“Defounding America”
I recommend reading this article by Myron Magnet, which is a summary of how we got where we are today in terms of the loss of autonomy and the growth of federal control, as well as the extreme change in our social culture. We find the usual players – Wilson and his “living constitution,” FDR and his federal steering of the economy, and LBJ and the welfare state – but it’s an overview that ties it all together and in the process explains much of the conservative viewpoint.
An excerpt:
Lyndon Johnson was an impatient man, and, when the Civil Rights Act didn’t produce instant magic, he abruptly changed focus in one of the most wrongheaded presidential speeches ever. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ ” he declared in June 1965, oblivious to his words’ imputation of racial inferiority. If clearing away bars to black opportunity hadn’t sparked success, then—by God!— he’d give black Americans their Great Society by sheer federal force. He would provide “equality as a fact and equality as a result,” he vowed. They didn’t have medical insurance? Medicaid would lay it on free, at triple the estimated cost. Bad housing held them back? He’d raze the slums and build them new high-rises that, instead of uplifting their residents, soon became crime-ridden new slums. Aid to Dependent Children was stingy? He’d pay the National Welfare Rights Organization to agitate for richer payments, matching those of a minimum-wage job—and he’d fund legions of “public-interest” lawyers and “community activists” to press bureaucrats and judges to funnel yet more tax money to the minority poor. The outcome: starting in 1964, as the War on Poverty began, every index of social pathology among the minority poor—crime, drug use, illegitimacy, welfare dependency, and school dropout—streaked higher for three decades.
FDR was right: welfare proved “a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” It wasn’t mainly a question of economic incentives, though social thinkers since Tocqueville have observed that the more poor relief a society provides, the more paupers will proliferate, as the slothful choose handouts over work as the sums equalize. What’s more important is the spiritual dimension that FDR noted. Individuals forge their characters in the work they do, discovering and refining what skills and virtues lie within them, bettering their communities, supporting their families, and making a meaningful life even in the most humble job. It isn’t government that “liberates [man] from the enslaving forces of his environment,” as LBJ claimed. It is man himself who grapples with the conditions life sets and, in the process, molds an identity. To be fed like gerbils in a cage by the seemingly extraterrestrial hand of the state is to be cut off from humanity’s wellsprings.
LBJ had only five years in the White House. But the words FDR’s treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau used to sum up the New Deal apply just as aptly to the War on Poverty: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot.”…
While the Sixties’ War on Poverty failed, its Culture War succeeded. Today, the bosses of America’s institutions are cultural-revolution veterans or their acolytes, and, as their own students and children survey the arid acres of housing projects, where generations of lives have improved not one whit as lbj’s dream turned to ashes, and the dumbed-down campuses where affirmative action kids still struggle and complain, they are reviving all the mistaken 1960s notions and launching a renewed assault on America’s culture that marks the third stage of the dismantling of the Founders’ republic…
Race is the soul of Culture War II. It explains everything…
Much more at the link.
Magnet, by the way, has an interesting background for someone with his point of view:
Magnet graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1962. He holds bachelor’s degrees from both Columbia University (1966) and the University of Cambridge, as well an M.A. from Cambridge and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Columbia University, where he also taught for several years.
I don’t think race explains much of anything. Social fictions about race are tools for one class in society (largely though not completely white) to use in abusing another part of society (white, not fancy, vernacular). The question is what is the origin of this vicious antagonism. (And why do you see analogues of it in Europe)?
Magnet is certainly all too correct in his assertion that the Trump administration never managed to drain the swamp of identity-politics bureaucrats, apparatchiks of the D.I.E. “diversity” racket, HR “wokesters” and social-justice administrators, not to mention all the many race-hustling grifters in education, in the MSM, and in the universities, but this was perhaps a task even beyond the might of Heracles in his cleansing of the Augean stables.
Art Deco:
Author Myron Magnet is not saying that race explains anything, much less everything. He’s saying that “Culture War II” SAYS that everything comes down to race and racism as a rot infecting our society from the start. Magnet doesn’t agree.
I cannot help but think reading Magnet’s article that it seems utterly familiar and rather misplaced.
Art Deco:
“Familiar” to a tiny percentage of the population. And why “misplaced”? Do you mean that, where it is, it’s only preaching to the choir? Or won’t get much circulation? If that’s what you mean, I agree, but outlets that cater to the population it would need to reach almost certainly wouldn’t publish it.
Have Marvel not self desttucted by becoming #Woke, I would propose that the name Myron Magnet deserves a marvel comics character. The person does as well.
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1788)
Add to that dynamic Marxism’s “March Through the Institutions” and you’ve got the basic dynamics that have led to the situation we face.
there are a lot of poor in the US… a lot and of all races..
so Art+Deco, explain why only one group acts like animals when they protest, and gangs up like packs even when they are not part of the fight… stomps on heads, etc..
Well now that Myron Magnet has come out and said it, I guess that all the Bad White Folks who said it 5, 10, 20 years or more back are forgiven and that’s OK.
So if we just stop the process of defaming the Founders and Implement Perfect Communism, oops, Constitutionalism and run the clock forward, it’ll all be OK? Or do we need a Council of Guardians (hmmm… vaguely familiar ring) of scholarly Myron Magnets and Roger Kimballs to keep an eye on it all?
Not going to work. As he says, it’s a system of lies. There are truths he cannot tell, too, or even be suspected of thinking; not if he wants to survive the week. In any organisation Lies accumulate until they bring it down. It’s too late, far too late to prevent some very big troubles. There *is* a lot of ruin in a nation, but as Lenin said “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Let’s hope it’s decades still. Been decades already, though.
Ideas Don’t Have Consequences:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ideas-dont-have-consequences/
“But conservative media isn’t the real world. Here, ideas don’t have consequences. You can be consistently wrong on every major political issue of the century and be absolutely certain that you’ll keep your magazine column, your think-tank fellowship, and your cushy book deal. Ideas don’t have consequences.
What’s more, you can be consistently right on every major political issue of the century and still be considered a pariah. Look at Pat Buchanan. The man coined the phrase “culture wars.” He founded this magazine in 2002 to oppose regime change in the Middle East. He was talking about raising tariffs and securing the border before Donald Trump launched The Apprentice. He has been warning us about the economic and security threat posed by China for decades. The same folks who would eventually go on to form the GOP’s pro-war, NeverTrump wing have been trying to cancel Pat since at least 1991. Have they ever apologized? Of course not. Because ideas don’t have consequences. Not even good ideas.”
Don’t worry folks, Charlie Kirk has the solution:
“Of course, I love the Grand Canyon. I love the Rocky Mountains. And I love Boston. And I love Chicago. But if all that disappeared, if all I had was ideas, and we were on an island, that’s America. That’s Israel. And that’s what people have to realize. America’s just a placeholder for timeless ideas. And if you fall too in love with, oh, the specific place, and all this… that’s not what it is.”
Blut und Erde sind augenscheinlich verboten, nicht war?
Well, there’s certainly nothing more Christian than to willingly and joyfully die out as a people whilst being dispossessed of the lands of ones ancestors for the sins of others elsewhere on other continents, now, is there? 😀 Scans much better with Blut und Boden… but gotta make concessions… always the concessions.
‘Proposition Nation’ — You hear that, you reach for your Browning or your progeny dies out.
Sarah Hoyt has been at the Phtyo- and Xeno-Estrogens again. Her already always brimming cup runneth over.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2021/04/28/everywhere/
There are bits here I agree with and bits I don’t, of course. That don’t signify. Posting it so that others may read and see if they can extract any useful marrow from it. We’re all blind men feeling out the Elephant bit by bit at our own individual paces.
Zaphod,
On the tone deafness on the left, Hoyt hits the nail right on the head here;
“their paradigm is broken and they can’t see it because they’ve done everything possible to insulate themselves from input coming from outside the paradigm.
When this happens and the people of the dead paradigm still have some power, the result is kind of like when you fill a container with gasoline, then drop a match in. It’s best to be in the places they think don’t matter.”
Magnet’s essay is a welcome salvo. I agree with 95% of the descriptive portion. However, as is often the case with conservative intellectuals, his prescriptive is woefully incomplete. Yes, the current state of our civil society and institutions (specifically that almost all civic institutions have been infiltrated by the left) puts conservatives in a bind. Yes, we need to follow Buckley (carried to the Nth degree) in yelling “STOP”.
But that’s not enough. Not even remotely.
Most importantly, we need to call out the left (which includes most liberals, fools or knaves the may be) for what there are: Cultural Marxists with totalitarian desires; wannabe tinpot dictators, who exploit racial grievances for personal gain. They hate white people out of envy. They exploit ‘black and brown’ people for greed. They want to destroy every aspect of our historical society, so they can recreate a utopia (for them) where they have dictatorial power. If they fail, so be it; at least they will have levelled the America they so despise. They are self-absorbed, narcissistic, sociopaths. If you care about your future, your family’s future, your neighbor’s future, your country’s future, you need to oppose them with ever fiber of your being.
That’s what needs to be said. Trump came closer than any GOP politician ever could, or would, in saying it. But we need to go far beyond even what he attempted to express.
Face it. The LAST truly great PotUS we had was a Dem — Grover Cleveland.
Teddy was also the source of much of what we have today — many of the alphabet agencies came from his admin.
Cleveland understood the proper limits of government power:
He also made similar noises in his third SOTU address:
Not a single man elected to the office since then has truly worked with that ideal in almost any regard. Probably the next-best since Cleveland was Coolidge.
Art Deco: The question is what is the origin of this vicious antagonism. (And why do you see analogues of it in Europe)?
ME (Minta): BLM and Antifa are, and have been for a few years, all over Europe and elsewhere. The pattern is Marxist: instead of the proletariate vs the owners they have substituted the non-white vs the white “supremacists”.
Artfldgr: there are a lot of poor in the US… a lot and of all races..
so Art+Deco, explain why only one group acts like animals when they protest, and gangs up like packs even when they are not part of the fight… stomps on heads, etc..
ME (Minta): There are a lot of whites—often college age females—in both Antifa and BLM. They act exactly like the others. There are Latinos in MS 13. They act like the BLM and Antifa, in terms of viciousness and pacts and acting like animals. There are others, in the middle and Far East. People in Ruwanda and Yugoslavia, and Nazi’s on Kristol Nacht, etc. Given the adequate indoctrination, passionate motivation, and a crowd of like-minded humans, all bets are off.
Ok, Zaphod. I enjoy Sarah Hoyt. But I’ve read her “Everything” piece, and other than vengeance and somehow the US will be transformed in a few years — and at less blood than the rest of the world — I cannot tell what she’s going on about!
Anyone else gotta clue?
I did read Michael Yon’s post (which inspired her, apparently), too. He’s confident of violent pushback because the Left is shooting at National Guard troops in Minneapolis.
At least Yon’s more concrete! But nowhere as forthcoming except about his long track record of getting coming mayhem right.
Any other opioniobs? Am I wrong?
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ideas-dont-have-consequences/
I got to “Take the war in Iraq, the greatest policy snafu in American history. ” and stopped reading. The jerks who write for and edit The American Conservative can never get off their hobbyhorses.
Magnet’s essay is a welcome salvo. I agree with 95% of the descriptive portion.
It’s the 1,000 th time I’ve read something like that in the last 35 years. And it has a ‘wet streets cause rain’ notion of cause and effect.
Race is the soul of Culture War II. It explains everything…
No, diversity [dogma], inequity, and exclusion, not limited to racism (sexism before that), is merely a means to stoke division and manufacture sustainable, renewable, ideally green (i.e. stochastically naive) leverage in a Hutu/Tutsi cycle of redistributive and retributive change. #HateLovesAbortion
“Take the war in Iraq, the greatest policy snafu in American history.”
The first, intermediate, second, third, or fourth? The first was a response to transnational war, the intermediate sustained the first, the second ended both, the third was progressive, and the fourth was a response to transnational terrorism that followed with the third.
n.n.:
Magnet is not saying race explains everything. He’s saying that the “anti-racism” group says that everything is the fault of racists – that they use it to explain everything, or just about everything. It’s a tool for “anti-racist” culture warriors.
Of course, “anti-racist” is in quotes. They’re anti a lot of things but racism isn’t one of them.
Maybe one question could be how long until the obvious lie stops convincing people? One may call an action “anti-racist” when it is obviously something else. But how long until the armor, the shield, the protection of the term becomes obsolete?