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I’m surprised that someone would put it this plainly, but they did:

In practice, this means replacing our current elites in government, the media, and universities with a class of “self-conscious aristoi.” This new elite will “secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people.” More specifically, this new elite will abolish the system of “separations” that plague modernity including the separation of church and state and the separation of powers. The stakes are high for this more ennobled form of postliberalism. Should we fail to embrace it, we may well lurch toward “civil war, hot or cold.”

I’ve lamented the effete, sybaritic and (to cover up the first two) self-righteous elites that dominate our national life. I’ve also, contrary to what passes as political thought in Christian circles, felt that replacing them is the key to the long term survival and prosperity of the country. The fact that our Christian political class spent so much time wanting more to become a part of our elite rather than displacing them was a mistake, probably a fatal one.

But rather than some kind of “self-conscious aristoi,” I have a different approach.

• Why is it that the educational institutions that dominate our government life are private? The states’ counterparts to those aren’t. Every President between Reagan and Biden has been an Ivy Leaguer. (It was a sign of the depth of desperation that the Democrats nominated Joe Biden on this account alone.) Without breaking up this monopoly we won’t get anywhere. Making them federal institutions (like the service academies) would also be a stronger guarantee of First Amendment rights, and would signal to everyone what they’re about.
• Why are we still, in this technological age, still obsessed with the arts (such as they are these days, that’s a big part of the problem) when we need more technically educated people in our upper reaches? That’s an inheritance from our British roots that we need to get past. Some in the past have thought we would make that shift, but we haven’t. This is why we turn our nose up at technological solutions to our problems while embracing zero-sum thinking and mass movements to get us past our problems: they’re the only weapons in the elite arsenal.
• We need to seriously break up our tech monopolies. The supposedly “liberating” web has turned into a net to corral us. Such concentration of wealth will always lead to the centralisation of power, and tinkering with institutions will not change that.

I’m sure I’ll get howls of indignation about these ideas; I have in the past. But if we don’t come up with a better way to fix our problems than the one we have now, someone else will do it for us, and we won’t like it one bit.

It’s that time of the decade again when we look back on the Watergate scandal and how it brought down Richard Nixon and many of those around him. In this case it is the fiftieth anniversary. I usually like to note that at this time of year–the scandal itself drug out for almost two years and beyond–because I feature two recordings of John Erlichmann testifying at the Senate Select Committee on the subject. You can hear the first of these here and the second here.

As will become evident, I still have my doubts on many of the “official” explanations of what happened. Some of these doubts arose during the events and some are the result of subsequent events, which cast the whole thing in a different light. This is a personal reflection of the impact the scandal had on me–and I’m sure on others–and how life was different as a result of it.

Let me start by presenting this, which brought much of the pain of the era back into consciousness:

At the beginning of 1973, things were starting to look up. The Vietnam War, which had dominated the years before, was coming to an end. It wasn’t the best end (something that was obvious at the time) but it was probably the best we could hope for. I was graduating from prep school in June. That hadn’t been the happiest experience but I had “swum the Tiber” and left the school’s church behind, and had been accepted to Texas A&M and left the school’s socio-economic slice behind, and things were finally looking up.

Watergate and the other crises of the era–especially the oil related crises–wrecked all that.

I listened to the hearings while working at the family business during the summer in the drafting office shown above. I (and my co-workers) were a little mystified by the whole thing. More to the point, I had read subversive books, and knew there were other ways of dealing with problems like this. In a Westminster system, the government would resign, we’d get a new government, and things would go on. In other systems the whole thing would have been shoved under the rug, the lower level miscreants given the boot, and life would go on. The United States–which supposedly had the greatest form of government the world had ever known–could bring itself to do none of these things; it took what seemed like an eternity to finally get to a “changing of the guard” while the nation was torn apart with night after night of the scandal (that was before the 24-hour news cycle we have now) and its energy drained from the Cold War it was supposed to be engaged in with the Soviet Union.

The basic problem was twofold. The first was that the U.S. Constitution made it difficult to remove a President from office, a simple fact which has been repeatedly forgotten in all of the subsequent impeachment efforts. The second was that Nixon’s opponents turned the whole thing into a moral crusade–a very American thing to do–in order to advance their cause. Had they been more focused on their effort, they could have sent the Republican Party to a permanent wilderness, but they missed their best chance to do so.

In the middle of all this most of my faith in this system–a faith which hadn’t been done any favours by my aforementioned prep school–was seriously damaged. Things bounced downward as the decade wore on, leading in part to my first writing of this. It also led to my serious consideration of emigration, which for better or worse I never went through with. Texas A&M turned around my faith in this country and altered my spiritual course as well.

Subsequent events have shown several things.

The first is that our government is capable of intrusive, one-sided suppression of our liberties in ways that Nixon’s people could only dream of, and that the same group of people who attacked Nixon for his dirty tricks have employed worse on our population. That puts the whole business of Watergate in a new light.

The second is that the right–especially the religious right–ploughed into political involvement without really understanding the nature of their opponents nor how to achieve their objectives. This is why their effort stalled and they ultimately turned to Donald Trump, an unlikely a hero of religious conservatism as one could want. I discuss this in my “retrospective” on my earlier writings.

The third is that Watergate taught people that dragging out scandal and resorting to the legal system were the way to “get things done.” Such has poisoned our political system ever since.

But we have a “democracy,” don’t we?

If you had to pick the exact day when the young, affluent, and oblivious of Washington DC were forced to accept that they live in a failed city, 22 …

Washington DC is a failed city

Mike Pence might want to consider this…

Timothy Fountain’s piece That Golden Age of Porn is an honest piece on the era of 1969-1984 when porn was distributed freely (thanks in part to SCOTUS) in print and in theatres. Porn was a major disseminator of the sexual revolution.

Tim’s major contribution in this piece, however, was to remind everyone of the routine trashing of people who objected to the sexual revolution in general and porn in particular:

First of all, objections to the Golden Age of Porn were “cancelled” in the same way objections to “Pride” are censored today. To challenge the public proliferation of porn was to be:

• called a religious zealot or nut;
• labelled a Philistine opposed to artistic expression;
• tagged as a Nazi opposed to free speech;
• pop-psychoanalyzed as a sexually repressed neurotic;
• lumped in with the old, ignorant and generally uncool.

But there were consequences, not the least to feminism:

Self-described feminists sometimes attacked porn as “objectifying women,” then pivoted to extol it as “women finding empowerment through their sexuality.” Very much like arguing for elevation of women’s sports while simultaneously bringing biological males into women’s events and locker rooms.

The sexual revolution in general put feminism in a tight place. Were women supposed to spurn sex in order to minimise contact with men? Or was it their most powerful weapon? Feminism has had a schizoid cast to it ever since, something that becomes evident when women like Paula Jones and Tara Reade come forward.

Tim brings us to the present: the transgender movement. It’s worth noting that the sexual revolution used to be called the “free love” movement. We were promised that, when our inhibitions were cast aside and we ripped off our bourgeois phoniness to be our true selves, that we would all be happy. But that’s how it started: how is it going? What we have really done to ourselves is turn sexual activity into a performance-based arena, where there are some winners and many losers. Porn made it look easy. It’s not, especially when it intersects with real relationships.

The trans movement is a way of removing the performance-based sexual activity by pivoting away from sex to gender, and from there to tie gender to personal identity, which in turn ties is to the issue we can never seem to get away from, authenticity. Now we focus on identity, with expensive medical procedures (there’s the cash flow, as was and is the case with the porn industry.) It’s a tacit admission that the sexual revolution has failed, and its attractiveness to young people (along with declining sexual activity) is an indication that they realise the jig is up for “free love.” It’s admitting the sexual revolution has failed without admitting it.

The first victim of this is, ironically, the LGB community. They’ve been telling us that they’re “born this way,” but the trans people tell us that no one is born any way, that we’re “assigned” a gender at birth subject to subsequent alteration. They’ve put themselves into the same kind of tight place as the feminists did. But things can play out differently. In the U.S., a relatively large community of religious conservatives have forced the LGB and T (along with the other alphabet letters) into an unnatural alliance, at least for the moment. In the UK, where religious conservatives are nearly invisible, things are different, especially with the lesbians and their “TERF wars.”

Until we find a way to cast aside our sexo-centricity and attain a more balanced view of things, which includes productive output for our mental health, prosperity and protection from foreign invaders, we will stumble from one disaster to another until we succumb to the last one.

To his army of ardent followers, Tom Holland has a unique ability to bring antiquity alive. An award-winning British historian, biographer and …

The shadow of Pax Romana

Future of an Illusion and other writings on religion by Sigmund Freud

Another (maybe the last) in this series. It shows that, even for people sympathetic with Freud’s project, his atheism doesn’t have as strong of a case as he–or those who continue to make that case–thought it did. Includes a summary of a dialogue with Oskar Pfister, a Swiss pastor’s son who made a case for Christianity. One interesting takeaway from the whole narrative:

Given Freud’s lifelong animus against religion, it’s surprising that, when he finally got round to writing a complete book on the subject, it turned out to be such a surprisingly bad and unsystematic text. It trots through various arguments for atheism, buttressed by bits of psychoanalytic theory, but is surprisingly ramshackle and unconvincing.

For me, the Voice of the Believer wins, especially when you consider that, as Freud was writing, some European nations stood poised to experiment with just the sort of alternative, non-religious, pseudo-scientific ideologies to bind society together which Freud appears to recommend: Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany.