Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Long War

Long War

VS THE PLASTICISTS:

Comprehensive or Constitutional Politics?: Two broad political inclinations underlie and complicate our political practice and language. (John G. Grove, 5/09/24, Law & Liberty)

Comprehensive politics, therefore, elevates particular substantive outcomes over procedural rules and institutions. Political activity is to be judged by the extent to which aggregate social conditions match the preconceived vision of the Good Society. Procedural norms, constitutions, rights, divisions of power, and the rule of law can easily hinder this pursuit. At best, therefore, they are accorded a secondary status as constraints on the primary activity of politics.

Moreover, comprehensive politics may also transform procedural commitments into ideals to strive after. Democracy (itself a procedural practice for selecting governors) may morph into “Our Democracy”—a package of desired substantive policies and social outcomes that ought to be protected, even against the will of voters. Commitment to a constitution may slip into a pursuit of the never-fully-attained “ideals” or “Spirit” of the Constitution. A belief in equal treatment under law can morph into a quest to create by conscious choice a more comprehensive human equality.

While comprehensive politics starts with a dream of what could be, constitutional politics starts with what is: the actual people, institutions, and authorities of any given society. Rather than focusing on a constructed vision of the whole to be evaluated and adjusted, it sees aggregate social conditions as the byproduct of multiple sources of authority, ones which often pull in different directions. To protect that kind of plural society, governance must also be the product of multiple sources of authority that have found consensus.

Human beings may be capable of changing over time, and such change may come largely from their social circumstances, but those circumstances are so infinitely complex—and the human capacity for understanding so limited—that they cannot be explained by single, purposive causes, or consciously manipulated to attain certain desired ends. The planner, innovator, revolutionary, or counterrevolutionary who attempts to do so may succeed in destroying fragile institutions and destabilizing social order, but he rarely winds up with the society he set out to build.

Constitutional politics, consequently, presents political activity as a process of settlement, and a seeking after consensual order, acceptable to the various parts of society. Politics has neither the ability nor the moral authority to function as the conscious creator and molder of society at large. But it may establish procedures for living peacefully and productively together in a particular place. This notion of political activity allows for a great variety of other nodes of authority to flourish that need not all point one way.

The core Anglospheric insight is that Man is not plastic. You can’t mold him into your preferred shape.

All Comedy is Conservative Identitarianism

IDENTITARIANISM CAN NOT BE SAVAGED HARD ENOUGH:

‘It should be satirized’: A Q&A on ideological extremism, identitarian infighting and CanLit conformism – with the Vancouver novelist Patrik Sampler (TARA HENLEY, APR 28, 2024, Lean Out)

TH: Your novel is about a pseudo-Marxist, anti-authoritarian performance art group that implodes … The group undertakes “actions” that are entirely symbolic, totally divorced from material conditions — and really from any political impact. Naked Defiance reflects currents in our contemporary culture, and satirizes them in nuanced and funny ways. Anyone coming from the progressive left, and dismayed with the turn it has taken, will find lots to recognize here. You were writing this novel at the height of the identitarian movement. In Vancouver, where I’m from and you live. As far as I can tell, Vancouver went all in on this. What did you see, during the years that you were writing this, as you were looking around at our culture?

PS: I saw identitarianism ramping up and ramping up. The question in my mind was always: When are we going to reach peak identity? I don’t know when it’s going to stop, but I think there’s starting to be some questioning of it now.

There’s always been a focus on identity in Canadian literature, but then it kept getting even more and more specific over time. Whereas it used to be, “I’m going to write a novel about my identity,” it became even more circumscribed — the parameters for identity kept shrinking and becoming more specific … There started to be some fear that if you questioned this trend, then you were going to be ostracized as a writer. In fact, there are writers who experienced that.

I have always just tried to do my own thing and have tried to ignore it. And maybe even have tried to promote my writing outside of Canada, for that reason. But I think a lot of writers felt that writing what they really wanted to say would be risky.

TH: There’s a moment when your narrator provides his exact lineage, and notes that it corresponds precisely with that of the character he is writing about: 50% Ukrainian, 37.5% Irish, et cetera. This is a send-up of that trend, but it also seems to be a comment on what you’ve referred to as “the anti-literary focus on the person of the author,” something you’ve written about in the past. How do you see that trend impacting the Canadian cultural scene?

PS: I questioned my assessment of how prevalent that mode of thinking is — is it really as bad as people say? — so, I wrote an item about this very extreme focus on identity. And when I was researching it, I went and looked at various publishers’ websites in Canada. Are the author bios really all that focused on this very minute idea of identity? If you look at it objectively, I don’t think most Canadian writers are all in on this. But that kind of a mode of being an author really gets highlighted in a lot of the mainstream places.

Where I think it’s impacting Canadian writing is that I don’t think we’re seeing a lot of progress in CanLit, as a form of literature — as opposed to writing being seen as a kind of a platform for a political notion. The writers who are my heroes, people like Robert Walser and Abe Kobo … Robert Walser said that the role of the author is self-effacement. Whereas now we see this strong idea that your writing has to be connected to who you are as a person. I think that’s really a step backward. And maybe it’s disrespectful of the readers.

TH: How so?

PS: Because I feel that it’s promoting the idea that the writing is so closely connected with the author, that it is the author — and there is really no room for interpretation, or having one’s own take. It’s just a platitude, but Andrei Tarkovsky wrote that “a book read by a thousand different readers is a thousand different books.” I feel strongly that we’re being told quite differently here in Canada, in many cases.

Identitarianism

REACTIONARIES HAVE TO KEEP REACTING:

Is Bari Weiss Embarrassed by the Intellectual Dark Web? (Matt Johnson, May. 4th, 2024, Daily Beast)

However, in the 2018 Times essay, Weiss conceded that audience capture—a phenomenon where public figures are rewarded for producing content that flatters the biases and prejudices of their audiences—“probably helps explain why some people in this group talk constantly about the regressive left but far less about the threat from the right.” Weiss warned of the dangers of aligning with right-wing charlatans who happen to have large platforms. She worried that “cranks, grifters and bigots” might take over the movement.

These concerns turned out to be well-founded.

The IDW name, nowadays, is more of a punchline than a movement—not even used by superfans of its erstwhile members. This is in no small part because many of its core members have devolved into a cadre of virulent MAGA activists, anti-vaxxers, and unhinged conspiracy mongers of all kinds.

The Right exists to amuse normals.

Identitarianism

“I JUST KNOW THERE WAS A LAB LEAK!”

STUDY: MID-LIFE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS ARE INDEED LONELY WEIRDOS (NOOR AL-SIBAI, 5/01/24, Futurism)


It’s a commonly-held assumption that most people who believe in conspiracy theories are loners — and new research backs it up. […]

With a 2022 meta-analysis strongly associating social alienation with conspiratorial beliefs, the Oslo researchers decided to look into nearly three decades of records on more than 2200 Norwegians, using healthcare and psychological data to determine what factors might help explain mid-life conspiracism. What they found, as they explain in their paper, was fascinating:

Conspiracist worldviews were particularly appealing to participants who were relatively lonely as adolescents and experienced increasing loneliness through their lives. One possible explanation for this pattern, albeit tentative and requiring further research, is that the contrasting of one’s own increasing loneliness relative to peers might be potent in fostering feelings of social isolation motivating our participants to turn to conspiracy theorizing to protect their ego, or to seek social connection among like-minded conspiracist groups.

Identitarianism

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

Israel’s War Within: On the ruinous history of Religious Zionism (Bernard Avishai, February 24, 2004, , Harper’s)

For Israel, the normalization of Gush Emunim, and the larger Religious Zionist settler movement that spawned it, has been no less ruinous. Their record of obstructing peace is longer than that of Hamas, while their reliance on state coercion has become second nature, and, much like Hamas, their program for remaking the state along orthodox lines is ambitious. Disquiet derives, correspondingly, from the ways that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has recently attacked the judiciary (as well as the academy, the entrepreneurial economy, and the press)—ways calculated, in part, to satisfy his Religious Zionist allies, such as his finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of national security Itamar Ben-Gvir, and ultra-Orthodox leaders associated with their theocratic vision.

That grim demonstration against Kissinger, in other words, seems to have been the portent of a two-front culture war—for the land, but also for the state apparatus—which has yet to be decided. And it rages on in Israel today, albeit alongside the calls for unity that have accompanied the Gaza invasion.

It is being waged to determine what kind of state Israel will be. The most authentic Jewish state, Gush Emunim believed, would never entertain the return of biblical land; moreover it would privilege halacha (classical rabbinic law) and militarized tribalism over the norms of a secular Hebrew democracy. Their chant was a kind of battle cry for Greater Israel, seeming to suggest that Kissinger—a German-Jewish refugee who chose America and assimilation, and made the most of both—could not possibly fathom their toughness or messianic grandeur. Entertaining Jewish preeminence, the chant seemed, ironically, of a piece with an anti-Semitic slur.

Nor, on the surface, was Greater Israel consonant with the place I had encountered, first as a volunteer during the summer of 1967, and then as an immigrant in 1972. Standing on the other side of the culture war were descendants of the Zionist pioneers who had built the country and developed a secular Hebrew life that helped engender the coastal “Global Israel” of the Nineties. In contrast to them, Gush Emunim’s Greater Israel seemed grotesque, alien to many secular Israelis—who were often more highly educated and likely to be in the professional class, and who were building a kind of Hebrew republic in Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Haifa, and the suburbs of Be’er Sheva. It was similarly a distortion of the liberal nuances I had taken for granted in the Jewish traditions of my native Montreal.

In early 2023, Global Israel finally pushed back, fighting to preserve the independence of the Supreme Court, rallying in the streets in the hundreds of thousands. Watching them demonstrate, journalists in the West have assumed that Netanyahu has been trying to disrupt the judicial order: to augment his power, say, or pander to his allies, or avoid prison. But this is a half-truth, and not the more interesting half. Netanyahu’s government was attacking the judiciary not because he wanted fundamental changes, but because he supposed the Supreme Court did—that the status quo works for his Greater Israel ideology. And he wasn’t wrong. Greater Israel coalitions have largely maintained power since Begin’s election in 1977, and one has to ask why: What institutional life, what political ethos, had been so congenial to them such that—in spite of the legacy of pioneering secular elites—annexation and orthodox Torah culture were generally valorized?

Indeed, Netanyahu and his allies have accused the high court of “judicial activism” in much the way Southern politicians did in the Sixties. They purported to invite a high-minded debate about the proper balance between branches of government, but in fact aimed to obstruct any disruptions of social norms that no liberal democratic republic should have tolerated in the first place. But without changes, the country will continue to incubate Smotriches and Ben-Gvirs like cultures in a laboratory; politicians who will not just forestall peace, but debase liberalism and Judaism both. And to understand what kind of changes are necessary, we must go back to the intellectual origins of the Zionist revolution itself.

A religion or a race?

Identitarianism

UNUSEFUL IDIOTS:

With Passage Of Aid Bill, It’s Ukraine 1, Putin Republicans 0 (Lucian K. Truscott IV, April 21 | 2024, National Memo)

But Vladimir Putin has enough supporters among House Republicans, including such leading lights as Marjorie Taylor Greene, that Donald Trump has been able to stymie aid to Ukraine for almost a year. Now that military assistance from the U.S. will begin flowing again, Ukraine has a chance to counter the Russian summer offensive that is expected to begin as early as June.

Even though a temporary victory has been won against the Putin wing of the Republican Party, I’m afraid we’re in yet another “can you even imagine” moment with the political party that used to call itself “the party of Lincoln.” With six months to go before elections in the fall, there is no doubt in my mind that we’ll be unable to imagine the garbage that will emerge from the mouth of Donald Trump and his Russia-friendly acolytes.

Identitarianism It's a RICO case

JUST WARMING UP:

‘It can happen again’: Judge set to preside over Trump trial delivers her toughest Jan. 6 sentence to date (KYLE CHENEY, 04/19/2024, Politico)

Chutkan, who is in line to preside over the criminal trial of Donald Trump for his bid to subvert the 2020 election, emphasized her belief that the Jan. 6 mob attack was “close to as serious a crisis as this nation has ever faced.” She lauded officers who, though outnumbered and ill-equipped, fought to protect the building.

“They faced horrendous circumstances. They were assaulted, spat on, beaten, kicked, gassed,” Chutkan said. “They are patriots.”

Chutkan also worried that the conditions that caused Jan. 6 still exist.

“It can happen again,” the Obama-appointed judge said. “Extremism is alive and well in this country. Threats of violence continue unabated.”

Conservative Thought Long War

iDENTITARIANISM IS JUST ANOTHER ISM:

The Origins of Conservatism’s ‘Gnostic’ Meme (Joshua Tait, 4/12/24, The Bulwark)

His moment came in 1951, when Voegelin was invited to the University of Chicago to give a set of lectures under the auspices of a conservative program that had produced influential books by Leo Strauss, George F. Kennan, Daniel J. Boorstin and others. Voegelin’s lectures were gathered into a book, The New Science of Politics. It was through this book that American conservatives were introduced to the concept of Gnosticism in its political and ideological application.

VOEGELIN’S GRAND HISTORY begins with the priestly kings of antiquity who united the secular and spiritual order under their rule. Over time, the unity of their authority developed cracks, many of which resulted from the growth of Christian belief in an omnipotent God who is ontologically separate from His Creation. Society became more secular as the created world was de-divinized, but the spiritual energies were not scoured from the Western imagination—they were merely sublimated. This is where Gnosticism comes into play: For Voegelin, it names the true motivation of anyone who advocates any substantive change to the political order. It is the attempt to bring “our knowledge of transcendence”—our inchoate sense of the Kingdom of Heaven, the eschaton, the endpoint of history—into secular reality through politics.

Voegelin experienced the rise of both Nazism and Bolshevism, and he came to see Gnosticism at the motive core of both movements. “The totalitarianism of our time,” he wrote, “must be understood as journey’s end of the Gnostic search for a civil theology.” But Voegelin was interested in more than endpoints. He saw Gnosticism in a variety of dynamic and emerging ideologies including liberalism, progressivism, positivism, scientism, and still other outlooks and systems. Few could escape his novel, encompassing metaphysical critique.

If Gnosticism involves self-deception—no advocates of the ideological systems Voegelin targeted would accept it as a characterization of their true political motives—it also runs afoul of a self-defeating contradiction, Voegelin argued: Its gnosis, the special knowledge upon which these movements are based, is ultimately false. In his view, Gnostics see their program as an end state that they insist upon in defiance of reality. When Gnostics triumph politically, they only manage to build a dreamworld— fundamentally flawed social arrangements that create a “very complex pneumopathological state of mind”—which he elsewhere defines as the “condition of a thinker who, in his revolt against the world as it has been created by God, arbitrarily omits an element of reality in order to create the fantasy of a new world—among anyone unfortunate enough to live under them, including the Gnostics themselves.

The Summers of Theory (Peter E. Gordon, 4/09/24, Boston Review)

On the one hand, “theory” carried a hint of privilege, the cultivation of exquisite skills in reading and interpretation that were accessible only to an elite. On the other hand, it implied the hopeful idea of an emancipatory practice, since presumably anyone who wished to “do theory” did so because it promised, someday and somehow, to link up with the moral and political business of transforming the world.

Identitarianism

LONG COVID IN HAVANA:

What Cass review says about surge in children seeking gender services (Andrew Gregory, Tobi Thomas and Amelia Gentleman, 10 Apr 2024, The Guardian)

A systematic review highlighted by the Cass report found that use of social media was associated with body image concerns. Numerous other studies cited by the report implicate smartphone and social media use in mental distress and suicidality among young people, particularly girls.

All showed a clear dose-response relationship: the more hours spent online, the greater the effect.


The report suggests that although the impact of societal influences on a child’s gender expression remains unclear, it’s clear that the influences of a child’s peers are “very powerful during adolescence”.

Although the report does not specifically state that girls are affected by social and cultural influences, such as peer pressure, more than boys, and so too their gender expression, other evidence has suggested this is the case.

Several studies have implied that girls are more affected by peer pressure than boys, and are more likely to develop a negative body image during adolescence.

Another societal influence that the report references as possibly having an impact on a young person’s gender expression includes information on gender dysmorphia and gender expression found online.

More specifically, a focus group of gender-questioning young people and their parents who spoke to the review said that they often found online information “that describes normal adolescent discomfort as a possible sign of being trans and that particular influencers have had a substantial impact on their child’s beliefs and understanding of their gender”.

One gender-questioning young person is quoted in the report affirming this view, saying a “lot of trans people make YouTube videos, which I think is a major informational source for a lot of people, and that’s mainly where I get my information from, not so much professional services”.

We don’t pretend that their anorexia is merely a lifestyle choice.

NHS pauses transgender clinic appointments for minors after review: ‘Extreme caution’ (Ryan Foley 11 April 2024, Christianity Today)

Chaired by Dr. Hilary Cass, the retired former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the report lays out the recommendations from the NHS England Policy Working Group as to practices medical professionals should follow when ministering to youth with gender dysphoria in the future.

Participants in the NHS England Policy Working Group include endocrinologists, psychologists, individuals who have experienced gender dysphoria, a child psychiatrist, an academic ethicist as well as several NHS employees.

The review was commissioned following the exponential increase in the number of youth seeking treatment for gender dysphoria over the past decade-plus, as well as concerns about the long-term impacts of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on trans-identified children.

“The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass wrote in an introduction to the report.

Better late than never.

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