RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://bda1776.substack.com/p/klaus-schwabs-great-reset?token=

Klaus Schwab & Thierry Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset (Forum Publishing, 2020);

Klaus Schwab & Thierry Malleret, The Great Narrative for a Better Future (Forum Publishing, 2022).

For all the hype and confusion, “The Great Reset” is the actual title of Klaus Schwab’s take on global government responses to Covid-19, written in mid-2020.  “The Great Narrative” is his follow-up, written in 2021 upon consultation with fifty notable thinkers and futurists. 

For those keeping score at home, Schwab heads the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its famed Davos confabs.  (His co-author, Thierry Malleret, is a long-time collaborator).  As such, Schwab does indeed loom large in many conspiracy theories.  He also has many adoring fans.  These books allow us to see through those filters to the thoughts he most wants to share.  They’re important books and relatively readable (as such things go).  They’re also deeply disturbing books.  They have the potential to do to the twenty-first century what The Communist Manifesto did to the twentieth.

Longtime readers know that I credit The Communist Manifesto with teaching me that the key to understanding radical literature is remembering that diagnosis and prescription are distinct skills.  All good radicals have (at least) one thing in common: They’re unconstrained by mainstream thinking and conventional wisdom.  Radicals challenge the very basic assumptions that trip up their mainstream contemporaries.  That vantage point can let them see what others miss.  As a result, the best radical observations and diagnoses of deep, broad societal problems are often far more insightful than anything that their more respectable peers can present.

At the same time, however, smart, untethered radicals tend to flatter themselves into thinking that because they alone can see through the fog of conventionality, they alone know how to solve the world’s problems.  From there they tend to become dangerously utopian and authoritarian. 

The challenge for readers is thus to appreciate the insightful descriptions and diagnoses at the heart of radical problem identification while rejecting the disastrous prescriptions that these same radicals are eager to sell. 

No one exemplified this distinction better than Marx.  His discussions of the shortcomings of nineteenth century capitalism are truly perceptive.  In one of my favorite passages, he explains (without using the words) that capitalists are addicted to constant growth.  For Marx, that addiction was a problem.  Like the neurotic green folks constantly worried about resource depletion, Marx reasoned that there had to be “limits to growth.”  Once the capitalist system hit those limits—that is, once it found itself unable to replace the pre-existing modes of production with a new and superior set—the entire system would implode. 

I’m hardly alone in appreciating that passage.  Joseph Schumpeter cited it as the basis of his famous theory of “creative destruction” that has come to underpin our understanding of the innovation economy.  It’s insightful in ways that few other bits of nineteenth century economic writing can even approach.  And though Marx was wrong in foreseeing those limits as imminent, his analysis provides a dire warning: Whenever a political movement downplays growth, it threatens to undermine the entire capitalist system. 

Marx was absolutely right about our addiction.  Those of us who have benefited from life under market capitalism—meaning nearly everyone alive today—are indeed junkies.  We need our next growth fix.  The moment the economy stops growing, we shed our generosity, become belligerent, and threaten to fight anyone who looks like they might take our stuff.  When and where that situation persists (Venezuela?) freedom and prosperity crumble into dictatorship, economic planning, and misery.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/11/the-view-from-the-cocoon/

A review of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti (Basic Books, 496 pages, $32)

Sometimes one begins a book with such low expectations that one is delighted to find the printed material is not quite as bad as what one expected. This is precisely my impression of Matthew Continetti’s much touted monograph, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. As someone who holds the honor of being Bill Kristol’s son-in-law (and who holds his father-in-law’s vacated place at Fox News), and a prominent NeverTrumper to boot, Continetti is hardly an unbiased interpreter of conservatism. A revealing passage from his book tells us clearly where on the ideological divide he stands: “The one hundred years war for the Right is to conceive of it as a battle between the forces of extremism and the conservatives who understood that mainstream acceptance of their ideas was the prerequisite for electoral success and lasting reform.” 

As the world’s most notorious critic of misused political taxonomies, I shall allow myself to quibble about Continetti’s eccentric use of the term “Right.” For him and his well-connected friends, the designation mostly serves as a synonym for “Republican.” There are two groups on his telling, both located in the GOP, that are fighting to be the true face of the Right, but only one passes muster as “non-extreme.” This is where I start to part ways. Today, I would argue, the populist Right is the true American Right because it alone is fighting the cultural Left and its allies in the deep state, media, and educational establishment. I have no idea what makes its neocon and Republican establishment adversaries any kind of Right, since on most domestic social issues and certainly on foreign policy, this group happily cooperates with leftist power elites.

In explaining how the current populist Right came along, Continetti stresses the divisive character of the Iraq War and the failure of the George W. Bush Administration to carry along all self-identified conservatives. That prolonged struggle “delegitimized the conservative movement in the eyes of populist independents, conservative Democrats, and disaffected voters crucial to past GOP victories.” This observation is entirely correct. Bush’s invasion unleashed acrimonious debate at home, and a populist Right was able to consolidate itself by standing in opposition to a course of action heavily endorsed by neoconservative journalists and policy advisers. But cultural and moral issues, often intertwined with economic ones, soon became the sustaining themes of the populist revival, which has taken cultural wars and the plight of the working class more seriously than neocons and establishment Republicans have done.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/david-mamet-book-recessional-free-speech-covid-mask-vaccine-mandates-lockdown-transgender-lgbtqia-sogie-woke-crt-critical-race-theory-blm-hollywood-theater-11649424996?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

“Woke signaling, blind compliance with public-health authoritarianism, deference to theater critics and tyrannical city officials—Mr. Mamet doesn’t play along.”

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, innumerable films, TV documentaries and history textbooks instructed us that the 1950s were years of conformity and conventionalism: “The Donna Reed Show,” McCarthyism, “The Organization Man,” TV dinners. In fact, the ’50s were a time of extraordinary artistic creativity, boundless technological innovation, original thinking in politics, intellectual diversity in journalism and higher education, new energy in religion, and enormous progress in race relations. What the ’80s and ’90s mistook for conformity was a naturally evolved cultural solidarity—something nearly everybody, on the left and the right, longs for now.

An informed observer of present-day America might reasonably conclude that our own decade—at least among the educated and advantaged classes—is far more imbued with the spirit of conformism than the ’50s were. Corporate managers and military leaders parrot nostrums about diversity, inclusion and sustainability that few of them believe. Museums and orchestras studiously avoid programming that might offend ideologues. Reporters and producers in the mainstream press seize on stories—or ignore them—solely because that’s what everybody else in the press is doing. Large majorities in wealthy cities dutifully comply with public-health restrictions they know to be largely ineffective, mainly because refusing to do so would invite the ire of friends and neighbors complying with those restrictions for the same reason.

Maybe America’s deciders and describers (to use Nicholas Eberstadt’s phrase) aren’t the independent-minded lot they think themselves to be.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/alice-walker-disinvited-book-festival-hugh-fitzgerald/

Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, has been disinvited from a book festival when the organizers discovered her long history of antisemitic remarks about Jews and Israel, the Jewish state that she often compares to Nazi Germany. A report on the reasons for her being uninvited is here: “California Book Festival Rescinds Invitation to Author Alice Walker Over Past Antisemitic Comments,” by Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner, March 29, 2022:

A book festival in California has disinvited Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet Alice Walker from its event due to the author’s history of making antisemitic remarks about Jews and Israel, The Jewish News of Northern California reported on Friday.

Walker, 78, was scheduled to interview writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, at the latter’s request, at the headlining event of the annual Bay Area Book Festival, which will take place May 7-8 in downtown Berkeley and is set to feature over 250 authors. The festival is the main project of the Foundation for the Future of Literature and Literacy, a California non-profit organization.

Organizers cancelled Walker’s participation in the festival on Thursday after being informed about her past hateful comments, according to The Jewish News of Northern California. Jeffers subsequently pulled out of the festival in response, the festival’s publicist Julia Drake told the outlet.…

Walker, who was the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “The Color Purple” in 1983, has repeatedly compared Israel to Nazi Germany and is an avid supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. In 2011, she claimed, “I think Israel is the greatest terrorist in that part of the world. And I think in general, the United States and Israel are great terrorist organizations themselves.” That same year she said Israel is “as frightening to many of us as Germany used to be.” Walker has also made antisemitic claims about Jews and Israel in her poetry.

Walker has been obsessed with Jews and Israel for years. She frequently compares Israel to Nazi Germany, and attacks the Talmud as an evil and racist document. 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/review/2022/04/beyond-the-reach-of-debate-evidence-and-logic/

Even as the wave of wokeness seems at its peak, there are signs it could be about to break. ‘Defund the police’ is being replaced in many US cities that embraced it in 2020 with ‘Refund the police’. The 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race was won by Republican Glenn Younkin, in part a voter rejection of the teaching of critical race theory in schools. President Biden’s deep trough of climate change and social spending demanded by the Democrats’  Bernie Sanders wing crashed in the Senate. The re-emergence of serious geopolitics with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has re-oriented energy policy in Europe and elsewhere. And women are pushing back against the transgender activists to protect their sports and facilities from encroachment. It’s encouraging, despite the depressing grip woke agendas have rapidly gained in many public and private organisations.

Encouraging, too, is that the once isolated critical voices, such as Jordan Peterson, are becoming a choir, even if not yet a massed choir.

Joining the chorus is John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University and regular New York Times columnist. And he’s black. He wrote his new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has
Betrayed Black America, on his porch in the summer of 2020, when the US was engulfed in the civil unrest following the killing of George Floyd.

In 2012, on his third tour of duty, an improvised explosive device left Dan Crenshaw’s right eye destroyed and his left blinded. Only through the careful hand of his surgeons, and what doctors called a miracle, did Crenshaw’s left eye recover partial vision. 

And yet, he persevered, completing two more deployments. Why? There are certain stories we tell ourselves about the hardships we face – we can become paralyzed by adversity or we can adapt and overcome. We can be fragile or we can find our fortitude. Crenshaw delivers a set of lessons to help you do just that. 

Most people’s everyday challenges aren’t as extreme as surviving combat, and yet our society is more fragile than ever: exploding with outrage, drowning in microaggressions, and devolving into divisive mob politics. The American spirit – long characterized by grit and fortitude – is unraveling. We must fix it.

That’s exactly what Crenshaw accomplishes with Fortitude. This book isn’t about the problem, it’s about the solution. And that solution begins with each and every one of us. We must all lighten up, toughen up, and begin treating our fellow Americans with respect and grace. 

Fortitude is a no-nonsense advice book for finding the strength to deal with everything from menial daily frustrations to truly difficult challenges. More than that, it is a roadmap for a more resilient American culture. With meditations on perseverance, failure, and finding much-needed heroes, the book is the antidote for a prevailing “safety culture” of trigger warnings and safe spaces. Interspersed with lessons from history and psychology is Crenshaw’s own story of how an average American kid from the Houston suburbs went from war zones to the halls of Congress – and managed to navigate his path with a sense of humor and an even greater sense that, no matter what anyone else around us says or does, we are in control of our own destiny.