Getting an education in the Big Apple: George Packer’s honesty, a parent’s dilemma

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s easy to mock George Packer for what he writes in this Atlantic essay about choosing a school for his son in New York City.

But I find his essay heartbreaking as well as complex. He’s a well-meaning liberal who checks all the usual liberal boxes, who wants social justice and diversity and is against what he continually refers to as “meritocracy” (as though that’s a bad thing), but is reluctant to make his child pay the price, and is torn about knowing what’s best for his child’s education. We all want the best for our children—at least, we should—and George Packer does. He hasn’t much of a clue what it might be or how to go about obtaining it, and his confusion is understandable in this day and age of the progressive hard left takeover of NYC public schools.

Packer states that he and his wife went to public schools. But he was born in 1960, so he attended in the 60s and 70s. I went to NYC public schools, from kindergarten right through to high school graduation, about ten years prior to Packer. So although we’re of slightly different generations, and no doubt there were some differences in our experience in public schools (his was in San Francisco, and from his description of it in the essay it was significantly better then mine), our experience spent in public schools probably had far more similarities than either of us would have with the experience of a student who attends public schools today in the same places.

The demogaphics in New York City schools were different in my time, for starters. My school was diverse by the standards of the day: students from the projects, low income students of all races, and kids from various ethnic backgrounds, but probably nothing resembling the proportions today. There was a stratified track system and the honors students had all their classes together. Teachers were mostly old and the curriculum was traditional, and pretty challenging for the honors students. There was some violence and some trouble and some family strife, but absolutely nothing on the order of what you find in most city schools now. The atmosphere was far from ideal, and it wasn’t as good as the private school some friends went to, but it wasn’t bad at all. Every year, a number of graduates from my public high school went to elite universities, and others went to not-bad universities, although the majority of students from my high school never went on to college at all or went to a 2-year community college.

I think it was pretty typical of the times, but very different from now. So what Packer was facing when he contemplated a public school system for his son (he was too financially strapped to continue paying the exorbitant fees of the private schools of New York) is something far different than what my parents or his own parents faced.

Here’s Packer, describing his decision to send his son to a specially selected public school that wasn’t his local school but was reputed to be pretty good:

[The school’s] combination of diversity, achievement, and well-being was nearly unheard-of in New York public schools. This school squared the hardest circle. It was a liberal white family’s dream. The admission rate was less than 10 percent. We got wait-listed.

The summer before our son was to enter kindergarten, an administrator to whom I’d written a letter making the case that our family and the school were a perfect match called with the news that our son had gotten in off the wait list. She gave me five minutes to come up with an answer. I didn’t need four and a half of them.

I can see now that a strain of selfishness and vanity in me contaminated the decision. I lived in a cosseted New York of successful professionals. I had no authentic connection—not at work, in friendships, among neighbors—to the shared world of the city’s very different groups that our son was about to enter. I was ready to offer him as an emissary to that world, a token of my public-spiritedness. The same narcissistic pride that a parent takes in a child’s excellent report card, I now felt about sending him in a yellow school bus to an institution whose name began with P.S.

Things are okay at the school for a quite a few years. But at some point—Packer pinpoints it as around 2014—the situation begins to change. Although he’s in sympathy with liberal politics, the atmosphere now transitions to, in his words, “the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology” which he also refers to as a “new progressivism.”

I would describe it as a switch from liberal to left.

It initially took the form of voluntary opting out of standardized testing because it was supposedly racist, and here’s how Packer describes the process:

Opting out became a form of civil disobedience against a prime tool of meritocracy. It started as a spontaneous, grassroots protest against a wrongheaded state of affairs. Then, with breathtaking speed, it transcended the realm of politics and became a form of moral absolutism, with little tolerance for dissent.

Ya think, George? Surprise, surprise.

Something else about the opt-out movement troubled me. Its advocates claimed that the tests penalized poor and minority kids. I began to think that the real penalty might come from not taking them. Opting out had become so pervasive at our school that the Department of Education no longer had enough data to publish the kind of information that prospective applicants had once used to assess the school. In the category of “Student Achievement” the department now gave our school “No Rating.” No outsider could judge how well the school was educating children, including poor, black, and Latino children. The school’s approach left gaps in areas like the times tables, long division, grammar, and spelling. Families with means filled these gaps, as did some families whose means were limited—Marcus’s parents enrolled him in after-school math tutoring. But when a girl at our bus stop fell behind because she didn’t attend school for weeks after the death of her grandmother, who had been the heart of the family, there was no objective measure to act as a flashing red light. In the name of equality, disadvantaged kids were likelier to falter and disappear behind a mist of togetherness and self-deception. Banishing tests seemed like a way to let everyone off the hook. This was the price of dismissing meritocracy.

It’s odd that a man as smart as Packer wouldn’t have understood in the first place that this would happen as a result of “dismissing meritocracy.” But not really, because liberalism can block logic and thoughts that are not politically acceptable. It is to Packer’s credit that he came to admit the problem at all, and that he wrote about it.

Packer describes the decision he and his wife made to have their son take the tests. This may seem neither revolutionary nor brave, but believe me it did take some courage in the face of fairly intense pressure to conform. He writes:

[A school administrator Packer spoke to on the phone] described all the harm that could come to our son if he took the tests—the immense stress, the potential for demoralization. I replied with our reason for going ahead—we wanted him to learn this necessary skill. The conversation didn’t feel completely honest on either side: She also wanted to confirm the school’s position in the vanguard of the opt-out movement by reaching 100 percent compliance, and I wanted to refuse to go along. The tests had become secondary. This was a political argument.

Our son was among the 15 or so students who took the tests. A 95 percent opt-out rate was a resounding success. It rivaled election results in Turkmenistan.

Or in the USSR, back in the olden days.

You know where this led, don’t you? Exactly where you think it might:

The school’s progressive pedagogy had [previously] fostered a wonderfully intimate sense of each child as a complex individual. But progressive politics meant thinking in groups. When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability. I understood the solidarity that could come from these meetings, but I also worried that they might entrench differences that the school, by its very nature, did so much to reduce. Other, less diverse schools in New York, including elite private ones, had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising “affinity groups.”

Next came gender-neutral bathrooms:

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day.

Sad, but unsurprising. But the kids came up with a solution—they simply divided into sexes and used the old bathrooms, same way as before the gender-neutral relabeling.

Packer’s article then veers off into a lengthy riff on the awfulness of Donald Trump and how Packer’s kids were traumatized by Trump’s election and beset by a host of fears (for example, his daughter was worried that Trump would split up their family). Packer reacted by damping down the political talk in front of his children (not a bad idea, actually) rather than changing any of his liberal viewpoints.

Unsurprising, really, because a mind is a difficult thing to change.

Packer goes on to describe how the curriculum his children learned in school both frightened them and made them feel guilty. Again, I don’t see Packer questioning the truth or falsehood of the actual content they learned—that would probably be too threatening for him—but he certainly is aware of its terrible impact on his children:

[Packer’s son had] been painfully aware of climate change throughout elementary school—first grade was devoted to recycling and sustainability, and in third grade, during a unit on Africa, he learned that every wild animal he loved was facing extinction. “What are humans good for besides destroying the planet?” he asked. Our daughter wasn’t immune to the heavy mood—she came home from school one day and expressed a wish not to be white so that she wouldn’t have slavery on her conscience. It did not seem like a moral victory for our children to grow up hating their species and themselves.

And then Packer states this—which does not echo the liberal party line:

Adults who draft young children into their cause might think they’re empowering them and shaping them into virtuous people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents post of their woke kids “selflessies”). In reality the adults are making themselves feel more righteous, indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiating their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anxious battles onto children who can’t carry the burden, because they lack the intellectual apparatus and political power. Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children what to think. The point is to teach them how to think so they can grow up to find their own answers.

I wished that our son’s school would teach him civics.

Civics, yes! And then Packer veers back again into liberal paranoia about Trump – without, as is typical, explaining what Trump is doing that illustrates Packer’s judgments about him. Packer may think that everyone reading the Atlantic agrees with him about the utter obviousness of Trump’s awfulness:

By age 10 [Packer’s son] had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of freedom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was trashing or of the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power accountable. Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had been betrayed.

I find this fascinating, this oscillation between a rejection of the excesses of liberalism and leftism and a wallowing in them.

Packer’s piece ends with a description of the de Blasio/Carranza school system in NYC (I wrote this post on Carranza), in which the idea of race and privilege hierarchies is practically the only idea there is. At some point his son asks the following poignant question: “Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading…not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?” Well yes, it used to be, but not any more.

Packer is sad and he’s bewildered. He doesn’t really know how this all came up, doesn’t connect the dots, and he doesn’t know what to do. The idea that the right has some answers never really occurs to him. I sympathize with him in his struggle, and wonder where it may ultimately lead. At the moment, the cognitive dissonance is fierce.

I didn’t really write this post to muse on the dilemma of George Packer the individual. But he’s especially interesting to me because I believe he stands for a large group of liberals who are currently wrestling with the consequences of what they supported, thinking the results would be good, and finding that the left had other and more terrible things in mind.

Democrats and that pesky old Constitution (plus a Neo audio)

The New Neo Posted on by

I just wrote a post about the Democrats’ cavalier attitude towards the 2nd Amendment, but that post was more about politics. Now I want to emphasize the anti-Constitutional aspects of the move. As John Hinderaker of Powerline writes:

…[W]hy should we be surprised? Democrats regard the Constitution as an illegitimate product of white supremacy, written by a bunch of dead white males who were racists. Why should it command any respect? In their eyes, it doesn’t. Once they achieve power, it will be a dead letter.

Democrats have adopted the Erdogan philosophy: democracy is a streetcar. When you get to your stop, you get off. Let them win one more election, and the Constitution will protect no one. Bernie Sanders has made this explicit. Power is an opportunity to jail your opponents. For a crime? No. Who needs a crime?

One might think that the push from Democrats to delegitimize the Founders as old dead white racist men is about racism and the fight against it. But that would be wrong, IMHO. It’s the other way around. Calling them old dead white racist men is a way to attack the Constitution, because they are its authors and if you discredit the authors the left thinks it helps to discredit the document itself.

That is the target, and the approach is multi-faceted and long pre-dated Donald Trump’s presidency.

Just to show you what I’m talking about, I’m going to put up an audio file of an interview I did in early 2013 with Michael Savage on his show. Yeah, that Michael Savage, who had seen this post of mine about Michael Seidman, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown who wrote an op-ed in the NY Times about how outdated the Constitution is.

The audio is now gone from the internet, but I had saved it at the time, and here it is. It demonstrates that almost seven years ago this anti-Constitutional movement was picking up quite a bit of steam by coming out into the open. The audio quality isn’t all that good, and there’s some weird phone-ringing going on for a moment or two, but I think it’s pretty easy to understand what I’m saying and I think the points still hold up today, only more so:

Gun-grabbing Democrats and the bitter clingers

The New Neo Posted on by

I wonder what polls Kamala Harris had access to that make her think the time was ripe for the “just do it” approach to gun control:

During last night’s Democratic presidential debate, former Vice President Joe Biden admonished Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) for promising to impose new gun controls by executive fiat if Congress fails to pass the laws she thinks it should. That gave Harris a perfect opportunity to explain how her 100-day plan for gun control can be reconciled with constitutional restrictions on presidential power. The former prosecutor not only conspicuously failed to do so but literally laughed at the question.

I actually don’t think most of the Democratic candidates believe that the type of gun control they advocate will do much if anything to reduce crime. They merely think that their constituents want it, and that it also is generally a good way to control/subdue the law-abiding majority of the people now and in the future.

But Beto O’Rourke had his own version of upping the ante as a gun-grabber when he said:

Neither Kamala nor Beto is anywhere near getting the nomination, although each was an MSM darling for a short while before they began to fade. Perhaps their gun-control statements during the most recent debate are some sort of Hail Mary pass for the two candidates, an effort to reach the Democratic base and surf its strong sentiment for gun-control-no-matter-what. They’re certainly not thinking of the general election at the moment, where these statements probably would hurt them. Of course, they can always disclaim them later on, knowing that the MSM would cover for the home team.

But neither Beto nor Harris will be the Democratic nominee, or at least they only have an infinitesimal chance of it. Thing is, their statements can become a rallying cry for the right, a chance to tell voters in the general that this is what all the Democrats plan to do when they get power.

And that would probably be a correct statement.

It turns out my mother’s stories were true

The New Neo Posted on by

My mother was an excellent writer. She was also a good storyteller—that is, an entertaining one—although she sometimes embellished things for the sake of the story. I know this for a fact because I sometimes heard her stories about me and used to chafe at the fact that certain things were exaggerated.

Most of the stories I know about my mother’s family and my father’s family came from my mother. My father said hardly a word about any of it, but my mother was a talker. There were even some family secrets, held for a century, that she divulged to me.

But I took her stories with a substantial grain of salt, knowing that she wasn’t above taking a bit of poetic license with her tales. But you know what? I’ve developed increasing respect for her, because every single story of hers about the families’ past that I’ve been able to research and find any evidence about—sometimes through archives (such as the census), sometimes through Googling, and sometimes through old newspaper stories—has been true.

I now see her as a paragon of accuracy, at least for the past, if not for her amusing and entertaining stories about me.

Not only that, but she did something else that was extraordinarily helpful: for many of our old photos, she wrote on the back the names of who was in the picture or her best guess about who was in the picture. She wasn’t always right, nor did she write on the back of all of them since I doubt she even had a guess as to the identity of some of them. But boy, do I appreciate seeing her characteristic slanted handwriting when I turn those photos over.

Last night’s Democratic debate

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t watch it. I’m not a masochist. And I dislike debates anyway, no matter what side they’re on.

But I hear tell about it. Sounds like the highlights (or low lights, depending how you look at it) were Beto O’Rourke’s “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15s” and Joe Biden’s “Nobody should be in jail for a non-violent crime.”

Bernie Madoff will be very pleased to hear it.

Now I realize that Biden probably didn’t mean that, but he said something so stupid that it’s really quite mind-boggling. I don’t think that particular remark reflects senility, either. I think it’s just the way his mind works and has always worked.

I find the Democratic field very depressing. One of these people will be the nominee (no, I don’t think any rescuer like Michelle Obama is riding in at the 11th hour). All of them are dreadful in a variety of ways. There is a chance one might be the next president.

Even the press seems a bit disgusted at the prospects.

Left and right and one-party rule

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Some of the following is lifted from a back-and-forth discussion I had with commenter “Montage” on a previous thread.]

I maintain that the left’s goal is to be in charge forever: one-party rule. And they believe in breaking the rules to get there, because the goal is so important and they know what’s best for society and for you.

Or, for some on the left, power is simply the goal rather than some sort of misguided idealism.

Commenter “montage” asked:

Just for the sake of argument wouldn’t the right also prefer one party rule? : ^ )
I can’t imagine many on the right objecting to that scenario.

Perhaps they wouldn’t object. But that’s very different from having it as a goal—a major goal, the paramount goal—and being willing to do just about anything to get there. Although there is some overlap between the parties, there is no question in my mind which side believes most strongly and more widely in the idea that the ends justify the means.

So, what would I like to see? Yeah, I want the world to be perfect or nearly perfect and to conform to my idea of perfect. But I’m not hubristic enough to think my idea of a perfect world is always correct. Nor do I think it’s possible to attain.

Therefore I believe in the classical liberal value of free speech and the free exchange of ideas. Leftists do not. I also believe that the leftist impulse is a human one that cannot be completely eliminated or stamped out, only argued against, hopefully successfully. And so I do not believe that the complete elimination of the left is possible (or even desirable in the sense that what it would take to do it would be as bad as the left itself). I believe in the defeat of the left. But that takes vigilance and work:

I believe this:

And I also believe in the need to “give the devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake”:

How can the right know how most effectively to fight the left’s need to eliminate the right, without the right’s becoming utterly compromised and turning into the thing it purports to hate in the process? I don’t pretend this is an easy question. But it’s a vitally important one.

[NOTE: That, by the way, is what I see as the heart of the fight between Trump supporters and NeverTrumpers. The NeverTrumpers see support of Trump as “turning into the thing we hate.” Trump supporters of various stripes may see him as somewhat flawed but as an effective fighter who does not violate any basic tenets of their belief system, and as a needed corrective to the left.]

McCabe indictment recommended

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, well, well:

U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu has recommended moving forward with charges against CNN contributor Andrew McCabe, Fox News has learned, as the Justice Department rejects a last-ditch appeal from the former top FBI official.

McCabe — the former deputy and acting director of the FBI — appealed the decision of the U.S. attorney for Washington all the way up to Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general, but he rejected that request, according to a person familiar with the situation…

The potential charges relate to DOJ inspector general findings against him regarding misleading statements concerning a Hillary Clinton-related investigation.

Will McCabe ever be found guilty? That depends on a lot of things, including (as Ace points out) the venue in which he is tried, if it comes to that.

I don’t know enough about the relevant law, or the totality of the evidence, to know whether the case against McCabe is strong enough for a conviction. He was almost certainly guilty of shocking wrongdoing. But that doesn’t always rise to the level of a crime that can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

[ADDENDUM: Andrew C. McCarthy weighs in.]

Flynn’s lawyer means business

The New Neo Posted on by

See this:

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who is presiding over the case, gave Powell an unusual amount of leeway as she argued the government withheld information from her client to pressure him into accepting a guilty plea, which he never would’ve done had he been aware of all the facts. Flynn’s sentencing has been delayed for a year as he cooperated with the government.

Powell said Flynn’s legal team doesn’t plan to withdraw Flynn’s guilty plea, but “the entire prosecution should be dismissed for egregious misconduct and the withholding of Brady material,” referring to the Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland that requires prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence.

She claimed documentation exists that shows then-FBI deputy director McCabe ruled out Logan Act charges against Flynn in January or February of 2017, yet DOJ “egregiously” held the possibility of being charged under the 18th-century statute over his head during plea negotiations anyway.

Powell said the defense still hadn’t been given access to all the interview notes from Flynn’s discussions with FBI agents, including one written by agent Joe Pientka that the government claims it no longer has.

Sidney Powell—whom I’ve seen on a few talk shows; she’s quite impressive—is no stranger to the phenomenon of prosecutorial misconduct. Please see this previous post of mine.

The arms-bearing Swiss and EU gun laws

The New Neo Posted on by

The Swiss have a long tradition of gun ownership. And they are not part of the EU.

However, the EU will get you one way or another. The Swiss are part of what’s known as the Schengen Area, in which people can travel without the old-fashioned restrictions of visas. Here’s the way it’s described:

Schengen Area, signifies a zone where 26 European countries, abolished their internal borders, for the free and unrestricted movement of people, in harmony with common rules for controlling external borders and fighting criminality by strengthening the common judicial system and police cooperation.

Schengen Area covers most of the EU countries, except the UK, Ireland and the countries that are soon to be part of: Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Cyprus. Although not members of the EU, countries like: Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Lichtenstein are also part of the Schengen zone.

It may have seemed like an innocuous thing to do way back when the idea was first being proposed. But it’s one of those foot-in-the-door phenomena that has meant that Schengen Area countries have had difficulty controlling entry by “migrants,” and now we see that gun control is part of the bargain as well, even for non-EU-member countries. The threat by the EU is to throw the non-complying country out of the Schengen Area, and thus hamper its tourism and perhaps a lot more.

Back in May (although I missed the news at the time) the Swiss voters opted for Schengen convenience over the right to bear arms, in one of those referendums we’ve heard so much about. In this case, the results of the referendum have stood, because the Swiss voted just the way the EU and their government wanted them to:

Almost 64% of voters in Sunday’s referendum supported tougher restrictions on semi-automatic and automatic weapons, final results show.

Switzerland is not an EU member, but risked removal from the open-border Schengen Area if it had voted “no”.

Nearly 48% of Swiss households own a gun – among the highest rates of private ownership in Europe.

The EU had urged the country to tighten its laws in line with rules adopted by the bloc following the 2015 Paris terror attacks.

The rules restrict semi-automatic and automatic rifles and make it easier to track weapons in national databases.

The EU’s initial proposal sparked criticism in Switzerland, because it meant a ban on the tradition of ex-soldiers keeping their assault rifles.

Swiss officials negotiated concessions, but some gun activists argued that the rules still encroached on citizens’ rights.

So, reading between those lines, my guess is that the proposal was sold on the strength of two things—to prevent terrorism (which seems highly unlikely to me; au contraire) and that it would be only a small change that wouldn’t affect too many people.

Till the next time. And the next.

The Democrats’ quest for one-party rule

The New Neo Posted on by

From a Kevin D. Williamson article in National Review:

They [several writers, but really much of the Democratic Party today] do not understand the United States as having two legitimate competing political camps but as suffering from a kind of infection in the form of the Republican party, which inhibits the normal and healthy — meaning Democrat-dominated — political life of the United States. They believe that something they call the “New America” has an unquestionable natural moral right to rule and that the Republican party is not a competing pole but a blockage. To write as Greenberg does that the Democratic party is to be liberated by the practical elimination of the Republican party, and hence able to operate unencumbered, is to embrace not only the end of the GOP but the end of ordinary political opposition.

This is an important point, one I was alluding to in this recent post titled “Why the left can’t accept defeat.”

Another way to put it is that in my lifetime the Democratic Party has morphed from being predominantly liberal to being predominantly leftist. Liberals (at least the kind I remember from my youth, and the shrinking number who still exist) are fine with an opposition party on the right which every now and then will win an election. Those liberals believe voters on the right to be people of goodwill who are just misguided.

The left, on the other hand, is the group described in the Williamson article. They want not just to defeat the opposition most of the time, they want to obliterate it. This obliteration can come through legal means, or semi-legal means, or it can come (ultimately, as we have seen in many Communist countries) from a never-ending and brutal attempt to kill anyone perceived as being opposed—or dangerous or extraneous in any way—and to terrify the rest of the populace into obedience.

There always were leftists among the Democrats, of course, and there still are old-fashioned liberals in today’s Party. But the balance has shifted in recent years. I believe the major part of the shift occurred from around the time of the 2000 election on. Leftism has been actively and more openly encouraged during the Obama administration and by now the shift is not the least bit secret or hidden.

Williamson writes of the American Left (in other words, of the majority of Democrats these days) that their desire to do away with the opposition takes many forms:

The only way to achieve that [political dominance they crave] would be through the political suppression of those with dissenting political views.

Which, of course, is the Left’s current agenda, from deputizing Corporate America to act as its political enforcer by making employment contingent upon the acceptance of progressive political orthodoxies to attempting to gut the First Amendment in the name of “campaign finance” regulation — it is the Democratic party, not the moral scolds of the Christian Coalition, that proposes to lock up Americans for showing movies with unauthorized political content — to grievously abusing legislative and prosecutorial powers to harass and persecute those with nonconforming political views (“Arrest Climate-Change Deniers”) and declaring political rivals “domestic terrorists,” as California Democrats have with the National Rifle Association.

Which is to say: It is not only the Republican party as a political grouping they dream of eliminating: It is Republicans as such and those who hold roughly Republican ideas about everything from climate change to gun rights, groups that Democrats in agencies ranging from state prosecutors’ offices to the IRS already — right now, not at some point in some imaginary dystopian future — are targeting through both legal and extralegal means.

The Democrats who are doing this believe themselves to be acting morally, even patriotically, and sometimes heroically. Why? Because they believe that opposition is fundamentally illegitimate.

I disagree somewhat with that last sentence. I think it’s true of some leftists. But I don’t think most leftists care about the legitimacy of their opponents or of opposition itself. That’s the sort of thinking the right indulges in far more frequently: who or what is legitimate and lawful?

No, the left doesn’t really care whether the opposition is legitimate. In fact, the more legitimate their opponents are, the more the left can justify using whatever means necessary to crush them.

I believe that the promotion of quibbles about “legitimacy”—for example, the idea that Trump is illegitimate because the Russians (ironic, isn’t it?) rigged the election, or because only the popular vote should matter, or whatever other reason the election of a Republican might be deemed illegitimate—is for the “useful idiots” who remain in the Democratic Party. They are the ones who might still care about niceties such as “legitimacy,” so these assertions are trotted out to get them onboard. But the true believers, the leftists who are activists and who plan to be in charge when they achieve their goals, do not give a hoot about legitimacy. The only coin of their realm is power.

[NOTE: This article about how Texas is in play sent a chill down my spine. Recall that the Beto O’Rourke did pretty well there against Ted Cruz in 2016. That O’Rourke was a strong candidate anywhere, much less in Texas, is extremely disturbing.]

Nationhood: why Brexit hasn’t happened

The New Neo Posted on by

A number of people have recommended this article by Christopher Caldwell that appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, entitled “Why Hasn’t Brexit Happened?”

It’ well worth reading. A few excerpts:

In Britain as elsewhere in the world, the struggle [reflected in Brexit] has been unleashed by innovations in administration that have arisen since the Cold War. These shift power from electorates and parliaments to managers of information, inside government and out. From thousand-year-old constitutional ideas to five-year-old ones. From habeas corpus to gender identity. Because it was Britain that did the most to construct the ideal of liberty which is now being challenged, Brexit clarifies the constitutional stakes for the world as nothing else…

Many statesmen warned from the outset that British ideas of liberty would not survive a merger with the E.U. The most eloquent early diagnoses came from the Labour Party, not the Tories. That is because the fundamental disposition of the E.U. is to favor technocratic expertise over representative government, and the Tories have not generally been the British party that placed the highest priority on the passions of the masses.

So there’s a reversal, one I noticed earlier, in which the democratic referendum is currently being championed by the right rather than the left.

Continued:

The E.U. destroyed the system of parliamentary sovereignty at the heart of Britain’s constitution. For all its royalist trappings, Britain has traditionally been a much purer representative democracy than the United States, because it excludes courts from reviewing legislation on any grounds. British politicians tried to calm the public with assurances that, where British law and E.U. law clashed, British law would prevail. But the acknowledgement of E.U. legal supremacy in the treaties meant that E.U. law was British law…

Here’s the portion of the article that summarizes what I consider the most important aspect of the Brexit battle and what it means for a nation to become a member of the EU:

From the outset there was a dangerous asymmetry of motives. Britain had nothing against its neighbors on the continent—it sought only the right to make its own decisions again. The E.U.’s leaders, however, had an incentive to inflict maximum hardship on Britain. In most member countries the E.U. was being blamed for stagnating economies, dizzying inequality, and out-of-control immigration. If Britain were granted a pain-free exit, others would follow suit…

Brexit is an epochal struggle for power, and an exemplary one. It pits a savvy elite against a feckless majority…

…[T]he [Brexit] vote had been about not just a policy preference but also an identity. It raised the question for each voter of whether he considered himself an Englishman or a European, and of whether it was legitimate to be ruled by one power or the other. As such it made certain things explicit.

If you think about the history of Europe, you might observe that some European countries are relatively recent. For example, Italy only became a united Italy in 1861, Germany in the 1800s and in particular in 1871 (and of course there was the recent split into East and West, and the reunification). I’m not going to tackle France—it’s complicated. But we saw how fragile the unity of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were.

That doesn’t mean that countries such as Germany and Italy don’t have a strong sense of national unity. The UK is even older as an entity, but actually not all that old either:

The medieval conquest and subsequent annexation of Wales by the Kingdom of England, followed by the union between England and Scotland in 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the union in 1801 of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Five-sixths of Ireland seceded from the UK in 1922, leaving the present formulation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.[note 12] There are fourteen British Overseas Territories, the remnants of the British Empire…

England itself has a far more ancient feeling of nationhood, having become a unified state by the 10th Century. Gilbert and Sullivan expressed it in a somewhat humorous way, but it’s something very real (or used to be, anyway):

I’m no history expert, but all that national history I went into is a way to indicate that the concept of a nation and the history of a nation isn’t the same for all nations, and some are apparently more willing and eager to give up their sovereignty to an entity such as the EU. In addition, the EU wasn’t originally sold as having as much control as it subsequently has exerted. Many people are resentful and afraid at giving up so much autonomy to elitist bureaucrats they haven’t even chosen themselves, and I believe their fear is fully justified. And yet it stands to reason that those very same elitist bureaucrats who seek more power are loathe to give it up just because the people want them to do so.

And it is no accident that one of the major beefs (although by no means the only one) that people have with the EU is its dictating of the terms of immigration to countries that used to be allowed to decide such things for themselves, which is an essential function of nationhood.

[NOTE: I explore the origins of the European war on nationalism in this post.]

9/11 and the NY Times: the airplanes were the guilty parties

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a tweet posted today by The New York Times that has since been taken down, probably because they got too much criticism for it:

Eighteen years have passed since airplanes took aim and brought down the World Trade Center. Today, families will once again gather and grieve at the site where more than 2000 people died.

During the days and months following 9/11, the Times was a good source for news about it. At least, that’s what I recall. The destruction of the WTC was many things, depending on the perspective of the observer, but one of the things it was was a story that took place in New York, a local story in addition to its enormous national and international dimensions.

Originally, the Times knew who perpetrated the terrorist crime and was not shy about using their names or ascribing agency to them. (I’m doing this from memory at the moment, but I think that’s correct.) The Times may have used a certain amount of dodging and hedging, and I’m not sure it talked a whole lot about fanatical Islamic fundamentalists and all the background. But I believe it’s a mark of how far the Times has come towards leftist gobbledygook that a tweet ascribing the agency to airplanes could get by whatever passes for an editor there these days.

Note that the tweet didn’t just say “since airplanes brought down the World Trade Center.” That phrasing would have been bad enough, but the Times couldn’t rest with that. These airplanes were sentient beings or programmed guided missiles, and they took aim. No terrorists—much less terrorists with a coherent philosophy that dictates the mass killing of innocent Americans in a way intended to strike fear into our hearts—were involved.

That tweet is emblematic of the changes that have occurred in the MSM—not just the Times—during the last eighteen years. It’s not a total transformation, because the MSM was already at least halfway there before 9/11. But now the problem is worse.