Rod Dreher's Blog, page 21

This is beyond infuriating:

EXCLUSIVE: In in-custody phone calls, 26 y/o transgender child molester Hannah Tubbs boasts about not having to serve prison time or register as a sex offender before being sentenced to 2 yrs in a juvenile facility after LA DA @GeorgeGascon refused to prosecute Tubbs as an adult. pic.twitter.com/n9KesabvXE

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) February 21, 2022

Tubbs was convicted of sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in a Denny’s bathroom in Palmdale in 2014 at age 17.

In one call in November 2021 while in LA County custody, Tubbs makes extremely crude, disparaging remarks about the girl and his sexual desires for her at the time.

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) February 21, 2022

Here’s a link to the webpage for Bill Melugin’s story.

Liberal DA George Gascon — one of a slew of progressive district attorneys whose campaigns have been financially supported by billionaire George Soros — released a statement saying that in the wake of the Tubbs case, he is backtracking on his progressive approach to cases like this one.

Meanwhile, New York City continues to reel from criminal assaults on innocent people. Here’s Nicole Gelinas writing about the savagery unleashed on her city’s streets:

Kristal Bayron-Nieves, Michelle Go, Dorothy Clarke-Rozier, and now, Christina Yuna Lee—four women, all making their way in the big city, all murdered by strange men in the first six weeks of 2022. Over the past two years, New York City has become increasingly unsafe for everyone—men, women, and children. But an explosion of horrific male violence against women in public spaces is a particularly acute sign of the city’s failures. Textbook urban policy holds that cities thrive only when women feel safe in public spaces; no sane woman feels safe in New York right now.

Early Sunday morning, Lee, a 35-year-old producer at a digital-music firm, took a cab home to her Chinatown apartment after a night out. A stalker followed her from the curb, trapped her in her apartment, and stabbed her to death. Just a week earlier, Clarke-Rozier, 50, walking to her job at a Brooklyn supermarket, was stabbed to death by another stranger. Clarke-Rozier died just a month after Go, a 40-year-old professional at Deloitte, was pushed to death in front of a Times Square subway train. Just a week before that, on January 9 of this year, Bayron-Nieves, a 19-year-old aspiring nurse, was shot to death during her shift at a Harlem Burger King. The four killings represent an acceleration of a trend that emerged last year: Maria Ambrocio, a 58-year-old nurse, killed last October in Times Square; Than Than Htwe, 58, a garment worker, pulled to death down a set of subway steps last August. Though no woman should feel safe in the city, Asian-American females are in particular peril: Lee, Go, Ambrocio, and Htwe were all of Asian descent.

Even with New York’s City’s overall murder rate up 53 percent in two years— from 319 in 2019 to 488 last year—these murders are especially dislocating. In each case, there was nothing the victim could have done to prevent her death. There’s no excuse for any murder, but most murder victims, now as always, are men who know their killers, and many, if not most, are engaged in high-risk criminal activity. Nor does robbery appear to be the motive behind any of these recent murders, save for Bayron-Nieves’s. (Ambrocio’s killer was allegedly fleeing an earlier robbery). Even in Bayron-Nieves’s case, the alleged killer shot and killed her after she had complied with all his requests, implying an extra level of malice. It’s impossible to recall so many fatal stranger-on-stranger attacks on women in such a short time, seemingly motivated by nothing other than misogynistic and, perhaps, racial hatred. We all like to think we have some measure of control over our own public safety, but what could any of these women have done to remain alive, besides not go outside?

The same cannot be said of New York State and City, however, which could have prevented at least half of these deaths. In the latest instance, Lee’s alleged killer, 25-year-old Assamad Nash, has a disturbing criminal history. Last year, Nash allegedly punched a stranger in a subway station near the scene of Sunday’s murder so hard that the victim needed four stitches—one of four crimes for which he faced arrest in 2021. Late last year, too, he allegedly damaged or destroyed dozens of Metrocard machines at three subway stations, crimes for which he was arrested this January. These crimes aren’t minor: attacking someone with no provocation is a deeply antisocial behavior, as is wanton destruction of public property. Yet Manhattan prosecutors in both the Cy Vance era, ending last year, and Alvin Bragg era, starting this year,  Nash only with misdemeanors, and he went free on “supervised release.” Where was the supervision? Similarly, Go’s alleged killer, 61-year-old Martial Simon, has a long history with state and city criminal-justice and mental-health bureaucracies. Five years ago, he told mental-health officials at a state hospital that he would push someone in front of a train someday, according to the New York Times—but they let him go. Ambrocio’s alleged killer, Jermaine Foster, was free on no bail after an earlier incident, having been accused of forcibly touching a stranger near Times Square a month earlier. Again, such behavior isn’t an incidental, isolated crime; it’s a sign of pathology.

Read it all. This is a sign of a society so debilitated by liberal pieties that it is unwilling to defend itself, and its most vulnerable people.

For years now, we have been informed that the United States is a “carceral state,” one that locks up a shameful number of its people — especially black men — because it is racist. This is Critical Race Theory in action: the idea that if there is a disproportionate number of people of color punished by the criminal justice system, that is prima facie evidence of racism.

It’s a lie, and a lie that is costing people their lives. It is certainly true that a wildly disproportionate number of black men are sent to prison for violent crimes. But you know what else is true? That a wildly disproportionate number of black men commit violent crimes! There are reasons for that, not least among them the collapse of the black family, but the answer to this problem cannot be going soft on crime. James/Hannah Tubbs is not black, obviously, but he still benefits from the soft-on-crime sentimentality of liberal DAs and the people who vote for them.

A society in which so many people commit criminal violence may be said to be a failed one, or at least a failing one. But you know what’s worse? A society that will not hold such criminals accountable for their crimes. If we have to double the number of prisoners, that is the price we have to pay for safety and order. Certainly we have to get these liberal DAs out of office, but we also have to purge ourselves of this maniac idea that punishing criminals is distasteful. What you tolerate, you encourage.

Do liberals think that we sent, and send, so many people to jail because we are a cruel, racist society? Yes, I think they do. Liberals have a hard time holding the anti-social responsible for their actions. We can either have a proper civilization, or we can have liberal approaches to crime. Nobody likes prisons, but what is the alternative?

In his Fox report on this Tubbs scumbag, he says Tubbs’s mocking, salacious comments about the ten-year-old girl he assaulted were so offensive that the station declines to air them. I hope he will change his mind about that. The public needs to know the kind of people who actually benefit from this crackpot liberal approach to criminal justice. It does not need to be protected from knowing the truth about the kind of evil men of which men like Hannah Tubbs are capable.

Evil is real. I don’t like “the carceral state” either, but if the alternative is a state of violent anarchy, in which violent criminals run rampant, I prefer the carceral state, and it’s not even close. If it means a disproportionate number of black men go to prison, that’s a pity, but the alternative is absolutely unacceptable. Lock these vermin up, throw away the key, and I’ll happily pay higher taxes as the cost of protecting civilization. How many more innocent people have to suffer, and even die, to protect progressive illusions about human nature?

The post Up With The ‘Carceral State’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

I mentioned the former Catholic traditionalist Steve Skojec’s crisis of faith in my St. Gellert post earlier today. I see that Steve has posted now a new essay to his Substack talking about how Jordan Peterson’s teaching helped him when no Church figure’s did. It’s a free public post, so you can read it. My buddy and TAC podcast partner Kale Zelden makes an appearance. Excerpts:

I can’t tell you for certain when Kale, the formerly-online friend who invited me to Peterson’s Providence talk, first started interacting with me. If I had to guess, I’d say it was 2018 or 2019. At first, he was a reader of mine who pinged me with some interesting thoughts, sharing them on Twitter in a way that was provocative without being snarky — a rare enough thing to take notice of. Later, we transitioned to more in-depth conversations via private message. Then, one day, he practically reached through my screen and grabbed me with an email that I can say, without exaggeration, changed my life. It was in August of 2020, while I was still in the thick of running 1P5. For the previous six months, I had found myself increasingly alienating large segments of my long-cultivated audience with decidedly non-tribal takes on current events. My faith was crumbling, and I was trying to hold on through sheer force of will. The answers I was finding within Catholicism no longer satisfied. I had no idea what to do. My sense of identity was dissolving, and I was rapidly losing my sense of direction.

When his email came, it was within 48 hours of my experience of a turning point from a personal crisis so deep it had almost cost me everything. My marriage, which had almost ended, was inexplicably saved in a moment of unearned forgiveness. My perspective on the expectations I had for “the way things should be” had been blown apart. I had been shown mercy and love I had not deserved. If my heart had been hardened before, the churn of my life and the nascent epiphany that love mattered more than rules, doctrines, or even order itself had broken me open, and I was vulnerable and ready for unexpected ideas. The ground was fertile for new seed. The old me was dead. I was ready for what was next.

Kale knew none of this, of course. He had been pondering the online discourse, and was increasingly concerned with what he saw — and thought maybe I might be the guy willing to address it. He had no idea that his observations were about to take me from the dark wood in which I had found myself and show me a pathway out. I have come to think of him as the Virgil to my Dante, at this phase of my life. He has helped to lead me out of my particular Inferno and on to higher things.

In the email, which to an outsider may seem like an unlikely catalyst for profound metanoia, Kale made an appeal to look outside of trad-world bubble I had spent the better part of two decades within for some sense-making help:

A few years back I stumbled upon the Jordan Peterson/Kathy Newman clip on Rod Dreher’s blog. I was intrigued by the interchange, and enjoyed his calm demeanor in the face of an obvious attempt at a smear job. But honestly, bill C16 wasn’t really my jam. 

But as I started to watch his videos, along with other members of the group dubbed the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), I lamented that this group (Peterson, Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying, Eric Weinstein, James Lindsey, Joe Rogan, et al) has almost zero interaction with my (our) own tribe of Trad Catholics.

There is virtually no one in the Catholic Trad-ish world with the capacity and/or stones to actually remain elastic enough to learn from the IDW without resorting to some kind of of knee-jerk response along the lines of “well in sacrum sacrum sacrum, the church condemns this as wrong-think,” etc.

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the farcical poke at pontifical prooftexting in his last sentence. This had been my world for many years, and I was rather proficient at citing the proverbial Sacrum Sacrum Sacrum myself. But it wasn’t cutting it anymore. A lot of the harshness in my persona, as well as the anxiety, the fear, the guilt, the triumphalism, the frustration I dealt with on a daily basis — a jumble of emotions and ideological positions one would be hard-pressed to see as in any way positive — were very directly a result of the traditionalist ideology I had imbibed. It was a belief system that perpetually saw itself as a tiny, persecuted minority (within an already persecuted minority, namely Catholicism itself) whose members were perpetually on the brink of defeat, and were just waiting for divine reinforcements who never came. A cultivated hostility with not just “the world” but the larger Church meant seeing enemies everywhere, criticizing everything and everyone, all the time, and encountering daily existence with the sort of hawk-eyed search for threats that leads to seeing existential danger in the flicker of every shadow. It’s a kind of self-inflicted PTSD — which feels oddly normal, if you’ve already got the real kind in some form — and it makes you a miserable, trigger-happy sonofabitch.

More:

Being a full-fledged member of Tradistan means your cup is always full. There’s just no room to take in more when you already know everything — or at least, when whichever version of Sacrum Sacrum Sacrum you have in your screenshots folder does. There’s this weird psychological phenomenon in tradland where folks — usually but not always young men —outsource the pride and arrogance they know would be personally sinful to the Church, since She Can Never Be Wrong. They then weaponize this narcissism-by-proxy to glibly condemn anyone who falls short, unconvincingly disguising their rash judgment as a spiritual work of mercy: “I’m just admonishing the sinner/instructing the ignorant, fam.”

But my cup had just been emptied in the most profound and moving of ways. I was done, done, done with the constant negativity, the doom and gloom outlook, the conspiratorial overtones, the fear and anger and judgmentalism, all of it. I had brought that shit home and wielded it on my wife and children. For years. And I had been too blind to see the damage it had done. As I’ve written before, being Catholic didn’t make me a better person. It made me a worse one. And the ideological side of traditional Catholicism, which I’d gone all in on back in 2004, had ‘roided up the problem.

So there I was, having just woken up and realized that nothing was worth this. Not the Church. Not even God. I was not going to be a willfully miserable person for another. single. day. But I still needed to make sense of the world, and suddenly in marches this dude I barely knew from Twitter with answers on a silver platter.

I honestly didn’t realize until I sat down to write this just how profound this coinciding of events actually was.

I’m so pleased to see Kale get some public recognition. He is a very fine, questing orthodox Catholic who always makes me think, and who always leads with common sense and compassion.

Anyway, Skojec goes on to talk about how Jordan Peterson stabilized him, and led him out of a dark hole. You’ll want to go to the essay and see for yourself how JP did this for him. Skojec concludes:

Peterson is a man who has a profound gift for helping us to better understand ourselves, the world around us, and the archetypal stories that make sense of our existence. He is cutting through the noise and the clutter and the chaos of post-modern thought and offering substance and duty and purpose and meaning without sugar coating the reality of suffering, all offered to a world of broken souls who were neglected or abandoned by those who were supposed to care for them and raise them and teach them how to live rightly. He is also, for those overly concerned with such things, a man grappling with Christian belief, as I’ve written about before. But he has to get there via his own path, because he is too honest to simply bend the knee while questions remain.

Read the whole thing. 

Happening now with @kalezelden and @jordanbpeterson pic.twitter.com/YpmvnjIWVx

— Steve Skojec (@SteveSkojec) February 18, 2022

I haven’t gone very far into Jordan Peterson’s work, but I find him to be impressive. I gave his lectures on Genesis a try, and was astonished that this funny-sounding, kind of dorky Canadian psychology professor held me riveted by his discourse on the profundity of the Bible — and the man isn’t even a Christian!

Why is it that Peterson succeeds, especially with young men, when so many Christian pastors fail? Kale wrote about in this 2020 essay on One Peter Five, the Catholic trad website that Skojec founded, but sold last year. Excerpt:

What we [Catholics] are doing isn’t working. We are not winning the war for the culture. We are not even winning the war for the soul of the Church. Meanwhile, civilization is, to borrow a line from Yeats, slouching towards Gomorrah. These days, that slouch is looking more and more like a sprint.

Something needs to give. We need to learn how to see again. It is my hope that for those willing to explore ideas from thinkers who are not exactly safe – men and women who will never survive the endless Catholic purity spiral – we may find a view of our unflattering state that will help us mend the wounds.

Are you a Christian who has improved your spiritual or moral life from paying attention to Jordan Peterson, or any of other IDW figures? If so, would you mind explaining it in the comments section? I’d like to know more. In my relatively limited experience with Peterson, what’s so compelling about him is that he comes across as a relentlessly honest searcher for big-T Truth, not like he’s trying to deliver pat answers to settle questions too quickly, or to reinforce settled teachings.

Take a look at this clip of one of his talks. Maybe what it is about Jordan Peterson is that he is unafraid to talk about the fact that life hurts, that we all suffer. He doesn’t sentimentalize it, or blame others for it — but he does offer us a no-b.s. way through it.

The post Jordan Peterson: Spiritual Father appeared first on The American Conservative.

There will be war in Ukraine. I don’t know how anyone could have watched Russian president Vladimir Putin’s extraordinary extemporaneous speech to his nation just now and conclude otherwise. It was shot through with every grievance in the book, and concluded with him declaring that Russia will recognize two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, creating the pretext for war.

It was a frightening speech, because Putin looked enraged and not fully in control of his emotions. It seemed to me that this has gone beyond any kind of rationality now; it’s personal with him.

What should we do if the Russians invade? I was at a Danube Institute geopolitical conference in Budapest early today, and naturally everybody was talking about Russia and Ukraine. I missed the opening keynote by Tony Abbott, the former prime minister of Australia, but I was told by several people who heard that it was a hawkish anti-Russian stemwinder. I’m not surprised. I was at a small dinner party with him on Friday night, and when Russia-Ukraine came up, Abbott was passionate in his belief that the West can’t let Putin get away with attacking Ukraine.

But what does that mean, exactly? I didn’t hear his proposals today, so I can’t say. But I talked to a bunch of different Hungarians in the coffee break, and every one of them was alarmed. Their general view was that Abbott — whose views on the matter, when I heard them articulated on Friday evening, sounded like a standard Republican senator’s — is wholly unrealistic

“He talked about the moral high ground, but for people like him, the moral high ground is far away from where we live with our families,” one fumed. This person went on about how arrogant the Americans and other Westerners far from the potential battlefield seem. “What do you call it in English when people refuse to see any evidence that doesn’t confirm their beliefs?”

“Epistemic closure?” I said.

“Yes, epistemic closure.” The Hungarian shook her head in disbelief.

“We Hungarians are supposed to be the fascists because we are governed by a prime minister who is a realist,” one Hungarian fumed. “If there is a regional war, it will affect us and our children. We get 80 percent of our gas from Russia. That’s just a fact. Europe gets most of its gas from Russia. What are we supposed to do, freeze?”

Another Hungarian, on the Australian PM: “He lives on an island. He has no idea about what it means to live in a small country that has had to fight for its life for centuries against stronger powers.”

There was more of this. I don’t mean to crack on PM Abbott. Again, I did not hear his speech. But I was really struck by the emotion all these Hungarians had in reaction to it. They had been watching the American discourse about Russia and Ukraine, and were visibly anxious that this whole thing is a game to the US leadership. One Hungarian man said to me in the hallway, “Nobody likes having a bear live in their backyard, but if you have a bear in your backyard, you had better find some way of living with it.”

In a later session, Charles Crawford, former UK ambassador to Poland and to several Balkan countries, gave a compelling presentation about psychology as a weapon of geopolitics. He showed the by now famous clip of the British woman trying to teach Afghan women about the glories of conceptual art:

Crawford said this kind of thing is cited by the Russians as an example of Western decadence. He might have put up an image of Sam “Dog Boy” Brinton on the screen. Look:

Russian state television is now broadcasting a long segment about Biden hiring a drag-queen fetishist to supervise U.S. nuclear waste.

Whatever you think about this person’s private lifestyle, publicizing it is harming America’s image abroad. pic.twitter.com/eA0iEbwg7X

— Clint Ehrlich (@ClintEhrlich) February 19, 2022

Or this:

The utter state of the west pic.twitter.com/IbOS1ICYUX

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) February 21, 2022

The more the world sees of what American life and culture is doing to its young (e.g., 21 percent of Generation Z now identifies as LGBT), the less any sensible peoples will want to have to do with America. We have long thought of ourselves as a light unto the nations, but now we are becoming a flashing neon warning sign.

Crawford then brought up what he called the “Soviet strategy,” which involves playing a weak hand well by telling one’s adversaries that your side is tougher than you can imagine. He showed this video of Putin, back in 2002, answering a reporter’s question about Russia’s war in Chechnya. The reporter asked if he didn’t think that Russia, by going after Islamic militants there with overwhelming force, risked killing the civilian population of Chechnya. Here, in Russian (no subtitles), was Putin’s answer:

Back then, The New York Times translated Putin’s words like this:

“If you want to become a complete Islamic radical and are ready to undergo circumcision, then I invite you to Moscow. We are a multidenominational country. We have specialists in this question as well. I will recommend that he carry out the operation in such a way that after it nothing else will grow.”

The room was silent. Crawford summed up the psychological impact of Putin’s statement like this:

“You Europeans, with your cafes, your nice conference rooms, and the like, that’s very nice for you. But you come to Russia, if you dare.”

“This is not a policy question,” Crawford said. “This is a psychological question.”

Tonight’s long, rambling, angry broadcast by Putin telegraphed the words and images of a Russian leader who is halfway crazy and ready to fight. However true that really is, I think one would be nuts to underestimate him at this point. He might be bluffing — but what if he isn’t? Is the US really willing to risk a shooting war with the Russians over … Ukraine?! A long-suffering country that is on Russia’s border, and has been part of Greater Russia for centuries? I fully agree that Putin should leave Ukraine alone, but come on, this is literally in Russia’s backyard, and we are not under a NATO treaty obligation to defend it from Russian aggression.

Europe doesn’t want to mix it up with Russia over Ukraine, and I don’t blame them. You can blame the Europeans for being weak if you like, but you can’t goad people who do not have the capacity to risk armed conflict with Russia, and who have no material interest in heightening tensions with Russia, to go along with an aggressive US response. I was genuinely moved by the Hungarian responses today. If they were at this particular conference, unless they were media, they were all likely to be conservatives. Hungary borders Ukraine. The Hungarians, having suffered de facto Soviet occupation for forty years, have no love for the Russians. But they also like to keep their own liberty and sovereignty, and their own lives. A conservative, military veteran friend back in the US texts tonight that he’s having it out with his neocon friends and family, who are fuming over Biden’s supposed weakness, and how the US has to stand up for Ukraine’s freedom or be seen as weak, etc. He told me they can’t answer how many American deaths are worth fighting for Ukraine, nor can they wrap their minds around the fact that America shot its wad on these two failed Mideast wars over the past 20 years, and have a military led by a senior officer class who is not held to account for its lies and bad decisions.

In other words, it sounds like these conservatives are living back in 2002, when America was the sole world hyperpower. Guess what? We blew it.

What would happen in Russia wins in Ukraine? That’s the question taken up by this Foreign Affairs essay. Nothing good will come of it, at least not from a Western perspective. It’s going to be extremely costly for Russia, economically, but maybe Putin thinks it will have been worth it to have divided the West and restored Russia to great power status.

In the long run, after a Russian victory, I foresee a new front on the left-wing McCarthyism that progressives have been undertaking these past few years via wokeness. In his new piece, Glenn Greenwald talks about Trudeau’s repression in Canada, and about how liberals refuse to see themselves for what they are: despots. For example, this screenshot from Greenwald’s essay:

And this tweet from a liberal retired Harvard Law school professor who used to be shortlisted as a SCOTUS nominee in a Democratic administration:

Couldn’t ask for a better, or more demented, example illustrating the thesis of this article that western liberals have become a completely despotic movement which, without hyperbole, does not believe in the right of dissent but wants to criminalize it. These people are menaces. pic.twitter.com/q8fea1pMO5

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 21, 2022

I expect to see many establishment Republicans take this line too if Cold War 2.0 kicks off. It’s instinctual — that, and an inability to come to terms with the fact that we are an Empire in decay. Ukrainians are going to pay the price for Putin’s inability to accept Russia’s decline, and America’s determination to use Ukraine to poke the bear. American soldiers who will yet be deployed for more foolish foreign wars will also pay. And, God help them, people in countries caught between these two empires will as well.

Last point: in recent remarks, Putin cited Solzhenitsyn’s words about how Ukraine has always been inextricable from Russia, but he edited out the great man’s belief that nevertheless, the Ukrainians must be free to make their own choices. From a Joseph Pearce essay about Solzhenitsyn and Ukraine:

Although Solzhenitsyn feared the consequences of an independent Ukraine, he respected the right of the Ukrainian people to secede, a right which they duly exercised as the former Soviet Union unraveled. Reiterating his subsidiarist principles he insisted once again that “only the local population … can decide the fate of their locality, of their region, while each newly formed ethnic minority in that locality should be treated with the same non-violence”.

Today, almost six years after his death, Solzhenitsyn’s position is still the only sane and safe solution to the Ukrainian crisis. Those regions of eastern Ukraine which desire to secede from the Ukrainian-dominated west of the country should be allowed to do so. There are already two nations in the de facto sense. It makes sense, therefore, that this de facto reality should be honoured with de jure status. Any other suggested solution is not only unjust but will lead to even greater injustice in the form of war, terrorism and hatred. In this, as in so much else, the voice of the prophet should be heeded.

Maybe the declaration of these new puppet republics in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine is not a pretext for war, but the only way to avoid it. I doubt that very much, but I hope so.

Meanwhile, Beijing eyes Taiwan…

The post Putin’s War, And Ours appeared first on The American Conservative.

That photo above is an image of a statue of St. Gellert (Gerard), one of Hungary’s patron saints. He was an early bishop in Hungary, a Benedictine missionary who was martyred in 1046 when a pagan mob threw him off of that very hill overlooking the Danube from the Buda side. The statue, erected in 1904, shows the saint defiantly brandishing the holy cross. I took that shot yesterday, walking back home to Buda from church in Pest. I found it very moving, especially given that during the Orthodox liturgy, I had been praying for Hungary’s reconversion — only a very small number of people here are churchgoing Christians — and also for neighboring Poland.

Why Poland? Because of this Wall Street Journal story that appeared the other day, which verifies what I have been saying here since I first visited Poland in 2019: that Poland is secularizing very fast, and that within a decade or two, Europe’s most steadfastly Catholic country could have gone the way of Ireland. If you’ve been reading me since back then, you will recall that a Polish Benedictine whom I was told was one of the wisest priests in the country, Father Wlodzimierz Zatorski (who died in 2020 of Covid, I’m sorry to say), affirmed all of this to me when I met him in 2019. When I asked him what was to blame for the collapsing state of the Polish Catholic Church among the young — aside from the secularist currents from the West washing over postcommunist Poland, and from anger over the abuse scandals — he said, “The vainglory of the bishops.” His English wasn’t strong enough to explain to me what that meant, but in talking about it with a Polish Catholic friend later, I was told that the Polish bishops of the postcommunist era assumed that everything would be just fine from here on out, and they lived like presumptious princes.

I had also been praying, as I often do, for Christianity back home in America, whose decline I have been publicly mourning for years, and attempting to resist in my last two books. I don’t follow the Evangelical world closely, but lately I’ve been hearing from some of my Evangelical friends that things are going very badly among them. Things are continuing to fragment over post-Trump fallout, as well as Critical Race Theory, and the liberalization and/or secularization of the young. I have no recent data or credible anecdotes about my own communion, the Orthodox churches, because we are so small, but last week brought a bunch of depressing information from my Catholic sources and others, about Catholicism in the US.

First, this from the political scientist Ryan Burge. What the hell happened to American Catholics?! There is decline in every group, but look at the plummet among Catholics:

This is the share who believes that pornography should be illegal.

1973 vs 2021

Evangelical: 47% to 41%
Mainline: 48% to 33%
Black Protestant: 28% to 25%
Catholic: 42% to 25%
Other Faith: 44% to 29%
No Religion: 15% to 10% pic.twitter.com/Xf53RyVtJH

— Ryan Burge (@ryanburge) February 19, 2022

The historian Bill Tighe, a Byzantine Catholic layman, sends out a daily compendium of religion stories and commentaries that pique his interest, usually Catholic ones. Last Wednesday’s newsletter was pretty depressing. Some of its highlights below.

Here’s the veteran Catholic journalist Phil Lawler expressing deep suspicion about the Vatican’s upcoming “Synod on Synodality,” which he suspects will be used to ram through liberalization. And here is a chilling piece of analysis by Catholic writer Michael Hichborn on how the synod is likely to be hijacked. This excerpt begins with a quotation from the official synodal handbook:

2.1 Who can participate?

For this reason, while all the baptized are specifically called to take part in the Synodal Process, no one – no matter their religious affiliation – should be excluded from sharing their perspective and experiences, insofar as they want to help the Church on her synodal journey of seeking what is good and true. This is especially true of those who are most vulnerable or marginalized.

The process is that the baptized will hold sessions under the direction of their diocesan bishops who will then synthesize these sessions and submit this to the Vatican which will then prepare a document for the bishops to discuss in 2023.

Heretics, schismatics, apostates, non-Catholics, and even atheists are allowed to participate, and though they are not counted as part of the sensus fidelium, their presence not only poses a threat to poorly formed members of the Faith, but actually affords an open door for radical and unprecedented changes.

Can you believe that? It’s insane.

There’s more. Here’s a link to a story in America, the Jesuit magazine, about a heretical gay priest who openly dissents from authoritative Church teaching on homosexuality, and who teaches his students at Fordham University, where he holds an endowed chair, to do the same. Excerpt:

At Fordham, a Jesuit university, Father Massingale teaches a class on homosexuality and Christian ethics, using biblical texts to challenge church teaching on same-sex relations. He said he came to terms with his own sexuality at 22, upon reflecting on the book of Isaiah.

“I realized that no matter what the church said, God loved me and accepted me as a Black gay man,” he said.

…

Father Massingale has a different vision of the church: one where Catholics enjoy the same privileges regardless of sexual orientation.

“I think that one can express one’s sexuality in a way that is responsible, committed, life giving and an experience of joy,” he said.

… Father Massingale remains optimistic about gradual change in the Catholic Church because of Pope Francis and recent signals from bishops in Europe who expressed a desire for changes, including blessing same-sex unions.

“My dream wedding would be either two men or two women standing before the church; marrying each other as an act of faith and I can be there as the official witness to say: “Yes, this is of God,” he said after a recent class at Fordham. “If they were Black, that would be wonderful.”

How can a Church that not only permits a priest like that to preach and teach, but that also valorizes his heresy, be said to be serious about following Christ? I don’t get it. The truth is, nobody in authority cares to stop it.

My friend Steve Hutchens, a senior editor at Touchstone and a lifelong Protestant, writes this response, which I publish with his permission:

It is immeasurably sad to watch the Catholic Church I have known it in its death throes.  It is very much Fr. Reardon’s beached whale, a truly magnificent beast dying prey to every hostile force, and now, as several authors have noted, “the world’s largest liberal Protestant denomination.”  If I ever forgot the debt I owe to Catholics, this latest list of articles, all by Catholics in the vestibule of the house of mourning, has thrust it back upon me.

Traditionalist Catholics, sure on unshakeable principle that their Church is the True One and cannot be overthrown, ignore the Protestant experience with progressivism (they are, after all, only heretics experiencing the inevitable), and do not recognize that by the time the power structures of their church are in the hands that they are–that the Synod on Synodality with its attendant premises can move forward with papal approval–and their third estate (not just the pope and bishops) is as modernized and corrupted as it is, the Church is past recall.  There are, I believe, answers for this for the preservation of the faith, but none of them are “Catholic answers,” for the Roman mistakes (in the eyes of this Protestant), principally on the development of doctrine and the Roman papacy) are very old, and their correction unthinkable to the only people with sufficient insight and moral courage to recognize the problem.

I know Steve, and he really does mean it when he mourns what is happening to the Catholic Church, falling apart not under outside persecution, which it has withstood for many centuries, but from inner decadence. I think his last line is achingly tragic. He’s talking about how those within the Church who perceive the collapse around them are unable, because of their theological and ecclesiological convictions, to do what might arrest the decline.

Of course theologically orthodox Catholics will resist that conclusion, and I don’t want to argue the point here. I am no longer a Catholic, and do not share the Latin Church’s opinion on papal authority. I will say, though, that I don’t understand Catholic conservatives who rage against Pope Francis for making bad use of the authority that the Church has given popes. I mean, I completely understand their anger, but I don’t understand how a faithful orthodox Catholic can be so militantly against this or any pope, and still be faithful to what the Roman magisterium teaches about the papacy. When I was a Catholic, I wasn’t quite an ultramontanist, but I wasn’t far from it, given the moral qualities of Pope John Paul II (I was only two months away from formally converting to Orthodoxy when Cardinal Ratzinger was named Pope, and I shed not a few tears over leaving him, as he is one of my heroes). Were I a Catholic today, I would be in serious despair over the papacy and what it means for the Church.

I don’t take the least satisfaction in any of this. It would be a hardhearted and even vainglorious Christian of any communion who took pleasure in the agonies of any other church. I don’t even feel that way about the liberal Mainline Protestant churches, because even though I am confident that their decline follows naturally from their liberalization, every single one of us faces very difficult times now and in the immediate future.

I hope, though, that Christians who have denounced my Benedict Option idea will reconsider it in light of the rapidly worsening situation. It is not a “head for the hills” retreat, as shallow critics have claimed, nor is it a counsel of surrender, as other equally shallow critics have said. It is rather a way of deep resistance that must be followed in addition to resisting through political means. Before he died, Father Zatorski launched a Benedict Option organization in Poland, because he agreed with me that the long-term survival of the faith depended on rebuilding the Church from within, through small communities of committed faithful. While it is important to have political power, in part to protect religious institutions and believers, that power means nothing if the Church is hemorrhaging believers. For example, the Church of England is established, but it is likely on its last legs, because so very few Anglicans in the motherland of Anglicanism believe anymore. If you place all your bets on Christian political power, what happens when you start losing elections? And if you were able to establish Christian rule via tyrannical means — say, imposing an integralist state upon an unwilling population — what good would it do you if the churches were empty? Worldly power does not save souls. St. Benedict offers us a basic model of faithful resistance, I believe, one that lay Christians of all kinds — Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants — would do well to study and adapt to our own particular traditions and situations.

What else is there? If you know, please say, because we are all in this crisis together.

I want to share with you a searing essay by Steve Skojec, once a prominent Traditionalist Catholic commentator, but now a man who is suffering a terrible crisis of faith. It appeared last month on his Substack newsletter. I have never met Steve, but we have corresponded for the past few years. I first reached out to him when I observed that he was going the same way I was going back in 2004, burning out from my anger at the corruption in the Catholic Church. I told him back then that I still believe that my anger was justified, but that it ended with me losing my ability to believe in Catholic Christianity. I cautioned him to be aware that this is where he was headed too, and if I could help him in any way to hold on to his faith, please just ask. I told him that I would not  take advantage of his suffering to make a pitch for Orthodoxy, but that I felt his pain acutely as a brother in Christ who had been exactly where he was at the time, and wanted to help him. Steve responded in a friendly way, and we have been occasional correspondents since then.

It all happened like I feared. Now Steve hasn’t renounced Catholicism, exactly, but he has ceased to practice it for the time being. He explains it all in that essay. Steve was raised Catholic, and was deeply involved in the Legion of Christ, the powerful ultraconservative Catholic religious clerical and lay order whose revered founder was, it turns out, demonically corrupt. In his essay, he talks about how that played out in his own life (he was once a seminarian of the Legion):

This conversation was the beginning of a series of discussions that I have begun thinking of as “the Catholic ‘Me Too’ movement.” It’s the thing where you talk to other people about your bad experiences, and suddenly you see the light go on in their eyes, and they sit up and say, “Wait, that happened to you too? I thought it was just me!” And then what seemed like an anomaly turns quickly into a pattern.

More:

So why this stroll down (unpleasant) memory lane?

Because I feel like I’m right back there again. Ever since I wrote Against Crippled Religion, everything has changed. I pushed back against the institution, I said “to hell with your rules, I’m talking about the bad stuff you’re doing,” and almost instantly, I’m on the outside looking in. The whisper campaigns, the gossip, the attempts to destroy my reputation, they all started right back up again. This time, they weren’t an organized attempt to circle the pedophilic wagons, but the traditionalist tribe pushing me towards exile, one “last” big purity spiral in an endless string of purity spirals.

It was deeply telling to me that nobody in trad media I wasn’t already working with at 1P5 offered a word of unsolicited support when I outlined my struggles.

You know who did? Karl Keating and Jimmy Akin and Dave Armstrong and Dawn Eden Goldstein and a bunch of other people who either ignore or actively criticize me most of the time. People from the Patheos crowd, people who prefaced their emails with disclaimers like, “I don’t agree with a lot of what you say, but I just wanted you to know that I understand and I’m praying for you.”

You see, I don’t think I wanted to admit it to myself, but I replaced one cult with another one. I told myself, when I left the Legion, that I had to learn to find my identity in the Church as a whole, not in this or that religious movement. But the fact is, traditionalism is not the Church as a whole. It is, on the one hand, a top-level category for folks who just want reverent liturgy, better sacramental forms, and more nourishing devotional lives. I have no argument with these people. I agree with them, or I wouldn’t have championed this stuff for most of the past 20 years.

But it’s also an ideology, full of hubris and vitriol and negativity and gotcha journalism and conspiracy theorizing and vice masquerading as virtue. “I’m going to be a complete asshole to you but label it ‘admonishing the sinner’ so I can consider it a spiritual work of mercy.”

And so when you see me railing against trads, that is what I’m going after. Trad culture, especially online trad culture, is dominated by this type. (For those who say it doesn’t happen in real life, you’re wrong. A well-established trad priest I know once took me aside and said the reason he doesn’t do more coffee hours after Mass is because they inevitably turn into “trad bitch sessions.”) It’s toxic, it builds itself up primarily by tearing others down, it’s adversarial and contrarian about everything, and it actively cultivates hostility with anything not perceived as ideologically pure.

I didn’t get to the top of that particular heap without knowing how it works. People who tell me it doesn’t need to wake up.

For those who don’t know, Steve was the founder of One Peter Five, one of the most influential trad websites. He sold it last year; it is still going strong. He continues:

But I also know I’ve offended a lot of people who used to support me, including financially, by going after tradistan all the time. And if you’re one of the good ones, I owe you an apology. I’m not meaning to hit out at you, or your desire to fulfill your obligation to God in the best way possible, or to give your children the best shot at heaven. But look at what rises to the top of the thought leader charts in the traditionalist movement: panderers, malcontents, and shit-slingers. People who prey on your justifiable fear, and need to keep you anxious and riled up so you keep reading or watching. “Did you see what the pope did now” is a solid business model. I know. And when I realized what I was doing, I had to stop. Even when it’s true, it’s NOT HELPING ANYONE BE A BETTER PERSON.

I was desperate to separate myself from these people, and from the LARP some of them are trying to create, and so I kicked off, hard, to get some space from their orbit.

But that leaves me adrift. It doesn’t change my opinion that the post-conciliar Church is a failed experiment that is dying before our eyes and holds no real appeal for people serious about religion. It doesn’t change my opinion that this pope is a moral and theological monster who has called into question the very dogmas of the Church on some critically important matters. It doesn’t change my opinion that the old Mass is objectively superior to the new, or that the older sacramental forms more clearly convey the grace they attempt to signify and institute, or that a lot of the older Catholic ethos was better.

But not all of it was.

A lot of it was dour, and dire, and debilitating. I’d like to talk more about that in a future post, since this one is already rather long.

For my part, I’ve totally lost faith in the Catholic Church’s ability to be believed at face value. I know it might be as right as I always thought it was, but I don’t know how to find a path to making sense of that when those put in charge of the Church, given authority by God himself, are doing the most to undermine its very teachings and sacramental life. Some guy once said something about how a house divided cannot stand, and a lot of people thought he was onto something.

I’ve also come to realize that my belief in God was entirely predicated upon my trust of the Church telling me a) that it was true b) who he was and c) what that meant I had to do. It wasn’t because I think he’s self-evident, or because I feel that he loves or cares about me, or that we can possibly know what he wants with any degree of certitude. I took for granted all of these things because the Church told us he left them in charge, and that was that.

And now that the trust is gone, I realize the faith I thought I had was mostly illusory. And so yes, without the solid ground of belief firmly beneath my feet, I’m questioning everything actively, and openly, because like with the Legion, I feel like I’ve been played. They saw someone eager and zealous and took advantage of me and now my life is more than halfway done, my best years are gone, and they’ve almost all been given to the service of an insufferably corrupt institution that didn’t even make me a better person. That’s the thing I can’t get over. I’ve been a better man, a better husband, a better father, a more decent and loving human being since I stopped actively practicing the Catholic Faith than I ever was when I was receiving the sacraments regularly. If they are supposed to transform our lives, how does that even work? And why is it that so many of the nastiest people I encounter are overtly devout in their religious practice?

Of course, I’m not supposed to be saying any of this out loud. Over and over, people tell me I shouldn’t be airing my doubts and grievances in public. Just like the Legion, the Church has inculcated a terror of “scandal” in us, as though any grown up person with real faith is going to lose it because some dude on the internet says he’s not so sure anymore. And this fear of scandal is enforced by an army of fellow tongue-clickers. But really, all this speaks to is a lack of confidence that the “truths” of the faith can bear scrutiny. If you know they can, you should invite people like me to throw everything I’ve got at it, because I’ll do no damage and the Church will come out smelling like roses, triumphant again, just like always.

Read it all — and subscribe to his Substack. You will learn more about what you need to survive as a Catholic (and not just as a Catholic) from reading the words of this disillusioned Catholic trad than from reading many other more upbeat writers.

Why do I cite the Skojec essay, and at such length? Because it reveals the hard limits of the conservative/traditionalist approach. It speaks, I think, to the “vainglory” of Traditionalism (or religious conservatism) separated from an authentic culture of conversion and discipleship. Every Christian church has this faction in it. Yesterday after liturgy, I had lunch with an Orthodox convert friend who lamented the toxic nature of online conservative Orthodoxy — the kind of people who rant and rave about liberals within the Orthodox Church, and about Christians from other cultures, but who are guilty of what Skojec denounces as “trad bitch sessions.” This is why I stay out of these online circles. It’s not that they are necessarily wrong, at least not most of the time — we really do have a problem within Orthodoxy of those who want to compromise the faith to make it more appealing to the Zeitgeist — but that rather they offer no way out of the crisis. This is perhaps the most painful lesson I learned from the loss of my Catholic faith, and it was why I had to resolve when I came into Orthodoxy in 2006 to do my best to avoid the errors I made as a Catholic.

What were those errors? Principally I trusted in holding the correct thoughts in my head, and being angry at the right enemies. And I trusted in the basic integrity of the Catholic institution. That is, I believed that the solution to the crisis was primarily external: purifying the institution of heterodox elements, and getting the organization in right order. I could not have foreseen back then the coming of a Pope Francis figure, but observing the corruption of the church led even by a saintly man like John Paul II made me aware of the hard limits of my vision. I used to be the kind of Catholic who believed that putting right-believing bishops in place, ones that governed as defenders of Catholic orthodoxy, would be sufficient. I was wrong. It does no good at all to have the right bishops in place, or priests, if they won’t defend orthodoxy, and not just “orthodoxy” (right belief), but also preach and teach discipleship (orthopraxy).

What’s more, I did not reckon sufficiently back then with the failure of the laity (myself included) to desire to live fully Catholic lives. As I have confessed in this space countless times, I really did believe that as long as I held all the magisterially orthodox opinions, I was doing my part. I had placed unwarranted faith in an institutional solution — and so was unprepared when the leadership of the institution was shown by the abuse scandal to be rotten, and incapable of reforming itself. Someone once defined institutional corruption as what happens when people within an institution can perceive the problems, but lack the ability to do anything meaningful about it. All the destruction Pope Francis and his allies are wreaking within Catholicism now would not be possible if the institution — including the laity — were stronger in the faith.

I don’t know specifically how that affects us in Orthodoxy, except to say that Orthodox Christians who believe that going to church and trusting in the Church leadership is sufficient to preserve the faith and pass it on to our children are wrong. For Protestants, the same thing, with the added point that believing that there is a political solution to any of this is delusory. In the late autumn of 2020, a friend in Baton Rouge shared my new book, Live Not By Lies, with his Baptist Bible study group, and said that there is wisdom there for preparing ourselves for what’s to come. He told me that they all blew him off, telling him that they weren’t worried, because President Trump was going to be re-elected, and all would be well. We see how well that plan worked out. But even if Trump had been re-elected, the idea that he or any other president could stop the decay and decline of the Christian faith in the United States is nothing but a way of coping with impotence.

It is a form of vainglory, of pride, of hubris. Here in Hungary, most practicing Christians I know are staunch supporters of the Orban government, and for good reason. But I hope none of them are under the illusion that having a political leadership that is pro-Christian, however necessary in these increasingly anti-Christian times, is anywhere close to sufficient. In a public discussion the other day here in Budapest, a conservative Hungarian friend of mine acknowledged that the churches are weak here in Hungary, but suggested that the cultural Christianity that still exists among Hungarians is a reliable basis for building a political and social order. I responded by saying that’s what someone of my parents’ generation might have said. My mom and dad were not regular churchgoers, but the idea that Christianity would decline in America was literally unthinkable to them. America is Christian, and always would be, whether or not the Drehers participated actively in church life or not. That was totally unrealistic, as we now see — and as Hungarians will soon discover.

The core problem, I think — the one that Steve Skojec discovered, and that Christians of all kinds who can read the signs of the times are discovering — is that most Christians today lack a sense of realism about the state of the churches, about the state of our society, and indeed about themselves as Christians in a post-Christian world. T.S. Eliot famously observed that humankind cannot bear too much reality. Our disinclination to accept the painful realities of our situation today, and to formulate responses based on the world as it is, not as we wish it were, is the main reason, I think, why we Christians are dead in the water as sharks circle. As Skojec writes, when he was in the Legion, he was part of an official culture of denial: just do what we tell you to do, and don’t pay attention to the naysayers, have faith in the leadership — and all will be well. At worst this is a strategy bad men use to cover up their sins; at best, this is a coping strategy.

Today Catholics may place their hope in Christ’s promise that the gates of Hell will not prevail against His church. Yes, he said that, but he did not say that Hell would not prevail against His church in the West. Besides, to see what’s happening in the actually existing Catholic Church, not the Catholic Church of idealistic fantasies, could lead someone to despair about whether Catholic ecclesiological claims are valid. This is what has happened to Steve Skojec.

I don’t believe that Catholicism is correct about the nature of the Church, of course, but I’m not interested in arguing that here. I simply want to point out that resting in an unwarranted faith in institutional solutions is to put the future of the faith at risk. There are countless Christians in every church in the West who believe that everything is going to come round right again if they just sit still and wait it out, because God wouldn’t abandon us, right? What if the truth is that we have effectively abandoned Him, and we don’t know it, because we think that holding the correct opinions — affirming the Catholic magisterium, believing that Jesus is our personal savior, etc. — is all we need to do in this crisis?

I have written many times in the past in this space about the historian Edward J. Watts’s great book The Final Pagan Generation, about the Roman elites of the fourth century who sincerely believed that their paganism would last forever, because Rome had been pagan for many centuries. (Ed West takes up that book in his recent Substack essay.) They did not notice what was happening around them, until it was too late. So it is with us. History is not fated, but the hour for us Christians in the West is very late, and we are still sleeping.

In his must-read diaries, the late Father Alexander Schmemann, an Orthodox priest, often decried the triumphalism of Orthodox Christians, and their vainglorious indifference to the outside world. They put their faith in liturgies, in cassocks, in Tradition, and made idols of these things. In 1977, he wrote:

I realize how spiritually tired I am of all this “Orthodoxism,” of all the fuss with Byzantium, Russia, way of life, spirituality, church affairs, piety, of all these rattles. I do not like any of them, and the more I think about the meaning of Christianity, the more it all seems alien to me. It literally obscures Christ, pushes him into the background

Elsewhere in the Journals:

Once more, I am convinced that I am quite alienated from Byzantium, and even hostile to it. In the Bible, there is space and air; in Byzantium the air is always stuffy. All is heavy, static, petrified. . . . Byzantium’s complete indifference to the world is astounding. The drama of Orthodoxy: we did not have a Renaissance, sinful but liberating from the sacred. So we live in nonexistent worlds: in Byzantium, in Russia, wherever, but not in our own time.

This is the difference between Tradition and Traditionalism. We desperately need Tradition, but too many of us — Orthodox, Catholic, and otherwise — put our faith in an ideology that, in fact, obscures the living Christ. There are Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant versions of this, but the impulse is the same. A Southern Baptist friend told me not long ago that the travails shaking his denomination today have their roots in part in the Southern Baptists’ unwarranted faith in what they believed was the plain meaning of Scripture, but which was in fact a far more historically and culturally determined interpretation of Scripture than they realized. He told me that when he looks around at the institutional Southern Baptist church, he sees a leadership that is completely clueless about the crisis in which it is immersed. In his view, they are Boomers and older Gen Xers whose cultural and religious imaginations are stuck in the late 1980s, and who are generation responses to the crisis based on a world that they understand, but that no longer exists. “Ten years from now, the picture [for Southern Baptists] is going to look very different,” he laments. This is because the leadership of his church is paralyzed by its conservatism (not in the theological sense — my friend is a conservative — but in the sense of being afraid to think outside narrow confines), and has organized its gatekeeper class to keep those who challenge its static vision at bay.

Next month marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of The Benedict Option, which is more relevant now than when it appeared in 2017, and will only grow in relevance, alas. It should be read in conjunction with Live Not By Lies, which is more acute, and deals with the coming persecution of believers who dissent from what I call “soft totalitarianism”; if you doubt the existence of soft totalitarianism, I ask you to look to Canada, which has just announced the rudiments of a social credit system, going after the bank accounts of political dissenters.

There are many things that we small-o orthodox Christians can do now to prepare ourselves for persecution to come, and also to fight the decadence that can and will take us down even if no secularist ever lifts a hand against us. But we first have to live in reality, in our own time, not in the idealized past. This does not mean that we should conform to the Zeitgeist! It does mean, though, that we have to meet the challenges of right here, right now, fighting the war we are actually in, not the one that we wish we were in.

Look, the bishops are not going to save us. Amid the greatest crisis the Catholic Church has faced since the Reformation, the Catholic bishops will soon be meeting in Rome to hold a “Synod on Synodality.” Seriously! The Catholic world in the West, at least, is in collapse, but these bureaucratic divines have been called by Pope Francis to have a big meeting about having meetings. I don’t follow US Orthodox church life outside my own parish, but I have been told by those who do that our bishops are consumed by spiritual torpor. And as I’ve said, I don’t know too much about the specific situation in the various Protestant churches, but I hear from my Protestant friends a lot of gloom about their institutions. I hear from Christian friends in all the churches complaints that they can’t find solid and inspiring leadership. Me, I think it’s probably the case too that we could do with solid and inspiring followership — that is, Christian laity who are eager and willing to be challenged and discipled, not coddled and affirmed in our mediocrity. In any event, we are all consumed by a deadly crisis, and we do not have all the time in the world to deal with it.

I looked up at St. Gellert yesterday, and was inspired by his defiance. The mob killed him, but in the end, Christianity won over Hungary. Where are the statues of the murderers of Bishop Gellert? Yet if the Lord whom Gellert died serving does not live in our hearts and in our lives, Gellert’s statue will not be a call to us to courage and faith, but will be just another historical curiosity, like statues of Greek and Roman deities.

I choose to look upon that image of the martyred bishop as a call to change my life, to abandon spiritual complacency, and allow the Holy Spirit to create in me a heart willing to sacrifice and even to die for Christ, because that is the only way Christ will continue to live within our cultures and civilization. And you?

The post St. Gellert’s Call appeared first on The American Conservative.

One of my liberal readers dings me in the comments over my “obsession” with Hungary. Now, I have been in Hungary since February 2, and will be here through the end of April. It is true that I have written a lot about Hungary, for some easy to explain reasons: 1) What’s happening in Hungary is important to right-of-center politics in Europe and the US; 2) I am actually living in the country, unlike nearly all the Western commenters who offer opinions about the place and its government; 3) earlier this week, I was in a group of visiting Western intellectuals who spent 90 minutes talking with Viktor Orban, Hungary’s leader. That sort of thing doesn’t usually happen in any country, so naturally I wanted to write about it.

It is certainly true that I am passionate about Hungary, and enjoy writing about it. But “obsessed”? I looked up all the posts I’ve written since arriving here. There are twenty-six, in total. I broke them out by category. Not all of them fit into specific categories, but compare and contrast:

Wokeness: nine posts

Canadian trucker protest: four posts

Hungary: five posts 

So, after two weeks spent in Hungary, during which time I met with the Hungarian prime minister, and participated in a conference in which lots of visiting American and western European intellectuals talked about Hungary, resulted in a grand total of 20 percent of my TAC posts being about Hungary. Some obsession!

This is a typical example of how leftists view dissent from their ideological priorities: as a sign of psychological pathology. The issue is not that conservatives talk too much about homosexuality (or race, or gender fluidity, etc.). The point is that conservatives don’t agree with progressives. Therefore, we must be obsessed with the issue. This is a straightforward attempt to manage the discourse to render dissenters as mental defectives.

Here is an example. Pro Publica and the Texas Tribune sound the alarm against crazy right-wingers who are trying to stop or otherwise restrict the presence in school libraries of pro-LGBTQ books, on the grounds that this kind of advocacy is age-inappropriate. Excerpt:

On the campaign trail, the women promised to comb through educational materials for any signs of “indoctrination” in the form of books or lesson plans that they charged promote LGBTQ ideology or what they referred to as critical race theory, a university-level academic discipline based on the idea that racism is embedded in U.S. legal and other structures.

“When my daughter was 4 years old, my parental rights were taken away here at the public library in Hood County,” Graft, who said on the campaign trail that her school-age children did not attend Granbury public schools, told attendees at a GOP forum before the election. “I stood up for my daughter then, and I’ll stick up for our kids now.”

The yearslong journey in Hood County offers a window into the fiercely contentious debates over curriculum and library books that have cropped up across the state and country in recent months. Once-nonpartisan school board races are taking on a decidedly partisan tone, and administrators are now sounding like political operatives.

What these conservative campaigners are doing strikes me as normal democracy. They believe that people should have a say in how public schools educate their children. This is considered by progressives to be a sign of bigoted obsession. Mind you, the conservatives might be wrong — I don’t think they are, but for the sake of argument, let’s consider that they are — but that is beside the point. Pro Publica frames them as menacing bigots for exercising their rights as parents and as citizens. I have no problem with commentary criticizing these efforts. That is also the right and the responsibility of progressive citizens. What I object to is the pathologizing of conservative dissent. 

Some years ago, when the debate (“debate”) about the legalization of same-sex marriage had moved into the mainstream (circa 2005), I was an editorial writer and columnist on The Dallas Morning News. One day, I was discussing with a colleague my view that our newspaper was badly biased in its coverage of the issue, giving little or no space to writing about opposition — this, even though we lived in a conservative, religious part of America.

My colleague, a good guy, had no idea what I was talking about. He agreed that the News was biased against conservatives on this issue, but he thought that was a good thing. He said, “Would you consider us to be unfair if, during the Civil Rights era, we believed we were bound by fairness to give equal time to the Ku Klux Klan?”

He genuinely thought that religious and social conservatives who opposed same-sex marriage were the moral equivalent of the KKK, and should be suppressed. I tried to explain that sexuality is not the same thing as race, but he wasn’t buying it. He wasn’t even buying that someone could in good faith disagree that race and sexual desire were categorically different. His mind was made up. To him, opposition to same-sex marriage could only be a sign of bigotry, which is irrational, and therefore a sign of evil, or at best mental instability.

Back in 2019, the political scientist Zach Goldberg did a deep dive on the Lexis/Nexis database of news stories, checking the frequency in which words and phrases associated with left-wing social justice ideology appeared in the media. Here is a link to his entire Twitter thread. Here’s how it begins (sorry for the profanity, but that’s what he wrote, and you need to see the charts):

It goes on and on; read the entire thread here.

This is plain, irrefutable evidence that the mainstream US media began talking constantly about these issues, to a degree you might even call obsessive. And mind you, this was before the George Floyd spasms of social justice logorrhea! Yet it is conservatives who stand accused of obsessing over these issues. This is gaslighting, straight up.

In the past week, I published three posts here about Sam Brinton, the sadomasochism advocate who is also a nuclear engineer, and a Biden appointee to a senior post in the Department of Energy. As I wrote, Brinton’s out-and-proud genderfluidity and sadomasochism, which includes his wearing female clothes provocatively in his meetings with political leaders, and his being rewarded with a high government post despite this (and maybe even partly because of it), got me accused by some liberal readers of being, yes, obsessed with LGBT. But Brinton, on his website, confirms that he dresses like this in part to force us to talk about it:

See how this works? We are encouraged to talk about this stuff, but only if it is to agree that it is a good thing. Don’t share that view? You’re an obsessive.

So, in the spirit of my Law of Merited Impossibility (“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”), let me offer a new law explaining a core principle of progressive attempts to manage discourse by pathologizing dissent:

The Law of Inverse Pathological Enthusiasm: To a left-wing observer, discussing social justice issues  incessantly from a progressive perspective signifies moral commitment to justice, but talking about them at all from a dissenting point of view is evidence of insane obsession with the topic. E.g., Progressive: “Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay!” Conservative: “Gay?” Progressive: “Why are you so obsessed with homosexuality, you bigoted lunatic?!”

In the Soviet Union, the totalitarian state punished some dissenters by committing them to mental hospitals, on the grounds that only a lunatic could oppose Communism. The same spirit is at work here, among the soft totalitarians of wokeness. I write about this in Live Not By Lies. One of the reasons I talk about Hungary so much is that unlike in the US, Hungary is governed by a conservative party that understands how this stuff works, and is prepared to use the power of the state to do something about it.

UPDATE: A reader writes to say that the Law of Inverse Pathological Enthusiasm applies to how the US media covered Pope John Paul II’s encylical Veritas Splendor. From the Los Angeles Times‘s media columnist, writing in 1995:

Eighteen months ago, the Vatican released a 179-page letter–an encyclical–from Pope John Paul II to the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. It was a complex, tightly reasoned condemnation of moral relativism and situational ethics–a call for strict adherence to the principle that some acts are just plain wrong (“intrinsically evil”) and cannot be justified by extenuating circumstances, no matter how compelling.

The encyclical–Veritatis Splendor (Latin for Splendor of Truth)–is widely regarded as the most important statement of John Paul’s 16-year pontificate, even more important than last month’s Evangelium Vitae (Gospel of Life).

Veritatis Splendor was six years in preparation, and long before its release, global media speculation focused on the sex-related strictures it was expected to invoke. Once it was out–and on front pages worldwide–much of the media continued to focus on its (presumed) sexual emphasis.

But Veritatis Splendor specifically mentioned sexual behavior in only one paragraph. Only twice–once in passing–did it mention birth control.

So why did ABC’s “World News Tonight” devote most of its encyclical report to the sexual issues? Why did the Boston Globe say the encyclical “largely centers on the birth control issue”? Why did Colman McCarthy in the Washington Post dismiss Veritatis Splendor as “a 179-page message ordering Catholics not to use condoms”?

The most obvious explanation is that sex sells. Most journalists know that it’s much easier to interest editors, readers and viewers in a sex story than it is to try to parse this Pope’s scholarly, often obscure and turgid prose.

But many critics say the simple proposition that sex is sexier than religion exposes just one of many structural flaws in the news media. They say these flaws–a propensity for sensationalism, conflict and oversimplification and an ignorance of (and often hostility toward) religion in general and Catholicism in particular–have skewed coverage not only of Veritatis Splendor but of John Paul II’s entire papacy.

They may well be right.

And:

Peter Steinfels, a longtime religion writer now on leave from the New York Times, says the American media generally emphasize the subjects they think they know best–sex and politics–regardless of context; they force even the most nuanced of papal issues into those and other predictable but not necessarily applicable categories–liberals vs. conservatives, traditionalists vs. modernizers, authoritarians vs. free spirits.

The whole gay marriage debate (if you can call it that) was characterized by the media only in terms it could understand. One often heard liberals say things like, “Why haven’t conservatives made an argument against gay marriage other than, ‘The Bible says…’?”  Hey, those arguments were being made all the time, usually by Catholic intellectuals! I was there! But the media did not care. They knew which side they were on, and that was that. If theologians or philosophers wanted to talk about the meaning and function of marriage, they found few if any journalists willing to listen. The entire debate was framed by the media as one of both individual rights and civil rights, period, the end. It was easier to make the case for gay marriage if the only argument your opponents had was, “The Bible says.” So they ignored the theologians and philosophers, and pretended that there was no real argument against gay marriage, only bigotry.

Incidentally, they also claimed that accepting same-sex marriage would not change anything in society, only serve to integrate gays and lesbians into the bourgeois social order. Today, less than a decade after Obergefell, the same movement has added even more accomplishments in its campaign to re-form the American social order around sexual desire. From a new Gallup poll:

Now, if I were to talk about these facts as a great victory for sexual freedom, I would be lauded by the Left, and encouraged to keep spreading the good news. But I think this is very bad news. Therefore, under the Law of Inverse Pathological Enthusiasm, my having brought it up here is evidence that I am an obsessed bigot. See how that works?

The post Law Of Inverse Pathological Enthusiasm appeared first on The American Conservative.

I know some of y’all are getting tired of the Orban/Hungary posts, so let me assure you that they are about to taper off. I’ve been writing a lot about it this week because there has been a big conference on family and childhood at the Matthias Corvinus Collegium here, involving a number of intellectuals from the US and western Europe. As part of the conference (where I appeared on two panels), the speakers (about 40 of us) were taken over to the Prime Minister’s office for a 90-minute session with Viktor Orban. He came out wearing dad jeans, and answered everybody’s questions, on the record. (I wrote about it here.)

As I anticipated, the visitors who had never been around PM Orban were buzzing later, along the lines of that is not what I expected. One of those visitors was my friend Josh Hammer, the conservative opinion editor of Newsweek, who today published a column about it. Excerpts:

I’m writing from Budapest, the beautiful, Danube-bestriding Hungarian capital. Hungary, though a faraway land and modest in both size and population, has played an outsize role in the American conservative conscience for the past half-decade or so. After just a few days, it is not difficult to understand why. Hungary, under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party, is a real-life experiment in government under a framework of “national conservatism.” Lessons for American conservatives are clear and legion.

Western media typically covers Orbán in hysterical fashion, accusing him of autocracy, crypto-fascism or outright thuggery. It is difficult to believe that any of these left-wing keyboard warriors have ever met Orbán, much less spent any time with him. I spent a couple hours standing directly next to him earlier this week, when he met with a small group of visiting media, think-tankers and other public figure types. That meeting was illuminating.

From firsthand experience, I can attest that the prime minister is nothing like the caricature the media portrays him as. He is personally quite funny, gregarious and engaging, and he handled even critical questions with aplomb. Perhaps most surprising for blue-checked Twitterati types who view him as a power-hungry, barbaric European dictator, he is also a genuine conservative intellectual. Orbán spent time at Oxford, and he dedicates one day every week to reading up and immersing himself in substantive political reading material. To borrow a popular online phrase, he has “done the reading.”

This is exactly the impression I had the first time I met him in a similar situation a few years back. You can love or hate Viktor Orban, or somewhere in between, but if you spend significant time with him, and in this country, you can’t deny that the image Western media and liberal intellectuals paint of him is very far from the truth. That is not to say that he is unproblematic, but simply that American conservatives ought to realize that the image they get of Hungary is about as reliable as the one they would get of The New York Times covering Alabama. Libs who read this blog always complain that I’m being paid to say good things about Hungary (because I’m here for the second time on a fellowship). For one thing, the stipend is enough to live on and buy plane tickets back, but I would make as much if I stayed back in the US for these three months away and gave my usual speeches. For another, these libs simply cannot imagine that an otherwise smart and worldly person could come to Hungary and actually like it. Since last summer, I’ve been telling my conservative friends both here and in America that they should figure out ways to get more American conservatives to Hungary to see the place, meet conservative leaders (Orban and others), and let the country speak for itself.

More from Hammer:

Hungary under Orbán rejects the illusion of liberal neutrality, recognizing, as this column has previously phrased it, “that a values-neutral liberal order amounts to a one-way cultural ratchet” toward leftism and progressivism. As euroskeptical Hungary and other like-minded Central and Eastern European nations, such as Poland, have learned all too well, it is impotent to defensively plead “live and let live”-style tolerance from imperious liberal European Union overlords in Berlin and Brussels. Rather, the only way for traditionalist nations like Hungary and Poland to push back against the EU‘s progressive, globalist vision of the good, the true and the beautiful is by offering an affirmative counter in the form of its own conservative, nationalist vision of the good, the true and the beautiful.

Read it all. Hammer, who is Jewish, also talks about the false allegation that Orban’s government is anti-Semitic. I have spoken to Jews here who dislike Orban, because they are secular liberals, but who have told me that it’s simply false to call him anti-Semitic. Similarly, when I appeared with staunch liberal Orban critic Peter Kreko onstage at an ideas festival last summer, he began by telling the audience that as much as he opposes the Orban government, it’s simply foolish and wrong to call it “fascist”.

Compare Hammer’s column to this new one from David Brooks, an extended lament over the decline of the liberal American-led world order. I’m going to quote some key excerpts, and respond later:

The normal thing to say is that the liberal world order is in crisis. But just saying that doesn’t explain why. Why are people rejecting liberalism? What weakness in liberalism is its enemies exploiting? What is at the root of this dark century? Let me offer one explanation.

Liberalism is a way of life built on respect for the dignity of each individual. A liberal order, John Stuart Mill suggested, is one in which people are free to conduct “experiments in living” so you wind up with “a large variety in types of character.” There’s no one best way to live, so liberals celebrate freedom, personal growth and diversity.

Many of America’s founders were fervent believers in liberal democracy — up to a point. They had a profound respect for individual virtue, but also individual frailty. Samuel Adams said, “Ambitions and lust for power … are predominant passions in the breasts of most men.” Patrick Henry admitted to feelings of dread when he contemplated the “depravity of human nature.” One delegate to the constitutional convention said that the people “lack information and are constantly liable to be misled.”

Our founders were aware that majorities are easily led by ambitious demagogues.

More:

While the Constitution guarded against abuses of power, the founders recognized that a much more important set of civic practices would mold people to be capable of being self-governing citizens: Churches were meant to teach virtue; leaders were to receive classical education, so they might understand human virtue and vice and the fragility of democracy; everyday citizens were to lead their lives as yeoman farmers so they might learn to live simply and work hard; civic associations and local government were to instill the habits of public service; patriotic rituals were observed to instill shared love of country; newspapers and magazines were there (more in theory than in fact) to create a well-informed citizenry; etiquette rules and democratic manners were adopted to encourage social equality and mutual respect.

And:

Will the liberals of the world be able to hold off the wolves? Strengthen democracy and preserve the rules-based world order? The events of the past few weeks have been fortifying. Joe Biden and the other world leaders have done an impressive job of rallying their collective resolve and pushing to keep Putin within his borders. But the problems of democracy and the liberal order can’t be solved from the top down. Today, across left and right, millions of Americans see U.S. efforts abroad as little more than imperialism, “endless wars” and domination. They don’t believe in the postwar project and refuse to provide popular support for it.

The real problem is in the seedbeds of democracy, the institutions that are supposed to mold a citizenry and make us qualified to practice democracy. To restore those seedbeds, we first have to relearn the wisdom of the founders: We are not as virtuous as we think we are. Americans are no better than anyone else. Democracy is not natural; it is an artificial accomplishment that takes enormous work.

Then we need to fortify the institutions that are supposed to teach the democratic skills: how to weigh evidence and commit to truth; how to correct for your own partisan blinders and learn to doubt your own opinions; how to respect people you disagree with; how to avoid catastrophism, conspiracy and apocalyptic thinking; how to avoid supporting demagogues; how to craft complex compromises.

Read it all.

Look, David is a friend, and I sincerely respect and care for him, despite our political disagreements. Any criticism I ever make of his writing (or that of any other personal friend, ever) is done within the bounds of friendship. In a better world, I wouldn’t have to say that, but I do.

That said, Brooks did not bring up Orban, but I think it’s safe to say that the criticism he makes of Putin — who is a rather different figure from Orban — he would apply to Orban. In the eyes of many Western liberals (right-liberals like Brooks, and left-liberals too), there are no essential differences between any of these figures. So, one thing that is missing from the Brooks column is any reflection at all on why so many people have abandoned liberalism (“liberalism” in the sense of our Western model, not strictly speaking the views and policies of the Democratic Party).

The basic answer is in Hammer’s line here: “Hungary under Orbán rejects the illusion of liberal neutrality, recognizing, as this column has previously phrased it, “that a values-neutral liberal order amounts to a one-way cultural ratchet” toward leftism and progressivism.”

I told an audience last night at MCC that I, personally, am torn about all this. In theory, I would prefer to live in a liberal democratic polity, but that I can’t escape the conclusion that the choice for that is not on the table in the real world of 2022. The liberals of both the GOP and the Democratic Party have done little or nothing to protect those values, and that order, from the aggressively anti-liberal Left. For Americans, “liberalism” is a one-way ratchet to Critical Race Theory and gender ideology. Most conservatives — including me — have no real problem accepting gay people into the mainstream. But that is not enough for the Left today: we are compelled to affirm every new thing the sexual left comes up with, including teaching little children about gender fluidity, sending our kids to schools that do this, then set up formal structures of deceiving parents when their children come out as transgender in schools, and so forth. It is not enough that gays have the right to marry; the rare Christian baker or florist whose conscience will not let them participate in same-sex weddings must be professionally destroyed. That’s liberalism? Today, yes, it is.

Most conservatives have accepted that America used to be a racist society, and have absorbed the liberal Martin Luther King position that people should not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. But that was yesterday’s liberalism. Today, if you do not affirm the malignant, illiberal ideology that entails Critical Race Theory, you are labeled a racist. If you do not want your children to be taught that (if they are white) they are an oppressor by virtue of their skin color, or, if they are a racial minority, that they are a perpetual victim, and that all their all-too-human failings are not reflexively the result of white bigotry, then you are either a white supremacist or a fellow traveler of white supremacy.

Liberalism used to stand for freedom of thought and expression. This week in Budapest, we heard the conservative essayist Heather Mac Donald talk about how on many college campuses, she has only been able to give speeches there if she is given heavy police protection against left-wing student mobs. This is what liberalism has led to. Left-wing atheist professors like Peter Boghossian, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying tell harrowing stories about how they were driven out of their universities by both mob action and by Kafkaesque harassment by their woke university administrations,, simply because they defended liberal principles in the face of the mobs. The men and women whose duty it is to defend old-fashioned liberalism have capitulated.

Liberalism in practice has meant that our collective cultural and artistic heritage is being viciously dismantled. Mac Donald writes about how the progressive administration of the Art Institute of Chicago is destroying the museum to make it ideologically correct, according to the ideology of wokeness. Who is standing up to defend museums from this assault? Where are the Brooks columns denouncing this kind of thing? Or any of the stuff I’m talking about here?

Nowadays, to work for a major corporation, or to get into law or medicine, you are at a serious disadvantage if you are not a racial or sexual minority, no matter how competent you are at the actual job you would do. You will be forced to accept and affirm leftist cultural dogmas that you do not believe, and if you fail to do so, you put yourself at risk of unemployment. And what has liberalism done to oppose this, or roll it back? Nothing. The Democratic Party affirms this stuff, and the GOP remains too sleepy to fight it (or, as in Trump’s case, satisfies itself with lazy lib-owning, while the woke consolidate power within the institutions).

Back when Donald Trump was first running, establishment conservatives couldn’t get over how a figure like that became popular with the conservative base. I was one of those establishment conservatives — not a Never Trumper, but one who was baffled by Trump, and troubled. It took reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy to give me a better sense of the dispossession many working class Trump supporters felt in this country — in particular, how the free-market fundamentalism the GOP had been pushing for a generation had not worked out well for many of those people. I don’t believe Trump was the answer, but virtually nobody else on the classical liberal side even saw that this was a serious problem. Today, the very liberal, even woke, prime minister of Canada is invoking emergency legislation to fight protesting working-class Canadians, including threatening to take away their bank accounts, and calling them all filthy racist rabble.

This is liberalism? Yes, it is: actually existing liberalism, in the year 2022. And if it’s not actually liberal, then we can say that proper classical liberalism does nothing at all to defend itself. But oh, the old-school liberals sure do complain about leaders of the postliberal Right who are willing to pick up the fight that they have abandoned.

Here in Hungary, Orban remains popular in part because he believes that the globalist progressive bureaucracy in Brussels, and the NGO archipelago throughout the West, should not have the last word in how Hungarians are governed. That belongs to the Hungarian people. His economic policies would cause American free marketers’ heads to explode — but he believes there is nothing wrong with the state involving itself in the economy to protect the common good of the people.

I saw last night that the controversial Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore (also a friend I respect) attacked Hungary in his newsletter, saying:

Pay attention, though, to those who look behind the former Iron Curtain to find the future. Many religious conservatives—most notably Roman Catholics but some evangelical Protestants too—have allied themselves with Hungary’s authoritarian strongman, Viktor Orbán. As libertarian commentator Matt Welch notes, the Hungarian prime minister “makes for an odd champion of American-style Christendom.”

“Abortion is uncontroversially legal in Hungary, the people aren’t particularly religious, and Orbán has exercised kleptocratic control over churches that dare to dissent from his policies,” Welch argues. The key reason for the attraction to Eastern European strongmen, Welch concludes, is that they fight the right enemies and “win.”

If this were just a skirmish between those of us who believe in liberal democracy and those who find it expendable, that would be one thing. But the other, larger problem with this authoritarian temptation is the gospel.

If the church is a cultural vehicle for national stability and pride, then one can hardly expect dictators to do anything other than manipulate it. But if the church is made up, as the Bible tells us, of “living stones” brought in by regenerated hearts through personal faith in Jesus Christ (1 Pet. 2:4–5), then external conformity to “values” and “civilization” falls woefully short of Christianity.

“Authoritarian strongman.” Good grief. That’s ridiculous. What kind of authoritarian strongman puts himself before the people in free and fair elections every four years, and wins? Last year when I left Hungary, the Orban supporters in my circles were very worried that Fidesz, Orban’s party, would lose the April 2022 election. Orban has been in power since 2010, which is a long time. Now, though, weeks away from the election, they are more confident. The opposition candidate — chosen as the anti-Orban standard-bearer by opposition primary voters — has been terrible on the campaign trail, I have been told by both pro- and anti-Orban people. You watch: if Orban wins re-election, the Western media will be filled with accusations that he somehow must have cheated.

Anyway, Moore’s readers who don’t know any better may assume, from the way he has worded his column (which is mostly an attack on Vladimir Putin; on that, Moore is on stronger ground), that Orban is a Putin mini-me. It’s absurd. Here in Hungary, I know some Evangelical Christians, all of whom are Orban supporters. Why? Here’s Josh Hammer again:

 The Hungarian government under Fidesz is not “neutral,” furthermore, on basic questions of sexual morality and the Judeo-Christian tradition: Gender ideology is kept out of schools, marriage is vigorously defended as the exclusive union of one man and one woman and Christianity is woven into the very fabric of society and polity alike.

Fidesz has no appetite for policing bedrooms—and Budapest has its annual “Pride” parade—but the state decisively puts its thumb on the scale in favor of traditional Christian ethics. There are no “drag queen story hours” scandalizing innocent children here. On the contrary, the government’s public defense of European Christendom and the “illiberal” nature in which its policies prefer traditional religious ethics over alternative lifestyles represents a sort of “ecumenical integralism”—encapsulated by the fact Orbán himself is Calvinist, while his wife is Catholic. Hungary’s popular, elaborate and much-discussed family policy measures have also been successful in boosting the national birthrate.

I recall a conversation I had with a young Evangelical woman last summer, asking her about how she is likely to vote in the April elections. She said she will vote for Fidesz. I asked her about the most common complaint I heard from Fidesz supporters: that Orban is far too tolerant of public corruption. She said that she feels the same way, but that to vote in the opposition is to open the doors to a much more destructive kind of corruption: the surrender to gender ideology. Once that takes hold, she said, there’s no getting rid of it. Similarly, I talked to a 24-year-old female colleague who was not religious, and who lived with her boyfriend. She was planning to vote Orban, because she wants to have kids one day, and does not want to live in a society in which Brussels bureaucrats and their local allies have created a world in which schools and media teach her sons that they can be girls, and vice versa.

You can roll your eyes at that if you like, but these are real and important issues for ordinary people here. They are real and important issues for ordinary people in America too. Are the left-liberals and the right-liberals fighting for the integrity of natural families against the gender ideologues? No, they are not. Viktor Orban does.

Moreover, when it comes to protecting persecuted Christians in the Middle East, Orban opened a ministry within his office to offer aid, material and otherwise, to those communities. I wrote about that office here. In 2019, I sat in a meeting in which a senior Iraqi Christian leader thanked Orban. From my account of the meeting:

When the migration crisis hit Europe in 2015, Orban famously shut Hungary’s borders to Middle Easterners. Orban said that Hungary’s was the only government in Europe to respond to the crisis in its own interests, and in the interests of Christianity in Europe. With a population of only 10 million, and as a country where Christianity, as elsewhere on the continent, is fragile, the Hungarians concluded that allowing large numbers of Muslims to take up residence here would mean the death knell of Christianity in time.

This scandalized the European political class. Orban doesn’t care. He told our group that he understands that he is dealing with elites who believe that being a post-Christian, post-national civilization is a great and glorious thing. Orban rejects this. He said the main political question in the West today is how fractious pluralities can live together peaceably. He said, “Here the most important question is how not to have the same questions as them.”

Orban pointed out that the UK and France were once colonial powers in the Middle East. He added, “But Central Europe was colonized by the Middle East. That’s a fact.” He’s talking about the Ottoman occupation of Hungary, from 1541 to 1699. Orban told our group that the room we were sitting was part of a Church building that had been turned into a mosque during the occupation.

Explaining his decision to shut the borders to Muslim refugees, Orban said what tipped the scales was consulting the Christian bishops of the Middle East. Orban: “What did they say? ‘Don’t let them in. Stop them.’”

Middle Eastern Christians, said Orban, “can tell you what is the [ultimate] end of a society you have to share with Muslims.”

Sitting at the table listening to the prime minister was Nicodemus, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Mosul, whose Christian community, which predates Islam by several centuries, was savagely persecuted by ISIS. Archbishop Nicodemus spoke up, thanking Orban for what Hungary has done for persecuted Christians. Nicodemus said that living with Muslims has taught Iraqi Christians that they can expect no mercy. “Those people, if you give them your small finger, they will want your body,” he said.

“The problem is that Western countries don’t accept our experience,” the prelate continued. “Those people [Muslims] pushed us to be a minority in our own land and then refugees in our own land.”

Under the Orban government, Hungary frequently extends a helping hand to persecuted Christians.The archbishop exhorted Orban to stay the course in defense of Christians. For 16 years, he said, Iraqi Christians begged Western leaders to help them. Addressing Orban directly, Nicodemus said, “Nobody understands our pain like you.”

What is the typical American conservative political response to the suffering of Middle Eastern Christians? In 2014, Sen. Ted Cruz went to a Washington summit where leaders of besieged and persecuted Middle Eastern Christians had gathered, and read them the riot act from the stage, saying that he will not support them unless they openly support Israel. As I wrote back then in response, it was a disgusting act of self-aggrandizement — and I say that as a supporter of Israel. Whatever the personal views of those bishops and priests about Israel, had any one of them gone to America and publicly supported Israel, they would have been murdered when they got back home. This was a case of an arrogant American politician trying to make political hay among his Evangelical and fundamentalist supporters by exploiting the life-or-death suffering of the most persecuted Christians in the world.

Who is a better friend to Christians, then: Ted Cruz, or Viktor Orban? What should American Christians think?

Until I saw that 2019 piece I wrote just now, I had forgotten about this exchange I had with Orban back then. It came after Orban admitted frankly that Hungarian society, which is not particularly religious, was stiff suffering from the hangover of Communist totalitarianism:

Orban spoke frankly about the post-communist religious state of his country. “It’s still not a healed society,” he said. “It’s still not in good shape.”

I asked the prime minister if he saw evidence of a “soft totalitarianism” emerging in the West today, and if so, what are the main lessons that those who resisted communism have to tell us about identifying and resisting it.

He said that the Soviets and their servants in Central Europe tried to create a new kind of man: homo Sovieticus. To do this, they had to destroy the two sources of identity here: a sense of nationhood, and the Christian religion. In order to survive, said Orban, “we have to strengthen our national identity and our Christian identity. That’s the story.”

Western peoples have decided to create a post-Christian, post-national, multicultural society. Peoples in Central Europe do not.  For Orban, re-establishing a sense of national identity and the Christian faith are the same project. It’s an attempt to reverse the damage done by Communism. The danger, obviously, is that Christianity becomes emptied of its spiritual and moral content, and is filled with nationalism. On the other hand, if a pro-Christian politician like Orban can at least keep the public square open and favorable to the ancestral religious beliefs of the nation, religious leaders can step into the space politics creates, and do their work of recovery.

There you go. If Christians think that voting for Orban (or Trump, or any other populist conservative politician) is sufficient to restoring Christianity, they’re deluded. What Orban understands, though, is that politicians have to use power to keep liberalism from destroying the sense of the nation and religious belief and practice. I do not believe that liberalism per se necessarily destroys either. Again, though, I believe that actually existing liberalism offers no protection, because it doesn’t even believe in its own classical principles enough to defend them from attack by progressives who have marched through the institutions — including capitalist institutions.

One may not like the way the Viktor Orbans of the world fight to protect national sovereignty, cultural conservatism, and religion in the face of the Left’s assaults, but I prefer the flawed work of defense that they do to the work of defense left-liberals and right-liberals are not doing.

One more thing: Viktor Orban manages to be both a friend to Christians and a friend to Jews. Hammer — who, once again, is Jewish — writes:

The combination here of nationalism, public Christianity and Soros-bashing leads many in the Western press to decry Orbán and Fidesz as antisemitic. Nothing could be further from the truth. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving leader in the Jewish state’s history, considered Orbán his greatest European ally. Hungary routinely supports Israel at the United Nations and in its invariable border conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah. Moreover, Jewish life itself in Budapest is thriving (at least based on the bleak post-World War II baseline for European Jewry). I spent half a day touring numerous gorgeous synagogues, walking through the historic Jewish ghetto and dining at a very fine kosher meat restaurant. (The goulash was delicious.) And unlike in Western and Northern European countries, which have taken a diametrically opposite stance on the issue of Islamic migration, Jews in Hungary are safe and secure. Armed guards outside synagogues are far from ubiquitous here—unlike, say, in Paris or Brussels.

You know why? Because Orban’s government has kept Muslim migrants out. That’s the reason. I explained this in depth last summer, in the face of widespread anti-Semitic violence in Western capitals, when I was shocked that the traditional Jewish Quarter in Budapest was totally at peace, without armed guards or police guarding synagogues and Jewish businesses. I cited survey data of Jews in a number of European countries, revealing that the one country in Europe that Jews feel most safe in is … Hungary, governed by George Soros’s arch-nemesis. In “Viktor Orban Was Right,” I wrote:

If you could wind back the clock fifty years, and show the French, the Belgian, and the German people what mass immigration from the Muslim world would do to their countries by 2021, they never, ever would have accepted it. The Hungarians are learning from their example. It is impossible to look westward from Hungary, and to see a desirable future in the models elsewhere in the European Union. Hungarians are European, but they see among the European left, and among the European establishment figures (of left and right), a death wish. They seem to believe that the only way to live in harmony with these imported peoples and cultures is to train new generations of European children to despise their own culture and traditions. In this sense, secular liberalism has become a suicide pact for Western nations.

The Left cannot bear to face this fact. Right-liberals can’t seem to do so either. But people who live in the real world can’t afford such illusions. Like my friend David Brooks, I would like to see the roots of classical liberalism strengthened, so we could defend a liberal conception of society. But those roots have badly eroded, for reasons that he and I would likely agree on, to a meaningful extent. I don’t know whether the Hungarians are going to make it through, in the long term. I am told that the younger generations here are fairly woke, or at least they are far more liberal than their parents and grandparents. They get a lot of their information from Western media, and Western social media. The trends do not look good. But at least Viktor Orban and his people are making a stand, and not apologizing for it. Good.

Meanwhile, I would love it if either my friends David Brooks or Russell Moore would come to Hungary, and see for themselves what it’s like. Meet Christians. Meet Jews. Meet anti-Orban liberals, and pro-Orban conservatives. Draw your own conclusions. I don’t expect either man will leave her as an Orban supporter, but at least they will have a better idea of what Orban supporters believe, and why they believe it, than they have now.

And, as Josh Hammer says about Hungary’s national conservative approach to governance, “Lessons for American conservatives are clear and legion.” In a few weeks, CPAC Hungary will kick off. If you are an American conservative, why not come over and see for yourself?

UPDATE: Sorry, but I’ve since learned that CPAC Hungary is not receiving international visitors, and only a limited number of domestic ones. Covid regulations, apparently. Still, you should come over sometime.

The post What Josh Hammer Saw In Hungary appeared first on The American Conservative.

Three months and twenty pounds (oy) ago, I went out to Colorado to meet the Focus On The Family folks, and to do some interviews about Live Not By Lies. I loved being with those brothers and sisters in Christ, and I’m thrilled that they like the book and are now promoting its message. This just dropped yesterday:

Part two will be up tomorrow, I think (I will post it here as an update). Focus is also putting out audio-only versions of the interview on other channels.

I am so grateful to Jim Daly, Glenn Stanton, and their team for their attention to my book. It’s rather timely too, given events in Canada around the truckers’ protest. Whether or not you agree with the truckers’ cause or tactics (and I understand that there are Canadians who are no fan of Justin Trudeau, but who don’t support the truckers either), the important thing to observe is how the Trudeau government is going after them — specifically Trudeau’s invocation of an emergency law that permits the state to freeze the financial accounts of anyone the government deems sympathetic to the truckers. What’s more, Trudeau is trying to smear the truckers as nothing but a bunch of deplorable bigots. This week, The Economist magazine, the influential neoliberal publication that has been a supporter of the prime minister and his government, sounded an alarm about the shocking tactics Trudeau has now embraced:

Mr Trudeau’s government has expressed shock that racist symbols were displayed during the protest. It appears to be planning to reintroduce an “anti-hate” bill that could lead to the imprisonment of people who use racist speech. This could include a clause which would allow individuals to take other people to court if they fear that they may be about to say something which falls under the definition of “hate propaganda”. They could also be charged for contemplating an offence “motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other similar factor.

Hate pre-crime — can you believe it? You had better. Take a look at this stunning clip from a session in the Canadian parliament in which a visibly outraged Conservative parliamentarian demanded that the prime minister apologize for comparing them all to Nazi sympathizers for supporting the truckers. Trudeau, disgracefully, didn’t give an inch:

What the Canadian government is doing is a preview of what the US government in the future will likely to do dissenters: brand them as “domestic terrorists,” use anti-terrorism laws to persecute them (including seizing bank accounts and bringing them to heel by threat of economic ruin), and passing more laws to crack down on free expression, under the guise of fighting “hate” and protecting America from would-be terrorists, or pre-terrorists.

I woke up a short time ago here in Budapest, and see that things are heating up between Russia and Ukraine. I hope and pray (literally) that Russia does not invade, even as I believe that the United States would be foolish to risk any kind of military showdown with the Russians. But if the Russians go in to Ukraine, the woke in the West, and the national security/foreign policy class in Washington, will lash out against internal dissent from its belligerent policy. I expect they will label any dissent from the official Washington line as “Russian disinformation,” and go after dissenters. Look also for coming fabricated accusations of bigotry against people like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald, who call out the war party.

My point is, what’s happening in Canada — the government crushing dissent under the guise of keeping Canada “safe” from haters and deplorables — is a prelude of what’s to come here. Of course we have to fight it! For example, if you have never joined a public demonstration, you need to prepare to do so. But you should also read Live Not By Lies and follow the practical advice of the dissidents who lived under Soviet communism. Here is a link to a free, downloadable study guide I wrote for the book. You — we — need to be ready for these people. If you wait until active persecution starts to get your family, your church, and your community prepared, and to get your networks in place, it may be too late.

The emigres who came to America decades ago escaping Soviet communism are sounding the alarm about what they see emerging here in the West. Their testimony, and their advice, is a gift. From the book:

It is very hard for Americans who have never lived through this kind of ideological fog to recognize what is happening. To be sure, whatever this is, it is not a carbon copy of life in the Soviet Bloc nations, with their secret police, their gulags, their strict censorship, and their material deprivation. That is precisely the problem, these people warn. The fact that relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty. That, and the way those who take away freedom couch it in the language of liberating victims from oppression.

“I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and I’m frankly stunned by how similar some of these developments are to the way Soviet propaganda operated,” says one professor, now living in the Midwest.

Another émigré professor, this one from Czechoslovakia, was equally blunt. He told me that he began noticing a shift a decade or so ago: friends would lower their voices and look over their shoulders when expressing conservative views. When he expressed his conservative beliefs in a normal tone of voice, the Americans would start to fidget and constantly scan the room to see who might be listening.

“I grew up like this,” he tells me, “but it was not supposed to be happening here.”

This week in Budapest, I was having a conversation about the book with a Hungarian I met at a conference. He was telling me how the habits of those who were formed, and deformed, under Communism die hard. Even today, he told me, when he’s listening to his older relatives, and the talk turns to politics, they all instinctively lower their voices. If we allow this evil to take root in our country, the habits of mind that emerge from simply having to survive under wokeness will mark us for the rest of our lives.

Don’t you dare think that it can’t happen here. It can, and it is. Canada is farther along the road than we are, but not by much.

The post Focus On Preparing Your Family For Persecution appeared first on The American Conservative.

I’m at Day Two of a conference at MCC in Budapest. At lunchtime, I was talking with an American journalist. When I mentioned that the Canadian government has threatened to freeze the bank accounts of protesting truckers, her jaw literally dropped. And now, the Trudeau government is using emergency legislation to cut even people who are indirectly involved with the truckers’ protest — such as those who donated to them — from the financial system.  You may not be able to buy, sell, or access your money, apparently, if you are in any way suspected of aiding the truckers. From the CBC:

Under the regulations, the banks have a “duty to determine” who among their customers is considered a “designated person” who should be denied financial services. The regulations stipulate it is up to the banks to “determine on a continuing basis whether they are in possession or control of property that is owned, held or controlled by or on behalf of a designated person.”

Banks will be working with law enforcement to decide who should be “de-banked.”

“When are we going to face that we are headed towards totalitarianism?” she said.

“Well, I wrote a book about that,” I said.

It really is astonishing, isn’t it? Every single day there is another sign that we must, must, must start preparing ourselves for the day when they will come after us, simply for dissenting. Meanwhile, the other day, this lunatic leftist below is allegedly the one who hacked the Give Send Go site, stealing and publicizing the names of tens of thousands of small donors who had given money to support the truckers.

This is apparently the dude who hacked GiveSendGo pic.twitter.com/rmZNN9iDXb

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) February 16, 2022

There are reports that now people are losing their jobs because their name is on the list, but I haven’t seen anything confirmed yet. Let me know if you see any.

Now the media are participating in the de facto doxxing of donors. Here’s a Washington Post story about donors, based on the hacked information. The info has been released into the public domain, so it’s not like the Post did the hacking itself. But I gotta say, J.D. Flynn has a point:

Back in July, the Washington Post lectured us for identifying, through legally obtained data, a public official engaged in suspect conduct.

Here the Post identifies identifies a public official, using hacked data, who made a donation to a controversial group. pic.twitter.com/eFds80dYZ0

— JD Flynn (@jdflynn) February 16, 2022

Yes. The Pillar, edited by Flynn, used that publicly available information to out a senior Catholic priest at the US Bishops Conference who was using the gay hookup app Grindr. After 20 years of scandals having to do with closeted, sexually active gay priests, The Pillar decided that a priest as prominent as their target was ought to be outed, given that his behavior could directly impact the US Church’s response to the scandal and its causes. See, for the Post, gay priests should only be supported, even when they are violating their vows and working against the integrity of the Catholic Church. It’s always “who, whom,” you know.

Anyway, she is not my favorite member of Congress, but I give a lot of credit to Rep. Ilhan Omar for speaking up here:

Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar has come out defending an Ottawa shop owner who made a donation to the Freedom Convoy in Canada.

Omar said journalists should not be reporting and publicizing the names of people who made ‘insignificant’ donations.

Omar tweeted in response to a newspaper editor from the Ottawa Citizen who had shared a report about Stella Luna Gelato Cafe in Ottawa, which was forced to close down after receiving continual threats.

The owner, Tammy Giuliani, had her name listed among donors who gave money via the GiveSendGo website to the Freedom Convoy, which is protesting the country’s vaccine mandates.

The entire list was made public following a hacking on Sunday. The data included names and email addresses.

Omar tweeted how she failed to understand why journalists felt the need to report on people who made donations as it resulted in harassment.

Tammy Giuliani was forced to shut down her business after she received an onslaught of threats over her $250 donation.

The most important thing you’re going to read all day is this analysis of the truckers’ protest by N.S. Lyons, who writes the must-read Substack newsletter The Upheaval. Lyons writes that the protest embodies the divide between people who work with their hands, and those who work with their minds. He writes:

For our purposes here, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively.

When considering the causes and character of the current protest, and the response to it, I would say the divide between Physicals and Virtuals is by far the most relevant frame of analysis available. In fact I’d say this is among the most significant divides in all of Western politics today.

Much has rightly been made of the “working class” and their alienation from “the elite.” But this phrasing comes mixed up with associations about material wealth and economic class that aren’t necessarily helpful. Many (though not all) of those who support “populist” politics in opposition to the elite tend to frequently be either fairly solidly middle-class skilled tradesmen, relatively successful small businessmen, or land-holders (e.g. farmers, ranchers, real estate entrepreneurs) who are often actually relatively well-off. It is the character of their work that seems to shape the common identity and values of each side of the class divide more than income.

So too does this difference appear to widen – and perhaps even help explain the root of – the huge and growing gender divide in politics, given the fairly well-established preference (on average) by men to work with “things” (more concrete) and women to work with “people” (more abstract).

More:

But the most relevant distinction between Virtuals and Physicals is that the Virtuals are now everywhere unambiguously the ruling class. In a world in which knowledge is the primary component of value-added production (or so we are told), and economic activity is increasingly defined by the digital and the abstract, they have been the overwhelming winners, accumulating financial, political, and cultural status and influence.

In part this is because the ruling class is also a global class, and so has access to global capital. It is global because the world’s city-brains are directly connected with each other across virtual space, and are in constant communication. Indeed their residents have far more in common with each other, including across national borders, than they do with the local people of their own hinterlands, who are in comparison practically from another planet.

But the Virtual ruling class has a vulnerability that it has not yet solved. The cities in which their bodies continue to occupy mundane physical reality require a whole lot of physical infrastructure and manpower to function: electricity, sewage, food, the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain, etc. Ultimately, they still remain reliant on the physical world.

The great brain hubs of the Virtuals float suspended in the expanse of the Physicals, complex arterial networks pumping life-sustaining resources inward from their hosts. So when the Physicals of the Canadian host-body revolted against their control, the Virtual class suddenly faced a huge problem.

Lyons says that the response of Justin Trudeau, the progressive beta male who is the epitome of the Virtual Class, as well as all the institutions controlled by that class, has been entirely predictable:

If all this seemed awfully synchronized, that’s the whole point. Systematic information control, or what the Chinese Communist Party refers to as “public opinion management,” is now the entire strategic response of the Virtual class to every political problem.

But have a little sympathy for them: they do this not just because it is cynically convenient (though it is), but because this is literally the only way they know how to navigate and influence the world. The post-modern fish swims in a narrative sea, and their first reaction is always to try to control it (through what the CCP calls “discourse power”) because at heart they well and truly believe in the idea of the “social construction of reality,” as Lasch pointed out in the quote at top. If there is no fixed, objective truth, only power, then the mind’s will rules the world. Facts can be reframed as needed to create the story that best produces the correct results for Progress (this is why you will find journalists are now professionally obsessed with “storytelling” rather than reporting facts).

See how this works? This is why the Virtuals believe that women can have penises and men can have vaginas. They are gnostics who believe that reality is constructed by the imposition of will.

Now, though, by threatening the bank accounts of dissidents and fellow travelers, the class war has gone nuclear:

That Trudeau’s government would choose to jettison any remaining illusion of Canada still being a liberal democracy just to harm their political class enemies isn’t too surprising. It’s their method of doing so that is particularly striking: control over digital financial assets is pretty much the ultimate leverage now available to the Virtuals. We should expect more use of this tool around the world anywhere the Physicals continue to revolt against their masters.

Note well:

So expect the Virtuals of the ruling class to double down on trying to exert control, moving with all haste to develop new and innovative methods of information management and coercion to try to eliminate every human vulnerability from the machine. Self-driving truck startups are about to have an excellent next funding round.

Read it all.

Again, this is class warfare. The Left hates not only the working class, but the Physicals. Leftist culture will continue to push the Virtualization of all aspects of life, because this is what dispossesses the Physicals and increases the control of the Virtuals. This is a story of the World Outside One’s Head clashing with the World Inside One’s Head.

UPDATE: Damon Linker sounds the alarm from the center-left about how Canada is right now pioneering a social credit system with its financial punishment to truckers and their supporters. Excerpts:

The alignment of pervasive high-tech gatekeeping with an impulse to police ideological and moral conformity is not only possible but already beginning to emerge. The right’s warnings about ascendent antiliberalism are therefore welcome — though many of those sounding the alarm are singularly ill-suited to combat it.

More:

Modern politics is, among other things, a battle over these competing sensibilities — with liberals usually thriving in the cosmopolitan openness of the city and conservatives favoring the closed comforts of the countryside and small town. Liberal democracy itself favors the former, as the name implies, foreswearing any attempt to bring the nation state as a whole into alignment with a single comprehensive and exclusive vision of the good life. Individuals and communities are left free (within limits) to cultivate and enforce that kind of life at the local level, but the nation as a whole is far too diverse to attempt it collectively.

That has always been unacceptable to some antiliberals, who have longed to reproduce the community and solidarity of the small town or village at a national level. Civic nationalism, when wedded to liberal norms and institutions, is a relatively benign expression of such hopes, aiming merely at the encouragement of national cohesion. Totalitarian dictatorship is a far more malign version of the same yearning.

Where would a social credit system fit in on this spectrum? It’s too soon to know. But what is clear is that the drive for it comes from a similar place — a kind of nostalgia for the moral unanimity and homogeneity of village life, and the hope to recreate it on a national scale. (In the case of China, that scale extends to 1.4 billion people.)

Conservatives are right to worry and warn about the danger of the progressive left using a combination of political, technological, and cultural power to enforce unanimity on American life. That would be an unacceptable infringement on the liberty of millions.

But so would populist conservatives seizing those same powers to impose a comprehensive moral vision of their own rooted in the “integralist” fantasies of the Catholic right or the autarkic dreams of a blood-and-soil or race-based nationalism.

It would be nice to see critics of a social credit system taking their stands in the name of an honest and consistent liberal pluralism. But alas, ours is a time of equal-and-opposite illiberalisms battling for moral control of our national life.

Read it all.

Well, I am not an integralist, and have said in this space before that some form of classical liberalism is the only way I can conceive of a pluralistic nation like the USA holding itself together. The problem, though, is not going to come from the integralists, all of whom could fit into a big coffeeshop. It’s an interesting intellectual project, but there is zero chance of Catholic integralism taking hold in America. Damon’s idea that there are “equal-and-opposite illiberalisms battling for moral control of our national life” is simply not true. If there are autarkic race-based nationalists pushing for an illiberal state, I have never heard of them. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but I don’t know where they are. The illiberal progressive left, however, are in control of most institutions of American life, as I argue in Live Not By Lies (Damon takes a shot at the term “soft totalitarianism,” but I stand by it, because it signifies how what we are moving into, thanks to the progressive left in power, is a non-violent but still effective form of totalitarianism).

There may well be figures on the Right who would be willing to use a social credit system to enforce their moral vision — and I would strongly oppose them, even if I shared their moral framework! — but where are they? Where are their supporters? I ask not to be a whataboutist, but simply to say that it’s a false equivalence to say that both sides do it. The most dangerous enemies of liberty today come from the Left. I do agree, however, that we should absolutely not normalize social credit system tactics, because if we do, a future right-wing government would certainly be tempted to use that Ring Of Power, telling itself that it will use those capabilities for the Good. Both freedom-loving liberals and freedom-loving conservatives should come together and stand strongly against this malicious use of technology.

The post War Of The Worlds appeared first on The American Conservative.

Heather MacDonald is here in Budapest this week. We were on a panel yesterday at the Matthias Corvinus Collegium, where she, more forcefully than any of us, brought home to the Hungarian audience how embracing wokeness means the destruction of one’s civilization. I wish the Hungarians all had a copy of her recent City Journal piece on the self-immolation of the Art Institute of Chicago. It starts like this:

In 2012, the Art Institute of Chicago posted a tribute to its volunteer museum educators. “Our docents are incredible,” read the Facebook post. “ ‘To walk through the galleries and see children, led by docents, jumping up and raising their hands to talk is to see the work of the museum at its best,’ ” the entry continued, quoting then–Institute director Douglas Druick.

At that time, the Art Institute was still seeking to expand its docent corps. “We Want You! (To Become a Docent),” announced a contemporaneous article in the museum’s newsletter. The article emphasized the program’s rigor: becoming a docent “was no small task,” the museum advised, involving a competitive admissions process and written, supervised research on the museum’s collections.

Less than a decade later, in September 2021, the Art Institute shut down its docent program entirely and told its participants that they would no longer be allowed to serve the Institute in a volunteer capacity. Henceforth, six salaried part-time employees would replace the 82 unpaid educators. The docents were told to clean out their lockers; as a consolation prize, they were offered a two-year complimentary membership in the museum.

Had the docents been delivering subpar performances? Had the Institute discovered an incurable flaw in their training? No, it had noticed that they were overwhelmingly white. And that, in 2021, constituted a sin almost beyond redemption, whether found in an individual or in an institution.

The racialist wave that swept the United States following the arrest-related death of George Floyd in May 2020 has taken down scientists, artists, and journalists. Entire traditions, whether in the humanities, music, or scientific discovery, have been reduced to one fatal characteristic: whiteness. And now the antiwhite crusade is targeting a key feature of American exceptionalism: the spirit of philanthropy and volunteerism.

The Art Institute of Chicago is not the first museum to turn on its docent program. But it is the most consequential. It is worth tracing the developments that led to the docent firings in some detail. The Institute is a case study in what happens when museums and other cultural organizations declare their mission to be antiracism. The final result, if unchecked, will be the cancellation of a civilization.

More:

The Institute’s chairman, Robert Levy, offered a different explanation in a Chicago Tribune op-ed. The docents constituted a “barrier to engagement,” he wrote. The Institute was choosing to “center . . . our students across Chicago—as we take this unexpected moment to rethink, redraw and iterate.” Sacking the docents was an example of the “critical self-reflection and participatory, recuperative action” that is required for the Institute to remain relevant to “changing audiences.”

This euphemistic phraseology, too, requires translation. Put simply, the Institute terminated the docents because they were, as Rondeau put it in Iowa, “99 percent white females.” “Centering” Chicago’s students means not subjecting them to the trauma of learning about art from white females volunteering their time and energy. (Rondeau’s “99 percent” estimate was too high, but the hyperbole was born of shame and frustration.)

The Institute has thus reinforced the consensus among the nation’s elites that racial divides should be deepened rather than dissolved. Using white docents to serve “urban schools,” Rondeau said in Iowa, creates a “disconnect between the voices [that students] hear for interpretation and the population we’re trying to serve.” Never mind that the docents were connecting to students through the language of art and perception. Their voices are irredeemably white, and thus a barrier to engagement.

Of course, this imaginative apartheid only works one way. No one would dare suggest that a black person can’t teach white students. But it is unobjectionable to say that whites are not competent to teach blacks.

It may be the case that inner-city Chicago students see whites, especially older bourgeois whites, as alien. But white middle-class females in the early twentieth century taught immigrants who did not look like them the fundamentals of American history and literature, helping them to assimilate into American culture. That instruction did not harm the immigrants. An encounter with the bourgeois world of accomplishment and manners could constitute a lifeline to Chicago’s inner-city children, compared with the oppositional underclass norms too prevalent in urban schools and families. Teaching them to expect color-coding and to view its absence as oppressive, by contrast, will prepare them for a life of resentment and excuse-making.

The new, paid educators will be chosen for their antiracist credentials, not for their ability to present art as a means of expanding one’s knowledge of what it means to be human. They must have previous experience facilitating “anti-racist” programming and be “equity-focused,” according to the Institute’s job announcement. A minimum of two years’ experience “working with people who identify as ALAANA” [African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, Native American]is a must. Once on the job, the new hires will deploy “anti-racist museum teaching,” develop “anti-racist pedagogy,” and engage “anti-racist student experiences.” One might think that students visiting the Institute were entering KKK territory, rather than a welcoming environment eager for their presence.

The heart of the matter:

The new antiracism mission of museums is not an outgrowth of the democratic impulse that inspired those institutions—it is its repudiation. In 2018, Alice Walton, art benefactor and heiress to the Walmart fortune, told Rondeau [who is white] that she wanted to give him a “ton of money,” by his recounting, to loan some of the Institute’s unexhibited holdings to poor rural communities in America. Rondeau was contemptuous. “I don’t want to get into your business, Alice,” he told her, with a sneering emphasis, “but I’m not sure poor rural communities in America need Toulouse-Lautrec. I’m not sure that that’s what they’re asking for. But this kind of art for the people, like, eat your Shakespeare, look at beautiful paintings, you will be ennobled, not so much. I don’t, you know, I don’t think that that methodology is sufficiently sophisticated even though we’re seeing it still operable.” Rondeau then hit Walton up for a contribution to Chicago’s ethnic museums that “struggle to keep their doors open.” What is the difference between the poor rural communities that don’t need the Art Institute’s art and the hoped-for audiences of Chicago’s ethnic museums that deserve Walton’s money? The former are white, the latter are not.

Read the whole thing. Seriously, do. You might not be the sort of person who would go to a major art museum, but you are probably the kind of person who is glad that they exist, believing that they serve an important civilizational function. Well, wake up. They are now administered by people who hate them, who hate themselves, and who hate the civilization whose artifacts fill those museums. When Heather Mac Donald told the Hungarians yesterday that civilization is at stake in this struggle with wokeness, she was not exaggerating.

Yesterday I spoke at length with an American journalist who is here trying to discern why some of us American conservatives are drawn to Orban’s Hungary. One answer is that Orban defends the people here against wokeness. I told the reporter that a few years back, when I heard that Orban’s government had removed funding and accreditation for the two university gender studies programs in Hungary, I was troubled, because I didn’t think the state should interfere in university life that way. Now I think Orban not only did the right thing, he was prescient in doing so. This stuff means the suicide of a civilization. Where are the leading Republican politicians sounding the alarm about the destruction of our nation’s cultural heritage at the hands of these sophisticated woke barbarians? Where are the leading Republican politicians moving to withdraw federal funding from any museum that undertakes this kind of racist, anti-intellectual self-scouring? They don’t exist. These Republicans are happy to take our votes, but they don’t have either the vision or the courage to defend our common civilization.

Whatever else you can say about Viktor Orban, he’s not that kind of politician.

The post Woke Barbarians Sack Art Institute Of Chicago appeared first on The American Conservative.

Yesterday I was invited to go with a group of American and western European visiting intellectuals and journalists to the office of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, to meet the leader and spend about an hour talking with him. This happened to me once before, three or four years ago, when I was here in Budapest speaking at a religious liberty conference. I had anticipated that this would be a short meet-and-greet, but it turned into a 90-minute session in which Orban fielded questions from visitors, and discoursed with sophistication and confidence about politics at a level that you just never see from US presidents. I found it stunning, frankly, that this man I had been informed by the US media was nothing but an authoritarian thug was, in fact, very far from the liberal caricature.

It happened again yesterday, with the other visitors. After we finished our session, I heard lots of chatter, with people saying they were quite taken aback by how sharp, smart, and quick on his feet Orban was (and not only Orban, but Katalin Novak, the longtime Family Minister in the Orban government, who is now about to be elected state President by Parliament). One American and I ended up talking about how much the image of Hungary in America has changed, at least among conservatives, because of Orban’s sitting down with Tucker Carlson for an interview last year, and how much it could yet change the more Orban would be able to get in front of the American people to make his case.

At one point, Orban, a Calvinist, was asked about his government’s support for persecuted Christians abroad. As I wrote here last year, he established a ministry out of his office to assist and defended persecuted Christian communities. He told the visitors yesterday that to defend and help these Christians is, for him, his Christian duty. He added that as he sees it, defending Christianity is intimately tied to defending the Hungarian nation, as so many times in this nation’s history — such as with the Ottoman Turks and the Soviets (but nobody mention the Habsburgs!) — the attack on Hungarian sovereignty was led by an outside force that despised Christianity.

Later, when Novak arrived, the two were asked about Hungary’s family policy, and its policy towards LGBT people, which has caused such a furor abroad. Orban said the way to think about Hungary’s approach is not to think about LGBT people per se, but about how they fit into a society that prioritizes the natural family, and traditional marriage.

“We are freedom fighters,” he said. “That means the freedom of homosexuals as well.”

He pointed out that in Hungary, gays and lesbians are guaranteed civil partnerships in law, but they cannot have formal marriage. That is reserved for one man and one woman, because that is what marriage and family is.

“In Hungarian society we always make a distinction between love and marriage,” Orban said. “If they coincide, great, but love is love; family is an institution.” His point is that it is possible to be tolerant, and to create a space in Hungarian law where gay people’s lives can be made easier, while at the same time prioritizing what has worked since time out of mind.

A German visitor asked Orban during the meeting how he bears up against the withering attacks from him from western European leaders and the media. Because of his roots in the anticommunist movement in the 1980s, when he was a student, Orban said. If you’ve had to face down the Communists, taking the slings and arrows of liberals and progressives is easy.

Here is a clip of a young Orban giving a brave speech at the reburial in 1989 of Imre Nagy, the reform communist prime minister murdered in 1956 by the Soviets. Watch it with the subtitles turned on, and realize that this man denounced the Communists at a major national event, while they were still in power. You cannot understand Orban and his appeal to Hungarians without having watched this:

Everybody yesterday laughed at Orban’s line about it being easy for face liberal criticism if you’ve had experience standing up to the Communists, and I suppose there’s a lot to it. But the truth is, Viktor Orban is plainly a man who relishes political combat, and who is at his best when he fights. One of the American conservatives present said to me yesterday after the meeting that if we on the Right had a leader like Orban championing our cause, the American scene would be very, very different. You say, “But we had Trump!”, to which I repeat that any comparison between the two is superficial. Orban fights, but fights intelligently and strategically — and usually wins.

He is a political leader who cares more about getting things done than owning the libs — but he damn sure owns the libs. About five weeks before Election Day, Orban’s party, Fidesz, is up by eight to ten points, even though many Hungarians are weary of twelve years of Fidesz governance. The opposition has once again proven itself to be incompetent. Last evening, after the meeting, I went with an American and a British friend to a working-class wine cellar, where you can get a big glass of respectable Tokaji wine for a dollar fifty. There we fell into conversation with a friendly American woman who has been living here since 1991. She’s an older Baby Boomer from New England, so I figured she was a liberal. When I asked her how she thought the election was going to go, she said she hoped like hell that Fidesz would win, because she can’t imagine the country falling into the hands of the opposition.

During the meeting with Orban, I mentioned to him that I had just read the night before a 1984 essay by Milan Kundera, in which the exiled Czech novelist reflected on the tragedy of Central Europe under the Soviet boot.

In it, Kundera argues that the then-captive nations of Central Europe were, in fact, of the West, though they had an Eastern political system forced on them by the Russians. The essay begins with this striking anecdote:

In November 1956, the director of the Hungarian News Agency, shortly before his office was flattened by artillery fire, sent a telex to the entire world with a desperate message announcing that the Russian attack against Budapest had begun. The dispatch ended with these words: “We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe.”

What did this sentence mean? It certainly meant that the Russian tanks were endangering Hungary and with it Europe itself. But in what sense was Europe in danger? Were the Russian tanks about to push past the Hungarian borders and into the West? No. The director of the Hungarian News Agency meant that the Russians, in attacking Hungary, were attacking Europe itself. He was ready to die so that Hungary might remain Hungary and European.

Kundera goes on:

In fact, what does Europe mean to a Hungarian, a Czech, a Pole? For a thousand years their nations have belonged to the part of Europe rooted in Roman Christianity. They have participated in every period of its history. For them, the word “Europe” does not represent a phenomenon of geography but a spiritual notion synonymous with the word “West.” The moment Hungary is no longer European—that is, no longer Western—it is driven from its own destiny, beyond its own history: it loses the essence of its identity.

“Geographic Europe” (extending from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains) was always divided into two halves which evolved separately: one tied to ancient Rome and the Catholic Church, the other anchored in Byzantium and the Orthodox Church. After 1945, the border between the two Europes shifted several hundred kilometers to the west, and several nations that had always considered themselves to be Western woke up to discover that they were now in the East.

As a result, three fundamental situations developed in Europe after the war: that of Western Europe, that of Eastern Europe, and, most complicated, that of the part of Europe situated geographically in the center—culturally in the West and politically in the East.

More:

The contradictions of the Europe I call Central help us to understand why during the last thirty-five years the drama of Europe has been concentrated there: the great Hungarian revolt in 1956 and the bloody massacre that followed; the Prague Spring and the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968; the Polish revolts of 1956, 1968, 1970, and of recent years. In dramatic content and historical impact, nothing that has occurred in “geographic Europe,” in the West or the East, can be compared with the succession of revolts in Central Europe. Every single one was supported by almost the entire population. And, in every case, each regime could not have defended itself for more than three hours if it had not been backed by Russia.

That said, we can no longer consider what took place in Prague or Warsaw in its essence as a drama of Eastern Europe, of the Soviet bloc, of communism; it is a drama of the West—a West that, kidnapped, displaced, and brainwashed, nevertheless insists on defending its identity. The identity of a people and of a civilization is reflected and concentrated in what has been created by the mind—in what is known as “culture.” If this identity is threatened with extinction, cultural life grows correspondingly more intense, more important, until culture itself becomes the living value around which all people rally. That is why, in each of the revolts in Central Europe, the collective cultural memory and the contemporary creative effort assumed roles so great and so decisive—far greater and far more decisive than they have been in any other European mass revolt.

It was Hungarian writers, in a group named after the Romantic poet Sándor Petöfi, who undertook the powerful critique that led the way to the explosion of 1956. It was the theater, the films, the literature and philosophy that, in the years before 1968, led ultimately to the emancipation of the Prague Spring. And it was the banning of a play by Adam Mickiewicz, the greatest Polish Romantic poet, that triggered the famous revolt of Polish students in 1968. This happy marriage of culture and life, of creative achievement and popular participation, has marked the revolts of Central Europe with an inimitable beauty that will always cast a spell over those who lived through those times.

This part is key:

Central Europe, according to Palacky, ought to be a family of equal nations, each of which— treating the others with mutual respect and secure in the protection of a strong, unified state— would also cultivate its own individuality. And this dream, although never fully realized, would remain powerful and influential. Central Europe longed to be a condensed version of Europe itself in all its cultural variety, a small arch-European Europe, a reduced model of Europe made up of nations conceived according to one rule: the greatest variety within the smallest space. How could Central Europe not be horrified facing a Russia founded on the opposite principle: the smallest variety within the greatest space?

Indeed, nothing could be more foreign to Central Europe and its passion for variety than Russia: uniform, standardizing, centralizing, determined to transform every nation of its empire (the Ukrainians, the Belorussians, the Armenians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, and others) into a single Russian people (or, as is more commonly expressed in this age of generalized verbal mystification, into a “single Soviet people”).

What struck me about reading Kundera’s 1984 essay today is that the force that is trying to defeat cultural tradition, cultural variety, cultural particularity, and cultural sovereignty today is not the failed Soviet empire, but imperial Brussels — the West. It is the European Union, and leaders of some of its member states (Macron of France, Rutte of the Netherlands), that is trying to compel the Hungarians to surrender their own sovereignty in areas that should not concern the EU. PM Orban noted yesterday that Hungary is facing a very strong challenge from the EU over the LGBT media and education law Parliament passed last summer, banning LGBT-themed media aimed at children and minors, and giving the state more say over sex education (this, to prevent NGOs and activist groups from queering schoolchildren’s imaginations, as is happening in the US). He said that even most Hungarians who believe in gay marriage — about half the country, in his estimation — also believe strongly that parents ought to be sovereign over the sex education of their children. (In any case, we will see what Hungarians think on election day, when the media law is up for a referendum.) Minister Novak yesterday added that the Hungarian government will never stop defending its view of what is right for families, regarding sexual education, but that it also respects the cultural sovereignty of other EU states, whose values may not be the same as Hungarian ones.

In other words, despite the liberal media propaganda, it is the Hungarians who are defending democracy and national sovereignty over and against the culturally imperialistic liberals of the West. They know too that their fight is a David-and-Goliath one, because they are a small nation. One more quote from Kundera:

But what is a small nation? I offer you my definition: the small nation is one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear and it knows it. A French, a Russian, or an English man is not used to asking questions about the very survival of his nation. His anthems speak only of grandeur and eternity. The Polish anthem, however, starts with the verse: “Poland has not yet perished….”

This is why the Hungarians feel so strongly about defending their national borders. There are only about nine million Magyars here. Nobody else speaks a language like theirs. They have been a distinct nation for a thousand years, here in the Carpathian Basin. They are very proudly European, but look to the West and see that the European bureaucrats (which includes establishment conservative parties) have embraced a vision of Europe that wishes to dissolve Europe into a de facto superstate that will not defend its borders, and that is ashamed of European nationalism and cultural particularity — especially Europe’s Christian heritage. They want to be European, and they are European, but not at the expense of being Hungarian. And the same goes for many people in the other Visegrad Four nations: Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland, along with Hungary.

So, my question to Orban, based on my reading of the Kundera essay, had to do with the blistering irony that the nations of Central Europe, having survived forty years of Soviet captivity, now find themselves as besieged defenders of older European identities, against a deracinated and technocratic colossus headquartered not in Moscow, but in Brussels.

Orban stipulated in his response that it’s really not much of a comparison to posit the brutality of the Soviet regime and their Central European puppet governments to the EU. (True, to a point, but I would like to talk about it with Orban after he reads the recently published Hungarian translation of Live Not By Lies.) Yet Orban concluded by saying that the Visegrad countries are the last remaining defenders of the Free World, by which he meant the West as it used to be. I agree, and I urge American readers to read beyond what you get in the US media, which uniformly posits these elected governments as reactionary menaces.

(By the way, someone, I believe it was the Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald, asked Orban yesterday about his infamous statement that he was trying to lead an “illiberal democracy.” I wasn’t taking notes about his answer, but I believe he said, in effect, that that had been a poor choice of phrasing, that by “illiberal democracy” he meant only a democracy that emphasized conservative principles, particularly Christian moral values.)

Thinking this morning about that event in light of Kundera’s essay, I am reminded of a comment made by Tamas Salyi, a Hungarian teacher of high school English, to me in Live Not By Lies:

To those who want to keep cultural memory alive, Connerton warns that it is not enough to pass on historical information to the young. The truths carried by tradition must be lived out subjectively. That is, they must not only be studied but also embodied in shared social practices—words, certainly, but more important, deeds. Communities must have “living models” of men and women who enact these truths in their daily lives. Nothing else works.

Tamás Sályi, the Budapest teacher, says that Hungarians survived German occupation and a Soviet puppet regime, but thirty years of freedom has destroyed more cultural memory than the previous eras. “What neither Nazism or Communism could do, victorious liberal capitalism has done,” he muses.

The idea that the past and its traditions, including religion, is an intolerable burden on individual liberty has been poison for Hungarians, he believes. About progressives today, Sályi says, “I think they really believe that if they erase all memory of the past, and turn everyone into newborn babies, then they can write whatever they want on that blank slate. If you think about it, it’s not so easy to manipulate people who know who they are, rooted in tradition.”

Here, then, is the tragedy of contemporary Hungary, and the Visegrad nations: They survived one totalitarian attempt to crush the cultural memories that made them distinct peoples, only to find that the forces of post-Christian liberty and capitalism are doing the job more effectively than the Soviets did. And you know, back in 1984, Kundera anticipated this:

Now it seems that another change is taking place in our century, as important as the one that divided the Middle Ages from the modern era. Just as God long ago gave way to culture, culture in turn is giving way. But to what and to whom? What realm of supreme values will be capable of uniting Europe? Technical feats? The marketplace? The mass media? (Will the great poet be replaced by the great journalist?) Or by politics? But by which politics? The right or the left? Is there a discernible shared ideal that still exists above this Manichaeanism of the left and the right that is as stupid as it is insurmountable? Will it be the principle of tolerance, respect for the beliefs and ideas of other people? But won’t this tolerance become empty and useless if it no longer protects a rich creativity or a strong set of ideas? Or should we understand the abdication of culture as a sort of deliverance, to which we should ecstatically abandon ourselves? Or will the Deus absconditus return to fill the empty space and reveal himself? I don’t know, I know nothing about it. I think I know only that culture has bowed out.

More:

The last direct personal experience of the West that Central European countries remember is the period from 1918 to 1938. Their picture of the West, then, is of the West in the past, of a West in which culture had not yet entirely bowed out.

With this in mind, I want to stress a significant circumstance: the Central European revolts were not nourished by the newspapers, radio, or television—that is, by the “media.” They were prepared, shaped, realized by novels, poetry, theater, cinema, historiography, literary reviews, popular comedy and cabaret, philosophical discussions—that is, by culture. The mass media—which, for the French and Americans, are indistinguishable from whatever the West today is meant to be—played no part in these revolts (since the press and television were completely under state control).

That’s why, when the Russians occupied Czechoslovakia, they did everything possible to destroy Czech culture. This destruction had three meanings: first, it destroyed the center of the opposition; second, it undermined the identity of the nation, enabling it to be more easily swallowed up by Russian civilization; third, it put a violent end to the modern era, the era in which culture still represented the realization of supreme values. This third consequence seems to me the most important. In effect, totalitarian Russian civilization is the radical negation of the modern West, the West created four centuries ago at the dawn of the modern era: the era founded on the authority of the thinking, doubting individual, and on an artistic creation that expressed his uniqueness. The Russian invasion has thrown Czechoslovakia into a “postcultural” era and left it defenseless and naked before the Russian army and the omnipresent state television.

While still shaken by this triply tragic event which the invasion of Prague represented, I arrived in France and tried to explain to French friends the massacre of culture that had taken place after the invasion: “Try to imagine! All of the literary and cultural reviews were 11 liquidated! Every one, without exception! That never happened before in Czech history, not even under the Nazi occupation during the war.”

Then my friends would look at me indulgently with an embarrassment that I understood only later. When all the reviews in Czechoslovakia were liquidated, the entire nation knew it, and was in a state of anguish because of the immense impact of the event. If all the reviews in France or England disappeared, no one would notice it, not even their editors. In Paris, even in a completely cultivated milieu, during dinner parties people discuss television programs, not reviews. For culture has already bowed out. Its disappearance, which we experienced in Prague as a catastrophe, a shock, a tragedy, is perceived in Paris as something banal and insignificant, scarcely visible, a non-event.

After the destruction of the Austrian empire, Central Europe lost its ramparts. Didn’t it lose its soul after Auschwitz, which swept the Jewish nation off its map? And after having been torn away from Europe in 1945, does Central Europe still exist?

Yes, its creativity and its revolts suggest that it has “not yet perished.” But if to live means to exist in the eyes of those we love, then Central Europe no longer exists. More precisely: in the eyes of its beloved Europe, Central Europe is just a part of the Soviet empire and nothing more, nothing more.

And why should this surprise us? By virtue of its political system, Central Europe is the East; by virtue of its cultural history, it is the West. But since Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe only Eastern Europe.

Central Europe, therefore, should fight not only against its big oppressive neighbor but also against the subtle, relentless pressure of time, which is leaving the era of culture in its wake. That’s why in Central European revolts there is something conservative, nearly anachronistic: they are desperately trying to restore the past, the past of culture, the past of the modern era. It is only in that period, only in a world that maintains a cultural dimension, that Central Europe can still defend its identity, still be seen for what it is.

The real tragedy for Central Europe, then, is not Russia but Europe: this Europe that represented a value so great that the director of the Hungarian News Agency was ready to die for it, and for which he did indeed die. Behind the iron curtain, he did not suspect that the times had changed and that in Europe itself Europe was no longer experienced as a value. He did not suspect that the sentence he was sending by telex beyond the borders of his flat country would seem outmoded and would not be understood.

Almost forty years later, the Europe that could not understand the Hungarian journalist has triumphed, and is trying to erase what remains of European cultural memory here in Central Europe. Europeans live now in the flattened, postcultural world satirized by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, where the only thing that gives most of them meaning is shopping and screwing. Last summer, an eminent Hungarian told me that his teenage son had disclosed that he could not imagine dying for his country. This was in the same conversation in which another eminent Hungarian told me her 19-year-old son had proudly informed her that his generation was experimenting with sexual desire and gender.

Viktor Orban is a political leader, not a cultural one. Politics is downstream from culture, but politics can create the conditions under which culture can flourish. I believe that is what Orban is trying to do here in Hungary. He is doing it almost alone in Europe today. He has the Poles on his side, but he desperately needs the populist-nationalist parties of Europe to score some wins in the West. I believe Viktor Orban is the heir to that desperate director of the Hungarian News Agency in 1956. He is not dying for Europe, but he is living to fight for Hungary, and for a better vision of Europe than what the Brussels Eurocrats envision. Nobody came to help the Hungarians in 1956. We have to hope that conservatives, especially American conservatives, will rally to the cause today. Orban and his people are not simply fighting a political battle, but a civilizational one. American conservatives, pay attention! What is happening in Hungary today matters for our country more than you think.

Finally, here is a nice souvenir of yesterday:

The post Viktor Orban And The Future Of The West appeared first on The American Conservative.