Andrew Sullivan Attacks Radical Ideologues

Andrew Sullivan calls it “illiberal liberalism,”  and I find the phrase well chosen. In fact, I have posted about illiberal liberalism on a few occasions. Link here.

Of course, illiberal liberalism is really radical politics. You know it as political correctness. It’s form of indoctrination.

It tells people not to argue, not to dispute, not to debate with opposing ideas.

It prefers to condemn and discredit the messenger.

Sullivan writes:

Writers are not just condemned any more for being wrong or dumb or rigid. They are condemned as sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, blah blah blah – almost as a reflex in trying to discredit their work. That’s particularly true when it comes to fascinating issues like race or gender or sexual orientation, where liberalism today seems to insist that there are absolutely no aggregate differences between genders, races, ethnicities, or sexual orientations, except those created by oppression and discrimination and bigotry. Anyone even daring to bring up these topics is subjected to intense pressure, profound disapproval and ostracism. This illiberal liberalism is not new, of course. But it’s still depressingly common.

The enemy of political correctness is scientific fact and objective reality.

Writing about Sam Harris, Sullivan explains that Harris:

 … assumes that there are some essential biological and psychological differences between men and women, and for a certain kind of leftist, this is an intolerable heresy. If that truth cannot be suppressed or rebutted in a free society, its adherents must be stigmatized as bigots. 

The marketplace of ideas, Sullivan continues, does not always function to please ideologues:

The free flow of ideas will often lead to different audiences for different authors. That some books by white Americans are read disproportionately by whites doesn’t mean they’re racist. And, yes, style of writing – especially the combative, testosteroned debates that occur online or typify the slash-and-burn atheist conversation – can lead to a disproportionately male-skewed audience for that kind of thing. But all that is a function of free choice in a free market of ideas – not some kind of institutional sexism – let alone personal sexism. Why we cannot revel in these differences and embrace them as part of what makes being human so fascinating and variable is beyond me. But clearly it threatens people. Reality can.

Why do people practice illiberal liberalism?

Since they cannot win an argument based on facts, and since they cannot persuade anyone of the rational validity of their own ideas, they try to enforce them through threat and intimidation.

Sullivan says:

The point is the enforcement of an ideology by the weapon of stigma and social ostracism.

When Liberalism Becomes Illiberal

Two days ago I essayed to discuss Anne Applebaum’s Atlantic essay about the rising tide of radical leftism. The idiot theories of the radical left-- now called, for reasons that escape me, progressive-- have invaded social media and the educational establishment. Leftists have taken to indoctrinate children and just about everyone else in the theoretical blather that constitutes this warmed-over Marxism.

Now, The Economist has weighed in on the subject. Being a superbly serious magazine, it offers a superbly serious discussion of the topic. We note, however, that it commits the same absurd error that Applebaum commits, blaming the rise of academic and media illiberalism on Donald Trump. They should have paid more attention to some remarks by John McWhorter, to the effect that the radical right does not control either the media or the educational establishment or the legal profession or the bureaucracy. Blaming it on Trump makes you look unfair and unbalanced.

One notes also, with some chagrin, that these champions of liberalism seem to believe that liberalism, which used to be the province of the Democratic Party, is the only alternative to illiberalism. Whatever happened to conservative thinking in this intellectual morass? Liberalism promotes freedom, whether in free markets or in free expression. And yet, conservatives also champion freedom, only they distinguish free markets from a free for all. They believe that people should be free to play by the rules but not free to break the rules.

Failing to distinguish between these two freedoms turns the debate into an intellectual hash. Worse yet, conservatism promotes values that would make society cohere, while radical liberalism promotes a form of individuality that causes society to fragment. 

Anyway, the Economist presents its own definition of liberalism and its triumph in the West. 

SOMETHING HAS gone very wrong with Western liberalism. At its heart classical liberalism believes human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets and limited government. Yet a resurgent China sneers at liberalism for being selfish, decadent and unstable. At home, populists on the right and left rage at liberalism for its supposed elitism and privilege.

Today’s liberalism does not accept anything resembling human behavioral norms. It does not respect custom or norms or standards. In that way, it is more radical than liberal, but it is surely not conservative.

As noted, the magazine takes a mindless swipe at Trump. It’s a good reason not to subscribe:

The most dangerous threat in liberalism’s spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as façades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.

Not a word about the liberal left that refused to accept Trump as a legitimate president and that spent four years trying to make it impossible for him to govern. Respect for tradition, for democratic decorum would have told Trump to stop contesting the 2020 election, but the left laid down the predicates during the Trump administration. 

Now, the American left, for failing to respect political norms, has become radicalized. It has been given control over the media and public education. It is flexing its muscles:

The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left. We describe this week how a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.

Clearly, the important point lies in the fact that a cohort of young people, chosen not for merit but for diversity, has come to inhabit the halls of media and pedagogical power. They reject the old standards, the ones that involved merit and achievement, because they never would have been credentialed under those standards. They feel like imposters because they did not earn their way. And they are horrified at the simple fact that most people are in on the con. So, the effort to force the public to grant them even more power and authority lies in their knowledge that they were promoted for reasons that had nothing to do with their achievement.

They do not believe in competition, because they would never have succeeded in fair competition, not in business, not in the professions and not in the media or the academy. At the least, their shrieking about diversity, Shelby Steele has been arguing for decades, makes it appear that they did not earn their way:

Classical liberals believe in setting fair initial conditions and letting events unfold through competition—by, say, eliminating corporate monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making education accessible with vouchers. Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which powerful vested interests use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing “equity”—the outcomes that they deem just. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind policy, including the standardised testing of children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differentials, however enlightened the intentions behind it.

Case in point, the feeble minded professor named Ibram X. Kendi.

The Economist continues:

Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society and then use elections to settle on a course. The illiberal left believe that the marketplace of ideas is rigged just like all the others. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is really yet another assertion of raw power by the elite.

True enough, some of today’s liberals do champion free speech. We have made a point of presenting their views on this blog. But, those who could never compete in debate must consider that the debating process is rigged:

Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary. That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice. It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.

Then the magazine raises the issue of why classical liberalism is struggling around the world. It’s answers are less than satisfying. I will pass on their thoughts and point out that free markets today are being hobbled by activists, by bureaucrats, by regulators and by lawyers. Worse yet, free competition has become a relic in Silicon Valley, where tech oligarch have increasingly shut down debate and discussion, and have assumed monopoly control over products that more and more people are seeing as addictive substances.

In truth, the West is barely competitive in the free market these days. What showed it more clearly than our failure in Afghanistan. While we sent planeloads of feminist scholars to that country to teach its women the sexism behind urinals-- no kidding-- other countries were offering economic development.

If we no longer believe in capitalism, the world is going to look to those who do. If we allow our children to be addicted to videogames, the world is going to look to countries that exercise more authoritarian control over these mental opioids. If we insist that it doesn’t matter whether our military can win or lose, but that it is co-ed, the world will look to countries that have not bought into the radical nonsense.

What Became of American Liberalism?

American liberalism is no longer very liberal. It does not promote basic freedoms, like the freedom to lecture on a college campus. And it does not, Shelby Steele explains, have an economic agenda that might help America’s less fortunate to improve their lives. It has, in Steele's words, exhausted itself. It has no agenda beyond moral posturing.

American liberalism has become infested with what is now called virtue signaling. People join the cause because it appears to offer them a moral identity, moral legitimacy. Steel argues that they really want to shield themselves from the shame of being labeled a bigot.

One likes to think that Steele is right to say that this brand of illiberal liberalism has exhausted itself, that it is a shell of its former glory. It was sufficiently powerful to con people into voting for Barack Obama, but could not elect Hillary Clinton.

One reason, Steele suggests. is that today’s so-called liberals do not respect themselves. It’s the price of virtue signaling. They believe that they are so virtuous and that their cause is so just and their enemies so evil that they can do anything they want to advance it. Living in a cosmic narrative, a battle between absolute good and absolute evil... anything goes.

Steele compares the recent political protest against the Trump presidency to the early civil rights protests. He emphasizes the fact that those who marched in the 1950s and 1960s respected themselves.

In his words:

Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism.

Sad to say it, but wearing a pussy hat is not a sign of self-respect. Resorting to acts of violence against bearers of unpopular ideas does not bespeak true liberalism.

The Vietnam War ushered in an era of American guilt. The guilt covered up the shame of a failed war. I made this version of the argument myself over two decades ago in my book, Saving Face: America and the Politics of Shame.

It took time for the failure of Vietnam to coalesce around white guilt. Of course, liberals wanted to blame white males, especially white conservative males. The military was a male institution and it was largely, even in the time of Vietnam, a white institution.

Since the policy had been initiated by John Kennedy and had been pursued by Kennedy’s vice president and his cabinet, it was necessary to shift the blame on to anyone but the elite guardian class called the best and the brightest. The dirty secret about Vietnam is that it was initiated and conducted by liberals. The Kennedy-Johnson administration escalated it. The Nixon administration de-escalated it. Most left-thinking young people at the time did everything in their power to avoid the fight.

Liberalism offered a new moral identity. To many it seemed preferable to identifying as an American. Why identify with the losing team when you can join those who occupy the moral high ground. Why identify with a losing fight when you can engage in a new fight for America’s hearts and minds.

In Steele’s words:

This liberalism came into being not as an ideology but as an identity. It offered Americans moral esteem against the specter of American shame. This made for a liberalism devoted to the idea of American shamefulness. Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism’s unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.

Rather than fight a foreign war against a real enemy, American liberals chose to fight a domestic war against prejudice. They were saying that they were too good and too virtuous to fight a war. They were: “too proud to fight.” They did not win any territory, but they did occupy the moral high ground. They insisted that their moral authority was more valid than the political or military or business authority of those who were in the real world building and producing.

Steele notes well that with guilt brings along a narrative. We are, as I have often noted, still living within this narrative:

America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us.

Guilt for having transgressed followed by penance leads to more sins. We become mired in the narrative because it does not show us any way out.

America was not merely stigmatized as racist. People accepted the guilt of racism because it was better than thinking of themselves as losers, as having lost a war to the Vietcong and the Vietminh. They could proclaim their moral authority to be a higher authority, one that shows the way to Heaven and thus can be used to produce the Heavenly City on earth:

When America became stigmatized in the ’60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it wanted moral authority above all else. Subsequently the American left reconstituted itself as the keeper of America’s moral legitimacy. 

The effort to reconstitute the nation as a kingdom of justice—following the template laid down by a John Rawls— evaded all of the real problems that minority communities face. Remove all of the world’s bigotry and you can engage in endless moral preening, but you have still not created any wealth or any new jobs.

Steele explains:

Bigotry exists, but it is far down on the list of problems that minorities now face. I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It’s harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.

The lives of minority Americans are being sacrificed to the gods of multiculturalism. Liberalism has failed its constituency because it does not have an agenda for economic and social progress. Strike out against bigotry... is not an agenda.

In Steele’s words:

 But American liberalism never acknowledged that it was about white esteem rather than minority accomplishment. Four thousand shootings in Chicago last year, and the mayor announces that his will be a sanctuary city. This is moral esteem over reality; the self-congratulation of idealism. 

Out-of-control crime in a sanctuary city—it produces self-congratulatory moral posturing but does nothing for minority lives.

Is This the End of Illiberalism?

Franklin Foer, editor of the sensibly liberal The New Republic is not happy to see his world, or better his world view, crash and burn around him.

While President Obama’s flacks claim that all is well with Obamacare, Foer joins those of us who believe that its failure will undermine the basic premise of modern liberalism.

In Foer’s words:

Liberalism has spent the better part of the past century attempting to prove that it could competently and responsibly extend the state into new reaches of American life. With the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the administration has badly injured that cause, confirming the worst slurs against the federal government. It has stifled bad news and fudged promises; it has failed to translate complex mechanisms of policy into plain English; it can’t even launch a damn website. What’s more, nobody responsible for the debacle has lost a job or suffered a demotion. Over time, the Affordable Care Act’s technical difficulties can be repaired. Reversing the initial impressions of government ineptitude won’t be so easy.

But, if liberalism wants to extend the power and the influence of the state, and not the freedom of individuals, why call it liberalism? Why believe that it has anything to do with liberty? Wouldn’t illiberalism be a better term?

Modern liberalism is a misnomer and a sleight-of-hand… kind of like Obamacare.

One might argue that liberals defend First Amendment freedoms, but, too often, they believe that its purpose is to relieve us of all social constraints. They want to control the economy, but they see the free market in ideas as a free-for-all.

Modern illiberalism was founded on this incoherent proposition.

And yet, where old school liberals defend everyone’s free speech, modern illiberalism cannot resist the temptation to take control over the free market in ideas. They are for freedom of expression but draw a line at what they call “hate speech.” Often that means, any opinion they disagree with.

Increasingly, today’s illiberalism is more about freedom from the market than about freedom to participate in the market.

It’s not just about the state. It’s really about allowing our betters, that is, government officials to make our decisions.

Today, academic experts in behavioral economics are leading the charge to enhance state power. Since they know what’s good for you and know what is good for the collective, they certainly know better than the unwashed masses who participate in the free market. They will protect you from the evils that are necessarily going to be released when too much freedom is given to the wrong people.

It’s not a new idea. It refers basically to what Plato called the guardian class of philosopher-kings. Foer credits Woodrow Wilson with the modern version of the idea.

Wilson believed that society should hand regulatory power to university professors because they were smarter than everyone else. But he also believed that since they did not obey the law of profit they were also more virtuous than everyone else. Thus, they were eminently qualified to bring justice to the world and save people from the excesses of capitalism.

Illiberal liberalism believes that the state is morally obligated to control the free market and free enterprise… because free people making free decisions in the marketplace can only become vulnerable to predatory capitalists.

Obviously, Foer is seriously unhappy to see that a Democratic administration, unhindered by Republican interference, resting on the greatness of liberal politicians and enlightened functionaries cannot even get a website to work.

Foer describes Wilson’s theory:

Wilson imagined technical experts, the new breed of social scientists emerging from the universities, who could help steer the economy. He would come to see these experts as a bulwark against the predations of corporations and protectors of the “man on the make.”

Wilson wanted to protect the people from freedom. He wanted to protect them from the consequences of their own decisions and to release them  from responsibility for their own actions.

Woodrow Wilson notwithstanding, the American president is not charged with steering the economy. He is charged with steering the ship of state.

Take the example of President Wilson. During his tenure in office Wilson was the only world leader who might have stopped the senseless slaughter of World War I before it got completely out of control. True enough, Wilson did manage to enter the war in 1918. Within a matter of months the fighting was over.

Had he intervened in early 1915, when he famously declared himself “too proud to fight” the course of history would have been changed radically, for the better.

As George Kennan pointed out, World War I was the defining catastrophe of the twentieth century.

Of course, we are not indulging in hindsight here. When war broke out in 1914, retired president Theodore Roosevelt—who apparently did not get the memo about retired presidents not speaking ill of their successors—wrote newspaper columns, week after week, until the end of the war, in which he pointed out the catastrophic incompetence of the Wilson foreign policy.

Faced with a major international crisis, the man who is now touted as the father of modern liberalism stood by and did nothing. As an academic thinker, Wilson had no experience with the marketplace or the battlefield or even with diplomacy.

So much for the superior wisdom of academic thinkers, especially when compared to that of what Theodore Roosevelt called “the man in the arena.”

Illiberal Liberalism on Campus

I don’t why this comes as news to anyone. Everyone knows that college campuses have become hotbeds of radical thought, and that radical thinkers do not allow free expression or free speech.

Extolling radical thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, and Alain Badiou, praising the great accomplishments of national and radical socialism, students end up behaving like Brown Shirts and Red Guards.

Some elder academics like to consider themselves to be liberal and Nicholas Kristof is still willing to call them thus, but the truth is, on campus, in many academic departments have become more about indoctrination than thought.

A few weeks ago Kristof wrote a column denouncing his “fellow progressives” for favoring every kind of diversity, except the diversity of thought. To his shock and dismay, he discovered, while reading the comments posted on the Times website, that his liberal readers disagreed entirely with what he was saying. They insisted that conservatives had no right to free speech on college campuses. And that they ought not to be allowed to speak or to teach there.

Intolerance does not seem to be quite the right word. Oppression feels better. By all appearances, liberalism is dead.

Kristof returns to the issue today:

In a column a few weeks ago, I offered “a confession of liberal intolerance,” criticizing my fellow progressives for promoting all kinds of diversity on campuses — except ideological. I argued that universities risk becoming liberal echo chambers and hostile environments for conservatives, and especially for evangelical Christians.

As I see it, we are hypocritical: We welcome people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

Readers were outraged. Kristof describes the reaction, a stunning instance of groupthink:

Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead wrong.

“You don’t diversify with idiots,” asserted the reader comment on The Times’s website that was most recommended by readers (1,099 of them). Another: Conservatives “are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers.”

Finally, this one recommended by readers: “I am grossly disappointed in you for this essay, Mr. Kristof. You have spent so much time in troubled places seemingly calling out misogyny and bigotry. And yet here you are, scolding and shaming progressives for not mindlessly accepting patriarchy, misogyny, complementarianism, and hateful, hateful bigotry against the LGBTQ community into the academy.”

Now, today’s so-called liberals refuse to consider opposing points of view. They are paragons of virtue and anyone who disagrees with them is vicious. They live in an echo chamber—narcissism is the other word for it—and have turned education into indoctrination.

In Kristof’s words:

But as I see it, the bigger problem is not that conservatives are infiltrating social science departments to spread hatred, but rather that liberals have turned departments into enclaves of ideological homogeneity.

Sure, there are dumb or dogmatic conservatives, just as there are dumb and dogmatic liberals. So let’s avoid those who are dumb and dogmatic, without using politics or faith as a shorthand for mental acuity.

College teaching, and all teaching for that matter manifests rank hypocrisy:

But liberals claim to be champions of inclusiveness — so why, in the academic turf that we control, aren’t we ourselves more inclusive? If we are alert to bias in other domains, why don’t we tackle our own liberal blind spot?

And yet, as the nation has policy debates, leftist academics are often left out of the conversation: because their ideas smack of ideology and have nothing to do with the real problems. Professors of economics, who are just as likely to be Republicans or Democrats, have honed their positions in the crucible of debate. They are respected as contributing to public conversation:

We desperately need academics like sociologists and anthropologists influencing American public policy on issues like poverty, yet when they are in an outer-left orbit, their wisdom often goes untapped.

In contrast, economists remain influential. I wonder if that isn’t partly because there is a critical mass of Republican economists who battle the Democratic economists and thus tether the discipline to the American mainstream.

It isn’t so difficult to understand how this happened. These campus radicals, who now hold august chairs in university departments, seem to have been hired more for their ideological commitments than for their grasp of their subjects. If they were forced to debate with people who disagreed with them, the imposture would immediately be evident to all.

Kristof is wistful about this point:

We liberals should have the self-confidence to believe that our values can triumph in a fair contest in the marketplace of ideas.

He adds:

Can’t we be a bit more self-aware when we dismiss conservatives as so cocky and narrow-minded that they should be excluded from large swaths of higher education?

Cocky? Narrow-minded? I suggest that we look in the mirror.

Can Europe Be Saved?

One will be forgiven for thinking that a Bret Stephens column will enlighten a foreign policy issue. After all, New York Times columnists are an array of mediocrities, so there must be at least one who is worth reading.

But then, it does not take two full Stephens paragraphs to read something that is so stupid that it might have been written by Tommy Friedman.

See if you can catch the glaring error. Or is it a Freudian slip:

Trump’s truculent brand of American nationalism is a terrible idea for many reasons, not least in the encouragement it gives to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to target weaker American allies.

Apparently, Stephens has a short memory. During the Trump administration, what with its truculent nationalism, Vladimir Putin did not invade Ukraine. He did not conduct a war in Ukraine. 

It’s Biden’s weak-kneed internationalism that incites autocrats like Putin to invade weaker countries. Even I can figure that one out.

While China has been relatively restrained, militarily, it has built up a formidable military force. And let’s not forget that Trump was not president-- Biden was-- when Hamas conducted its October 7 massacre. While Biden has been sucking up to the ayatollahs, these latter are producing every manner of mischief across the Middle East. 

That includes attacks by Iranian proxies against American troops and the efforts of Yemeni Houthis to hamper shipping through the Red Sea. After having removed the Houthis from the terrorist watch list, the Biden crowd has said that it was going to shut them down. As of now, they have not.

True enough, if only Stephens had rewritten his sentence to say that under the weak-kneed Joe Biden bad actors around the world have felt emboldened to attack American allies, he would have been on to something. Then again, he might have been banned from the pages of the New York Times.

If you did not choke on that sentence, Stephens begins his rehabilitation in the very next sentences:

But Trump is also the messenger of a warning Europeans desperately need to heed.

In a nutshell: Shape up.

Did you catch the problem in the last sentence?

In a better world, in a better newspaper and in a better analysis, an editor would have deleted, “Shape up” and replaced it with: “Man up.”

In our current cultural configuration you are certainly not allowed to replace the notion of shapeliness with manliness. And yet, what else was President Trump saying when he was inveighing against our European NATO allies for failing to spend money on their defense?

These countries have squandered resources on social welfare programs and have relied on America to pay for their defense. 

Lest we be too obvious, social welfare programs are motherly and charitable. Defense spending involves competitive striving. But it also involves winners and losers, a concept that the welfare queens of Europe cannot grasp.

Note how well my thesis suits the information that Stephens provides. He begins by pointing out that Europe has become economically stagnant:

In 1960 the E.U. 28 — the 27 countries currently in the European Union, plus Britain — accounted for 36.3 percent of global gross domestic product. By 2020 it had fallen to 22.4 percent. By the end of the century it is projected to fall to just under 10 percent.

Europe does not innovate, perhaps because the capital is being thrown at the poor, or perhaps because it abhors risk. We recognize that one of the two sexes is more risk averse. More empowered women seems to lead to more risk aversion.

Think of any leading-edge industry — artificial intelligence, microchips, software, robotics, genomics — and ask yourself (with a few honorable exceptions), where’s the European Microsoft, Nvidia or OpenAI?

And, of course, as Donald Trump has pointed out-- perhaps not in the most elegant way-- Europe no longer spends money on the military:

When the Cold War ended in 1990, the West German military fielded more than 500,000 troops and spent 2.5 percent of its G.D.P. on defense. As of last year, it was down to 181,000 troops and 1.57 percent. Britain’s Royal Navy, the most powerful in the world at the outset of World War II, can now deploy just 10 submarines and fewer than two dozen major surface warships, some of which are inactive.

In an all-out war, the British would exhaust their defense capabilities in about two months, according to a report to the House of Commons defense committee. The same would likely be true — if not much sooner — for every E.U. member-state apart from Poland, which aims to spend as much as 5 percent of its G.D.P. on defense next year.

European countries are incapable of defending themselves, and do not really care. They have Big Daddy America defending them. 

And, of course, Europe has a migrant problem. It has chosen to open its borders to hordes of Middle Eastern migrants, many of whom have brought crime with them. 

While native Europeans are not reproducing at replacement levels, the Muslim migrants are doing so. And these migrants do not favor European cultural values. They are more likely to become criminal gang members, as has happened in Sweden, than to assimilate:

Under a “medium migration” scenario estimated by Pew, by 2050 Britain will be nearly 17 percent Muslim, France 17.4 percent and Sweden 20.5 percent. Those wondering about the ascendence of far-right European parties, who are heavily favored to sweep this week’s elections in the E.U. Parliament and who are often sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, know this is a factor. And they need to be honest that the values of depressingly notable segments of these Muslim populations are fundamentally at odds with European traditions of moral tolerance and political liberalism.

Stephens bemoans the fact that these new migrants are opposed to political liberalism.

And they need to be honest that the values of depressingly notable segments of these Muslim populations are fundamentally at odds with European traditions of moral tolerance and political liberalism.

How forceful are European leaders willing to be in insisting that their values — including freedom of speech, women’s rights and gay rights — must be protected against the illiberal instincts of a growing share of their voters?

When he wrote those lines Stephens must have been having a bad hair day. He should understand that the migrant population does not want to assimilate. It does not want to buy into a culture that promotes gay rights and that places women in charge of their armies.

I suspect that the armies of Islam see these signs of cultural decadence and concludes that Europe is ripe for a takeover, by Islam. 

In a culture that is being girlified, what happens to manliness? Good question. As I have sometimes noted, it turns into a negative caricature of itself. When men are incapable of protecting and providing for women and children, a new form of manliness takes root. Some call it machismo. It lacks gentility and a sense of purpose. It makes conspicuous shows of faux masculinity by committing crime and by visiting abuse on non-men.

And besides, Stephens notwithstanding, there is no requirement that citizens of the West buy every piece of liberal democracy. You need not be a feminist to be a good American. You do need to speak the language, to respect the constitution and to conduct yourself with decorum and propriety. You have a right to believe whatever you want to believe.

Obviously, Donald Trump has seen a Europe mired in decadence and unwilling to admit its decline. For which writers like Stephens, after analyzing said failings, blame Donald Trump:

Trump’s ideas about NATO, his zero-sum attitudes about winning, his fondness for strongmen and his ignorance of and indifference to history are all, rightly, causes for European alarm. But people, and nations, succeed or fail to the extent that they refuse to hand over responsibility for their fates to others.

Columnists succeed or fail, not just by collecting information, but by being willing to analyze situations outside of their ideological comfort zone.

If you take the Stephens analysis as worthwhile, you would need also to assume that Donald Trump has seen the same facts and has offered a cogent solution. He has done so boisterously and aggressively, but the weak and ineffectual Europeans might not have been able to hear anything else.

Does Europe need another D Day, another invasion by the armies of the Anglosphere in order to grow a spine and to reject not only the internal decadence but also the reactionary fascism? 

I am sorry to say, on this anniversary of D Day, that Bret Stephens, a writer who is often intelligent and illuminating, managed to live up to his initials.

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Fighting Back against CRT, BLM and BLT

The nation is abuzz with talk about critical race theory. To be fair, it is Marxism for Dummies. It is not critical, because it never brooks any criticism of its own mindless musings. It makes race the only factor that has ever counted in America.  And it is not a theory, because it is too incoherent to have any theoretical heft.

Since it would never stand up to any scrutiny, it is imposed on children. In school they are being force fed CRT, because its practitioners cannot discuss or debate. Witness imbecile Ibram X. Kendi, whose works are now recommended for the United States Navy.

As for its provenance, a Marxist theory that divides the world into black and white-- easy to understand for the feeble minded-- and that sees blacks as the vanguard of a necessary revolution against the white capitalist order-- where have we heard that before?

In truth, it bears an uncanny resemblance to Black Liberation Theology, an offshoot of South American Liberation Theology, an unholy amalgam of Marxism and Catholicism, designed to overthrow the white Anglo-Saxon cultures that built North America and that made America and Canada far more prosperous than their Southern neighbors.

For the record, among America’s leading promoters of BLT is one Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Since America put Wright’s protege in the White House, BLT and BLM are basically the Obama legacy. 

BLM and BLT are the revolt of underachievers against overachievers. Where have we heard that before? Doesn't it bear an uncanny resemblance to the BHO notion that: you didn't build that.

These movements foment violence against whites, Asians and Jews-- and then blame it on white people. They happily excuse the underachievement of people of color and absolve them of all sins. For looting and pillaging through Manhattan, BLM supporters have been excused. That is, they will not be prosecuted.

Sadly, like the BLT promoted by Jeremiah Wright, these movements do not merely promote race hatred against America, against its symbols, against its founders, against its heroes. They tell the country that blacks are not loyal and patriotic, and thus are best not trusted. Obviously, this stokes antagonism and makes the goal of racial integration recede into the mist.

So, as Andrew Sullivan points out, (via Maggie's Farm) CRT is designed to brainwash children, to detach them from their roots in a great country and to infuse them with guilt. No one among the band of idiots promoting this theory has figured out that this will make children resentful and antagonistic:

The goal of education of children this young is to cement the notion at the most formative age that America is at its core an oppressive racist system uniquely designed to exploit, harm, abuse, and even kill the non-white. This can be conveyed in easy terms, by training kids to see themselves first and foremost as racial avatars, and by inculcating in them a sense of their destiny as members of the oppressed or oppressor classes in the zero-sum struggle for power that is American society in 2021.

Don’t work to achieve, because people of color have not gained as much success as Asians. Dare we say that the goal is therapeutic-- if you win others will feel bad about losing, so we must ban winning.

Worse yet, CRT proponents do not know how to think. They are trying to dumb the country down to their level:

For these reasons, CRT insists that what we have always understood as liberal education is, in fact, a lie, because liberalism assumes that we are all individuals, capable of reasoning with each other as equals, where, in fact, we are mere representatives of racial constructs which are part of a permanent struggle between the oppressors (white) and oppressed (non-white).

Sullivan identifies it as the liberal tradition, the tradition that fostered open debate and discussion. Since this tradition has now been identified as an instrument of white supremacy, it must also be overthrown. People who can’t think straight want to ban straight thought.

It is almost too stupid to consider, and would be ignored, were it not for the fact that it has invaded corporate America, the military and the school system.

The question is: what can a liberal society do when almost all of its educational, media, business and cultural elites have adopted an ideology that believes that liberal society needs to be dismantled? And the answer is: not much. Liberalism assumes that bad and noxious ideas will eventually be driven out by better ones. Banning illiberal ideologies like CRT makes us indistinguishable from the woke — who would ban any speech they didn’t like if they could get rid of the First Amendment (just look at what “liberals” are doing in Canada or Britain, for example, where they lock people up for resisting this ideology). Replacing CRT with crude, jingoistic versions of history or society is no answer either.

Sullivan believes that we should counter CRT with rational arguments. We are in sympathy with this approach. And yet, how do you argue rationally with people who disparage rational arguments. Better yet, who do not know how to argue rationally. And how do you present rational counterarguments when social media will ban you for disputing the current dogma?

It’s not just a culture war gambit. It’s a deep defense of our liberal inheritance. Once a generation grows up believing that there is no such thing as reason — just “white thinking” and “black thinking”; once it grows up believing that free speech is a device for oppression not liberation; once it sees our founding documents as cynical lies to perpetuate slavery and “white supremacy”; once it believes that no progress has ever been made in race relations, because the “systems” sustain unaltered “white supremacy” for ever, then we have detonated the foundations of a free society.

It is easy to give up. When all the major cultural powers in America — almost all media, every major corporation, every university, every industry, and, under Biden, the entire federal government — have succumbed to an ideology deeply hostile to Western civilization, and uses brutal tactics of smearing and firing and ostracizing to enforce its will, you can end up in despair.

But then, sad to have to say it, when your children are being brainwashed in school by people who are forcing them to think a certain way, you might also get angry. You might decide that you need to speak them in a language that the CRT crowd understands-- that being force.

Amazingly, the majority of the people in this country do not support CRT. And yet, the majority of people in this country did support BHO-- and most of them still love him. 

Sullivan seems overly optimistic if he thinks that America will overcome CRT with rational arguments. For the moment, we allow him his say:

But it’s important to remember: many of those people don’t really believe in this stuff; they’re just too frightened by a ruthless but tiny minority to do anything about it. And the American people as a whole do not buy this. A new YouGov poll found that Americans oppose CRT by a 58 - 38 percent margin, with a whopping 53 percent having a “very unfavorable” view of it. Yes, this is skewed because the subject has become ubiquitous on Fox News, and the MSM is doing all it can to downplay, dismiss or dissemble on the issue. But a full and wider campaign exposing it, protesting it, and defending liberal education will, I predict, win big majorities.

Notes on Kirsten Powers: "The Silencing"

In her new book The Silencing—great title, incidentally—Kirsten Powers calls out her fellow liberals for their decidedly illiberal practices toward the exercise of free speech.

Efforts to shut down free speech, to create a climate of groupthink are coming from the academic left, from leftist radicals. They come from a left that was defined by radicals like Saul Alinsky and that gave us Barack Obama.

In an excerpt from her book for The Daily Beast, Powers writes:

The root of nearly every free-speech infringement on campuses across the country is that someone—almost always a liberal—has been offended or has sniffed out a potential offense in the making. Then, the silencing campaign begins. The offender must be punished, not just for justice’s sake, but also to send the message to anyone else on campus that should he or she stray off the leftist script, they too might find themselves investigated, harassed, ostracized, or even expelled. If the illiberal left can preemptively silence opposing speakers or opposing groups— such as getting a speech or event canceled, or denying campus recognition for a group—even better.

Beyond the fact that this paragraph sorely needs an editor, Powers is correct to show the extent to which leftist academics have imposed an ideology on college campuses. Or better, as Powers says, they have shut down dissent and have forced everyone to follow their script. There is no marketplace of ideas on many of the best college campuses today.

Liberals like Powers are appalled because these activities are discrediting liberalism. They might even be playing a role in the slow-motion disintegration of the Democratic Party.

Radical leftists are marching behind the banner of sensitivity. They are saying that certain oppressed groups are so beaten down and so thin-skinned that they do not know how to deal with the least offense—i.e. microaggressions.

They call for sensitivity, but they use violent methods that remind us of Ernst Rohm’s Brown Shirts and Maoist truth squads.

When someone deviates from the party line, he is attacked, vilified, harassed, condemned, ostracized and expelled. This pertains especially if he is a privileged white male.

The thought police will not even accept that someone might have made a mistake. The least, even unintended transgression becomes a crime against humanity, one that needs to be punished mercilessly.

These radicals are masters of rhetorical hyperbole: all offenses, from bad language to wrong ideas are equivalent to the Holocaust. Or else, a man who touches a woman inappropriately is labelled a rapist.

In truth, the ambient culture is not very much better. A politician who leans right and who says the wrong thing will be routinely excoriated, even to the extent of being driven from politics.

Well before the current administration, the long knives came out to attack Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas because one Anita Hill testified that he had made some inappropriate, grossly sexual remarks

Of course, when Bill Clinton was credibly accused of sexual harassment and even rape, the same thought police gave him a pass.

Justice, such as it is, was anything but blind.

Here, Powers describes the atmosphere on college campuses:

This Orwellian climate of intimidation and fear chills free speech and thought. On college campuses it is particularly insidious. Higher education should provide an environment to test new ideas, debate theories, encounter challenging information, and figure out what one believes. Campuses should be places where students are able to make mistakes without fear of retribution. If there is no margin for error, it is impossible to receive a meaningful education.

The radical left has created a hostile learning environment. Perhaps this is yet another reason why so many students today are concentrating in STEM subjects and hard science.

The situation Powers describes pertains, of course, to the university as a whole, but it is more prevalent in the Humanities and social sciences.

Obviously, universities should teach ideas, theories and information, but I am far from convinced that those who are teaching Humanities courses today are capable of doing so. I suspect that they obsess about offense in order to cover up the fact that they do not know their disciplines well enough to teach them. And of course, even in a time of massive grade inflation, many students are incapable of passing classes, even in education school.

Powers recounts one incident:

In November 2013, more than two dozen graduate students at UCLA entered the classroom of their professor and announced a protest against a “hostile and unsafe climate for Scholars of Color.” The students had been the victims of racial “microaggression,” a term invented in the 1970s that has been recently repurposed as a silencing tactic. A common definition cited is that racial microaggressions “are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults towards people of color.” Like all these new categories, literally anything can be a microaggression.

So what were the racial microaggressions that spawned the interruption of a class at the University of California at Los Angeles? One student alleged that when the professor changed her capitalization of the word “indigenous” to lowercase he was disrespecting her ideological point of view. Another proof point of racial animus was the professor’s insistence that the students use the Chicago Manual of Style for citation format (the protesting students preferred the less formal American Psychological Association manual). After trying to speak with one male student from his class, the kindly 79-year-old professor was accused of battery for reaching out to touch him. The professor, Val Rust, a widely respected scholar in the field of comparative education, was hung out to dry by the UCLA administration, which treated a professor’s stylistic changes to student papers as a racist attack. The school instructed Rust to stay off the Graduate School of Education and Information Services for one year. 

Of course, Powers is not alone in condemning this radical agenda. Liberal lawyer Wendy Kaminer has been there before. Powers explains Kaminer’s idea:

In an article in the Atlantic, Wendy Kaminer—a lawyer and free-speech advocate—declared, “Academic freedom is declining. The belief that free speech rights don’t include the right to speak offensively is now firmly entrenched on campuses and enforced by repressive speech or harassment codes. Campus censors don’t generally riot in response to presumptively offensive speech, but they do steal newspapers containing articles they don’t like, vandalize displays they find offensive, and disrupt speeches they’d rather not hear. They insist that hate speech isn’t free speech and that people who indulge in it should be punished. No one should be surprised when a professor at an elite university calls for the arrest of ‘Sam Bacile’ [who made the YouTube video The Innocence of Muslims] while simultaneously claiming to value the First Amendment.”

Do you remember Sam Bacile?

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was trying to shift the blame for the attack on our consulate in Benghazi she conveniently chose to scapegoat Sam Bacile, aka Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.

When Sam Bacile was tossed in prison, no one, left or right, really cared.

Hillary Clinton went on to even more fame and fortune.

[Addendum: Powers has an essay on illiberal feminists in today's Daily Beast. Link here.]