His critiques of right-wing elites land beautifully (admittedly, their intellectual and moral stagnation make such a task easier every day), but he goes further to reveal an equal or greater disdain for the “white underclass.”
As Williamson discusses the ugly world of poverty that he grew up in, he gets to a line that feels the most true and is thus the most insidious: “The more you know about that world, the less sympathetic you’ll be to it.”
He intends this to skewer the chattering classes of liberals who are overflowing with sympathy for the abstract “poor” but squirm at the thought of sharing a school or subdivision with actual poor people.
Feeding such people the lie that their problems are mainly external in origin — that they are the victims of scheming elites, immigrants, black welfare malingerers, superabundantly fecund Mexicans, capitalism with Chinese characteristics, Walmart, Wall Street, their neighbors — is the political equivalent of selling them heroin. (And I have no doubt that it is mostly done for the same reason.) It is an analgesic that is unhealthy even in small doses and disabling or lethal in large ones. The opposite message — that life is hard and unfair, that what is not necessarily your fault may yet be your problem, that you must act and bear responsibility for your actions — is what conservatism used to offer
.. These ideologues have been shocked to see their principles abandoned in favor of vulgar might-makes-right tribalism and you can find any number of well-written essays from this past year reckoning with this disappointment and cursing the alliance of fools, cowards, crazies, and racists that have come to dominate right-wing institutions.
.. If all conservatism has to offer is a stern message about personal responsibility and a repetition of something conservative-sounding you heard from that one black friend of yours, it’s no wonder nobody wants it. It’s simply not a political philosophy you can govern with, win votes with, or even communicate with.
.. If personal responsibility and tax cuts were the path to prosperity and virtue, then Kansas and Alabama ought to be shining exemplars of governance.
- .. The first way he’s wrong relates to common tropes about welfare: the more poor people you know, the more you realize how little they get from the government and how few of them actually get anything. The most shocking anecdotes get our attention – a cousin or a friend of a friend who is a lazy drug addict and gets a disability payment – but these examples are far from representative. You can only know that, though, if you are actually spending time with poor people.
- .. it actively discourages friendship with the poor and praises the sort of ignorance his statement is meant to lambast liberals for.
- our obsession with meritocracy. When we are constantly encouraging people who are born with or acquire the virtues necessary to live a stable life to shake the dust off their feet and abandon their dysfunctional friends, those left behind stagnate in ever-more-toxic dysfunction.
- Conservatism rejects the deterministic economics that denies people their agency, but the modern conservative movement has preached an atomizing freedom that eviscerates the structures and relationships that help people to exercise agency. This is why the eloquent ideas of politicians like Mike Lee or Ben Sasse ring hollow:
- The most prominent right-wing writers at various outlets .. are always suggesting the old wineskins of 20th-century conservatism, which is part of why their reformocon ideas have never taken off.
- .. conservatism needs to decide what it is we’re trying to conserve and rewrite everything else around that.
- Conserving the institutions that help people to flourish – churches and families most prominent among them – is more fundamental than “liberty” or “small government”.
- .. Williamson’s formulation is backwards: the more that one chooses to love and share in the pain of the poor, the more intimately you will want to know them and be friends with them.
Richard Rohr Meditation: Prophecy from the Inside
Prophets, by their very nature, cannot be at the center of any social structure. Rather, they are “on the edge of the inside.” They cannot be fully insiders, but they cannot throw rocks from outside either. They must be educated inside the system, knowing and living the rules, before they can critique what is non- essential or not so important.
.. Only with great respect for and understanding of the rules can a prophet know how to properly break those very same rules—for the sake of a greater purpose and value. A prophet critiques a system by quoting its own documents, constitutions, heroes, and Scriptures against its present practice. This is their secret: systems are best unlocked from inside.
.. For the next 1700 or so years, most of the preaching and interpretation of Scripture was from the perspective of power, from primarily European, educated, quite comfortable, and presumably celibate males.
Mark Levin: Mooch’s ’Absolutely Disgusting’ Remarks to ‘Liberal Rag’ Make WH Look ‘Moronic, Pathetic’
Conservative talk radio host Mark Levin blasted new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci on Thursday for going to a “liberal rag” and making “absolutely disgusting” comments about White House Chief Strategist Steve K. Bannon.
.. Levin marveled at the fact that Scaramucci called a “liberal reporter at a liberal rag” and spoke in that way about his colleagues.
“What the hell has Steve Bannon done to this guy?” Levin asked. “Nothing!”Levin, who is the author of the current best-selling book Rediscovering Americanism, said that “if you support Donald Trump, then you don’t sit back and excuse all this.”.. Levin, a Reagan administration alum who has written some of the most seminal books of the modern conservative movement like Liberty and Tyranny, which became a runaway bestseller despite scant to no coverage in the legacy media, asked, “Do you think this kind of internecine warfare makes America great again?”“It makes these guys look stupid, moronic, pathetic! That’s not how you serve your president, in my view,” he said... “The president is under brutal attack, and he really needs some pros around him,” he continued.
.. On Fox News, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham slammed Scaramucci for “trashing Steve Bannon, who has been carrying the conservative populist banner for years, loyal to this president,” and said Scaramucci’s comments were “humiliating to the president.”
Levin had a reminder for Scaramucci about the position he holds.
“You’re communications director to the president of the United States,” Levin said. “You hold a public trust.”
Sean Hannity Is No William F. Buckley
On the subject of cycles, Warren Buffett likes to talk about “the natural progression, the three I’s.” As he put it to Charlie Rose in 2008, those I’s are “the innovators, the imitators and the idiots.” One creates, one enhances — and one screws it all up.
Buffett was describing the process that led to the 2008 housing and financial crises. But he might as well have been talking about the decline of the conservative movement in America.
.. If we have reached the point where rank-and-file conservatives see nothing amiss with giving Hannity an award named for Buckley, then surely there’s a Milton Friedman Prize awaiting Steve Bannon for his insights on free trade.
.. Buckley shed isolationism, segregationism and anti-Semitism, and insisted the conservative movement do likewise.
.. as the gatekeeper of conservative ideas, he denounced the inverted Marxism of Ayn Rand, the conspiracy theories of Robert Welch (founder of the John Birch Society) and the white populism of George Wallace and Pat Buchanan.
.. In March 2000, he trained his sights on “the narcissist” and “demagogue” Donald Trump. “When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection,” he wrote in a prophetic short essay in Cigar Aficionado. “The resistance to a corrupting demagogy,” he warned, “should take first priority” for Americans.
.. The conservatism he nourished was fundamentally literary: To play a significant part in it you had to know how to write, and in order to write well you had to read widely, and in order to do that you had to, well, enjoy reading. In hindsight, 2008, the year of Sarah Palin, was also the year when literary conservatism went into eclipse.
Suddenly, you didn’t need to devote a month to researching and writing a 7,000-word critique of Obama administration’s policy on, say, Syria to be taken seriously as a conservative foreign-policy expert. You just needed to mouth off about it for five minutes on “The O’Reilly Factor.” For books there were always ghostwriters;
..The quality of an idea could be tested not by its ability to withstand scrutiny from experts, but by the willingness of people to swallow it.
.. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a post-literate conservative world should have been so quick to embrace a semi-literate presidential candidate. Nor, in hindsight, is it strange that, with the role Buckley once played in maintaining conservative ideological hygiene retired, the ideas he expunged should have made such a quick and pestilential comeback.
- Thus, when Hannity peddles conspiracy theories about Seth Rich, the young Democratic National Committee staffer murdered in Washington last year, that’s an echo of John Birch.
- When fellow Fox host Tucker Carlson — who once aspired to be the next Buckley and now aims to be the next Ann Coulter — tries to reinvent himself as the tribune of the working class, he’s speaking for the modern-day George Wallace voter.
- Isolationism is already back, thanks to Trump.
- Anti-Semitism can’t be far behind, either, and not just on the alt-right.
a Buckley Award for Sean Hannity suggests nothing ironic
.. a fresh reminder of who now holds the commanding heights of conservative life, and what it is that they think.