RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/america-enraged-mark-tapson/

One thing Americans can presumably all agree on in our current cold civil war is that civility, mutual if grudging respect, and rational if testy debate in our political discourse have all been replaced by a hair-trigger performative outrage, the scorched-earth warfare of cancel culture, and even occasional violence. It’s difficult to remember that there was a time when even acerbic antagonists like William Buckley and Gore Vidal could trade barbs onstage without hurling chairs at each other and inciting nationwide rioting. What has happened to us? How did we come to this point? And is this state of rage destined to be a permanent feature of our cultural and political landscape?

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars and author of the essential 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, has addressed these questions incisively in a must-read, brand new book titled Wrath: America Enraged. He agreed to answer some questions about the book.

Mark Tapson: Mr. Wood, what is the “new anger,” and what is the difference between anger and wrath in a political context?

Peter Wood: “New anger” is show-off anger, the display of someone who expects to be admired for the performance or to boast about it afterwards: anger mixed with self-delight.  New anger contrasts to the older ethic of trying to master your anger and not to let it master you.  Through much of American history, giving free vent to anger was regarded as a sign of weakness and immaturity.  We admired the man or woman who, when provoked, found ways to handle the situation without descending into rage.  Of course, that kind of self-control often failed, at which point brawls erupted.  Those who brawled in public or in private, however, were not regarded as good people.  Those who turned to anger too quickly or too often were shamed.

“New anger” became a recognizable force in American life in the 1950s, though it was at first a trend confined to avant garde parts of society:  the beat generation, early adepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, and people reading French existentialist novels. From these seeds grew the counterculture of the sixties, and then the disillusioned anger of the Big Chill 1970s.  I am collapsing a lot of history into a few sentences.  The breakdown of the older ideals of emotional self-control and their replacement by a new ethic of emotional expressiveness didn’t happen overnight or all at once or equally in all sectors of society.  Fifteen years ago I spent a whole book (A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now) to describe the slow progression of new anger into the position it now has of cultural dominance.  I’m mindful that whole generations have grown up for whom there is nothing “new” about “new anger.”  It is all they have ever experienced unless they have been immersed in the world of Turner Classic Movies, where you can glimpse a world ruled by different emotional norms.

When Politicians Panicked tells the tragic story of how, in response to a spreading virus, global politicians mindlessly pursued economic desperation, starvation, and death as the cure.

The global economy was booming as 2020 dawned, but within a few short months wreckage, death, and desperation borne of economic contraction were the new normal. What happened? 

In When Politicians Panicked, economic commentator John Tamny tells the heart-wrenching story of a time when politicians were tragically relieved of basic common sense in their response to the new coronavirus. 

In March of 2020, the virus quickly became a major news item as political panic about it traveled around the world. Even though anecdotal and market-based evidence from the virus’s epicenter indicated very low lethality, politicians quickly imposed economy-crushing lockdowns on the rather specious assumption that unemployment, bankruptcy, and starvation would somehow halt the virus’s spread. 

Tamny methodically dismantles the political consensus by showing how economic growth has long been the first and last answer to death and disease. He then shows how politicians, having mindlessly crushed a growing economy, proceeded to double down on their mistakes by throwing taxpayer money at their shocking errors. 

Throughout When Politicians Panicked, Tamny makes a relentless case that free people don’t just produce the wealth that renders today’s killers yesterday’s news. They also produce crucial information about health threats that shine a light on that which threatens us. Lockdowns suffocate economic progress, but they also blind us to how we can progress—as Tamny makes plain in what will go down as an essential history for anyone seeking to understand the coronavirus panic of 2020.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/david-solway-2/2021/10/13/john-of-salisbury-the-statesmans-book-and-its-contemporary-relevance-n1523801

There are many theories purporting to explain the “march of history,” as, for example, the hoary notion of “scientific socialism” with its dialectical certainties, the “great man” hypothesis that focuses on towering figures like Napoleon or Winston Churchill who determine the course of events, or the “from below” perspective treating of the lives and social movements of the lowly, marginal, oppressed or otherwise unacknowledged peoples, most famously espoused in Howard Zinn’s politically skewed and tendentious A People’s History of the United States.

One theory that receives little exposure we may call the idea of the “virtuous leader” as the indispensable factor that allows for the establishment of a decent, well-governed, and “happy” state. The concept of the “virtuous leader” is a classical trope, going back to Epictetus (Enchiridion), Plato (Republic), Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics), and Cicero (On Obligations). The idea enjoys little traffic because there are so few such leaders and because virtue itself is a problematic concept. Indeed, whatever “virtue” might entail, we are all, as poet W.H. Auden wrote, “articled to error.” No human person, lay or elect, can be said to be unblemished, devoid of foibles, frailties, and defects of character, but so unfortunate a fact does not invalidate the approach to an elusive standard of virtue and exemplary leadership.

The subject was taken up by John of Salisbury, a 12th-century theologian, philosopher, and moralist who eventually became Bishop of Chartres and who is scarcely known today, but was an important figure in the late medieval Renaissance. An influential commenter on the affairs of the court of Louis VII, King of France (their dates are coterminous), with particular regard to Louis’ wife, the celebrated Eleanor of Aquitaine, he understood courts and royal goings-on and was intimately acquainted with the consequences of troubled statesmanship. The Policraticus, translated as The Stateman’s Book, is his most notable volume. As he writes, “This book concentrates in part on the frivolities of the courtiers…and busies itself with the footprints of philosophers”—a spectrum covering the terrain between foolishness and wisdom, the “yoke of vice” and the “rule of virtue.”

The themes he addresses are perennially relevant and particularly so in our current historical moment.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-the-democrats-dark-campaign-master

THE DEMOCRATS’ DARK CAMPAIGN MASTER. Mollie Hemingway’s important new book, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections , goes on sale tomorrow. In it, she covers the ways Democratic activists took advantage of the Covid pandemic to push long-sought changes in the ways people vote. They were enormously successful in some key states and left Republicans desperately playing catch-up.

For some Democrats, the effort was the culmination of a drive to bring down Donald Trump that began well before he took office. And for no Democrat was that more true than Washington lawyer Marc Elias.

What is really extraordinary, as Hemingway points out, is that one man, Elias, was responsible for both the Steele dossier, which was the covert Democratic disinformation operation designed to bring down Trump during the 2016 campaign, and those wide-ranging changes in state election procedures, designed to make sure he did not win reelection in 2020.

The dossier was one of the most successful dirty tricks ever. Elias, working on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, paid the oppo/attack firm Fusion GPS to enlist former British spy Christopher Steele to compile a list of false and slanderous allegations about then-candidate Trump.

There was the Michael-Cohen-in-Prague allegation. The Carter-Page-in-Moscow allegation. The “pee tape.” The Manafort fiction. The dossier was done in what looked like official intelligence-report style, relying on Steele’s credibility as a former British agent and FBI informant. Elias hit a home run when the FBI picked up Steele’s false reporting. Then the whole world found out about it when insiders leaked to CNN that then-FBI Director James Comey had briefed President-elect Trump about it. It was an extraordinarily damaging moment for the new president — all choreographed by Elias.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/victor-davis-hanson/2021/10/07/america-and-the-dying-citizen-n1522290

The present article summarizes arguments in Victor Davis Hanson’s new book “The Dying Citizen” that appears this week from Basic Books.

Only a little more than half of the current world’s 7 billion people are citizens of fully consensual governments.

That lucky 50 percent alone enjoys constitutionally protected freedoms. Most are also Western. Or at least they reside in nations that have become “Westernized.”

Migrants, regardless of their race, religion or gender, almost always head for a Western nation. And most often their destination remains the United States. The more it is now fashionable for Americans to take for granted or even to ridicule the idea of their own country, the more the non-American global poor risk their lives to crash America’s borders.

Constitutional systems easily perish because they ask a lot of their citizens — to vote, to be informed about civic and political issues, and to hold elected officials accountable. That responsibility is perhaps why, of the world’s true republics and democracies, only about 22 have been in existence for a half-century or more. We are seldom told, then, that America is a rare, precious and perhaps even fragile idea, both in the past and in the present.

American citizens are clearly also not the custom of the past. Unlike history’s more common peasants, citizens are not under the control of the rich who, in turn, seek undue influence in government through controlling them.

Instead, viable citizenship has always hinged on a broad, autonomous middle class. Those Americans in between lack both the dependence of the poor and the insider influences of the elite. Suffocate the middle and we know that a binary feudalism will soon replace it. We are seeing just that medievalization in contemporary California.

Nor are American citizens mere migratory residents who drift across nonexistent borders in expectation of receiving more rights than meeting responsibilities. Forfeit a sacred national space, a place where common customs, language, and traditions can shelter and thrive, and a unique America disappears into a pre-civilizational migratory void like the fluid vastness of late imperial Rome.

Americans are quite different from tribal peoples, whose first loyalties are determined by mere appearance or innate blood ties. Take this nation back to pre-civilizational tribalism, and our future as the next Yugoslavia, Rwanda or Iraq is assured.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/debunking_the_1619_project.html

Debunking the 1619 Project

by Mary Grabar

Mary Grabar has authored a serious, mature book that should be in every American household and classroom.  Its message is so critical to understand that it might usefully serve as required reading in a test and qualification for American citizenship. There were a couple sections I found demandingly granular, but they stem from her determination to get the story re-assembled factually, as much historical detail was falsified or ignored by the 1619 project members.

Ms. Grabar “debunks,” either directly or by implication, at least four primary objects:

the asserted significance of the date 1619;
the asserted unique culpability of Jefferson and other Founders in American slave-labor perpetuation;
the assertion of unique colonial and early Republic promotion of slave markets and slave trading and;
the asserted educational value of such historical revisionism that also rests on a modern policy narrative of unresolved racial discrimination and harm in legal and financial dimensions. 

Ms. Grabar doesn’t merely “debunk” the 1619 Project, she devastates it, by a relentless, professional marshalling of facts and data, and with thoughtful argumentation, choice sourcing and careful footnotes.  For its depth in historical research, the book reads very smoothly. I found it a “page-turner” as the case she makes unfolds with surprise, pleasure and wisdom, concerning not only the facts of colonial slavery, but its larger context in American history, and indeed in a larger context still, of world history. 

https://pjmedia.com/culture/matt-margolis/2021/10/03/hillary-clinton-has-co-written-a-novel-and-i-cant-even-n1521352

Earlier this year it was reported that Hillary Clinton was teaming up with bestselling author Louise Penny to write her first novel—a political thriller. I guess she felt she had a flair for fiction after pushing the phony “Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2020 election” narrative.

But I digress. The political thriller, co-written by the twice-failed presidential candidate, is now just over a week from getting published, if you’re interested. It’s about a newly sworn-in secretary of state—the former rival of the elected president (sound familiar?)—who takes over for an administration “out of touch with international affairs, out of practice with diplomacy, and out of power in the places where it counts the most.” A bizarre and inaccurate dig at Trump, I’m sure.

Time magazine calls it “a heart-pounding mystery about terrorism, corruption and diplomacy, meticulously written with the promise of details only someone on the inside could contribute.”

American crime writer Karin Slaughter also lauded the novel, calling it “an absolutely gripping, utterly believable, heart-stopping thriller that will make readers question how much is fiction and how much is based on reality.”

Hillary is following in the footsteps of her husband, who has also dabbled with fiction in his collaborations with bestselling author James Patterson.

Here’s the book’s description from Amazon:

After a tumultuous period in American politics, a new administration has just been sworn in, and to everyone’s surprise the president chooses a political enemy for the vital position of secretary of state.

There is no love lost between the president of the United States and Ellen Adams, his new secretary of state. But it’s a canny move on the part of the president. With this appointment, he silences one of his harshest critics, since taking the job means Adams must step down as head of her multinational media conglomerate.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_alarm_bells_are_ringing_for_american_citizenship.html

The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson

Basic Books, October, 2021

Victor Davis Hanson, the classics scholar and military historian, has written or co-authored two dozen books and many hundreds of articles. His latest book, The Dying Citizen, is a powerful and carefully developed argument for preserving American citizenship, a unique patrimony now under attack in many ways from many sources, and from all appearances, a  losing battle.

Hanson provides a history of the concept of citizenship dating back to the Greeks and Romans and makes clear how rare the American experience has been in creating a modern citizenry with both rights and responsibilities. Hanson’s book was mostly written from 2018 through early 2020, and contains a final chapter which updates the impact of the calamitous last year on the citizenship issue, dominated by the coronavirus, racial unrest and a bitterly fought presidential election. Hanson argues that the Trump presidency pushed back against the forces diminishing American citizenship with some modest success from 2017 to 2019, but the events of the past year led to a reversal of those gains, and the prospect of greater threats than existed before.

Hanson’s book contains six primary chapters, each addressing a specific threat to American citizenship, as it was understood in our founding documents, and expanded through political participation for women and races and ethnicities different from the original predominant majority culture.

The first chapter, “Peasants,” maintains that for a people to be self-governing, they must be economically autonomous. In essence, they need to avoid dependency on either the “private wealthy or the state.”  A healthy middle class enables economic self-reliance and autonomy. Politicians from both parties are always claiming they are fighting for the middle class, but if they have been doing this, they have been failing on their promises, as evidenced by a hollowing out of much of America as its industrial and manufacturing base faltered, and major parts moved overseas and the failure to replace the lost opportunities with “good jobs with good wages.”  

Without a sustainable and thriving middle class, society becomes divided between “modern masters and peasants.” In this circumstance, government assumes a responsibility to subsidize the poor to dampen any possibility of revolution, and exempt the wealthy, who respond by enriching and empowering the governing classes. The current attempt by Democrats in Congress to pass a massive “human infrastructure” bill is part of developing a cradle-to-grave dependency for much of the citizenry (and non-citizens as well) on government welfare programs.

Chapter 2, “Residents,” argues for privileging citizens over non-citizens (residents). Citizens live within “delineated and established borders.” Citizens share values, and they assimilate and integrate into what becomes a national character. But today, many argue for a borderless world, and opening America to the world’s 8 billion people. They ask, “Why should those fortunate enough to have been born here, or been legally allowed to enter under various quotas or other limits, be privileged above those others who would also benefit from living here rather than where they are now living and  fleeing?”

The collapse of the American southern border under the current Biden administration was not an accident, but a plan. It fits an ideology that more people moving here, from wherever they may have come, is better for America, since it makes us look  more like the rest of the world going forward. Naturally, there is a political dimension to this ideology, since it assumes that when the new residents become citizens at some point, they will align with the political party favoring mass immigration and open borders.

Hanson argues that people will naturally want to move to a country with political rights, a Bill of Rights,  economic opportunity, and a generous welfare system to tide them over in the short term or forever.  Immigrants don’t see America in the critical fashion of many of its current citizens, but as better than the places they left, but will they accept the responsibility of citizenship, as well as its bounty?