106:04
ultimate question and one of the maybe
106:06
before answering and I’ll be brief I
106:08
invite people and this is may be
106:10
responsible y’all should just say to ask
yourself what are you trying to
accomplish here if what you’re trying to
accomplish is how do we strengthen the
left that’s one answer and you’re saying
how do we try to strengthen democratic
norms that’s quite a different answer
and there’s been a tendency to blur them
the way I’m not on the person with the
left at all so I’ll just give you four
Myositis me you wanna strengthen life
the way you do it is by ramping up is by
building a coalition of minorities
that’s that’s the best democratic
mobilization build-up racial antagonism
black lives matter those because of the
the big the reason that Hillary which
the reason the 2016 election was
abnormal was by the normal political
science indicators Hillary Clinton
should have won fifty three percent of
106:52
the vote the fact that she got forty
106:54
eight is abnormal she lost five points
106:56
in a very common friendly
106:58
environment why failure de mobilized
107:00
black voters partly because of voter
107:02
suppression partly because she wasn’t
107:04
offering them much of anything Medicare
107:06
for all that that’s how you build the
107:09
left but what you will discover when you
107:12
do that is the candidates who leave that
107:13
will be Trump’s of the left not as gross
107:19
for example like Bernie Sanders who was
107:23
good at his job
107:24
yeah they won’t they they will be norm
107:29
travelers they will do things like
107:30
Obama’s executive actions to in his
107:33
second term that’s what you’ll get that
107:36
is a way to a more social democratic
107:38
United States it’ll be an ethnically
107:40
driven way if what you want to do if
107:42
it’s it but if your question is how do
107:43
we build democratic norms that’s a
107:46
different question and then and and then
107:49
you have to say this is not about party
107:50
advantage and that means that some of
107:52
the people you have to address the
107:55
things that are driving the corrosion of
107:56
democratic norms what do you think was
107:59
you would you be a butter he said why
108:02
did you why did you vote for trouble and
108:04
by the voter said well you know I’m just
108:06
really disappointed and what is happened
108:08
to my personal living standard I’ve been
108:09
at a way wage increase in twenty years
108:10
saying you are so greedy and
108:14
materialistic don’t you understand that
108:15
money is the root of all evil hi Colin I
108:19
caught you like order you delay aside
108:21
these crass okay but that is the sermon
108:24
that they get if they say I’m happy that
108:26
my sis my neighborhood which used to be
108:28
a hundred sailors percent
108:29
english-speaking now has 30 percent
108:31
English second language learners in my
108:33
children’s school and that will happen I
108:34
went to a school in North Carolina what
108:36
does research in Oakland 20 in 2007
108:38
where family reported the change from no
108:40
foreign language speakers to 30 percent
108:42
over the course of their through
108:43
children’s time in that one school
108:44
district if what finally what is
108:48
bothering and do something about and
108:52
take them and take the grievances
108:54
seriously I’m the trumpeter Jose
108:57
trumpeter is deeply at a stop but I had
109:00
a big impact on me the job that seems to
109:04
me that Democratic systems get into
109:05
trouble in two ways
109:06
one is when you put populist muses the
109:09
people identify the problems and the
109:10
people offer the solutions
109:11
bad lead ISM is the the people identify
109:17
problems the elites tell them they’re
109:18
wrong about them and offer other
109:19
problems and other stages also bad
109:23
listen to the problems then then use
109:26
partisan competition to compete to offer
109:28
responsible solutions but do not read
109:30
the problems on court any anyone else
109:36
want to pick up any of that well there’s
109:46
several questions that are basically
109:48
about the connections between populism
109:51
and presidential ism to what extent are
109:54
they some kind of you know symbiotic to
109:59
mutually encouraging or one one
110:02
producing the other or yeah I’m going to
110:10
be very brief this time but I’m gonna
110:12
make myself even more unpopular um if
110:15
there’s one thing but all of political
110:16
scientists seem to agree on over the
110:18
last thirty years so that it’s all about
110:19
institutions right and and it’s not
110:23
clear to me in the case of populism but
110:25
it is now obviously the particular way
110:28
in which populism plays out in different
110:29
countries is shaped by institutions but
110:34
when you look around these different
110:36
contexts what is striking is that
110:39
populism has found a way of expressing
110:41
itself here for a presidential election
110:43
there threw a party was very strong in
110:45
Parliament there through you know a
110:47
popular referendum across all it is very
110:50
very different institutional context so
110:53
while I think was obviously things to be
110:55
said about hyper partisanship about
110:56
anger about the fact that the political
110:58
system is blocked because of all the
110:59
veto powers and all of those things the
111:01
United States what’s striking to me when
111:03
you look at international perspective is
111:05
how little of the experience and the
111:09
variation of populism can be explained
111:11
by institutions
111:13
just add you know Viktor Orban era Diwan
111:15
came to power as Prime Minister you know
111:17
you go down the list and so to me what
111:19
this suggests is that old debate juan
111:21
linz his question actually in some ways
111:23
it was answered I think by Adams
111:24
students a chaemoo I don’t know if you
111:25
stood but he answered it about a decade
111:27
ago you know that it’s not presidential
111:29
ism or parliamentarism per se there’s
111:31
selection issues which create the
111:33
outcomes we see and to me that suggests
111:35
a much more micro focus in terms of our
111:38
research agenda can I pop in I wrote a
111:40
book about mandates and presidential
111:43
mandate claiming and my argument in the
111:45
u.s. context is that populism is a
111:46
rhetorical strategy for presidents to
111:49
deal with the legitimacy challenges to
111:52
an incredibly powerful and problematic
111:55
institution and the conditions of
111:58
partisanship so I think this there’s
112:01
something separate there about populism
112:03
as as a rhetorical strategy
112:16
well so here’s one that this says it has
112:30
david firm’s name at the top but that
112:32
may be a rhetorical sleight making
112:36
America great again would require
112:38
strengthening the welfare state which
112:40
many voters interpret us giving handouts
112:43
to blacks and Latinos these voters are
112:46
also the most vulnerable to
112:48
anti-immigrant and xenophobic appeals
112:51
would your concessions work question
112:54
mark did at one point endorse the
113:16
lowering of the age would qualification
113:17
for Medicare I think to 55 I forget that
113:20
was one of her 972 policy proposals and
113:23
one of the things I has always been a
113:25
theory of mind about campaigns as if you
113:27
have 1972 policy proposals you don’t
113:29
have any if you have four you don’t have
113:32
any if you have two you’re testing
113:35
people’s memory so if you yeah I think I
113:41
think generally I think you see
113:42
throughout the that the United States
113:44
needs a thicker Social Insurance network
113:46
Europe needs a thinner one we need ways
113:49
of financing it that are not too
113:51
provocative and you need you need an
113:54
offer but the offer the offer works
113:58
because it’s an offer to the politic if
114:00
if the offer is to the planet then the
114:05
offer is going to break down to the tone
114:06
of its own way so I think actually the
114:08
two thing when you talk about it is not
114:10
that this there in this it is not a
114:12
contradiction that you have a policy of
114:15
thicker social insurance and higher
114:17
borders those two go hand-in-hand and
114:19
that’s one of things by the way that
114:21
people want to break the welfare state
114:22
they understand that very well that’s
114:25
that’s why you find libertarians are
114:27
very committed to open borders because
114:28
they know with
114:29
orders your welfare system your social
114:32
service system cannot work and that’s
114:33
why they’re favored so a question for
114:37
for Emily and perhaps also Yasha there’s
114:43
a deals party with social media
114:44
how can journalists deal with the
114:46
particular challenges of covering the
114:48
Trump presidency a that so much is
114:51
happening such that many important
114:54
stories get neglected and be that Trump
114:56
manages so often to dominate the news
114:59
cycle with tweets that derail attention
115:02
from substantive and timely issues
115:06
sometimes this seems to me like Trump’s
115:08
main talent is that he has taken his
115:11
reality television show and turned it
115:13
into the news that we consume all the
115:16
time that is an inescapable and there’s
115:19
a kind of fire hose and in fact there
115:21
are all kinds of teasers you know you’ll
115:23
we’ll see soon he’s sort of using all
115:27
those strategies that served him in this
115:29
different role to great effect and it is
115:31
a huge challenge for the media you know
115:33
we cover everything it’s just that
115:35
people can’t really keep up and it
115:37
becomes harder and harder to know what’s
115:39
important the 972 points
115:42
kind of hold in that era as well you
115:46
know one part of the media that I
115:48
probably should have mentioned and
115:49
didn’t it’s obvious is that um you know
115:51
the right-wing media has become has
115:55
taken on such a role in fueling social
115:57
media in covering the president in a
116:00
different way and I think that again
116:03
that puts pressure on the mainstream
116:06
media to become kind of a different
116:08
animal and responds in a way that were
116:10
not particularly well suited for um I do
116:15
think one thing the mainstream media has
116:16
doing been doing better at is covering
116:19
fake news as fake news as opposed to
116:21
ignoring it even last year you see a
116:25
fake news story you just sort of like
116:27
act as if that’s you’re not gonna touch
116:31
that as opposed to trying is realizing
116:33
that it’s out there being consumed and
116:35
needs to be debunked and it’s always
116:36
tricky debunking also you know spreads
116:39
misinformation too but I think we’re at
116:41
the point
116:42
given how people are consuming news how
116:44
difficult it is to tell on Facebook
116:46
whether the source you’re looking at is
116:48
credible or not that the mainstream
116:50
media has a responsibility to be
116:52
engaging in these stories that we used
116:55
to see as beneath us yeah so I mean
117:00
i-i’ve been thinking through sort of the
117:02
different notions of truth and lies we
117:04
have right so those this pair of
117:07
concepts that were very popular a few
117:08
years ago so Stephen Colbert’s
117:10
truthiness and when Harry Frankfurt on
117:12
which is basically saying the
117:15
problem isn’t isn’t any more of a sort
117:17
of straightforward lies for problem now
117:19
that people are sort of indifferent to
117:20
the truth and we don’t quite know how to
117:21
deal with that and that’s different from
117:24
the straightforward lie because at least
117:26
there’s a how Frankfurt ones at least
117:27
Valaya pays it kind of tribute to the
117:29
truth right I actually think that that
117:31
in retrospect is really naive that
117:34
compared to what we have now
117:36
that sort of child’s play but what you
117:38
see and I think the first place where I
117:40
observed it actually was Italy and a
117:42
silhou Bella’s kony but I think Donald
117:43
Trump is completely following that part
117:45
of Paris Coney’s example it’s it’s it’s
117:49
over frating the public of so many false
117:52
claims and with just so much spectacle
117:56
and with so many things going on that it
117:59
becomes impossible for people to
118:00
ascertain what’s true or not because if
118:03
you have a normal sort of attention span
118:05
to politics which is to say a fraction
118:07
of that of what most people in this room
118:09
whose life it is to study politics half
118:11
you just cannot no longer it’s the
118:14
opposite of what David was saying what a
118:15
policy promise it’s not one lie that is
118:18
defining of your presidency you do 10
118:19
lies a day and so nobody in the you know
118:23
in 98 percent of population don’t have a
118:25
patience to try and figure out with
118:27
details on each of those claims and so
118:29
all you can do is to trust the people
118:32
whom you trust and if you’re on the
118:34
right that’ll mean you know Fox News or
118:36
to the right lad and if it’s on the left
118:38
it means you know the kinds of things we
118:40
must be probably consumed right and I
118:42
think there’s a difference between those
118:43
two I’m not saying but we’re the same
118:44
but but but I at this point don’t have
118:48
the time and the patience to go through
118:50
every claim and
118:51
make my own assessment as to whether
118:53
Donald Trump is actually true in bout
118:55
racist things he claims a happening I
118:58
simply assume that they’re false because
119:01
he has managed to over freight the
119:03
system so much but there’s no other way
119:05
of dealing with that I’m a diving is a
119:06
fundamental attack on the very
119:08
possibility of having a truth based
119:11
discourse or a political discourse in
119:14
which truth sort of negotiates how we
119:16
should act though we haven’t quite faced
119:18
up to conceptually much less in terms of
119:20
our response to it can I say something
119:22
very brief about this very brief yeah
119:24
it’s a question actually you know Trump
119:26
has a big Twitter following but you know
119:28
when you tweet something it might get
119:29
retweeted I don’t know ten twenty thirty
119:32
thousand times it’s nothing like Kim
119:34
Kardashian right so my question is why
119:36
is it that every tweet is news why is
119:39
the mega the megaphone is actually the
119:41
New York Times printing you know
119:42
treating his tweet as news and I wonder
119:45
how you guys think about that so it does
119:48
seem that the subject no I’m sorry
119:53
oh you want an answer to that well
119:57
you’re gonna get the penultimate worries
120:00
well and also this is just like
120:01
everything turns into my trying to
120:03
answer for the New York Times right I
120:04
don’t even work on the news desk but
120:06
look the president is making statements
120:08
right I mean I don’t know if you all
120:10
notice the Twitter account that turns
120:11
every tweet into an official statement
120:13
but ridiculous as it is that is what
120:16
they are and so then you have to make
120:18
judgments as the news desk every day
120:21
that covers the president well which of
120:23
these really matter and that is hard to
120:25
do there is no question that there’s all
120:27
kinds of chaff with the weed but that is
120:30
a tough decision for a journalist to
120:32
make something the president says
120:33
something provocative isn’t newsworthy
120:35
the problem with the refusal to stay
120:39
away is we have things like you know the
120:41
four days during Puerto Rico where
120:43
Puerto Rico is a nun television because
120:46
there’s no electricity there and it’s
120:47
very hard to get images and instead
120:49
we’re having some made-up fight about
120:51
you know Colin Kaepernick and Steph
120:53
Curry and the and black athletes which
120:55
is simply divisive it’s that is tough
120:59
for journalists to push back on
121:01
and one sentence I know this is will be
121:03
to your question the fact that the
121:07
statements don’t matter is why they
121:09
matter so when the President of the
121:11
United States the commander-in-chief of
121:12
the Armed Forces says with an eight and
121:14
a half minute gap in between to give the
121:15
Russians lots of time to get off a
121:16
nuclear missile response I am about to
121:19
announce a total and complete ban on dot
121:22
transgender soldiers in the military and
121:24
then the military says thank you for
121:26
your helpful comment we certainly will
121:31
take it into consideration
121:33
and give it to and the military’s
121:35
actually no we thought it over we’re
121:37
sticking to our original policy because
121:39
it’s tweetIn that’s astonishing that’s
121:41
an amazing thing and the fact we have
121:44
this decision of government where the
121:46
president proposes ideas from time to
121:48
time and the Secretary of Defense
121:49
determines whether they’ll become
121:50
government policy we we are out of time
121:56
I would just say that I think it’s
121:58
fitting since we are a university that
122:01
the subject of truth is where we’ve
122:04
we’ve ended up we are after all our
122:07
basic mission is the creation and
122:09
dissemination of knowledge and you know
122:13
some might might go so far as to say
122:15
that the the movements within
122:19
universities to question whether it’s
122:21
possible to actually generate nevermind
122:23
disseminate knowledge have have created
122:27
part of the intellectual and ideological
122:29
terrain that makes what we’ve been
122:32
talking about for the last five minutes
122:34
possible and perhaps in addition to
122:37
being public intellectuals are coming
122:39
out of our our ivory towers and speaking
122:42
in the public sphere we might want to
122:45
pay some attention to the the recreation
122:49
of norms of truth-telling and truth
122:51
seeking within our own institutions but
122:54
I want to thank everybody for
122:57
participating and particularly the
122:59
people have done all a tremendous amount
123:01
of work to come here
123:04
thank you all very much indeed
123:06
[Applause]
123:11
[Music]
The Anti-Christian Alt-Right
The Perverse Thought of Right-Wing Identity Politics
.. “The Church has become the number one enemy of Western Civilization. Soon the only people left in Christianity will be third-world immigrants and a handful of self-hating whites.”
..Hillary Clinton devoted a speech in Nevada to deploring its influence on the election. “These are race-baiting ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas, anti-woman—all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘alt-right,’” she charged.
.. Clinton could not name a single member of a movement that, she warned, imperiled American democracy
.. The movement exists almost entirely among anonymous users of the Internet. It has no institutions, no money, no political representation, and no traditional media.
.. It enjoys the close attention of the liberal establishment it seeks to discredit and the conservative movement it intends to displace.
.. “Everything we have seen over the past year suggests that the alt-right will be around for the foreseeable future.”
.. The alt-right purports to defend the identity and interests of white people, who it believes are the compliant victims of a century-long swindle by liberal morality. Its goals are not conventionally conservative.
It does not so much question as mock standard conservative positions on free trade, abortion, and foreign policy, regarding them as principles that currently abet white dispossession.
.. Its creed, in the words of Richard Spencer, is “Race is real. Race matters. Race is the foundation of identity.”
.. the alt-right represents something more nefarious, and frankly more interesting, than white identity politics.
.. The alt-right is anti-Christian.
.. Its leading thinkers flaunt their rejection of Christianity and their desire to convert believers away from it.
.. Greg Johnson, an influential theorist with a doctorate in philosophy from Catholic University of America, argues that “Christianity is one of the main causes of white decline” and a “necessary condition of white racial suicide.”
.. it argues that Christian teachings have become socially and morally poisonous to the West.
.. Its intellectual birth is marked by the 1918 publication of the first volume of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.
.. While the movement is often accused of advocating racial supremacy, its appeal is more often to cultural difference. A generation tired of multicultural pieties
.. A cultural relativist, Spengler rejects as a “ridiculous distortion” any view that privileges European thought or history.
.. “Each culture possesses its own standards, the validity of which begins and ends with it.”
.. Spengler therefore sees the world as divided into fundamentally different cultures, whose identities he interprets in morphological terms. Cultures are like plants
.. They live through a determined cycle of birth, growth, maturity, and death. During its lifespan, a culture gives expression to the animating “form”
.. Spengler had no scholarly expertise in non-Western cultures (his advanced studies were in mathematics), and Decline of the West is frequently nonsense as both history and sociology. But its interpretations of cultural artifacts and their hidden symbolic meanings are often brilliant and have enchanted readers for a century.
.. All cultures are unique, but some are more unique than others. “We men of the Western culture are an exception,” Spengler claims. At the heart of his book is an interpretation of the culture he named “Faustian,” a term widely used in the intellectual circles of the alt-right.
.. a single idea permeates the arts and sciences of the West. Its distinctive mark is an intense striving for “infinity.”
.. our culture has uniquely sought to see all things in relation to the highest or most distant horizons, which, in turn, it seeks to surpass and extend.
- The vaults of medieval cathedrals, the
- discovery of perspective in painting, the
- exploration of the New World, the
- development of orchestral music, the
- invention of the telescope and
- calculus
—in Spengler’s story, all express the Faustian drive toward transcendence.
.. He argues that there is no Christianity without Western civilization. He arrives at this conclusion by claiming the West begins not with ancient Greece or Rome, but with the high Middle Ages and the birth of scholasticism, Gothic architecture, and polyphony.
.. Its cultural achievements are not testimonies to faith in God. They are the monuments of Faustian man’s attempt—in speculation, stone, glass, and sound—to propel himself into infinity. Of this aspiration, Spengler maintains, “the Gospels know nothing.”
.. In the minds and hands of Europeans, Christianity became a religion that affirmed the unceasing expansion of human freedom, power, and knowledge.
.. There is no biblical god for Faustian man, but there is high Christian culture, which is a tribute to his identity.
.. To a young man lacking a strong identity he says, “This heroic culture is your inheritance, and yours alone. You stand in a line of men who have attained the highest excellences and freely endured the hardest challenges.
.. Albert the Great, Cortés, Newton, Goethe, the Wright brothers all carry this daring spirit, and so do you.”
.. in his 1933 book Hour of Decision, he foresaw the rise of democratic “Caesars” and growing racial animosity. Who will give birth to the next great culture? Not Europeans
.. Spengler predicted the future would belong to the race that had preserved its “strength” in face of the rising “colored menace.”
- If Spengler is the alt-right’s cultural critic,
- Julius Evola is its political mystic.
- Umberto Eco mockingly called him “the magician,” and the
- future Pope Paul VI condemned his writings in a Vatican newspaper
- Evola is the most right-wing thinker possible in the modern world. There is nobody to his right, nor can there be. His influence on the alt-right is detectable in one of its most controversial features: its rejection of human equality.
- “We don’t belong to the liberal family,” writes popular blogger Hunter Wallace. “Nothing is less self-evident to us than the notion that all men are created equal.” Here is the movement’s clearest dispute with conventional conservatism
- The alt-right denies that constitutional democracy is worthy of principled veneration. For Evola, its popular acceptance is a sign we are living in a spiritual dark age.
The basic problem with modernity is “desacralization,” the collapse of spiritual meaning in daily life. Work, family, and citizenship are no longer saturated with spiritual importance, but are understood in functionally secular terms.
.. materialism “kills every possibility
.. Spengler’s fundamental flaw was that he “lacked any understanding of metaphysics and transcendence,” which led him to conclude that human cultures are irreducibly different.
.. Evola believed more or less the exact opposite, arguing that there are timeless and universal principles that have provided the foundation for every true civilization. He referred to these perennial truths as “Tradition,” and he traced the disorders of modernity to our loss of contact with it.
.. No, the world had been slouching into spiritual poverty ever since the eighth century b.c., when the world of Tradition began to disappear.
.. Revolt Against the Modern World, claimed that these primordial societies—whose existence can be accessed only by way of myth and legend, not critical scholarship—all operated on the same principles.
.. In a traditional culture, every aspect of human life, every social activity, role, and caste, was dedicated to the service of an otherworldly order; indeed, they were ritual pathways into it. “According to Tradition,” Evola imagines, “every authority is fraudulent, every law unjust and barbarous, every institution is vain and ephemeral unless . . . they are derived from above.”
.. His key claim is that traditional societies were hierarchically ordered under an absolute ruler, who embodied the sacral order itself.
.. Men Among the Ruins, he argued that political conservatism is intrinsically impossible in a democratic age. True political order can never come from below; it must always be imposed from above.
.. only a transformative leader could elevate humanity out of its degraded state. Such a leader could not appeal to the masses—this was the mistake of the vulgar fascisms of Mussolini and Hitler—but must inspire submission through lofty contempt for democratic norms and popular tastes.
“The presence of superior individuals bestows on a multitude . . . a meaning and a justification they previously lacked,” Evola wrote. “It is the inferior who needs the superior, and not the other way around.”
Evola was less clear about what this sacred authority looked like than what stood in the way of its realization.
.. The problem is that Catholicism forbids the sacred state. And a state without absolute spiritual unity is no state at all.
.. Benoist is the leading theorist of the European New Right, an intellectual movement that began in France in the late 1960s
.. however, no return is necessary if we simply move beyond Christianity altogether. Evola did not believe in a personal deity, but his criticisms of Christianity were political rather than theological. With Benoist, the alt-right becomes explicitly and confessionally anti-Christian.
.. took its inspiration from the failed “conservative revolution” of Weimar Germany.
Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Spengler were its chief figures
.. Most of its members, including Spengler, took sides against the Nazi regime, but they also sought a path for the West beyond the twin evils of American democracy and Soviet communism. Benoist comes from this anti-liberal tradition
.. Benoist is the leading theorist of the European New Right, an intellectual movement that began in France in the late 1960s
.. attempt to envision a post-Christian future for people of European descent.
.. his 1981 work On Being a Pagan
.. Paganism’s central claim is simple: that the world is holy and eternal. “Far from desacralizing the world,” Benoist tells us, paganism “sacralizes it in the literal sense of the word, since it regards the world as sacred.”
Paganism is also a humanism. It recognizes man, the highest expression of nature, as the sole measure of the divine.
.. God does not therefore create men; men make gods, which “exist” as ideal models that their creators strive to equal.
.. Benoist’s case against Christianity is that it forbids the expression of this “Faustian” vitality.
.. It does so by placing the ultimate source of truth outside of humanity, in an otherworldly realm to which we must be subservient.
.. He accuses Christianity of crippling our most noble impulses. Christianity makes us strangers in our own skin, conning us into distrusting our strongest intuitions. We naturally respect beauty, health, and power, Benoist observes, but Christianity teaches us to revere the deformed, sick, and weak instead.
.. Benoist’s theology is in the service of a political warning, and it is this, more than his Nietzschean posturing, that attracts the alt-right.
.. Christianity is unable to protect European peoples and their cultures.
.. Christianity is not our religion.
.. Benoist means that Christianity renders Western culture morally lethargic and culturally defenseless.
.. its universalism poisons our attachments to particular loyalties and ties.
.. “If all men are brothers,” Benoist claims, “then no one can truly be a brother.”
.. Politics depends on the recognition of both outsiders and enemies, yet the Christian Church sees all people as potential members, indeed potential saints.
.. Christianity imparted to our culture an ethics that has mutated into what the alt-right calls “pathological altruism.”
.. Its self-distrust, concern for victims, and fear of excluding outsiders—such values swindle Western peoples out of a preferential love for their own.
.. Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it
.. we ought to see ourselves through the eyes of our pagan critics
.. They distort many truths, through both malice and ignorance, and lead young men into espousing views and defending authors they scarcely understand.
.. “Christianity provides an identity that is above or before racial and ethnic identity,” Richard Spencer complains.
.. invoking race as an emergency replacement for our fraying civic bonds.
.. identity politics on the left is a response to the same erosion of belonging.
.. we lack a compelling civic theology for the twenty-first century—a theology of the nation
.. In its absence the alt-right will continue to grow.
.. A nation will become an idol, however, if its cultural inheritance is not oriented toward, and inwardly transformed by, a divine inheritance.
.. “The inheritance we receive from Christ,” the late pope argued, “orients the patrimony of human native lands and cultures toward an eternal home land.”
.. It speaks of tradition, while transmitting no traditions. It guards a false patrimony, while destroying real ones
.. Race offers no inheritance, and its mere preservation reflects no human achievement.
.. Our stories, art, music, institutions, and religious traditions—unlike race—are transmitted only through special efforts of human intelligence and love. They are a bequest of the spirit, not blood.
.. The alt-right speaks a seductive language. Where liberalism offers security and comfort, the alt-right promises sacrifice and conflict.
.. . For Christians, the problem with Faustian man is not the vaunting heroism of his aims. It is the pitiable smallness of his goals.
We are not meant to merely aspire to the infinite. We are called to participate in it—to be, in a word, deified.
Faust could not overcome death. Through Christ, Christians already have.
Another Republican Call to Arms, but Who Will Answer?
In a stunning one-two assault, Mr. Corker of Tennessee, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Mr. Flake took on the president in terms rarely, if ever, heard from members of a sitting president’s party.
Mr. Corker, who has been feuding with the man he once contemplated serving as vice president, accused Mr. Trump of serial lying and debasing the office.
“We must never regard as normal the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals, we must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country,” Mr. Flake said.
.. But Mr. Corker, Mr. Flake and Mr. McCain remain the outliers.
.. Mr. McConnell left his lunch with Mr. Trump and members of the caucus to emphasize the issues that bind congressional Republicans to Mr. Trump and play down the divisions underscored by Mr. Flake and Mr. Corker.
.. They have been willing to look past some actions and pronouncements by Mr. Trump that they consider beneath a president in hopes of pushing into law some of their long-sought goals, the most important of which are tax cuts. And with no substantial legislative achievements so far, the party is all in on a tax overhaul, recognizing that failure to deliver one will be a political disaster. That necessity ties them tightly to Mr. Trump, at least for now.
Is Nothing Funny, Mr. President?
By stepping up to the line without crossing it, a commander in chief tacitly acknowledges that a line exists.
.. President Trump does not possess the sense of nuance a well-told joke requires. He does not seem to know when he is pushing the envelope.
.. This refusal to recognize the unwritten rules that govern us, so evident during Mr. Trump’s failed attempts at humor, is a central feature of his presidential tenure thus far. If a leader does not understand the idea of benign violations, blatant violations inevitably occur.
.. Presidents can either laugh at the strangeness of their circumstances or be consumed by them.
.. Without the qualities that laughter both demonstrates and fosters —
- a willingness to find common ground,
- the respect for agreed-upon norms and
- the awareness that we are all only human —
Mr. Trump’s attitude toward the presidency is defined by the one characteristic that remains: a lust for power.
.. Thanks to the power of the internet, there is proof that our president has indeed laughed at least once. This was during a campaign rally in January, when Mr. Trump’s speech was interrupted by a barking dog.
“It’s Hillary!” an audience member shouted. And the candidate tilted his head back, opened his mouth wide and laughed without reservation, quite possibly for the first time in his political life.
This documented incidence of Trump laughter is as illuminating as all the grim smiles that preceded it. For they reveal a president who is constantly, endlessly preoccupied with status.