My Day--So Far

Oh my goodness—lots of reading! Let me put some stuff together.

I started out reading a guest article at Larry Johnson’s blog:

WHY IS THE WEST SO WEAK (AND RUSSIA SO STRONG)? THE ROLE OF HUMAN CAPITAL AND WESTERN EDUCATION

The first thing to say is that, despite the title, this long article is really all about the US—and the collective West. It’s about the programmatic attempt to suppress the key element of any high functioning society—high IQ people who also have strong critical skills and independent character. It’s about the programmatic effort to elevate relatively smart people, but people who are easily molded and directed. Perfect bureaucrats, you might say, which explains the vast expansion of bureaucracy under our Uniparty system of generally progressivist oriented governance and culture. This is an article that requires you to sit back and think a bit, like, where did all this come from, how do we get out of where we are? This new culture has been inculcated through education in America—yes, in government schools, but not exclusively, because the attitudes described are part of the air we breathe as Americans. It seems to me that this speaks to an emptiness at the heart of America—of which a bit more below.

Reading the article I was immediately reminded of a news item from yesterday:

Colleges are now dominated by women, creating an ‘education gap’ afflicting men

This is really about the feminization of education in America, and how normal males react against it. Education is unconsciously perceived by many guys as a girl thing. Ask yourself whether the things described in the first article are a product of that feminization. For example, the common emphasis now on group projects over individual achievement. Who is most comfortable with that, men or women, boys or girls? What kind of personalities are molded in that environment, in that kind of upbringing? These are tough questions—which are, for the most part, banned in America and the West.

I happen to have recently started reading a new book, by an author whose essays (mostly at American Greatness) I’ve discussed repeatedly—Glenn Ellmers:

The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy

Here’s the blurb from the inside flap:

Americans are more divided today than at any time since the Civil War. Our differences are not merely moral and political, but philosophical, and even spiritual. We hardly seem to experience the same reality anymore, preferring to self-select into media perception chambers whose projections vary according to political persuasion.

Something has gone terribly wrong in the American political community. We have entered an era wherein the federal government’s democratically elected officers are powerless in comparison to their unelected, bureaucratic counterparts. The old balance of power, laid out in the Constitution, has been replaced by an entirely new structure.

The American regime has become post-constitutional. But what is this post-constitutional arrangement? How does it operate? Who is in charge? Can it be overcome? What role will the Constitution play in the nation’s future?

Glenn Ellmers—senior fellow with the Claremont Institute, widely-published analyst of current affairs, and scholar of political philosophy—provides answers to these and other questions, as he explores the deepest roots of our political turmoil, illustrating the connections between government bureaucracy, the misuse of science, and the leftwing ideology that controls so much of our public and private life.

Early on in the book Ellmers notes that the spiritual crisis is not merely about the pervasive leftiness of American society. Having pointed out the intellectual emptiness of the Left—the Left, he says, is no longer even able to articulate their program beyond a continuing revolution—he poses a challenging question: What would conservatives do if they gained dominant political power? He then observes that most of the people he unselfconsciously refers to as “conservative” would, in fact, find the moral universe of the Founding Fathers to be impossibly oppressive. That’s because the “conservatives” he’s referring to are, by and large, Libertarians rather than conservatives. Which raises the further question: If there’s no going back, what’s the way forward? Again, this points to a fundamental emptiness behind what some call American Exceptionalism.

Later this morning I read Andrea Widburg, who highly recommends a long interview:

A revealing interview reminds us what a bizarre, fake person Obama was and is

In 2017, David Garrow’s carefully researched Obama biography, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, appeared to much less fanfare than it deserved. The media undoubtedly downplayed it because it offered the truth behind many of Obama’s self-adulatory inventions, and Trump’s new presidency occupied everyone’s energy. What makes the book newsworthy today is that David Samuels has interviewed Garrow and revisited narratives in the book, reminding everyone of the scary, power-obsessed nastiness behind Obama’s carefully built façade.

The interview on Tablet is long and worth every second it takes you to read it.

The interview is, indeed, an eye-opener that goes far beyond what Widburg’s title suggests. For example it gets into the whole relationship of the presidency and the national security state that the US has devolved into. For example, Samuels observes in his lengthy intro:

In a normal country, the exhaustive report issued in April 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which uncovered no evidence that the 2016 election had been decided by Russian actions, let alone that Trump was a Russian agent, might have been a cue for the Obamas to go home, to Chicago, or Hawaii, or Martha’s Vineyard. The moment of crisis was over. Russiagate turned out to have been a politically motivated hoax, just as Trump had long insisted.

But while the attention of Republicans in Washington turned to questioning the FBI, more careful observers could not fail to notice that the FBI had hardly acted alone. After all, Russiagate had not originated with the Bureau, but with the Clinton campaign, which having failed to get even sympathetic mainstream media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post to bite on its fantastical allegations, was reduced to handing off the story to campaign press apparatchiks like Slate’s Franklin Foer and Mother Jones’ David Corn. The fact that the story only got bigger after Clinton lost the election was due to Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who in November and December of 2016 helped elevate Russiagate from a failed Clinton campaign ploy to a priority of the American national security apparatus, using a hand-picked team of CIA analysts under his direct control to validate his thesis. If Brennan was the instrument, the person who signed the executive order that turned Brennan’s thesis into a time bomb under Trump’s desk was Barack Obama.

Of course, this raises all sorts of questions. Who was actually the instrument? Brennan … or Obama? Were “Republicans in Washington” careless observers, or something else?

In the course of the actual interview Garrow briefly observes:

I’m going back to something you said 20 minutes ago. From the get-go, I know enough intelligence community stuff that from the first time I saw it, I realized that Christopher Steele’s shit was just complete crap. It was bad corporate intelligence, even. It was nonsensical.

Right. We all knew that—except for the wilfully blind or cynically dishonest among us. And yet it continues. What’s up, America? What’s up, Bluto and Turtle? That list goes on and on.

Here’s another Garrow observation that fascinated me, because as long time readers will recall I’ve not been an entirely uncritical fan of the late Justic Scalia:

Have you ever thought of writing a biography of Clarence Thomas?

Oh, yes. Yes. I have a huge collection of Thomas material.

I have to tell you that after meeting you and thinking about your oeuvre for the past few days, it seems like the natural capstone book for you to write. It will drive everyone on all sides nuts.

That would mean interviewing … oh God, all his former clerks. Oh God. The first piece I wrote about Thomas was a Times Week in Review piece in the Summer of ‘95, after Missouri v. Jenkins came down, explaining that Clarence Thomas is a Black nationalist. And I managed to get that in The New York Times. But that was 1995. Wouldn’t happen now.

Thomas has had a huge impact. And the network of former Clarence Thomas clerks. Oh my God. I mean, [the legal historian] Brad Snyder thinks that Felix Frankfurter generated an army of acolytes. Oh, wow. I mean, Thomas is at least as good.

It’s going to be interesting when someone like [legal historian] Brad Snyder puts Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas next to each other 50 years from now and asks his students, “Which of these two men had more of an impact on shaping the United States?”

Thomas is never going to get five votes to overturn everything going back to Palko. And he’s never gotten a second vote so far. Which shows that the vast majority of people writing about the court don’t know what the f*ck they’re talking about. They don’t know what Chevron deference is, and they don’t understand that [former Justice Antonin] Scalia was, in large part, the father of Chevron deference, because he’s pro unrestrained executive power. And who have been two of the most pronounced critics of Chevron deference? Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

But going back to Obama. Doesn’t the emptiness of Obama—which has always been apparent, and which Garrow makes no bones about (“not a normal person”)—suggest something about at least a disturbing number of Americans? What is the attraction of this self invented, transparently unreal figure, that is so irresistible to the Left?

Then, when I was done reading that, I discovered that CTH has a pretty long review of the article:

A Non-Pretending Discussion About Barack Obama

I should probably add here that I don’t by any means endorse all the views expressed by Samuels and Garrow. But it’s a disturbing interview that is bound to provoke reflection on the state of the nation.

Finally, I also read John Hinderaker’s conspiracy theory on how the Democrats are getting what they want. It’s easier to quote the summation of the Dem master plan than to summarize on my own:

When is the last time a presidential nominee lost his race, then was re-nominated and came back to win? …

The chief advantage of running against Trump is that the failures of the Biden administration, which are both legion and catastrophic, will be almost irrelevant, because Biden will not be the Democrats’ nominee. They will run a fresh face, most likely Gavin Newsom but perhaps someone else, against the retread Trump. The election, on that scenario, will be a referendum on Trump, and Trump will not come close. It will be a Democratic sweep, a remarkable achievement following one of the most pitiful administrations in American history.

That, I think, is the Democrats’ plan. Keep Trump in the headlines of friendly newspapers, indict him, attack him. Make him the central issue in the 2024 campaign. And then reap a victory that is entirely foreordained, since Trump lost in 2020 and can’t possibly win in 2024.

In my opinion, many leading Democrats are evil. But let’s be fair: they didn’t take control over virtually every American institution by being stupid. When it comes to politics, they know what they are doing. And what they are doing is trying to make Donald Trump the Republicans’ sacrificial lamb in 2024. That said, I can’t explain why Republicans would want to go along with the Democrats’ plan.

In other words, Hinderaker seriously believes that 2020 was for real and that one of the GOP midgets that Trump is currently crushing would not be a sacrificial lamb. I’ve said it before—after 2016 and 2020 only a fool would believe that Trump doesn’t scare the Dems for 2024. He also scares NeverTrump GOPers, who would prefer a Mike Pence, or a reincarnation of John McCain, or a Mitt insurgency, or—God help us—Jeb! The reality is that, for conservatives, there is no option except Trump at this point. Who is that on? The Dems … or the GOP? Maybe helping the Dems remove Trump wasn’t such a great idea, except that the GOP was all in on the Deep State agenda.

What’s the way forward?