You Hate to See it (I)

“As The Left Storms The Ramparts, What Are You Prepared To Do About It?” — A Retort

“You Hate to See It” is a series expertly written in poor taste. Its purpose is to respond to and mock as much of the Federalist’s output as possible; the Roman Poet Juvenal is its mascot

The left’s rout is on. Its foot soldiers are swarming every level of society.

This is not what a rout is. Nonetheless this opening line is very fitting: in using a military metaphor in a way that is completely, almost precisely wrong, the author makes us intimate with the mix of pretension and laziness that is the very essence of the rest of the article.

The Americans who still love this country and believe in its founding principles are facing an existential struggle, the depths of which many are now only realizing, and the lengths to which we will have to go to survive many could not have fathomed.

Like many of the lower courts, our Supreme Court is daily making a mockery of the Constitution and eviscerating the rule of law, over issues that should have never cropped up in the first place. It is proving we are a nation of men, not of laws now. That is a leftist principle regardless of whether those applying it come clad in robes of “conservatism.”

To be clear the “issues” in question here are: Should we be allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ people in the workplace; Should American children be deported to various Latin American countries because we can technically revoke their citizenship.

The *checks notes* primarily GOP appointed court, in the grips of a radical activist agenda, has answered: “No”. What red-blooded American wouldn’t be sweaty with rage and worry?

Was this after all really what the Founders fought and died for: a country that uses the critical light of reason to dispense with the prejudices that fragment and oppress humanity; a commonwealth that invites all to join in the great project of freedom, regardless of the circumstances of their origin?

Don’t answer that.

After usurping all of our liberties at once, most state and local “authorities” relinquished them to a chosen few in the mob, prior stated concerns for public health be damned, because political correctness trumps all else for them. They abdicated their authority, just like the courts said to hell with law and order, and left the law-abiding defenseless.

Most importantly, a Maoist-French hybrid cultural revolution is going on in our streets, our businesses, and even within our families, aided, abetted, and enabled by the dupes and useful idiots among our elites. They wish to snuff out any and all dissent; to excommunicate you from public life.

While Maost-French hybrid style cultural revolutions are definitely in the top three worst kinds of cultural revolutions, let us consider:

1. Courts have in no way said to hell with law and order, nor have they left the law-abiding defenseless. I understand the author may strongly feel this way — but I’m more of a facts and logic kind of guy. And the fact is that — surprisingly — no US courts have issued opinions to the effect of “It is racist (and therefore illegal) to resist Antifa”. Americans are free to — and one could argue are practically steamy with excitement at the idea of — shooting looters to kill.
2. The sentence “They wish to snuff out any and all dissent; to excommunicate you from public life” is almost 100% content-free. It is quite possible Ben has no memory of writing it. It is roughly the equivalent of “They are bad.” More precisely: “The left wants to silence you.” A proposition that is so well used at this point that — again — I think most of the time the people who lay it out in writing don’t actually remember doing so, just like a person who drives the same way home every day doesn’t remember the actual act of driving home, upon finding themselves pulling into their garage. This complete amnesia anyway would also go to explain how Ben can at once undulate at the idea of crushing an expression of free speech *and* claim that this crushing must happen because free speech and other precious societal values have to be defended.

During these events, the left is dictating the national meta-narrative. There is no Resistance to The Resistance. The assault is overwhelming, and aimed at demoralizing.

Like the incorrect deployment of the term “rout” at the beginning of the article, the use of the phrase “meta-narrative” here shows what a bad, lazy writer thinks a good, effective writer sounds like. “Meta” has no obvious place or meaning here. It is simply meant to dress the sentence up, and it does a very bad and incongruous job of this. It is the lexical equivalent of a fedora: a glaring, obvious failure to impress.

If we are to regroup and figure out a way to turn the tide, we have to first acknowledge the precariousness of the situation, and ask ourselves about the root causes. What we are witnessing is not the consequence of some cringe-inducing appointments, or craven politicians and corporate executives, or crazed kids bowing down to the secular anti-religion of Wokedom, engaged in a collective performative temper tantrum.

These are all symptoms. They are manifestations of the core problem of our culture.

You cannot name a problem in America today that does not stem from it: Not the Supreme Court’s asinine decisions. Not the legislative branch’s chicanery, and cowardice in kicking law to the Supreme Court or the administrative state; nor the executive branch’s being overrun and undermined by said administrative state.

Not the abdication of state and local elected officials to the mob. Not Big Tech’s tyranny. Not the media’s corruption. Not the schools — many of them indoctrination factories churning out individuals who matriculate into the critical institutions that govern our lives.

Ask yourself: If these institutions were comprised of individuals imbued with traditional Judeo-Christian and Western values and principles, and truly educated to be productive and patriotic citizens — raised by two loving and dedicated parents inculcating the same — would we be in such dire straits today?

You can reread it but it won’t become much more natural: despite basing the entirety of this rhetorical structure on there being some positive, identifiable it that is the root cause of all of our nation’s ills, Ben fails to name an it by the end of the section. He implies one: if these ills are all caused by X, and if “having Judeo-Christian and Western values and principles” would erase all of these ills, then it stands to reason that “having Jude-Christian…” = ¬X. So X would be “ having Judeo-Christian and Western values and principles.” But the fact that Ben leaves the reader to do this calculus is impressive. The sheer amount of the whiff here is impressive.

On a more substantial note: Only the most armchair-bound of philosophers are still taken in by the phrase “Judeo-Christian”. Even something as brief as a visit to the relevant Wikipedia page would make this clear. Its a lazy invention of American conservative politics, one that has been consistently rebutted by theologians from both sides. The differences between Jews and Christians are not so minor that they can be elided with a simple hyphen — but more importantly if they are then there’s frankly no reason whatsoever to not also include Muslims under whatever new label arises. Judeo-Christian-Muslim or something like that. The same vague things writers like Ben point to to characterize the Judeo-Christian tradition — monotheism, a belief in an abstract moral law, the ability of God’s gift of reason to empower our lives — yeah, those all belong to Islam too.

If I wrote then that literally every major problem in America today comes down to us from abandoning the worldly, humane, pagan tradition of Rome and Greek, I would rightly sound as stupid as Ben, but I would actually be on stronger evidentiary footing. Go figure.

If you do not have a virtuous people, all else fails.

“If I were a commonwealth I would simply have good, rather than bad, citizens — thereby ensuring political stability.”

Ok thanks!

In 2020 we are witnessing what feels like the culmination of these failures. At the same time, things can get much worse. After all, what was unimaginable on January 1 is now routine on June 19.

Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have pervaded every institution because they have pervaded every part of our culture. We are reaping the poisonous fruits.

We face many near and medium-term challenges. But in so doing, we will merely be grappling with the consequences of the initial failure in our culture.

The biggest question lovers of this country have to answer is: How do we change this culture? Each and every one of us will have to ask of ourselves: What are you prepared to do?

So continuing the whiff from earlier: we are completely left to our own devices to infer what these insidious ideas are. Maybe Ben was on his way to lunch when he was sending this in? Maybe he got bored? I know I’m bored of him. If this article were a body of water it wouldn’t be deep enough to touch your ankles.