapeutic view was born, nurtured by the “human sciences” such as psychology and sociology, and confident that progress would eventually eliminate even our private psychic traumas and subjective discontents, the causes of which lay in the social environment and could there be uprooted. The philosopher and Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer articulated this optimism at the end of the nineteenth century: “Progress is not an accident, but a necessity. Surely must evil and immorality disappear; surely must men become perfect.”

In contrast, however, our political order as enshrined in the Constitution was built on the older tragic understanding of human nature. The Founders particularly feared how power might further corrupt an already flawed human nature. John Adams, in his influential 1787 study Defense of the Constitutions, acknowledged the possibility of generosity and kindness in men, “yet every moral theorist will admit the selfish passions in the generality of men to be the strongest. There are few who love the public better than themselves . . . Self-interest, private avidity, ambition, and avarice will exist in every state of society, and under every form of government.”

Nor could man’s depraved nature be permanently improved. Driven by their flaws, people will always form what James Madison in Federalist 10 called “factions” based on mutual “passions and interests,” and thus will always strive to acquire more power at the expense of other factions. This tendency to aggrandize power, Madison says, is “sown in the nature of man,” never to be eliminated, but only controlled and limited by dividing, checking, and balancing the three branches of the federal government. In this way the freedom of the citizens­­ could be preserved and tyranny avoided, the Founders’ most important goal.

Our free-market capitalist economic order likewise is grounded in a tragic view of life. Economist Joseph Schumpeter said the “essential fact” of capitalism was “creative destruction.” Economist historians W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm describe this process and its costs: “lost jobs, ruined companies, and vanishing industries are inherent parts of the growth system.” However, “A society cannot reap the rewards of creative destruction,” they continue, “without accepting that some individuals might be worse off, not just in the short term, but perhaps forever . . . Capitalism’s gain and pain are inextricably linked.” As Cox and Alm point out, the improvements in transportation sparked by the internal-combustion engine, for example, destroyed whole industries such as carriage and harness manufacturers and blacksmiths.

Capitalism, then, reveals how inequalities in talent, brains, virtue, and luck lead to economic winners and losers. But a dynamic capitalism gives people the freedom and opportunity to rise as far as their abilities can take them, rather than being stymied by static castes, guilds, and classes.

In contrast, the rise of progressivism and collectivist economies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reflected the therapeutic vision of a world free of the tragic constants acknowledged by the Founders and free-market economies. In the late nineteenth century, the creation of human sciences persuaded the first progressives that human nature could be improved. In 1914, the progressive journalist Walter Lippmann discarded the idea that human nature is fixed. Rather, we must “devise its social organizations, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and control it.” Such progress is now possible, Lippmann continues, because of “the great triumph of modern psychology and its growing capacity for penetrating to the desires that govern human thought.” The influential progressive theorist Herbert Croly likewise asserted that a “better future would derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources which research could discover.”

The practical means for achieving this transformation were set out by Woodrow Wilson, who felt the Constitution’s balance of powers was made obsolete by this new knowledge. Government must now follow the “Darwinian principle,” he wrote, of organic development guided by the rationally organized improvement of people and society. This requires a more powerful executive branch overseeing a centralized network of bureaus and agencies “of skilled, economical administration” comprising the “hundreds who are wise” who will guide the thousands who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish,” wrote Wilson. Technocrats will replace the diverse people and the sovereign states as the primary determiners of public policy and action. Discarded was the Founders’ distrust of concentrated power whether wielded by the majority or by an elite no less vulnerable to the “encroaching nature” of power that necessarily diminishes political freedom.

Similarly, the idea that all problems can be solved by knowledge and technology would not accept as inevitable the necessary costs of capitalism’s “creative destruction.” In Marxist, socialist, and progressive economic theories, equality of opportunity was inadequate. Now equality of outcome was demanded, for no one should be left to feel inadequate or inferior to those of greater talent or luck who unfairly monopolize wealth. Government began to interfere in the market, attempting to control its workings through laws and regulations in order to create more egalitarian outcomes and eliminate the “various and unequal distribution of property,” as Madison described what we call “income inequality.” But our complaints about income inequality spring not from the tragic reality that some people are not as smart, hard-working, or lucky as others, but from unjust economic and social structures. These need to be corrected by the technocratic elite through coercive federal agencies and their rules.

“No poorest in thy borders but may now Lift to the juster skies a man’s enfranchised brow Oh Beautiful! My Country! Ours once more!”

James Russel Lowell, Harvard University, 1865

Lowell’s speech (above), given within a post-civil war commemoration service, was later described within The Growth of the American Republic (1937):

“Lowell was, in fact, delivering the swan song of the New England intellectuals and reformers. In the generation to come that region would no longer furnish the nation with reformers and men of letters, but with a mongrel breed of politicians, sired by abolition out of profiteering.”

Like a mythical phoenix, a reformer has arisen from the ash heap that was “politics as usual” (rife with obvious profiteering by pretentious mongrels) to form an unusual force to be reckoned with – a mix of grassroots support and “big money” borne of inheritance, intelligence, strength, and hard work. It may be unsettling for some; but those who form the backbone of the country seem to believe that it’s long past time for corrupt electioneering, “big-government” policies, and crony capitalism to flame out. This phoenix, who knows through personal experience how “the game” has been played, and rejects any attempt to control his thought and actions by way of campaign contributions, now has the opportunity – in fact, the mandate — to fly!

And fly, he must – there is much to be accomplished. Of all the things that must be done soon, the delivery of a “swan song” in the form of a proposal for complete bureaucratic transformation should be among the top of the list. The institutions that make up our government could be enormously effective and efficient – but not as they currently are, and not with the ideologically-skewed population that is currently employed within. If the new administration stands a chance of enacting and sustaining substantive change, the bureaucracies must undergo metamorphosis (or in the words of the President-Elect, the swamp must be drained). The extent to whether that is possible depends on how radical our new leadership is willing to be.

Practices that include “burrowing in” (the transfer of political appointees into permanent positions) have increased bias at the senior levels, while programs to facilitate the hiring of college graduates continually add liberal partisanship to the workforce at the entry levels. Although research is lacking, it stands to reason that hiring freezes coupled with increased attrition tend to sap the bureaucracies of those who do not conform to what has become “the ideological norm,” thereby exacerbating the problem.

The Hatch Act supposedly ensures a non-partisan, apolitical federal workplace, but the Act is rarely stamped into the consciousness of employees as it once was (especially among those who began their careers as political appointees). Political bias has become overt, pervasive, and pernicious as evidenced by recent scandals. If political contributions can be seen as an indication of bias, the bureaucracies are probably on par with the universities, courts, and media. Ninety-five percent of contributions to presidential campaigns (averaged across federal organizations) during the 2016 election were to the Democrat candidate, vice 5 percent for the Republican candidate.

Bias on the scale that we have seen over the past few years can only be ejected by an infusion of radical transformative action – a complete reconsideration of missions, followed by terminations of unconstitutional or unnecessary tasks, and perhaps entire organizations. Within those that remain or begin anew, the Hatch Act must be enforced – indeed, reinforced – as political appointees from new administrations and fresh college graduates find footholds into each and every segment of federal civil service.

In fact, given that liberal bias has become even more ensconced in the universities and colleges across the country, campus reform must be driven by similarly radical efforts to end liberal indoctrination and open discrimination against conservative students, as well as (whatever remains of) conservative faculty. But altering the highly partisan dynamics of liberal academia could perhaps be a bigger challenge than winning the Presidency.

Daphne Patal, in her September Gatestone article, “How Diversity Came to Mean ‘Downgrade the West’,” which discusses the degrading of college education to conform to politically correct subject matters to be studied, opens with

There was a time, within living memory, when the term multiculturalism was hardly known. More than twenty years ago, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and in late July speaker at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, wrote a book with fellow Stanford alum David Sacks called The Diversity Myth: ‘Multiculturalism’ and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (1995).

The book’s title refers to the pretense that embracing “diversity” actually promotes diversity of all types, a claim commonly heard to this day. Thiel had been a student at Stanford when, in January 1987, demonstrators defending “the Rainbow Agenda” chanted “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” This protest led to the infamous “revision” (i.e., suppression) of the Western Culture requirement at Stanford, replaced with a freshman sequence called Cultures, Ideas, and Values, mandating an emphasis on race, gender, and class.

Later in her article, Patal notes that

Furthermore, “multiculturalism” did not involve greater emphasis on mastering foreign languages or carefully studying cultures other than those of the English-speaking world. Instead, work in literature and culture programs was (and still is) done increasingly in English and focused on contemporary writers. Nor did multiculturalism, any more than the word diversity, mean familiarizing students with a diversity of views. Rather, as [Elizabeth] Fox-Genovese summarized it, it meant requiring students “to agree with or even applaud views and values that mock the values with which they have been reared.” And all this, she observed, was being accompanied by rampant grade inflation.

So, if anyone thought that “diversity” simply meant several individuals of various ethnic or cultural backgrounds being by happenstance squinched together into a group, or that “diversity” was similar to a bird aviary in which dozens of different species flitted around in an enclosed space, he would not be far off the mark. There have been dozens of TV and movie series and films that flaunt not only their racial diversity, but their cultural and sexual diversity, as well (i.e., the early and later manifestations of Star Trek).

A diversity-rich cast, albeit no Muslims

For example, The Walking Dead, at several points in its seven-Season-old broadcast, has featured blacks as well as whites, Koreans, Hispanics in leading and central roles, as well as Indians (or perhaps Pakastanis, it was never explained), “gender-breakers,” “mixed” couples, the disabled (in wheelchairs), and the “under-aged” (e.g., pre-teen children shooting guns at zombies and the living). The most recent Seasons of the series have introduced lesbian and gay couples, as well as overweight characters.

The most conspicuously absent group are Muslims; they appear neither as living survivors of the apocalypse nor as zombies, neither as bearded imams nor as women in burqas or hijabs. I do not think their absence is an oversight. I do not think it is a stretch of the imagination to assume that the producers were warned off casting characters as living or dead Muslims. Or perhaps, being so diversity-conscious, and sensitive to the sensitivities of Muslims, the producers decided not to “defame” Muslims or Islam with such risky casting, and warned themselves off the idea. I contacted Scott Gimple, The Walking Dead’s “show runner,” on his Facebook page, with the question, but have received no response.

Politically Correctness has no bounds, no demarcation lines. Everything is fair game to warp, subvert, and destroy, from wedding cake bakers to Halloween costumes to national security.
On December 12th, Judith Bergman, in her Gatestone column, “Europe: Illegal to Criticize Islam,” wrote:

In Finland, since the court’s decision, citizens are now required to make a distinction, entirely fictitious, between “Islam” and “radical Islam,” or else they may find themselves prosecuted and fined for “slandering and insulting adherents of the Islamic faith.”

I would like some state-appointed or free, independent Islamic scholar — Western or not — to explain with a straight face to me and to the world, the essential, fundamental differences between Islam and “radical Islam” or “extremist” Islam. If Islam is not just a bizarre, death-worshipping “religion,” but basically a collectivist ideology bent on total submission of its adherents and of the world, moved by a gnawing appetite for total and universal domination, what are the salient, distinguishing differences? How would one explain the differences, say, between “ordinary” Communism and “radical” Communism, or between “ordinary” Nazism and a benign “moderate” Nazism?

You can’t list those distinguishing differences. They don’t exist. Islam is a one-size-fits-all system, from your footwear to your hairstyle to your diet.

Islam is “radical” because, as both a “religion” and as a political ideology, it prescribes total submission of the individual – indeed, of society – to the arbitrary and wholly irrational rules, permissions, prohibitions, and punishments of its “creed,” otherwise known as Sharia Law. Just as Nazism and Communism required the total submission of the individual to the state, Islam requires the total submersion of the individual to the caliphate.

Islam is essentially, and readily admits, totalitarian – root branch, and twig.

Bergman, writing about Terhi Kiemunki, a Finnish writer, was found guilty of “slandering and insulting adherents of the Islamic faith,” and noted that,

Finland is the European country most recently to adopt the way that European authorities sanction those who criticize Islam. According to the Finnish news outlet YLE, the Pirkanmaa District Court found the Finns Party politician, Terhi Kiemunki, guilty of “slandering and insulting adherents of the Islamic faith” in a blog post of Uusi Suomi. In it, she claimed that all the terrorists in Europe are Muslims. The Court found that when Kiemunki wrote of a “repressive, intolerant and violent religion and culture,” she meant the Islamic faith.

I often find myself reflecting on Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals and Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, volumes which yield a sober conclusion: intellectuals as a class, including the literati, with only a few resonant exceptions, are a deeply corrupt breed. “The cult of success,” writes Benda, has led to the polluting of their vocation, as “politics mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers.”

This is broadly true of the literary community in the West, and certainly in my own country. Canada is a big little country, the extent of its land mass in inverse proportion to the reach of its mindscape. In my own chosen discipline, we have an extraordinary number of people publishing poetry, but almost no poets to speak of.

In our day it is the reign of political correctness and ovarian sentimentality that has helped to produce the debilitating infection we are witnessing. Our poets — test cases for intellectual and literary decay — can be relied upon to espouse the cultural orthodoxies and therapeutic causes that have descended upon us like the mothership from Independence Day. Their willing compliance may be owing to a deficiency of native intelligence, the inability to arrive at convictions independently, a lack of courage, or the temptation to reap the rewards, monetary or status-related, that sinuous complicity assures.

Making sure to keep in good standing with the progressivist consensus, such poets are given to parroting the bromides of the time, showing themselves as socially conscious, profoundly sensitive, right-thinking caryatids of the Temple of Social Justice. Put another way, they are for the most part fellow travelers, trimming their sails to the prevailing zephyrs of the mawkishly virtuous.

And this is one salient reason why their work is so dismally bad.

We note the nebbish attitude they affect in the maunderings of influential Carcanet publisher Michael Schmidt, who in a recent interview mourns the “unexpected and traumatic” Brexit vote as a “Trumpish decision.” Liberating the nation from the dead hand of the Brussels commissariat and enabling it to reclaim its independence of action are, apparently, bad for poetry, erecting a wall “between us and our dear friends.” Schmidt ludicrously refers to himself and his associates as “we Mexicans [who] will get over the wall.” Let’s hope his Spanish is up to scratch. His petulant salvo, I suspect, has more to do with dividends, gratuities, and reputation than with poetry. We are obviously meant to understand poets as dedicated insurgents speaking for the disinherited of the earth, engaged in a heroic struggle for “social justice.” That their melic efforts are chiefly mediocre is surely a form of poetic justice.

You think Brandon Dixon ever read these lines? rsk

“There are seasons in every country when noise and impudence pass current for worth; and in popular commotions especially, the clamors of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism”……. Alexander Hamilton

“Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike……. Alexander Hamilton

Trump’s transition has to transform the government. Obama’s people are deeply embedded and have to be replaced to restore our government’s ability to function properly. As Reagan taught us, personnel is policy.

Presidential transitions smooth the way for the peaceful transfer of power that has always characterized our democracy. When a transition passes power within a political party it changes little but the names on the door. Even when power passes between the Democrats and Republicans a transition isn’t necessarily transformational.

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition will and must be transformational because it not only passes power between the parties but is passing power from a president and administration that have intentionally and greatly weakened America to one that has as its principal objective completion of the daunting task of rebuilding America’s economic, military and political influence at home and abroad to restore its greatness.

From the beginning of his presidency, Mr. Obama has reduced our military, our intelligence capabilities and our influence abroad to such a degree that we are no longer a superpower. We are no longer able to influence the world’s important events.

Mr. Trump has to rebuild our powers and influence to regain the superpower status. It can be done, but only with the right sort of transition. As we learned in the Reagan era, personnel is policy. That’s why Mr. Trump’s team has to create a transformational transition.

The media — having done everything it could to prevent Mr. Trump from being elected — is now in full voice trying to prevent him from selecting the kind of people he needs to fill his cabinet. Consider former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose name is being floated as a possible secretary of State.

On Nov. 15, The New York Times published an editorial proclaiming that Mr. Giuliani should never be secretary of State. The Times said he had no experience as a diplomat, that his international security firm had earned millions from foreign governments and that he was insensitive at times.

The editorial reminded me of one incident that disproved all of the Times’ principal arguments.

In the aftermath of the election, with protests led by violent and professional protesters and a cast member of “Hamilton” peremptorily lecturing the newly elected Vice President, it may seem unrealistic to suggest that differences we have are reconcilable. But I believe they are.

In the heat of a political campaign, urged on by extremists from both Parties and encouraged by a biased press, we forget that all Americans ultimately want the same things: We all want a society that is fair, civil and free; one in which success is determined by meritocracy, not based on one’s parents. We want the rule of law, and we want justice meted out by a jury of one’s peers. We want peace and prosperity. We want hope for the future, and security at home and abroad. These wants are an expected part of the American experience.

Nevertheless, it is common, at times like these, to confuse means with ends – to focus on where we are most different, rather than on what we all share. That could be seen Friday evening when Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Aaron Burr in the Broadway hip-hop musical “Hamilton,” felt the need to instruct Vice President-elect Michael Pence – a man who spent a dozen years in the House of Representatives and four as Governor of Indiana – on the meaning of democracy. Mr. Dixon is free to speak as he wishes; however, his remarks were disrespectful and unfair to audience members who disagreed, but were compelled to listen to his harangue. For those who voted for Clinton his words may have provided a momentary sense of schadenfreude, but for those who voted for Trump he came across as pompous and sanctimonious.

It is in how to achieve common objectives that we differ. At its most fundamental, Democrats place more faith in government, while Republicans rely more heavily on free-market capitalism. Democrats prefer redistribution over lower taxes; tighter, rather than looser, regulations. But Democrats understand the need for the private sector, and Republicans recognize that government is essential to education, commerce and civility. It is in emphasis where there is disagreement.

My inbox is loaded with warnings from fellow Zionists about statements made by General Mattis against Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria in 2013. I share their concern and bow to no one in my support for Israeli sovereignty from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River with Jerusalem and Hebron as capitals of Israel. Americans for a Safe Israel, on whose executive committee I serve, has been the only….repeat only…. Israel support organization that opposed any inch of territorial concessions by Israel since 1973. Read OUTPOST our publication, where I contribute a monthly column for evidence.

Now, as to General Mattis. As a conservative and defense minded conservative I have gratitude to General Mattis for his service and his lifetime commitment to a strong and exceptional America. He will not set Middle East policy and as Secretary of Defense will rebuild our sagging military, restore aging ordnance and inspire recruitment. Support for Israel will come from the top- Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and be implemented by the State Department.

Our bigger problem is the Jewish left that engages with the anti-Semites on campuses and seeks to delegitimate Israel .

Please take the time to read this:

The Meaning of Their Service By James N. Mattis April 2015

A retired four-star Marine Corps general on the clarifying effect of combat experience, the poison of cynicism and how veterans can help revive American optimism.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-meaning-of-their-service-1429310859

This article was adapted from remarks for the fourth annual salute to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans at the Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco on April 16:

Our country gives hope to millions around the world, and you—who knew that at one time your job was to fight well—kept that hope alive. By your service you made clear your choice about what kind of world we want for our children: The world of violent jihadist terrorists, or one defined by Abraham Lincoln when he advised us to listen to our better angels?

I searched for words to pay my respects to all of you here tonight and had to turn to others more articulate than I to convey what our service meant. Someone once said that America is like a bank: If you want to take something out, then you must be willing to put something in. CONTINUE AT SITE

In 1978 the actress Vanessa Redgrave, an outspoken enemy of Israel and supporter of the PLO, won an Oscar for the movie “Julia”one of Lillian Hellman’s self aggrandizing fictions. Redgrave plays “Julia” -an anti-Nazi activist. There were protesters outside. In accepting her Oscar Redgrave said:

“You should be very proud that in the last few weeks you stood firm and you refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record against fascism and oppression. I salute that record and I salute all of you for having stood firm and dealt the final blow against that period when Nixon and McCarthy launched a worldwide witchhunt against those who tried to express in their lives and their work the truths that they believed in.”

Paddy Chayefsky, author of the highly acclaimed movie “Network” who presented the writing awards, chastised Redgrave:

“I’m sick and tired of people exploiting the occasion of the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own political propaganda. I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation and a simple ‘Thank you’ would have sufficed.”

I saw, enjoyed, and admired “Hamilton” very much. The democratically elected Vice-President Pence was in the audience. A simple bow from the cast would have sufficed instead of their preachy preening. rsk