Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist and professor at New York University. His research includes a great deal of cutting edge work applying moral psychology to the study of politics and business ethics. Currently he is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership in the Stern School of business at NYU. Professor Haidt is concerned about the group think that is enveloping America’s great universities, and as a result he co-founded Heterodox Academy that works to increase viewpoint diversity. He has also been visiting university campuses discussing how the academe has become so monolithic in its outlook and what we can do about it. One of the lectures he presented at Duke University in 2015 is in the video below. It should be watched by anyone who is concerned about the state of the nation’s universities.
Before his untimely passing Christopher Hitchens developed quite a following. Hitchens, a one-time Trotskyite who remained a man of the left until his passing, was a brilliant writer and polemicist who pulled no punches. He was a student and admirer of George Orwell. His biographical essay about Orwell, “Why Orwell Matters” is an example of both the style of Hitchens’ writing and the substance of his thought. Though he was an admirer of Orwell he did not write a hagiography. He forthrightly examined what he considered to be Orwell’s strengths and weaknesses.
Less well-known is Christopher Hitchens’ brother, Peter, also an intellectual. (Christopher and Peter did not get along.) Peter Hitchens, a former Bolshevik takes aim at the authoritarian left relying in part on his past experience as a leftist. Like his brother, he gives no quarter and calls it the way he sees it. Take a look at the video below of Peter Hitchens being interviewed about the silencing of voices of dissent and the cancel culture, a culture that is rapidly spreading through American society.
There was a time not so long ago when leftists routinely charged that the radical right, roughly defined as anybody who didn’t agree with leftist orthodoxy, consisted largely of a bunch of Neanderthal book burners. Well, look who the book burners turned out to be.
America’s institutions are failing because, among other causes, America’s elites are not willing to defend liberal values. Free speech is under attack by social justice warriors who want to destroy anybody who doesn’t buckle under. Take a look at the John Stossel Video below.
America has had several waves of Awakening in its history, characterized by intense religious enthusiasm and social activism. These waves stemmed from American Protestantism, often accompanied by a profound sense of conviction and redemption. They tended to be evangelistic, with an increase in evangelistic church membership and the formation of new denominations. The Awakenings were led by charismatic preachers who imbued in followers a profound sense of personal guilt and a need for redemption through Christ.
The original Awakening in the early 1700s was mostly an elite affair. The Second Awakening “The Great Awakening” took place in the late 1700s and lasted until the around 1850. It spread beyond New England elites and made its way to the Midwest. It also was a time when Black attendance at mainline white Protestant churches declined precipitously. At the same time dozens of free Black churches were formed and served Blacks who were abandoning white mainline churches. There is a case to be made that this resulted from white discrimination against Blacks, but it is not a settled matter. In any event, as many scholars have noted, there is no place in America that is more segregated than church on Sunday.
It should be noted that the Great Awakening coincided with progressive reforms including abolitionism, temperance and women’s rights. Note that social reformers and the Awakened often came from the same ranks.
The Third Awakening was also a profoundly Christian affair. It was characterized by missionary work, the Social Gospel and was instrumental in fostering revivals in American cities. Out of the Third Awakening came the YMCA, Christian and Sanitary Commissions that provided medical relief to Union Armies, and Freedmen’s Societies that provided educational services to freedmen in the South after the Civil War.
Fast forward to 2020. We are in yet another Great Awakening, known as the #Resistance. After all, why do you suppose that the #Resistance refers to itself as “woke”?
This one however is different from the others in that it is anti-religious.
The #Resistance has all the earmarks of an Awakening. Its adherents are profound believers in the cause (however poorly defined). It has charismatic leaders. It is a mass movement. It is not cerebral; it is dominated by feelings, emotion and a profound sense of alienation, resentment and guilt. The movement (like all movements) is remarkably intolerant of people who don’t toe the party line. They are the Other; they are “deniers”. Skeptics are canceled over the least variation from orthodoxy. Ritualized confessions of guilt are increasingly common.
Most importantly it is a movement that tries to fill a hole in the search for meaning that is lost in the soul of secularized man. It is a cry for help.
The irony is that the secularization of society began with a quest for pluralism and equal justice, associated with the 1960s. It quickly turned into an attack on the basic institutions of a free society, including the traditional family, the rule of law, property rights and most importantly, religion.
Why the attack on religion? It is the most important facet of the Gramscian long march through the institutions because religious authority stands above State authority. (That is why in the U.S. a priest can not be legally compelled to break the seal of confession.)
Religion ultimately succeeds by persuasion rather than by force (a principle honored in the breech). And it holds a privileged position in the U.S. legal system. Religious belief enjoys the protection of the free exercise clause of the First amendment. The U.S. Declaration is crystal clear that we have natural rights that are unalienable, endowed by the Creator. Rights are pre-political; they do not come from government, and government has no authority to take them away. Every individual is a unique being possessing intrinsic worth and dignity. That doctrine is a dagger pointed at the heart of collectivism.
Woke citizens (as opposed to their leaders) are searching for justice and dignity in a world without the Creator and without Redemption. They want to, need to, create a world without sin. It is a fool’s errand; it requires the perfectibility of man, which is to say it requires the creation of a “New Man.” In turn that requires a great man, an extraordinary man, for whom the rules, which are mere social conventions, don’t apply. There are no rules; just the will to power.
In Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the attorney Petrovich Porfiry refers to an academic article written by the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov when he was a student.
Porfiry provides a summation of the article:
“In his article all men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’. Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary.”
Rodion Raskolnikov replies by adding nuance:
“[An]…extraordinary man has the right…that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep…certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfillment of his idea {sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity}.”
In making his argument Raskolnikov makes the case for the nihilism that would shortly engulf the 20th century. The brutal ideologies of that century, communism and fascism, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people at the hands of Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh. Atheists all. Long after the facts were clear they were still supported by Walter Duranty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Earnest Hemingway and Theodore Dreiser among others.
When man’s yearning for meaning and dignity is divorced from faith in the Creator, the ultimate law-giver, what is left is nihilism. There is no truth; only “my truth”. There is no justice; only “my justice”. Decency is simply a matter of convenience. Who is to say that one system or action is superior to another? There are no facts, only interpretations. Which implies that all questions are then reducible to power and decided by the exercise of that power. And all power comes, according to Mao, from the barrel of a gun.
We have gone down this road before, many, many times. The result is always the same, and it isn’t pretty. It would be nice to avoid another go around. But that would require that liberals defend liberalism, and it doesn’t look like that is going to happen any time soon.
By now it should be clear to all sentient beings that protests over the killing of George Floyd have been hijacked by left wing radicals. Moreover, they (the radicals) mean to transform America by any means necessary, including the use of violence. The response from the political establishment that runs American cities set ablaze has been stone cold silence. It is then followed by a predictable cave-in to mob violence. What explains this?
It helps to look at history.
In the 1960s, the forerunner to today’s violence, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown proclaimed that “Violence is as American as cherry pie”. He urged his followers to use violence to resist the American government which he characterized as the “Fourth Reich” and urged his followers on with such comments as “If America don’t come around, we’re gonna burn it down.” That wasn’t an isolated remark.
Elected the 5th Chairman of the ironically named Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he also served as Minister of Justice for the Black Panther Party. While Chairman of SNCC he urged followers at a Washington D.C. rally to “carry on guerrilla warfare in all the cities…and make the Viet Cong look like Sunday school teachers.”
A little earlier Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which later became the Weather Underground, made an appearance. For the Weathermen, violence was necessary to create change. Brian Flanagan, a founding member, said “When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some pretty horrible things.”
And so the Weathermen set off a wave of violent protests and bombings across America. In 1970 Bernadine Dohrn announced a “declaration of War”. A few days later a bomb manufactured in a Greenwich Village townhouse, intended for an Army base, exploded killing three Weathermen. The explosion set off an FBI manhunt and the Weathermen went underground, hence the change of name to “Weather Underground”.
Other leaders of the movement included the infamous Chicago 7, the group put on trial for fomenting the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention, helped along by the behavior of the Chicago police. This group included Tom Hayden, a graduate of the University of Michigan. He authored the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the Weathermen. Later in life he married Jane Fonda and won seats in both the California Assembly and Senate.
Renne Davis, who graduated from Oberlin College, was an early activist in the SDS. He was an organizer of MOBE, The National Mobilization Committee to end the War in Vietnam. His father had served as chief of staff of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Harry S Truman. Later in life Renee Davis became a business consultant advising Fortune 500 companies on business strategy.
Jerry Rubin, along with Abbie Hoffman, founded the Yippie Party. Rubin studied at Oberlin College before graduating from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in history. He attended the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, but quickly dropped out to pursue social activism. That included a trip to Havana to learn about the Cuban revolution.
Meanwhile his fellow founder of the Yippies, Abbie Hoffman, studied at Brandies University where he became a student of Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse.
The influence of Herbert Marcuse, father of the New Left, can not be over emphasized. Marcuse worked as a professor at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis Universities. It was at Brandies that he wrote his most influential work “One Dimensional Man”. Marcuse believed that “all questions of material existence have been solved, moral commands and prohibitions are no longer relevant”. The realization of man’s erotic nature was what was needed to truly liberate humanity.
Liberating humanity, according to Marcuse, would require intolerance for heretical beliefs. Below I quote from Marcuse’s A Repressive Tolerance,1965.
“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.”
Sound familiar? It ought to because it is the animating idea behind today’s cancel culture.
Which brings us to Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the real agenda the organization is pushing, which has precious little to do with civil rights. Because they have no use for civil rights for anybody. They are self described Marxists; individual rights are not part of their vocabulary. Anyone who doubts this has only to view this 2 minute clip (below) in which Co-Founder Patrisse Cullors declares “We actually do have an ideological frame…we are trained Marxists.”
Patrisse Cullo — Co-Founder of BLM
And if that is not good enough, go visit the BLM Website where they proclaim their goal to transform Western society into a socialist Utopia through revolution. Here is specifically what they say:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).”
So let us not be naive about this. BLM is just one of many radical left wing Marxist groups who attack traditional Western institutions in an attempt to undermine the freedoms of a liberal society we take for granted. They, along with their brothers in arms, intend to stamp out those institutions that stand in their way; institutions like the traditional nuclear family, private property, the rule of law and the sovereignty of the individual.
Like the Weather Underground before them, they are at war with human nature and Western society. There should be no doubt about this. All you have to do is listen to them. It is the same old story; we have been here before, it is merely a reboot of 1968.
So why have progressives remained quiet in the face of this onslaught? After all, it is the progressive establishment that runs the major cities in America—the ones that have been torched. It is oh-so-progressive Seattle that stands by watching helplessly as a section of town is taken over by radicals in an armed insurrection. It is progressive Minneapolis that has a police department so lawless that the city council decided to defund it and turn it over to someone else. It is progressive New York mayor Bill de Blasio who announced that he was going to reduce the NYC police budget by $1 Billion—presumably to improve the quality of policing. The list goes on.
Why is it that in city after city minority citizens distrust police departments that report to progressive politicians? How is it that those same progressive politicians are silent when violent Marxist radicals hijack citizen demonstrations when those citizens peacefully and correctly demand that their rights be respected?
The best word for it is cowardice.
It was Aristotle who said the most important virtue is courage—because without courage the other virtues fade away. And so it is today. Progressives refuse to stand up for what they claim to believe about the rule of law, citizens’ rights and the liberal institutions that have protected what used to be known as the American way of life.
It is progressives that have been responsible for the management and oversight of city police departments and school systems for the last 50 years or so. And they have failed miserably. Rather than admit error and implement the reforms so desperately needed, they choose instead to appease the mob. They do this because they are captured by special interest groups (like public sector unions) and are more interested in virtue-signaling than doing the hard work of governing responsibly.
And so what we are left with is an incoherent political philosophy (progressivism) that lies at the root of the problem; a political class that would rather deal in sanctimony than govern, and affluent citizens who increasingly wall themselves off from the consequences of their votes.
In the meantime poor and minority citizens are distrustful of police, a sure sign of a governance failure—at the very least. Meanwhile poor and minority citizens do not have access to quality schools that would enable them to better their lives and compete on a level playing field. That opportunity is denied by progressives who refuse to allow school competition either through vouchers or charter schools.
So by all means, Progressives should keep on playing #Resistance. Virtue signaling is so fun and easy when somebody else pays the price.
People misunderstand what “activists” mean by “defund the police”. It doesn’t mean the abolition of policing. It does mean moving the jurisdiction of policing to another larger political entity—for instance moving the jurisdiction (and management responsibility) from the city to the county. It also means that the taxing locus will be the county. But the city will not reduce its spending by the amount its police budget has been reduced. It will use that money for more “social services” which is to say income transfers and vote buying.
So the Minneapolis city council, which for eons has been one of the most liberal cities in the country, has now voted to disband its police department by a veto-proof majority.
They have, in effect, conceded that they are incapable of managing their own police department. The same is largely true of its public school system; they just haven’t gotten around to admitting it yet.
This raises several rather obvious questions that Progressive cheerleaders in the press have thus far been reluctant to ask.
Is Minneapolis somehow significantly different from other big U.S. cities, and if so, how?
Does the Minneapolis experience represent a failure of governance and government? If not, why not?
How can it be that in Minneapolis (and everywhere else) the same one-party political machines that have consistently produced the same failures in policing and schools have been continuously re-elected for 50 years or so?
How can it be that Progressives, who claim to represent the interests of minorities and the poor, and who have presided over this disaster, have any credibility left at all?
One of the problems we face in the public square is that “argument” consists largely of assertions without regard to facts, evidence, or logic. It is commonly assumed, for instance, that differences in outcomes result from unequal treatment, and that were it not for unequal treatment differentiation in outcomes would be essentially non-existent. Things like taste, interest, ability, discipline, industriousness and even biology are mere social constructs that reflect the preferences of an oppressive class hierarchy.
There is a further underlying assumption that were it not for this oppressive class system, otherwise known as capitalism, poverty could be eliminated and the wants and needs of people could be fulfilled. (Note: material poverty has been largely eliminated in the West by…capitalism).
The common thread in all this is the assumption that wealth and income derive from external resources rather than from the development of human capital; that wealth should be distributed rather than created and earned. Most importantly, it assumes that wealth is the default position of mankind.
It isn’t. The default position of mankind is existence under conditions of poverty and scarcity. The reason why the West lives in abundance is because over the centuries it has created institutions that protect property rights, individual agency and the rule of law, all of which are necessary preconditions for liberal market capitalism.
Dr. Thomas Sowell, a pre-eminent economist with the Hoover Institution, discusses wealth, poverty and politics in a wide ranging interview with Peter Robinson in the video below.
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Jean-Jacque Rousseau
“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Edmund Burke.
There is a great philosophical divide between classical liberalism and utopian socialism. It is this divide that drives modern politics and has done so since the time of the French and American Revolutions. The intellectual poison served up by Rousseau, eagerly consumed by the ignorati, has wrought tremendous cultural damage. The damage is evident in the smoking ruins on literal display in America’s cities and figuratively in its cultural institutions.
For some historical perspective on todays politics and culture, it is well worth watching the discussion below with the David Starkey (no relation to Ringo), a Cambridge educated and very controversial British constitutional historian.
When the history books of the 2020 election are written they will most likely say that this was the week that Donald J Trump lost his bid for re-election. Not because of the economy; not because of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police; not because of mass protests and later rioting.
Donald Trump lost because his deceitful and cowardly nature was laid bare for all to see including those who would prefer not to see. It was laid bare when he was whisked to a bunker in the White House when the crowds outside got unruly. It was there and then that his phony macho rhetoric crashed into the reality of his cowardice.
Had he been a real leader he would have gone outside to address the crowd, while showing some humility and decency. But that is not part of his make-up. Instead he ran and hid in his bunker displaying his true nature—that of a coward and a weakling.
The American people can tolerate a lot in a President. Over the years there have been plenty of opportunities to forgive and forget. But the American public has little tolerance for an amoral sniveling coward in the White House; a narcissist whose primary concern is his own well being rather than that of the nation. Which is why even Mr. Trump’s backers are starting to waiver. Come November, the American public will likely show Mr. Trump the door.
Perhaps it was inevitable; it’s starting to look like 1968 again. According to press reports, at least 15 of America’s large cities have recently experienced what we decorously refer to as “civil unrest”. Needless to say, politicians—the people who are supposed to be passing laws and administering them—are confronting the situation by engaging in Twitter wars.
The proximate cause of the unrest (we’ll return to definitions later) was the death of a 46 year old African-American male named George Floyd, while in police custody. The encounter between Mr. Floyd and police officers was captured on camera. In the video it seems reasonably clear that, at the every least, the police officers at the scene used excessive force that resulted in his death.
The officers at the scene were quickly fired by Minneapolis Mayor Jeffrey Frey; Officer Derek Chauvin was charged with third degree murder and second degree manslaughter. The difference between the two charges is that third degree murder requires that the prosecution prove that the officer’s behavior caused the death and that he acted with depraved indifference. On the other hand, the lesser manslaughter charge involves “culpable negligence creating an unreasonable risk of serious bodily harm”. The difference in the two charges is the potential sentence. The more serious murder charge carries a maximum sentence of 25 years; the homicide charge 10 years. It will be up to a jury to determine which (if either) charge fits the facts of the case. (More detail on the legal aspects of the case can be found in an article by Andrew McCarthy here).
Let’s return to definitions, because the slippery among us will use deliberately sloppy language as they attempt to frame the “narrative” via Twitter, the press and other types of media.
There are thousands of people across America who have taken to the streets to protest the way George Floyd, a fellow human being, was treated. Good for them. They have exercised their first amendment right to peaceably assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances. Another group, in all probability a small minority, has taken to the streets to commit violence. They are not protesters. They are simply thugs and should not be lumped in with protesters.
It is clear that this case encapsulates long-held grievances within the African-American community. In a narrow sense the grievances center around how they are treated and how they perceive they are treated by police. More broadly it touches on how African-Americans believe they are treated generally. Moreover there is a wide and persistent gap between how whites and blacks perceive how fairly black people are treated by police, courts and other institutions relative to white people. See some typical survey data by Pew Research and Gallup here and here.
With compelling evidence at hand, both with respect to polling data and behavior on the ground, it is hard to avoid coming to a rather straightforward conclusion. We are facing a massive failure of governance and government. Why government failure? Let us not forget that the purpose of government as conceived at the American Founding is to secure unalienable natural rights. Differential treatment of citizens as a result of race is a pretty strange way to do it. So is turning over control of the streets to mob violence.
Is there actually differential treatment or is it “merely” a question of perception? Well, it is hard to imagine an upper middle class white man from Scarsdale being treated the same way. Admittedly the evidence of this case is anecdotal; but mysteriously enough the vast majority of anecdotes of this sort seem to involve African-Americans being victimized. On the other hand it also seems safe to say that the vast majority of Americans were appalled at the behavior of the Minneapolis police.
Let’s go beyond the police and take city school systems for a moment. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 85% of blacks in elementary and secondary public schools were in either large or midsized cities. And, according to a 2017 report published by search firm Advocate Staffing, in the 50 largest cities in America only about 53% of the students graduate from high school. Another study published in 2020 by the NCES reported that the national cohort adjusted graduation rate for black students was 79%, which suggests that the graduation rate falls off sharply in city schools.
The graduation rate is only the tip of the iceberg. There has been a persistent black-white school achievement gap. While this is certainly not monocausal, it is hard to argue that the scores are not related to the quality of the schools these students attend.
What do big city public schools and police departments have in common? First, they are two of the biggest responsibilities of city governments. Second, they (police and teachers) are highly organized and powerful political interest groups. Third, those interest groups exert a tremendous amount of pressure on city hall. They do so by turning out the votes in return for privileged treatment of their members. That is why machine politicians fight charter schools and vouchers. It is one reason why police officers are shown deference in investigations that civilians don’t enjoy.
In one sense it almost doesn’t matter if the perception of unfairness by a large group of citizens is accurate or not. The mere fact of its existence represents a failure of governance. And at the end of the day, it is hard to conclude that African-Americans are getting a fair shake when it comes to schools and other social services.
The obvious question is: Where does responsibility for this lie?
The answer is equally obvious, although it isn’t one the majority of people wish to hear. It is the failure of a progressive, collectivist ideology that privileges groups and ignores individuals. Consider: of the 50 largest cities in the United States, 35 or 70% are run by political machines with liberal or progressive Mayors. And for the most part it has been that way for the better part of 50 years, and in some places, longer.
The last time Chicago elected a Republican as Mayor it was William H. Thompson. That was in 1927. Milwaukee last elected a non-Democrat as Mayor in 1948. He was a socialist. Washington DC has had a Democratic Mayor since 1956. New York City’s last nominally Republican Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, ran for the Democratic nomination for President. The one before him, Rudy Giuliani, in 1994 supported incumbent Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo for reelection over Republican George Pataki. And the one before him (John Lindsay) also ran for the Democratic nomination for President in 1972.
When it comes right down to it, a few facts stand out that are indisputable. First, America’s large cities have been run by Democratic political machines for at least 50 years. The Mayors perched on top of those machines have been (for their time) liberals or progressives. Second, they have failed to provide decent schools for at least a large minority, if not a majority of their citizens. Third, at least a large minority of the citizenry is distrustful that the police will protect their rights, and many believe that they are especially vulnerable to abuse by police. About that they may very well be correct.
Liberal Administrations run by Democrats have presided over virtually all of this for at least a half century. But they always blame the results on somebody or something else.
This is the very definition of failure. Progressive governments–and that is what big city governments mostly are–have failed to provide essential services to large proportions of their populations. They have also failed to protect citizens’ lives and property. And so while the cities burn, the failed ideology that produced the fires continues to make the same tired arguments undaunted by the destruction it has unleashed.
