RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://politicalmavens.com/

In her hagiographic review of “Becoming,” Michelle Obama’s journey to the White House, Isabel Wilkerson chooses to emphasize the number of previous First Ladies who were daughters of wealthy merchants, showing how far the black First Lady had to climb. (Sunday Book Review NYT 12/22/18)

She fails to mention some of the 20th century First Ladies such as Bess Truman, whose father killed himself because of mounting debt; Betty Ford, whose father was a traveling salesman for Royal Rubber Co., who ironically died of carbon monoxide poisoning while fixing his car; Rosalynn Carter, whose father was a mechanic and farmer. She neglects to add that no First Lady before Michelle had the privilege of attending Princeton and Harvard Law School and that her chances for both admissions were undoubtedly enhanced by her minority status.

Like Chirlane McCray, First Lady of New York who has written about her feelings of resentment at being an outsider at Wellesley College, Michelle writes about Princeton where she picked up “the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging.” How different both these women are from Sonia Sotomayor who expressed enormous gratitude for the tutoring and mentoring she received at Princeton to bring her up to a level where she could properly compete with the other students and continue to make it all the way to the Supreme Court on her own merits. Although I haven’t read “Becoming” yet, I am struck by there being no mention in Wilkerson’s rave review of an America that could jettison the cruel legacy of slavery, devote itself to affirmative action to help the victims of segregation mingle with the best and brightest in the country and incredibly, elect a bi-racial man as president for two terms. The pride in being an American should properly have been felt by the future First Lady at her own graduations from two of the most prestigious schools in the world. I doubt there’s another black woman who had the opportunity to earn comparable degrees and achievements anywhere else on this planet.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/20/normal

Kurt Schlichter is funny. Really funny. Unlike so many commentators on the Right—especially those staid NeverTrump harpies—Schlichter has a wry, cutting sense of humor that animates his radio and television interviews, his Townhall columns, and his latest book, Militant Normals.

The book expands on what Schlichter—a retired Army colonel and California-based trial attorney—has been saying about the Trump era for more than three years: The election of Donald Trump was as much about an uprising by the “normals” against the ruling elite as it was about the man himself. In Trump, millions of Americans found a leader who, for the first time in years, actually spoke to their deep concerns about the current condition of the country they fiercely love. “The Normals chose Trump. And it was not okay with the Smart Set.”

While Republicans and Democrats spent the past decade jockeying for props on global issues like climate change and peddling the myth of unbounded “free trade” between nations, working-class voters became increasingly nervous about the rise of illegal immigration; the unseen and ignored toll of international trade agreements; a deadly tide of illicit drugs; a fixation on unwinnable foreign conflicts; and the breakdown of trusted institutions from trade unions to academia to the Catholic Church.

Then along came a brash billionaire from Manhattan who could speak to soybean farmers and masonry workers in Des Moines better than anyone. “The Elite did not just fail to do its job running our institutions and providing us a stable society and economy, though it has failed to do those things,” Schlichter writes. “The Elite has decided to declare war on the people who make up the backbone of this country because it just cannot live knowing the Normals are out there living free and uncontrolled. And in doing so, the Elite ignored the conflict we are living through today.”

Like me, Schlichter was not an early Trump supporter. His epiphany occurred exactly three years ago this week during an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon. (You can watch the clip here.) Lemon became agitated when Schlichter refused to condemn Trump for using the word, “schlonged.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/the-tyranny-of-experts/https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/the-tyranny-of-experts/

One of the many virtues of Salvatore Babones’ The New Authoritarianism is its dissection of ‘progressive’ liberalism, a political philosophy that assumes the task of ‘administering freedom’. When it comes to re-engineering society as the Left would prefer, there is no shortage of solons or arrogant presumption.

The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts
by Salvatore Babones
Polity, 2018, 128 pages, $21.95
_______________________________

Salvatore Babones’s The New Authoritarianism is an important book. The central proposition is that a class of experts, an illiberal liberal elite, has hijacked representative democracy in America (and Western nation-states in general). Our new masters, though tyrannical and radical, are not Marxist or Fabian in the customary sense of championing ordinary working people. They despise ordinary people or “everyday great American patriots” as Donald Trump refers to them. The new authoritarians, well-travelled, well-educated and well-heeled, are intent on refashioning the West according to their own “liberal worldview”. Brilliantly insightful and always fair-minded, The New Authoritarianism is a compelling insider’s account of how the liberal-minded became close-minded.

Babones must be something of a class traitor, given that he himself belongs to the expert class as Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. The New Authoritarianism, remarkably, is an expert casting a coolly authoritative eye over latter-day liberalism and finding it tarnished by a desire to dominate, adjudicate and legislate every aspect of our lives. The customary role of liberalism, according to Babones, was not to vanquish the other two strains of political thought, progressivism and conservatism. Liberalism, as one-time stalwart of the British Liberal Party Winston Churchill opined, should be an integral part of a constructive tension between the status quo/stability and change/progress. The true liberal thinker, sophisticated and broad-minded, appreciates that not all change creates progress and that reactionary intransigence does not guarantee stability.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/11/not-all-dead

A review of Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age, by Donna Zuckerberg. Harvard University Press, October 8, 2018 (288 pages).

Donna Zuckerberg holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton University. Her older brother, Mark Zuckerberg, is the co-founder of Facebook. Dr Zuckerberg has arguably become the most influential scholar of Greek and Latin literature in America, thanks to Eidolon, the online journal which she founded in 2015.

Outside university departments of Classics, Eidolon remains obscure. It emphasises Greek and Roman culture in the modern world, frequently in relation to some aspect of popular culture. Articles tend to be written in an informal, ‘accessible’ style; though few obviously appeal to readers who are not aspiring academics or junior scholars. Eidolon accurately reflects the orthodoxy prevailing in contemporary universities: this is what you have to say, and how you should sound, if you want an academic job.

The best-known Eidolon article remains Dr Zuckerberg’s “How to Be A Good Classicist Under A Bad Emperor,” which has been discussed before in Quillette . Dr Zuckerberg insists that the political movement known as the “Alt-Right” poses a credible threat to classical studies (not to mention the rest of America), and thus ought to be strategically resisted by all principled scholars, teachers and students.

In the concluding chapter to her new book Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age, Dr Zuckerberg details how she has been nastily attacked by online trolls for her explicitly ‘activist’ approach to classical studies in Eidolon, receiving “hundreds of anti-Semitic tweets and e-mails”, some of which are described in gruesome detail. Her nemesis Daryush Valizadeh, better known as the blogger and “Pick-Up Artist” “Roosh V”,

bragged to his followers that he knew where I and my family lived, but argued that no physical violence was necessary because he had already raped my mind.

It is curious to note just how far Dr Zuckerberg’s work has been shaped by her reactions to avowed personal enemies: Valizadeh turns out to be the most frequently-discussed author in Not All Dead White Men, with twenty-four works cited in the bibliography, and far more entries in the index than any classical writer.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/09/orwell-and-the-anti-totalitarian-left

In his review of Pascal Bruckner’s new book, An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt, Nick Cohen begins with a denunciation of the contemporary Left’s obsession with identity politics and “willingness to excuse antisemitism, misogyny, tyranny, and obscurantism, as long as the antisemitic, misogynistic, tyrannical obscurantists are anti-Western.” Cohen acknowledges that Bruckner has been among the most penetrating analysts of the Left’s moral and intellectual decline in the twenty-first century, recalling that he described Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism as a “brilliant defence of liberalism and a deservedly contemptuous assault on all those intellectuals who have betrayed its best values.”

However, Cohen now thinks Bruckner’s animus toward the Left has propelled him to the Right, arguing that he fails to “extend his opposition to Islamism to cover the purveyors of anti-Muslim bigotry,” uses the “language of demagogues and civil war,” and displays the “ethnic favouritism and intellectual double-standards of the counter-Enlightenment.” Cohen also laments Bruckner’s sparse commentary on right-wing populist and nationalist movements in Europe and the United States:

At no point would the uninformed reader [of An Imaginary Racism] guess that Law and Justice controls Poland, Fidesz controls Hungary, the Northern League is in power in Italy, and Donald Trump is president of the United States. Meanwhile, if Bruckner shows his concern about Marine le Pen making it to the final round of the French presidential election I must have missed the reference.

In his response to Cohen’s “caustic” and “intemperate” review, Bruckner explains that he doesn’t criticize the Left out of sympathy for the Right—he does so because he expects “more of a Left that was traditionally critical of religion and has now retreated into moral relativity.” Bruckner also points out that it’s possible to be an opponent of right-wing populism and Islamism at the same time: “To believe that we can combat one danger while surrendering to another is to nurse an illusion—this is not the first time in history that we have had to fight enemies on multiple fronts.” But he notes that “my new monograph is not about the rise of European neo-populism … Cohen’s complaint seems to be that I didn’t write a different book entirely.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/07/thomas-sowell-explains-the-economics-of-discrimination/
Thomas Sowell Explains The Economics Of Discrimination
The revered economist’s latest book, ‘Discrimination and Disparities,’ takes a look at the high cost of misguided policies aimed at achieving social justice.

At 88 years old, Thomas Sowell continues to demonstrate why he’s one of the most formidable intellects of the age. In Discrimination and Disparities, released earlier this year, Sowell rebuts common misconceptions regarding socioeconomic differences among individuals, groups, and nations, and demonstrates that disparities are often explained by economics.

For instance, emotionally loaded phrases like “systemic racism” and “exploitation” are frequently used to explain differences between blacks and whites, rich and poor, and even individual nations. But a better understanding of economics refutes these notions.

Sowell begins by noting there are different types of discrimination. Discrimination I he defines as “an ability to discern differences in the qualities of people and things, and choosing accordingly”—in other words, “making fact-based distinctions.” Discrimination II he defines as “treating people negatively, based on arbitrary assumptions or aversions concerning individuals of a particular race or sex, for example”—in other words, what most people mean today when they talk of “discrimination.”

Ideally, Discrimination I—judging each person individually—would be universally practiced. Rarely, however, is the ideal “found among human beings in the real world, even among people who espouse that ideal.” He gives an example:

If you are walking at night down a lonely street, and see up ahead a shadowy figure in an alley, do you judge that person as an individual or do you cross the street and pass on the other side? The shadowy figure in the alley could turn out to be a kindly neighbor, out walking his dog. But, when making such decisions, a mistake on your part could be costly, up to and including costing you your life.

In short, cost is the relevant factor when determining a course of action. The cost of Discrimination I—judging the person as an individual—may be prohibitively high in some cases, as when you approach a shadowy figure in a dark alley. But that does not mean that choosing to cross the street to avoid that shadowy figure is automatically Discrimination II—arbitrarily expressing antipathy toward a group.