I was fired from my job as a political science instructor bc the college did not like my conservative viewpoints. I recently settled with the college, as did a biology professor fired for teaching there are 2 genders. Now they are going after another conservative employee. All in Texas, where DEI is now supposedly "illegal".
St. Philip's College. It's a public community college in the Alamo community College district in San Antonio. They force you to write a DEI paper to become certified as a Master Teacher as well. Campus Reform did a thorough article on what happened to me.
Rufo will act for you ! Keep him informed - he understands the necessity of policy as it affects the entirety of a Republic’s life ! God Speed you towards success !
Thank you, Sir. I have respect for your decision to not "take it lying down."
I myself successfully sued an employer for unrelated abusive conduct, and came to see myself more clearly - as did my colleagues. Perhaps not preferable, but we make of it what we can.
I hope that you will stay in-touch here, among C.R.'s readers.
Not illegal until spring semester starts. Even then, lots of ways around it.
Since you got through your fight to a settlement, do you have a network or contact system for Texas faculty to reach out with inside information to fight back against woke/corrupt administrators that can be publicized?
Sowell is getting the Solzhenitsyn treatment ("The go-to black guy for white guys") from some astonishingly poorly turned-out young men who know the work of neither. It does not occur to them that Sowell wrote on precisely the issues that they, too, are interested in. Per your speech, these persons are low-level troops - no serious professional (not even an American Philosophical Association Book Prize Winner) would want to "go there," for fear of humiliation at the hands of serious non-credentialed readers.
If any of these semi public-intellectuals were serious, then they would engage Sowell's thought and take-on Loury, Reilly, McWhorter, et. al.- nothing is stopping them from, say, doing what you are doing (except maybe...).
Sowell is the Wilfredo Pareto of our time; if I thought that he was wrong, and I were aligned with these people, I would try to rival him and prove it wrong - but seeking truth also means that you must acknowledge your opponents.
On that note, I see that you are getting the treatment from some very second and third-tier nodes who do not engage the substance of your book, among other things.
Aside from what I have said of your rhetorical style and your standing up to the Provost as reality and symbol of a larger disposition, the school's institution of the Classics test is a demonstration of the practical meaning of the reforms.
Conservatives think the purpose of politics is to come to agreement.
Liberals recognize Clausewitz's Law: the purpose of politics is to destroy your opponents.
Conservatives are best when we agree on ends (ending poverty, protecting kids, etc..) and are arguing about means (more/less cops, marginal tax rates, porn regulation, etc...): essentially, good people struggling to figure out how to best solve a mutually agreed problem. That's not what time it is in America today. When your political opponents believe the sexual exploitation of children is good and that cops are evil... your opponents are not "good people trying to solve problems". They are evil. One does not convince evil to change; evil must be destroyed.
The Left realized this decades ago. Why do you think they started calling all conservatives Nazis? Dehumanizing your political opponents is necessary if you're going to wage war against them. The Right is just now pulling its head out of the sand, and there are lots of Nikki Haleys and Mike Pences who resist even that small amount of vertical movement.
That's nonsensical. A classic example of "sticking Angel Wings on Our Side, and Devil Horns on the Opposition" fallacy. Mired at the level of political sophistication of a very average 10 year old. Loyalty to ideological dogma always leaves people less intelligent than they otherwise would be.
In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich ran Republican Party retreats devoted to honing GOP partisan politics like a saber, using tactics like demonizing the opposition with polarizing language, stereotyping, and categorical disparagement.. Rush Limbaugh was a past master of the approach.
David Horowitz wrote his "Art of Political War" in 2000. He refers to his "Freedom Center" as a "school for political warfare." I've read the book (and several others by Horowitz.) There isn't anything about "compromise" in them. Politics is presented as a cage match to the death. Horowitz' ideological allegiances may have done a 180 degree turn, but the tactics that he advises are no different than the ones he learned as a young Bolshevik. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1890626287/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=publiweekl05-20
"The Center’s focus and the School’s curriculum have two agendas:
Really: consider the statement by Horowitz that ""Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out"; where's the compromise in that characterization? Delve into his ideas a little further, and the contradictions in regard to his purported embrace of "Freedom" become obvious to anyone who notices all of the details of the political solutions that he advocates.
Read Roger Morris's book Partners In Power, especially the three "Washington" chapters. That will give you some idea of who compromised with who, in the 1980s and 1990s. Available to borrow for free on-line https://archive.org/details/partnersinpowerc00morrrich
I think events since have largely borne out the veracity of Horowitz's statement.
Rereading my post, I'm willing to concede some hyperbole there, but not much. And yes, the Right has certainly done its share of namecalling. American politics has been a gutter sport since the rise of the 2 party system in the election of 1800. Despite that, it has functioned well.
However... I would argue that there is a huge difference between an unelected, think-tank leader like Horowitz using highly inflammatory language... and the major elected leaders of a party doing the same.
I didn't like Trump's "lock her up" chant. I thought using the political process to threaten your opponent with imprisonment was a very bad idea. Upon winning though, he never made any attempt to make good on it (thankfully). Perhaps that was his gnat-like attention span, but I suspect it was always hyperbole and he knew it. Similarly, Democrats ran on "get Trump" in 2020 from President down to dog catcher. But they ARE making good on it, against Trump, his political allies, and even ideological supporters who get too loud. For the Democrats, it's not hyperbole. President Biden declared that Donald Trump and all his supporters were "threats to democracy" in Philadelphia last year. Based on his actions (and those of his Party apparatus like the Atlanta DA) since, he means it and intends to use the power of the state against his political opponents.
That is the red line I see. And to be clear, I detest Trump's "I am your retribution" message, which essentially threatens to do the same from the other side. There are now Republicans (not elected, but think-tankers like Horowitz) who are advocating for a red-state D.A. to bring charges against a few sitting Democrat Senators. Again, I hate this, but I do understand the position: perhaps the the only way back from this banana-republic abyss (which we're gazing at but haven't yet stepped into, I think) is to make the Democrats realize the danger of what they're doing by using their own techniques against them.
To my larger point about the difference between arguing over means or ends, I maintain that distinction is 100% accurate. The modern electoral process can handle significant disagreements over means, but is very poor at disagreements over ends. This is by design, as the Enlightenment idea of a neutral/secular state arose as a response to the European wars of religion: Locke essentially says "look, we all basically agree on something called 'natural law', so let's stop killing each over rival conceptions of God and get on to making money." But those "rival conceptions of God" sometimes result in radically different moral codes (witness the intra-Christian split over LGBT today) which the state is now powerless to adjudicate. I maintain (as Deneen does) that there is no solution to this problem from within the Enlightenment framework. the Enlightenment systematically undermined the broadly Christian moral order which it relied on. At the extreme end, this can be seen in the logical conundrum: if you're just a smart ape with no Creator, who gave you those rights you say you have?
Today our political arguments are almost essentially all theological (disagreements over the definition of "the good"). Rival theologies are wearing our political parties as coats. And rival gods do not coexist well. One will destroy the other, hence the radical nature of our politics today.
"The modern electoral process can handle significant disagreements over means"
Oh, yeah. When it comes to means, by all appearances both major parties are committed to a race to the bottom. And in accord with the two-party status quo, both parties share tacit agreement on the desirability of calling out the ethical misbehaviors of the Other Side. While wagon circling in defense of ones own Side, facts and germane inferences notwithstanding. Partisan politics is stuporous. And, ultimately, an exercise that's more about personal ego concerns with team social status than about doing the right thing with impartiality and integrity. Partisans are capable of excusing, temporizing, and overlooking anything done by their Own Team, and hyping even trivial or inadvertent moves by the Other Side to the level of Evil Incarnate. It's opportunism. Both petty and pernicious.
"To my larger point about the difference between arguing over means or ends, I maintain that distinction is 100% accurate."
"I would argue that there is a huge difference between an unelected, think-tank leader like Horowitz using highly inflammatory language... and the major elected leaders of a party doing the same."
Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House for six years in the 1990s. He referred to his Democratic Party opponents as "Extreme Far Leftists" every chance he got, which is laughable. He encouraged every other Republican to do the same.
(The Democrats circling the wagons around Clinton was also disgraceful. Clinton basically manipulated the loyalty of his supporters. Neither "major party establishment" has sufficient integrity for me to respect them, at least at the national level. And Trump is just another manipulator. A Bonnie Prince Charlie for true believers, the way Bill Clinton was in the 1990s.)
Beyond that, I apply the same criteria to strident voices with punitive agendas and grandiose plans on "the Right" as I do to those on "the Left." I I don't base my concerns primarily on how much Power an extremist faction happens to possess at a given time; I judge them on what the extremists would do if they got hold of the levers. On the basis of evidence that they're typically only too willing to supply, for anyone willing to read their own statements.
fwiw, my opinion on Biden Impeachment hearings: fine, as a fact-finding investigation. But I've felt since 1999 that no party should go forward with actual impeachment proceedings unless they have the votes in the Senate to support the removal of the President. Anything less is a partisan food fight. Don't waste our time with nonsense. And it's while already clear that while some of Biden's deals are disgraceful and unethical, my main takeaway is that the real scandal about Washington isn't what ISN'T legal, it's what IS legal. For the eminences of both parties. As detailed in the pages of Partners In Power, the book I linked in my initial reply upthread. So there's your 2-party system that "has functioned pretty well", for you.
"American politics has been a gutter sport since the rise of the 2 party system in the election of 1800. Despite that, it has functioned well."
Yeah, herd that.
The 2-party system hasn't functioned well for decades. Since 1976, when Jimmy Carter was elected with 50.1% of the popular vote, only two US Presidents have been elected to their first term with a majority of the popular vote: Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Four times in US history, someone was elected to the presidency despite the fact that they received fewer popular votes than an opponent. That's happened twice in the previous six presidential elections- in 2000, and 2016. Before that, it hadn't happened since the election of 1888, when Benjamin Harrison beat Grover Cleveland, despite Cleveland's edge of around 0.8% in the popular vote. Neither of the two top vote getting candidates received a majority of the popular vote in 1988. (Or in 2000, or 2016.)
I know. The Electoral College. All nice and legal-like. That's a side issue. I can live with it. The issue that really concerns me is that the 2-party system has NEVER worked all that well, especially as more and more partisan cadres- of both parties- realized some time in the mid-20th century that the Dee/Dum system could be gamed by corraling voters by scaring them with dire predictions about the opposition.
I'll say it again: both parties want to maintain that status quo. Nothing stops either party from making ranked choice voting a top priority.. ( Passage of a Congressional bill has the ability to set common national standards in that regard- at least for elections to the House and Senate. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-i/clauses/750
Instead the two-party system gets the benefit of unexamined assumptions--as in your anodyne "the system works pretty well"- while ranked choice voting is dismissed by treating its bugs as if they were inherent features instead of fixable flaws.
If ranked-choice voting in national elections had been enacted throughout the US in 1992, George W. Bush would likely have won instead of Bill Clinton. That doesn't concern me. What concerns me is that the American political system should have had 30 years of opportunity for healthy metamorphosis and the ingress of novelty. Instead, the inertia and the stagnation have increased--the people of power and influence in both parties live in a bubble that seems to be hermetically sealed from outside input, in many important respects--and confidence in the political system has dropped to a point where it's become a hip thing to announce that the US is finished as a democratic republic. Or, conversely, to imagine that the only solution is to be found in pipe dreams of secession, or civil war. Whereas the simple addition of one more choice on a ballot- the opportunity for voters to put up an official ballot result of who they would actually prefer, not just who they're forced to settle for- that's somehow considered "unrealistic." Call it Catch-02.
That is not a system that's functioning well. In some ways, the status quo is hardly functioning at all.
Darkness At Noon is a great book. I gave serious thought to assigning it to my civics class last year, but I went with 1984 and Brave New World instead since I thought they would be more relatable.
Regarding Gingrich, I just view "Extreme Far Leftists" (or "MAGA Republicans" today) as within the realm of normal political namecalling. I view "threats to democracy" as something else. If someone is an "extreme partisan", electing them may be result in bad policies, but it's not intrinsically illegitimate. Saying someone is a "threat to democracy" means electing them undermines the electoral system itself. If that's true, absolutely ANYTHING is justified to prevent that outcome, which is what I believe you're seeing on the Left today.
I actually thought the Republicans should have let the Lewinsky thing go. I didn't think it at the time, but in hindsight, we should have taken the higher road. We had a significant hand in turning impeachment into a standard political tool. I agree with you about the Biden impeachment too, and I like your rule about whipping Senate votes before you pass articles. If you know it's going to be partisan, let it go. Sure, maybe the other side is just circling the wagons, but maybe your own side is overreacting. (And that applies to both sides.)
Regarding the 2 party system, I also agree. Increasingly, we have all the problems of a Parliamentary system (reflexive partisan opposition, parties voting unanimously on most issues) without any of the benefits (snap elections, easy dissolution of a govt, PMs defending their policies, etc...)
I love ranked choice voting! It's a wonderful system.
"Good conversation. Thanks." I'm enjoying it, too. The sort of input that engages my mind.
"I actually thought the Republicans should have let the Lewinsky thing go."
I thought Bill Clinton should have resigned. And I took the opportunity to express that opinion more than once on the airwaves. He could have owned up to his trysts with Monica, and told his inquisitors to pound sand. But instead he took the weasel's way out- smearing Lewinsky as a delusional stalker, and then compounding his falsehood by enlisting the Congressional leadership of the Democratic Party to back him up. That is not a betrayal that's politically forgivable, to me. And of course, if it hadn't been for the Blue Dress, no one would have been the wiser. Clinton didn't handle his predicament like a person of integrity. And American mass media consumers were cornered into amusing themselves into a stupor on a media diet of, like, the most threadbare, tedious soap opera ever. For two years. If anyone wants a media criticism project to take on, do an immersive deep dive into how the anchors and guests on every major news media network (except Pacifica; credit where credit is due) managed to waste that much time. A comparison of the actual number of new facts introduced per week over the course of the impeachment with the amount of speculative conjectures and tangential food fights would be very instructive. (Sadly, my life is too short to devote the time required for such an immersion and retrospective analysis.)
I didn't follow the case- I didn't own a television in the 1990s, and also knew right away that impeachment was entirely about petty harassment, and also that a conviction was practically guaranteed to fail. I view both the OJ trial and the Lewinskygate spectacle that arrived on its heels as extremely revealing of the rote//intellectually slack/superficial mentalities of the complacent American news media celebrity corps of the 1990s. Serious reporters did other stuff. Too bad there was so little room provided for those stories by the TV channels.
"I love ranked choice voting! It's a wonderful system." It's also a ballot reform that is made for a presidential system like that of the US. The final result is always majoritarian. It's funny that IRV gets called "the Australian ballot"; there's less need for it in a Parliamentary system. The parliamentary system also makes it more difficult to sort the results. It's like it's double-jointed. Whereas the logic gate of majoritarian election is straightforward, particularly for chief executive. The most straightforward way to do ranked-choice would be to allow voters to rank only a first and second choice. In practical terms, the candidate that one most prefers, followed by an expression of preference between the two established parties (who are likely to be running the strongest although there's no way to be sure. The established parties would benefit from their legacy status, I think. At least at the outset.
I think the reform has the potential to benefits both outsider candidacies AND the two established parties- at least for anyone in the Ds and Rs who is more interested in dynamic government than in power hoarding. I'd fully anticipate that one or the other of the major parties would do all that they could in order to co-opt the appeal of novel outsider ideas and issue priorities- because they'd be on notice. They would be able to afford to ignore addressing those issues any more; at best, they might even refine and improve the ideas.
Meanwhile, the platforms of outsider parties like the Greens and the Libertarians might manage to sober up sufficiently that their party platforms no longer resemble wish lists to Santa at the North Pole. Like, get the head out of the clouds, and you might find that you're the next big thing. But only if you understand principles like triage, reasoned compromise, and the necessity for achieving productive results instead of 99% rhetorical bloviation framed by 1% window dressing. Non-ideological principles like those. Promise modestly, and then deliver. Everyone I know is awfully burned out on the more usual situation of extravagant promises that get forgotten by election winners on Inauguration Day.
If ranked choice voting ever gets enacted nationwide, I'd anticipate that candidates put forth by the two major parties would remain the top contenders for at least the first couple of elections. If one or both of the big parties maintain that status by swiping the best ideas of the Outsiders, I'm fine with it- as long as they're true to their new game, and they don't phony it up. If they phony it up, voters retain their voting prerogative to shift allegiances. That's just enough of a threat- or promise- to induce some flexibility and openness into the election process. Because ranked-choice provides an emerging political movement with a way to track a consistent trend toward increasing popularity. A popularity that holds the potential to go viral, and grow dramatically larger very quickly. (And no, I really don't think the Nazis et. al. have that sort of traction.)
I'm not wedded to an outsider political perspective. I want more of the Outlier issue positions that I hold get mainstreamed, for real. I'm into successful outcome-based politics.
"Regarding Gingrich, I just view "Extreme Far Leftists" (or "MAGA Republicans" today) as within the realm of normal political namecalling."
Unfortunately, that's a trait of partisan election campaign politics that goes back a long way, in a lot of countries. Although my impression is that Americans are overall more rude and vulgar about it than most other nationalities. Many of us pride ourselves on not having to watch our mouths, after all.
But what I can't forgive Newt for is presenting a slightly cleaned-up version of the John Birch Society/Minutemen narrative as a way to straw-man the Democrats. Casting a cloud of inchoate suspicions over every Democratic party official; every member of a Democratic presidential administration; every elected official- and, ultimately, everyone who exhibits a preference for voting for Democrats rather than Republicans. He made his name as a backbencher torching a straw man named "Progressive". As if politics were a zero-sum game of personalities, associations, labels attached to sweeping generalizations, etc.
Newt led the way in propounding a Grand Unified Theory of the sinister goals of the Democratic Party opposition, when all that's really happening there is that the Democrats are unable to tell off their lunatic fringe, because they don't dare offend a single constituency. Thereby leaving it to everyone else to restore sanity to the discourse, which believe me has only just begun to happen. The interesting corollary to this situation is that when the effort to turn the light on the faux-mon solipsists succeeds. the Democrats currently residing in the Librocrat epistemic bubble will be able to take credit for exactly none of it.
Heh, I think you should assign Darkness At Noon the next time around. Brave New World is a futurist fantasy. The dystopian aspects are intended as a warning- and Aldous Huxley was doing a lot of Looking Around at the frontiers of scientific modernism (including aspects like eugenics, and the use of pharmacological regimes as coping mechanism) in the 1940s. He had some very prescient insights to communicate. But, ultimately, fiction. The Author-constructed world. I'm a hard sell for fiction, especially science/speculative fiction. Especially futurist spec-fi ideal Utopian templates, or the Dystopian inverse, with its predestinatian conceits. All narratives focus attention in ways that can lead the naive or suggestible into swallowing them hook, line, and sinker, so to speak. Every consumer of art should be wary of getting gut-hooked. Books have a massive advantage over films and video games; they're easy to argue back at. But the argument is more direct when the subject is nonfiction than when it's fiction. Good fiction is sneaky. And also funny. That's perhaps my main reservation about both Brave New World and Island (for those unaware, Island is another AH novel, sort of the benevolent utopia obverse of BNW.) There's no funny in either of them. Whereas Philip K. Dick always included his sense of humor in his writings. A saving grace.
Darkness At Noon, however, is non-fiction at heart. It's a novel, but it's a roman a clef about actual historical events that draws on the experiences of actual people. That gives it an edge. Sometimes historical fiction can take too many liberties or skim a surface of factoids. Darkness At Noon reads more like a nonfiction book that any other novel. It's more of a scrupulously detailed criminal indictment than a speculative gambit. No counterfactual scenarios are involved.
I should have read Darkness At Noon when I was in high school in the 1970s. I'm pretty sure I knew of the book's existence. I just never read it. I did, however, read Edward Hunter's book Brainwashing, on the application of indoctrination techniques to American and British Korean War POWs by North Korean and Chinese political cadres and interrogators. The most notable feature of those techniques is their reliance on the principles of conditioning. outlined by Ivan Pavlov, which were first adopted and refined by the Soviet Russians. Great book- I still own a copy. Free here: https://archive.org/details/brainwashingstor00huntrich
Later, in the mid-1970s, I read parts of the Gulag Archipelago. Notably the introductory passages. After a while, the prison ordeals...I had gotten the idea.
You are remarkably disciplined in the way you engage your ideological opponents, whether verbally or through your writings. Sometimes don’t you feel like telling mewling wokesters to F-off?
I respect your writings and your work on behalf of our cause. It is hard for our side to be activists for a number of different reasons; hopefully that will change. I also think of David Daleiden and his continuing travails as a result of exposing the sale of fetal parts. It has been and will continue to be a very tough road for him.
New Information + Activism = Policy. Thank you for using this formula and your skills to transform New College. My nephew, who lives in Fort Myers, is being scouted by PBA for a cross country scholarship. Love the school but would love to see him at NC learning from your experience and benefiting from you influence. Keep up the GREAT work!
Well done! I'm sharing this with my family. We're 3 and 4 generations Seattle born and bred, and were forced to make the decision to resettle in Texas. We are happy here, but in our dreams, we inevitably walk the Edmonds to San Juan beaches. I hope our home state will keep fighting back against this evil cabal. The lessons you've shared are important. "They assemble". That's a critical observation. Sending our regards from our Washington family now living in Central Texas.
Congrats Chris. Appropriate, encouraging, and well-deserved. I read your book as well. It was nicely researched and well written. You've "officially" achieved a voice in the discourse. Your signal cuts through the noisy bullshit of the chattering classes. Please keep it up.🙏🏽
Cristopher, your terse and incisive style - in this speech, your book, and your most recent video - are exemplary. It is a potent style of public rhetoric, with command of reality.
I was fired from my job as a political science instructor bc the college did not like my conservative viewpoints. I recently settled with the college, as did a biology professor fired for teaching there are 2 genders. Now they are going after another conservative employee. All in Texas, where DEI is now supposedly "illegal".
I’m sorry to hear this. Which university?
St. Philip's College. It's a public community college in the Alamo community College district in San Antonio. They force you to write a DEI paper to become certified as a Master Teacher as well. Campus Reform did a thorough article on what happened to me.
Tip of the hat to you for fighting back! How far we have fallen!
I'm lucky to have had the support of the Academic Freedom Alliance.
Rufo will act for you ! Keep him informed - he understands the necessity of policy as it affects the entirety of a Republic’s life ! God Speed you towards success !
I will look for that article, Prof. Moravits - I would like to read it. When was it published?
Earlier this summer. Google campus reform Moravits. NY Post and a few others covered it as well
Thank you, Sir. I have respect for your decision to not "take it lying down."
I myself successfully sued an employer for unrelated abusive conduct, and came to see myself more clearly - as did my colleagues. Perhaps not preferable, but we make of it what we can.
I hope that you will stay in-touch here, among C.R.'s readers.
Will do. Thank you.
Not illegal until spring semester starts. Even then, lots of ways around it.
Since you got through your fight to a settlement, do you have a network or contact system for Texas faculty to reach out with inside information to fight back against woke/corrupt administrators that can be publicized?
Only at that college
But you have the media contacts who would publish the inside info and/or access to state officials like Patrick who will care?
If so, would you like to build a wider network?
You’re definitely worthy of this award. I started reading City Journal on the recommendation of Thomas Sowell....couldn’t ignore that!
Sowell is one of the greats!
Sowell is getting the Solzhenitsyn treatment ("The go-to black guy for white guys") from some astonishingly poorly turned-out young men who know the work of neither. It does not occur to them that Sowell wrote on precisely the issues that they, too, are interested in. Per your speech, these persons are low-level troops - no serious professional (not even an American Philosophical Association Book Prize Winner) would want to "go there," for fear of humiliation at the hands of serious non-credentialed readers.
If any of these semi public-intellectuals were serious, then they would engage Sowell's thought and take-on Loury, Reilly, McWhorter, et. al.- nothing is stopping them from, say, doing what you are doing (except maybe...).
Sowell is the Wilfredo Pareto of our time; if I thought that he was wrong, and I were aligned with these people, I would try to rival him and prove it wrong - but seeking truth also means that you must acknowledge your opponents.
My conclusion: they don't want truth.
On that note, I see that you are getting the treatment from some very second and third-tier nodes who do not engage the substance of your book, among other things.
Aside from what I have said of your rhetorical style and your standing up to the Provost as reality and symbol of a larger disposition, the school's institution of the Classics test is a demonstration of the practical meaning of the reforms.
Conservatives think the purpose of politics is to come to agreement.
Liberals recognize Clausewitz's Law: the purpose of politics is to destroy your opponents.
Conservatives are best when we agree on ends (ending poverty, protecting kids, etc..) and are arguing about means (more/less cops, marginal tax rates, porn regulation, etc...): essentially, good people struggling to figure out how to best solve a mutually agreed problem. That's not what time it is in America today. When your political opponents believe the sexual exploitation of children is good and that cops are evil... your opponents are not "good people trying to solve problems". They are evil. One does not convince evil to change; evil must be destroyed.
The Left realized this decades ago. Why do you think they started calling all conservatives Nazis? Dehumanizing your political opponents is necessary if you're going to wage war against them. The Right is just now pulling its head out of the sand, and there are lots of Nikki Haleys and Mike Pences who resist even that small amount of vertical movement.
Hear, hear.
🙌🙌🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻Brian Villanueva👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
That's nonsensical. A classic example of "sticking Angel Wings on Our Side, and Devil Horns on the Opposition" fallacy. Mired at the level of political sophistication of a very average 10 year old. Loyalty to ideological dogma always leaves people less intelligent than they otherwise would be.
In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich ran Republican Party retreats devoted to honing GOP partisan politics like a saber, using tactics like demonizing the opposition with polarizing language, stereotyping, and categorical disparagement.. Rush Limbaugh was a past master of the approach.
David Horowitz wrote his "Art of Political War" in 2000. He refers to his "Freedom Center" as a "school for political warfare." I've read the book (and several others by Horowitz.) There isn't anything about "compromise" in them. Politics is presented as a cage match to the death. Horowitz' ideological allegiances may have done a 180 degree turn, but the tactics that he advises are no different than the ones he learned as a young Bolshevik. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1890626287/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=publiweekl05-20
"The Center’s focus and the School’s curriculum have two agendas:
1. Identify the enemy and understand his nature.
2. Devise ways to attack and neutralize him."
https://www.frontpagemag.com/freedom-center-school-political-warfare-david-horowitz-freedom-center/
Really: consider the statement by Horowitz that ""Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out"; where's the compromise in that characterization? Delve into his ideas a little further, and the contradictions in regard to his purported embrace of "Freedom" become obvious to anyone who notices all of the details of the political solutions that he advocates.
Read Roger Morris's book Partners In Power, especially the three "Washington" chapters. That will give you some idea of who compromised with who, in the 1980s and 1990s. Available to borrow for free on-line https://archive.org/details/partnersinpowerc00morrrich
I think events since have largely borne out the veracity of Horowitz's statement.
Rereading my post, I'm willing to concede some hyperbole there, but not much. And yes, the Right has certainly done its share of namecalling. American politics has been a gutter sport since the rise of the 2 party system in the election of 1800. Despite that, it has functioned well.
However... I would argue that there is a huge difference between an unelected, think-tank leader like Horowitz using highly inflammatory language... and the major elected leaders of a party doing the same.
I didn't like Trump's "lock her up" chant. I thought using the political process to threaten your opponent with imprisonment was a very bad idea. Upon winning though, he never made any attempt to make good on it (thankfully). Perhaps that was his gnat-like attention span, but I suspect it was always hyperbole and he knew it. Similarly, Democrats ran on "get Trump" in 2020 from President down to dog catcher. But they ARE making good on it, against Trump, his political allies, and even ideological supporters who get too loud. For the Democrats, it's not hyperbole. President Biden declared that Donald Trump and all his supporters were "threats to democracy" in Philadelphia last year. Based on his actions (and those of his Party apparatus like the Atlanta DA) since, he means it and intends to use the power of the state against his political opponents.
That is the red line I see. And to be clear, I detest Trump's "I am your retribution" message, which essentially threatens to do the same from the other side. There are now Republicans (not elected, but think-tankers like Horowitz) who are advocating for a red-state D.A. to bring charges against a few sitting Democrat Senators. Again, I hate this, but I do understand the position: perhaps the the only way back from this banana-republic abyss (which we're gazing at but haven't yet stepped into, I think) is to make the Democrats realize the danger of what they're doing by using their own techniques against them.
To my larger point about the difference between arguing over means or ends, I maintain that distinction is 100% accurate. The modern electoral process can handle significant disagreements over means, but is very poor at disagreements over ends. This is by design, as the Enlightenment idea of a neutral/secular state arose as a response to the European wars of religion: Locke essentially says "look, we all basically agree on something called 'natural law', so let's stop killing each over rival conceptions of God and get on to making money." But those "rival conceptions of God" sometimes result in radically different moral codes (witness the intra-Christian split over LGBT today) which the state is now powerless to adjudicate. I maintain (as Deneen does) that there is no solution to this problem from within the Enlightenment framework. the Enlightenment systematically undermined the broadly Christian moral order which it relied on. At the extreme end, this can be seen in the logical conundrum: if you're just a smart ape with no Creator, who gave you those rights you say you have?
Today our political arguments are almost essentially all theological (disagreements over the definition of "the good"). Rival theologies are wearing our political parties as coats. And rival gods do not coexist well. One will destroy the other, hence the radical nature of our politics today.
"The modern electoral process can handle significant disagreements over means"
Oh, yeah. When it comes to means, by all appearances both major parties are committed to a race to the bottom. And in accord with the two-party status quo, both parties share tacit agreement on the desirability of calling out the ethical misbehaviors of the Other Side. While wagon circling in defense of ones own Side, facts and germane inferences notwithstanding. Partisan politics is stuporous. And, ultimately, an exercise that's more about personal ego concerns with team social status than about doing the right thing with impartiality and integrity. Partisans are capable of excusing, temporizing, and overlooking anything done by their Own Team, and hyping even trivial or inadvertent moves by the Other Side to the level of Evil Incarnate. It's opportunism. Both petty and pernicious.
"To my larger point about the difference between arguing over means or ends, I maintain that distinction is 100% accurate."
Hmm.
"Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view."
Ferdinand Lassalle, Franz von Sickingen
Arthur Koestler uses that verse advisedly: the quote opens the final chapter of his book Darkness At Noon. Free to read at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.99646/mode/2up?view=theater (turn page to find contents; the face page is blank. Page 171, in the edition that's linked.)
"I would argue that there is a huge difference between an unelected, think-tank leader like Horowitz using highly inflammatory language... and the major elected leaders of a party doing the same."
Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House for six years in the 1990s. He referred to his Democratic Party opponents as "Extreme Far Leftists" every chance he got, which is laughable. He encouraged every other Republican to do the same.
(The Democrats circling the wagons around Clinton was also disgraceful. Clinton basically manipulated the loyalty of his supporters. Neither "major party establishment" has sufficient integrity for me to respect them, at least at the national level. And Trump is just another manipulator. A Bonnie Prince Charlie for true believers, the way Bill Clinton was in the 1990s.)
Beyond that, I apply the same criteria to strident voices with punitive agendas and grandiose plans on "the Right" as I do to those on "the Left." I I don't base my concerns primarily on how much Power an extremist faction happens to possess at a given time; I judge them on what the extremists would do if they got hold of the levers. On the basis of evidence that they're typically only too willing to supply, for anyone willing to read their own statements.
fwiw, my opinion on Biden Impeachment hearings: fine, as a fact-finding investigation. But I've felt since 1999 that no party should go forward with actual impeachment proceedings unless they have the votes in the Senate to support the removal of the President. Anything less is a partisan food fight. Don't waste our time with nonsense. And it's while already clear that while some of Biden's deals are disgraceful and unethical, my main takeaway is that the real scandal about Washington isn't what ISN'T legal, it's what IS legal. For the eminences of both parties. As detailed in the pages of Partners In Power, the book I linked in my initial reply upthread. So there's your 2-party system that "has functioned pretty well", for you.
"American politics has been a gutter sport since the rise of the 2 party system in the election of 1800. Despite that, it has functioned well."
Yeah, herd that.
The 2-party system hasn't functioned well for decades. Since 1976, when Jimmy Carter was elected with 50.1% of the popular vote, only two US Presidents have been elected to their first term with a majority of the popular vote: Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Four times in US history, someone was elected to the presidency despite the fact that they received fewer popular votes than an opponent. That's happened twice in the previous six presidential elections- in 2000, and 2016. Before that, it hadn't happened since the election of 1888, when Benjamin Harrison beat Grover Cleveland, despite Cleveland's edge of around 0.8% in the popular vote. Neither of the two top vote getting candidates received a majority of the popular vote in 1988. (Or in 2000, or 2016.)
Before that, in 1876, Rutherford Hayes (R) was installed as president as the result of a backroom deal that awarded him all 20 of the electoral votes of four disputed states. Hayes had won 47.9% of the vote; his opponent Samuel Tilden had won 50.9%. It's actually even more complicated than that summary makes it appear: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rigged-vote-four-us-presidential-elections-contested-results-180961033/
I know. The Electoral College. All nice and legal-like. That's a side issue. I can live with it. The issue that really concerns me is that the 2-party system has NEVER worked all that well, especially as more and more partisan cadres- of both parties- realized some time in the mid-20th century that the Dee/Dum system could be gamed by corraling voters by scaring them with dire predictions about the opposition.
I'll say it again: both parties want to maintain that status quo. Nothing stops either party from making ranked choice voting a top priority.. ( Passage of a Congressional bill has the ability to set common national standards in that regard- at least for elections to the House and Senate. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-i/clauses/750
Instead the two-party system gets the benefit of unexamined assumptions--as in your anodyne "the system works pretty well"- while ranked choice voting is dismissed by treating its bugs as if they were inherent features instead of fixable flaws.
If ranked-choice voting in national elections had been enacted throughout the US in 1992, George W. Bush would likely have won instead of Bill Clinton. That doesn't concern me. What concerns me is that the American political system should have had 30 years of opportunity for healthy metamorphosis and the ingress of novelty. Instead, the inertia and the stagnation have increased--the people of power and influence in both parties live in a bubble that seems to be hermetically sealed from outside input, in many important respects--and confidence in the political system has dropped to a point where it's become a hip thing to announce that the US is finished as a democratic republic. Or, conversely, to imagine that the only solution is to be found in pipe dreams of secession, or civil war. Whereas the simple addition of one more choice on a ballot- the opportunity for voters to put up an official ballot result of who they would actually prefer, not just who they're forced to settle for- that's somehow considered "unrealistic." Call it Catch-02.
That is not a system that's functioning well. In some ways, the status quo is hardly functioning at all.
Darkness At Noon is a great book. I gave serious thought to assigning it to my civics class last year, but I went with 1984 and Brave New World instead since I thought they would be more relatable.
Regarding Gingrich, I just view "Extreme Far Leftists" (or "MAGA Republicans" today) as within the realm of normal political namecalling. I view "threats to democracy" as something else. If someone is an "extreme partisan", electing them may be result in bad policies, but it's not intrinsically illegitimate. Saying someone is a "threat to democracy" means electing them undermines the electoral system itself. If that's true, absolutely ANYTHING is justified to prevent that outcome, which is what I believe you're seeing on the Left today.
I actually thought the Republicans should have let the Lewinsky thing go. I didn't think it at the time, but in hindsight, we should have taken the higher road. We had a significant hand in turning impeachment into a standard political tool. I agree with you about the Biden impeachment too, and I like your rule about whipping Senate votes before you pass articles. If you know it's going to be partisan, let it go. Sure, maybe the other side is just circling the wagons, but maybe your own side is overreacting. (And that applies to both sides.)
Regarding the 2 party system, I also agree. Increasingly, we have all the problems of a Parliamentary system (reflexive partisan opposition, parties voting unanimously on most issues) without any of the benefits (snap elections, easy dissolution of a govt, PMs defending their policies, etc...)
I love ranked choice voting! It's a wonderful system.
Good conversation. Thanks.
"Good conversation. Thanks." I'm enjoying it, too. The sort of input that engages my mind.
"I actually thought the Republicans should have let the Lewinsky thing go."
I thought Bill Clinton should have resigned. And I took the opportunity to express that opinion more than once on the airwaves. He could have owned up to his trysts with Monica, and told his inquisitors to pound sand. But instead he took the weasel's way out- smearing Lewinsky as a delusional stalker, and then compounding his falsehood by enlisting the Congressional leadership of the Democratic Party to back him up. That is not a betrayal that's politically forgivable, to me. And of course, if it hadn't been for the Blue Dress, no one would have been the wiser. Clinton didn't handle his predicament like a person of integrity. And American mass media consumers were cornered into amusing themselves into a stupor on a media diet of, like, the most threadbare, tedious soap opera ever. For two years. If anyone wants a media criticism project to take on, do an immersive deep dive into how the anchors and guests on every major news media network (except Pacifica; credit where credit is due) managed to waste that much time. A comparison of the actual number of new facts introduced per week over the course of the impeachment with the amount of speculative conjectures and tangential food fights would be very instructive. (Sadly, my life is too short to devote the time required for such an immersion and retrospective analysis.)
I didn't follow the case- I didn't own a television in the 1990s, and also knew right away that impeachment was entirely about petty harassment, and also that a conviction was practically guaranteed to fail. I view both the OJ trial and the Lewinskygate spectacle that arrived on its heels as extremely revealing of the rote//intellectually slack/superficial mentalities of the complacent American news media celebrity corps of the 1990s. Serious reporters did other stuff. Too bad there was so little room provided for those stories by the TV channels.
"I love ranked choice voting! It's a wonderful system." It's also a ballot reform that is made for a presidential system like that of the US. The final result is always majoritarian. It's funny that IRV gets called "the Australian ballot"; there's less need for it in a Parliamentary system. The parliamentary system also makes it more difficult to sort the results. It's like it's double-jointed. Whereas the logic gate of majoritarian election is straightforward, particularly for chief executive. The most straightforward way to do ranked-choice would be to allow voters to rank only a first and second choice. In practical terms, the candidate that one most prefers, followed by an expression of preference between the two established parties (who are likely to be running the strongest although there's no way to be sure. The established parties would benefit from their legacy status, I think. At least at the outset.
I think the reform has the potential to benefits both outsider candidacies AND the two established parties- at least for anyone in the Ds and Rs who is more interested in dynamic government than in power hoarding. I'd fully anticipate that one or the other of the major parties would do all that they could in order to co-opt the appeal of novel outsider ideas and issue priorities- because they'd be on notice. They would be able to afford to ignore addressing those issues any more; at best, they might even refine and improve the ideas.
Meanwhile, the platforms of outsider parties like the Greens and the Libertarians might manage to sober up sufficiently that their party platforms no longer resemble wish lists to Santa at the North Pole. Like, get the head out of the clouds, and you might find that you're the next big thing. But only if you understand principles like triage, reasoned compromise, and the necessity for achieving productive results instead of 99% rhetorical bloviation framed by 1% window dressing. Non-ideological principles like those. Promise modestly, and then deliver. Everyone I know is awfully burned out on the more usual situation of extravagant promises that get forgotten by election winners on Inauguration Day.
If ranked choice voting ever gets enacted nationwide, I'd anticipate that candidates put forth by the two major parties would remain the top contenders for at least the first couple of elections. If one or both of the big parties maintain that status by swiping the best ideas of the Outsiders, I'm fine with it- as long as they're true to their new game, and they don't phony it up. If they phony it up, voters retain their voting prerogative to shift allegiances. That's just enough of a threat- or promise- to induce some flexibility and openness into the election process. Because ranked-choice provides an emerging political movement with a way to track a consistent trend toward increasing popularity. A popularity that holds the potential to go viral, and grow dramatically larger very quickly. (And no, I really don't think the Nazis et. al. have that sort of traction.)
I'm not wedded to an outsider political perspective. I want more of the Outlier issue positions that I hold get mainstreamed, for real. I'm into successful outcome-based politics.
"Regarding Gingrich, I just view "Extreme Far Leftists" (or "MAGA Republicans" today) as within the realm of normal political namecalling."
Unfortunately, that's a trait of partisan election campaign politics that goes back a long way, in a lot of countries. Although my impression is that Americans are overall more rude and vulgar about it than most other nationalities. Many of us pride ourselves on not having to watch our mouths, after all.
But what I can't forgive Newt for is presenting a slightly cleaned-up version of the John Birch Society/Minutemen narrative as a way to straw-man the Democrats. Casting a cloud of inchoate suspicions over every Democratic party official; every member of a Democratic presidential administration; every elected official- and, ultimately, everyone who exhibits a preference for voting for Democrats rather than Republicans. He made his name as a backbencher torching a straw man named "Progressive". As if politics were a zero-sum game of personalities, associations, labels attached to sweeping generalizations, etc.
Newt led the way in propounding a Grand Unified Theory of the sinister goals of the Democratic Party opposition, when all that's really happening there is that the Democrats are unable to tell off their lunatic fringe, because they don't dare offend a single constituency. Thereby leaving it to everyone else to restore sanity to the discourse, which believe me has only just begun to happen. The interesting corollary to this situation is that when the effort to turn the light on the faux-mon solipsists succeeds. the Democrats currently residing in the Librocrat epistemic bubble will be able to take credit for exactly none of it.
Heh, I think you should assign Darkness At Noon the next time around. Brave New World is a futurist fantasy. The dystopian aspects are intended as a warning- and Aldous Huxley was doing a lot of Looking Around at the frontiers of scientific modernism (including aspects like eugenics, and the use of pharmacological regimes as coping mechanism) in the 1940s. He had some very prescient insights to communicate. But, ultimately, fiction. The Author-constructed world. I'm a hard sell for fiction, especially science/speculative fiction. Especially futurist spec-fi ideal Utopian templates, or the Dystopian inverse, with its predestinatian conceits. All narratives focus attention in ways that can lead the naive or suggestible into swallowing them hook, line, and sinker, so to speak. Every consumer of art should be wary of getting gut-hooked. Books have a massive advantage over films and video games; they're easy to argue back at. But the argument is more direct when the subject is nonfiction than when it's fiction. Good fiction is sneaky. And also funny. That's perhaps my main reservation about both Brave New World and Island (for those unaware, Island is another AH novel, sort of the benevolent utopia obverse of BNW.) There's no funny in either of them. Whereas Philip K. Dick always included his sense of humor in his writings. A saving grace.
Darkness At Noon, however, is non-fiction at heart. It's a novel, but it's a roman a clef about actual historical events that draws on the experiences of actual people. That gives it an edge. Sometimes historical fiction can take too many liberties or skim a surface of factoids. Darkness At Noon reads more like a nonfiction book that any other novel. It's more of a scrupulously detailed criminal indictment than a speculative gambit. No counterfactual scenarios are involved.
I should have read Darkness At Noon when I was in high school in the 1970s. I'm pretty sure I knew of the book's existence. I just never read it. I did, however, read Edward Hunter's book Brainwashing, on the application of indoctrination techniques to American and British Korean War POWs by North Korean and Chinese political cadres and interrogators. The most notable feature of those techniques is their reliance on the principles of conditioning. outlined by Ivan Pavlov, which were first adopted and refined by the Soviet Russians. Great book- I still own a copy. Free here: https://archive.org/details/brainwashingstor00huntrich
Later, in the mid-1970s, I read parts of the Gulag Archipelago. Notably the introductory passages. After a while, the prison ordeals...I had gotten the idea.
You Sir, are an inspiration to us all.
You’re a true soldier and thank you for your work.
You are remarkably disciplined in the way you engage your ideological opponents, whether verbally or through your writings. Sometimes don’t you feel like telling mewling wokesters to F-off?
Sometimes I do. :)
Chris, Congratulations on a keenly crafted speech, that launches with a throat-grip of a narrative and proceeds with a laser of crucial lessons.
Thank you, George! Great to see you here.
Mr. Gilder, you were the teacher of one of my teachers, Marlo Lewis.
I respect your writings and your work on behalf of our cause. It is hard for our side to be activists for a number of different reasons; hopefully that will change. I also think of David Daleiden and his continuing travails as a result of exposing the sale of fetal parts. It has been and will continue to be a very tough road for him.
He is being railroaded. So sad. So wrong.
Thank you for all that you do!
New Information + Activism = Policy. Thank you for using this formula and your skills to transform New College. My nephew, who lives in Fort Myers, is being scouted by PBA for a cross country scholarship. Love the school but would love to see him at NC learning from your experience and benefiting from you influence. Keep up the GREAT work!
Great, have him apply!
Well done! I'm sharing this with my family. We're 3 and 4 generations Seattle born and bred, and were forced to make the decision to resettle in Texas. We are happy here, but in our dreams, we inevitably walk the Edmonds to San Juan beaches. I hope our home state will keep fighting back against this evil cabal. The lessons you've shared are important. "They assemble". That's a critical observation. Sending our regards from our Washington family now living in Central Texas.
Congrats Chris. Appropriate, encouraging, and well-deserved. I read your book as well. It was nicely researched and well written. You've "officially" achieved a voice in the discourse. Your signal cuts through the noisy bullshit of the chattering classes. Please keep it up.🙏🏽
Congratulations and keep up your very important work
Congratulations. Please install journalism and also school/university reclamation programs in all 50 states.
And civics.
Cristopher, your terse and incisive style - in this speech, your book, and your most recent video - are exemplary. It is a potent style of public rhetoric, with command of reality.
Appreciate it!
Thank you Mr. Rufo for what you do. You also give the rest of us confidence and strength in fighting for what’s right.