Having come back to see the dreadful news about MB's family, which strikes me personally as well as abstractly, as it does us all, I know of no better way of showing my care and admiration and hope for them, than by doing what I can to keep on with The Work, in his name right now.
This morning I explained how the intellectual conservative Christian memeweavers created, over more than two decades, the climate that led to, strangely enough, on the same day, Sen. Cornyn making barely-veiled threats against disloyal lawmakers who do not represent the will of the people - by the skillful legerdemain of ideas and words, semantic substitution, and pseudo-Socratic "leading" of witnesses into carefully-managed destinations, like cattle being herded down chutes made of flimsy palings.
I also pointed out how so much - so impossibly much! - of what we have seen and suffered in the last four years, has foreshadowed by Sinclair Lewis (he has Phyllis Schlafly, Ollie North, Tom Delay, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and David Brooks, "Liberal Hawks," "Hollywood values", the Protest Warriors, hitting girls and indulging in cryptic homoeroticism, students making blacklists of unAmerican professors and classmates - and bewildered decent conservatives and moderates first laughing, then wringing their hands until it's all too late, at which point they start considering moving to Canada) in 1936.
But the twist on it which in Lewis' time was not so much the issue (and yet his hero is tempted sometimes by the easy lure of "Buzz," when his own very modern daughter talks frankly about her sex life, and the music the young people listen to these days!) is the sexual revolution, and specifically abortion. Women should be respected, not used for sex, and protected, in the home, and do what God and Nature designed them to, in both Lewis' story and the conservative "scholars" of the past forty years. And they should never, ever, be allowed to ruin themselves with casual sex, or worse yet, abortion.
They truly believe that they are protecting women. This I can attest. At the same time, like someone who keeps taking home baby birds to "raise" them, and after they die, goes out and gets more birds, and treats them the same way, they cannot be pardoned because of sincerity. As they are fond of telling us, a conscience must be well-formed and in accord with objective reality.
They may sincerely believe that Roe vs. Wade made America no longer America, tore up the Constitution, and absolved us of our responsibility to respect the government and the law.
They're wrong.
They may sincerely believe that "activist judges" are the root of all evil - and that they don't think so because their forebears, intellectual and/or physical, were forced to cut into their profits when activist judges told them to pay fair wages, full wages, and not to extort in their "dark satanic mills," ninety and a hundred years ago.
They're wrong. Deluded, liars, or both - and leading many thousands astray these last twenty, thirty, forty years and more.
So, I challenged us - regulars, visitors, decent and troubled conservatives realizing dimly that they have been seduced to the Dark Side, and wanting out - to work on debunking and defanging them, now that the agenda, to destroy the secular state and the "activist" judges, has come out from under its mask. I tried to explain, as I have before, how it all makes sense: the people who want rule of law are the ones who want protecting, and the powerful do not need, or do not think they need, protection by the laws. Their wealth is their shield and sword; it has always sufficed for Robber Barons in the past.
But now we have Theocratic Robber Barons, the worst of both worlds, and they have Evil Scholars (used to be called Sorcerers in the old days) as their Minions, blinding the eyes of the people with diversions so that they may go about their looting unhindered. So of course I have been thinking about how to answer them, beyond and above what I always try to do.
The problem: How to deal with people who are so orwellian that they shamelessly use Dietrich Bonhoeffer and MLK to defend laissez-faire capitalism and authoritarianism - which they have redefined as liberty, and true liberalism, no less!
Well, first off, we won't reach them. Not without miracles; they've made their bed, chosen their path for many years, devoted their lives to destroying us and they won't, because they can't, back down now. This is the thing, about becoming Minitrued: you believe your own narratives, you get caught in your own webs of sophistry, because all their position, social, fiscal, and temporal, is wrapped up in it. By such onions are we dragged down to hell.
But by engaging them and debating their pseudo-arguments and debunking their false assertions, we discredit their authority: by showing that they have claimed to be the sole true interpreters of both the Law (secular) and the Prophets (religion) but that this is on very shaky ground, we may break away those of their supporters who are not vested in such ways, not yet. (People like me, in the early 90s, who had no such guides and nothing outside the echo chamber I trusted, and had to find my way out alone.)
It's mucky work, sometimes it requires laughing at devils, and sometimes it requires hours of hacking away in dusty archives (sometimes virtual dust of course) to refute their claims. Critics will call you uncharitable and worse yet, stooping to their level. But ignoring bullies and slanderers never yet did discourage them, that I heard tell.
--I'm not the right person to be doing this. I keep saying there must be people more erudite, more wise, more temperate and eloquent and less brash and given to fits of exhaustion and sickness and distraction and ill humour, people with advanced degrees in Church History and Philosophy and experience in scholarly debate.
But there's only me, whose patron saint or guardian angel has turned to be Monkey, of all people, bringing the Words of Peace to China, slaying demons on the way.
So there are many ways to answer them, and they are all good, in that all of them are an answer, therefore active, and we must always keep moving or we will be crushed as if by a giant's club. But best if we can hamstring them, in ways that can be easily disseminated, though it is hard to be pithy and clear and catchy with the truth as it is with half-truths, the way that Kreeft and Limbutt are. And heaven knows I'm not the one to do it! But like the elites of Crisis, some of us can provide the evidence, in masses of statistics, in disentangling rhetoric, in relevant data from abroad, and (in my case) decoding the code, since I grew up speaking it.
And then maybe other people can distill it and clean it up and then we can all pass it around.
So here is my first, rough stab at it, because I am too tired and ill to make a proper job of it, and this is the rough outline of the argument.
1. The Theocrat Manifesto, aka the Democracy Symposium, argues that American govt lost its legitimacy due to unaccountable officials imposing their immoral will on the people in RvW. Part of this argument is the belief that the subsequent rise of legalized abortions is so heinous a thing, that decent people are now no more obliged to go along with these "nine old men" and the system that supports them, than we would have been if we had been living in Germany in 1941.
Sed contra!
If this argument is to be taken logically to its conclusion, not truncated, then there is never a time when the American government was legitimate, nor we obliged to respect its officials. Because there has never been a time when there was not injustice
[Don't try to argue that abortion isn't wrong, or that it's a nuanced problem whereby the "cure" of criminalization is worse than the disease - this will only "prove" you are a Moral RelativistTM and that you cannot be trusted in any way. By granting hypothetically the Conservative premise here, you are not compromising your own beliefs, you are simply a) turning their own tactics upon them, proving them inconsistent and illogical, and b) taking the battle to their own home turf. Make them defend the goal. --Be prepared for partisan historical arguments, seriously under-informed, invoking the US Civil War and the Aluminum Overcast, to be made in counter.)
2) By rejecting the orderly process altogether, and refusing to work within the system, are they not undercutting the entire thesis of their own conservativism? Is this not a denial of the principles of the status quo, of submission to authority and hierarchy for the common good, of order and civilization, as set out by Russell Kirk and claimed as the moral authority for seeking power in the first place?
This is a more philosophical argument, and will tie a consistent, or at least one who blieves himself to be consistent, conservative up in knots for hours. It will probably end up with shouting and ad hominem arguments. But as usual, it's the bystanders we're trying to win to our manchi here.
3)
Now that they have "cut down all the laws," what will protect them in the future, when the wind changes? The limits, the sacred "checks and balances" were put there for a reason, in times at least as politically dangerous and socially unstable as our own. Now that you have decided that you're wiser than all the Founding Fathers, that the experiment in democracy was a failure and called a halt to it after a mere two hundred years - what will stop a still-more ruthless, determined, and less-self-decieving group of power-hungry types from taking advantage of this? That's what happened in the French Revolution, after all.
This has many advantages: it invokes a beloved conservative trope, that of A Man for All Seasons - every last one of them (formerly us) thinks of themselves as Thomas, prisoner of conscience, so to be told that no, they're really just venal Richard and Cromwell serving Henry and setting the stage for future generations of national chaos and sectarian strife is a body blow. And the question is very real: it was, after all, in rx to the English wars of religion most of all, that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were formed. Plus equating them to the lawyers and social scientists of the early French Revolution is a low blow: they after all think of that as a typical liberal folly, as they have since the Tories were paying pundits to rail against the American levellers, godless feminists, and the French...
Anyway, this is a start, from me.
Then we need to figure out a way of debunking them wiggling out of paying attention to the poor, by claiming that the problem is really materialism, and the poor are just as vulnerable to consumeritis and need to be protected from it..."Blessed are the poor, so we're helping them stay that way, Lord!"
Kimberley, I sure do accept your apology - but I have to admit that at this point I don't even remember what we were arguing about!