Pish Tosh

To articulate afresh the meaning of human dignity and flourishing, conservatives must discover a way to speak authoritatively as defenders of the individual—a task made all the more difficult by the rise of an abstract ideal of individuality that undermines the very concreteness of individual being.

Doubtless, there are serious questions as to what kind of war we can afford in Afghanistan, and for how long – questions that should be put in perspective by the immense outlays that the current administration intends to see through in pursuit of its sweeping domestic agenda. But if we’re prepared to face up to our fears and face down our myths in Afghanistan, the uncomfortable possibility must be considered that we can afford neither to double down nor to cut our losses.

The cultivation of freaks, in its dual commercial and communal aspect, goes way beyond Michael Jackson. Not every entourage works like on HBO; instead of your best buddies from the old home town, LA newcomers who hit the big time wind up with a gaggle of locals and unclassifiable creeps, a whole service-industry class feeding off the wounds and desires of the star. What the person is famous for is incidental to this ecosystem. The guiding principle is special needs.

[…] Linker, like others, really seems to miss out on the way lots of our practical American deists retain a basically pagan understanding of virtue — manliness for men, womanliness for women, and the ideal family as one of both communal love and clear hierarchy. Religious thinkers on the right who are uncomfortable with deism of any kind probably need to recognize that the reality-based pagan virtue of our non-dogmatic theists will be essential to the survival of a Judeo-Christian social order in America.

There’s a real elephant in the room when it comes to our awkward and crucial relationship with Russia. Freddie DeBoer of The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, turning a nice phrase, once suggested we call the acknowledgment of problems like these ‘giving the elephant a peanut’. So here’s my peanut: bad relations with Russia make us feel so uncomfortable because they challenge and undermine our most cherished narratives about the moral and social progress of the global white community.

[…] citizens of a Pink Police State (I should say subjects) are apt to surrender more and more political liberty in exchange for more and more cultural or ‘personal’ license. And the government of a Pink Police State tends to monopolize and totalize administrative control while carving out a permissive playpen for the people. This tradeoff has a creepy economic component. Already, in places like Russia, China, the Gulf states, and Singapore, we see the machinations of a new ‘laboratory of autocracy’, as oppressive regimes grant wealthy residents de facto privileges to all the sin money can buy. As I’ve asked in our own context, however, how many hipsters are too poor to party? Next to the al Qaeda neanderthals, the harbingers of the Pink Police State pose a far more frightening and serious challenge to the Western model of social order. Nobody frets, like many of our intellectuals did over Stalinism, that maybe Osama got it right. There’s more to worry about when we see China’s youth consent en masse to equality in servitude in the shadow of Macau, Earth’s biggest gambling mecca. Of course the freaky environs of Dubai are a stone’s throw from the real Mecca. The secret depths of perversity and abuse at the ‘frontiers of the West’ — pent-up porn, sex slavery, the whole network reaching from the Baltics through the Balkans, down into the Gulf, and out to Indochina — really needs to be told. But our rapt attention is held instead by Bruno.

Tocqueville really is an undiminished resource — an almost unparalleled resource — for understanding the present and future of America, and even the world; but Tocqueville suffers from a malady related in a superficial way to what we might call ‘the Reagan problem’. Just as it’s easy for Republicans to invoke Ronald Reagan as a substitute for thinking, never mind ‘fresh thinking’, Tocqueville’s analysis is oftentimes too penetrating and too lyrical for our own good. The timeless or enduring character of Tocqueville’s insight lends itself to ‘trendification’: we wind up with a Tocqueville for every occasion, and feel sort of like the niece or nephew who gets a Chia Pet on birthdays and on Christmas.

We share in a strategically therapeutic conspiracy of vagueness. In a world where there are only senses of things, it’s impossible to be specific both about the events in our life and our responsibility for approaching, understanding, and judging those events. There are no facts of the matter, certainly about ourselves and one another, to which we must hold ourselves and one another to account. You can imagine how a society or culture in the collective grip of such a tacit pact would be apt to slip into all manner of dysfunctions and mistakes — and then think of these errors, vaguely and helplessly, as part of some crappy essence of the world or of life itself! Call it the soft nihilism of low expectations.