Our President-Elect
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.
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Driving out from town to feed my horses the morning of November 5th, I passed a house in West Laramie with the Stars and Stripes waving from the front gate. The flag hung upside down. A fitting salute, surely, for the most radical candidate ever to become president-elect of the United States.
The election of Barack Obama is a fluke, as well as a phenomenon. No great achievement is ever attained without a strong dose of luck, but Obama’s luck throughout the 2008 campaign was exceptional. Indeed, it was nearly incredible. After February 28, Senator Obama never won a primary as the voters flocked to support his opponent, Senator Clinton. The widely acknowledged explanation for this is that, by the end of February, Democratic and independent voters had taken Obama’s measure as a candidate and concluded that they favored a more “moderate,” that is, establishment, choice in their quest to put a Democrat in the White House. What is more, all signs pointed to the majority’s desire to make that Democrat a white person as well. As late as last August, Obama was perceived to be a tough sell to white blue-collar and rural voters, largely on account of his race. Almost certainly, he would have remained so had it not been for the financial collapse the following month, and John McCain would today be president-elect in his stead. Tuesday’s vote was thus less a vote for the candidacy of one man named Barack Obama than it was for the candidate representing the Democratic Party, which the electorate has confidently relied upon since 1933 to shower it with subsidies, benefits, and public-works programs in times of economic crisis. Once the economic motive was activated by the Wall Street implosion, the racial issue seems to have taken secondary, or tertiary, place. Many, if not most, Americans are enthusiastic fans either of black athletes, or black entertainers, or both. And it is these black American culture “heroes,” not Barack Obama, who are largely responsible for the erosion of 400 years of racial animosity in America, and who indeed made Obama’s election-night victory possible.
Obama campaigned under the banner of “change.” What sort of change, neither he nor any of his staff and supporters have ever said, though the inference was that “change” would be the precise opposite of the Bush administration, or perhaps even of what Richard Hofstadter, writing 60 years ago, called the American political tradition. “Change,” of course, is a democratic ideal broadly speaking, as well as, more narrowly, of the American political system and of the public it claims to represent. Democracy, which began as a form of government, devolved more than a century ago into an ideology, which is by nature insatiable in its demands. In the case of the American people, their impatient clamor for “change” is the expression of a moral and intellectual shallowness, a rampant desire for ever more material goods, “rights,” and freedom, an inability to derive satisfaction from the giveness of human life, a perennial lust for novelty in whatever form. And so Barack Obama, as a black man campaigning on a platform of “change,” triumphed less as a political reformer than as a novelty entertainer in the national forum that has come to be devoted, in almost equal parts, to politics, sports, and mass entertainment.
Obama will thus be our first real novelty president. He will also be our first truly ideological president. As George W. Bush was nothing if not an ideologue on the issue of global democracy, this statement requires some explaining.
Kenneth Minogue, in Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, defined “ideology” as an intellectual construct that reveals a salvational secret professing to explain a social system in terms of a set of repressive social relationships. According to Minogue, the classic revolutionary ideology of Marx and Engels, and of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, was both defeated and discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 20th century. Refusing to abandon their goal of bringing down the despised West, the Marxist ideologues reinvented Marxism, in ways pioneered decades before by the Frankfurt School with its concept of a “long march through the institutions.” According to Marxist-Leninism, scientific fact was everything. For the neo-Marxists, by contrast, “ethics” are the ideological touchstone. “Ethics,” of course, have nothing to do with morals. Morals are rules of conduct applying to relationships between individuals; ethics pertain to the realization of a social ideal. Thus, the decision to bed one’s neighbor’s wife, or to defraud him in a stock transaction, is a matter of morals, wholly unrelated to one’s commitment to the principles of feminism or a socialist economy. As Minogue wrote, “‘Ethical’ [is] whatever policies served the goal of perfecting society. To be in favour of change [my italics] [is] thus to be young, ethical, and, therefore, caring.”
Whether Barack Obama really needs to be understood as a post-racial, post-political statesman, or not, remains in doubt. (He certainly did not arrive at his present eminent position by availing himself of the services of an “ethical” campaign organization.) Nor were the majority of those who gave him their vote on November 4th casting a ballot for what they recognized as the first post-political presidential candidate in history. The same, however, cannot be said of the original Obamaniacs—those hysterical T-shirted, blue-jeaned white children hopping up and down ecstatically like adolescent Christopher Robinses—who constitute his base. These people, and their biologically grownup counterparts, exactly fit Minogue’s ideological cohort of the young, the ethical, and the caring. As I say, it is impossible to determine at present whether Barack Obama, as a person, is among these people. (My cynical instinct tells me that he is too cold, too analytical, too realistic for that.) But, whether he is or not, he has surely built a political movement, though not yet a party, upon them.
As I was falling asleep on election night following the president-elect’s victory speech, I found myself reflecting that the spectacle I had just witnessed was somehow not political, that it did not belong generically to the realm of politics at all. And so I was brought back to Kenneth Minogue’s insistence that “ideology can only generate a parody of politics,” a parody in which the ideologist is himself the universal element, unlike the true politician who serves as merely an actor in a process that is itself universal. It may well be that Barack Obama is in fact a mere politician, and no ideologue. But, if that is so, he is also most certainly, in his readiness to exploit the ideological inclinations of his most fervent supporters, some sort of demagogue. Whether he is indeed a demagogue of the worst type, only the next four years will tell.
A relative in Ft. Collins, Colorado, described to my wife how, while delivering her 13-year-old daughter to Catholic school on election day, she witnessed a flock of young children, neatly dressed in accordance with a relaxed uniform code, racing across the sidewalk from their mothers’ SUVs and into the school building. And, as they ran, they chanted. “Obama! Obama! Obama!”
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1 Comment by Bruce on 6 November 2008:
Mr. Williamson,
Thank you for this excellent piece. The discussion of the distinction between ethics and morals is very enlightening.
2 Comment by Tom Piatak on 6 November 2008:
A wonderful piece.
3 Comment by Rick on 6 November 2008:
So who is Obama? The OJ Simpson of USC Buffalo Bills,and the Hertz commercials or the murderous thug of Brentwood and Las Vegas.
4 Comment by Theodore Van Oosbree on 6 November 2008:
The “erosion of racial animosity” alluded to by Mr. Williamson is mostly a one-way street. The etiolation of racial consciousness among whites has no counterpart among most American blacks. Obama has shaped himself with this consciousness in mind and has benefited politically with 96% of the black vote, including a number of black Republicans.
5 Comment by Sempronius on 6 November 2008:
“A relative in Ft. Collins, Colorado, described to my wife how, while delivering her 13-year-old daughter to Catholic school on election day, she witnessed a flock of young children, neatly dressed in accordance with a relaxed uniform code, racing across the sidewalk from their mothers’ SUVs and into the school building. And, as they ran, they chanted. “Obama! Obama! Obama!”
Perhaps the answer lies within this excellent essay by Mr.Williamson and I’ve simply missed it,but could someone please explain that last paragraph to me?
I’m beginning to think we’re living in a gigantic insane asylum.
My long suppressed misanthropic instincts are beginning to well-up inside of me and I dont know if I can keep them down much longer.
6 Comment by ALAN on 6 November 2008:
“In the case of the American people, their impatient clamor for “change” is the expression of a moral and intellectual shallowness, a rampant desire for ever more material goods, “rights,” and freedom, an inability to derive satisfaction from the giveness of human life, a perennial lust for novelty in whatever form. And so Barack Obama, as a black man campaigning on a platform of “change,” triumphed less as a political reformer than as a novelty entertainer in the national forum that has come to be devoted, in almost equal parts, to politics, sports, and mass entertainment.”
As the boxing Ringmasters in Las Vegas might say introducing the heavy-weights, “Thank You, CHIL…. TON… Williamson !! Williamson!
7 Comment by Josh Cooney on 6 November 2008:
Great essay. Connecting politics to sports and entertainment is right on target. Those kids were really saying, Idolatry! Idolatry! Idolatry! That these are the children of Catholics only makes it more depressing.
“And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man…They worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1: 23-25).
8 Comment by Sempronius on 6 November 2008:
“Connecting politics to sports and entertainment is right on target. Those kids were really saying, Idolatry! Idolatry! Idolatry! ”
Ahhh,yes,now I get it.Thanks Mr.Cooney
9 Comment by Miles Gloriosus on 6 November 2008:
The author wrote: “Obama will thus be our first real novelty president. He will also be our first truly ideological president. As George W. Bush was nothing if not an ideologue on the issue of global democracy, this statement requires some explaining.”
Bush was more than an ideologue on global democracy. He pursued amnesty for illegals and “free trade” among other things with the blind ignorance of a true zealot. Had he governed by conservative principles, he might have been great. When he decided to pursue policies contrary to logic and which carefully thought showed wouldn’t work, the whole world could see his insanity.
QUEM DEUS VULT PERDERE, PRIUS DEMENTAT.
10 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 6 November 2008:
Miles Gloriosus@9
You say that George W. Bush pursued his mistaken policies “with the blind ignorance of a true zealot.” Quite so. We should remember that GWB was an alcoholic who went through a twelve-step program for recovery. These twelve-step programs have a tendency to produce some of the most robotic, android-like people in existence. Many of these persons are rigid, ritualistic, intransigent, and utterly impervious to reason once they have decided that something is “the right course.”
I don’t say this to belittle Bush. I respect him for his success in beating a serious addiction. But it’s useful to remember the context of his tendency to fixate on policies even when they were manifestly unworkable.
11 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 6 November 2008:
Great article Chilton! You really must come camping with us in the Dolly Sods, WV. We take a box of wine, bottles of Virginia Gentleman, guns and ammo. You’d love it!
@9 QUEM DEUS VULT PERDERE, PRIUS DEMENTAT.
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. I love it — almost as much as the Dow Jones plunge today. I guess the market crises are Lil’ Smokin’ Barry’s first brush fire to extinguish.
The markets dropped due to a plunge in retail sales, which are propped up by “commercial paper” — short term junk bonds used to finance advertising. Since the banks are stingy about lending, and the BO campaign has recently bought up any and all available advertising slots on television, the networks didn’t care where their money came from in the short run. Now that their “man” has won, the money will stop flowing in so they had better scramble to get revenue or they’ll go the way of every other failing business.
I can live without network TV because I listen to AM radio and have a massive collection of bootleg DVDs.
12 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 6 November 2008:
And for change in Washington let’s round up the usual suspects. Starting with the new chief of staff — Rahmbo Emmanuel son of an Irgun terrorist and congressdevil from Ill-inois.
http://judicial-inc.biz/811son_of_a_zionist_terrorist.htm
The mohammedan president and his ZOG chums will not only stick it to whitey, they will do it specifically to Christians. Oh well, the gospels promise us tribulations. Maybe we are not a Christian nation after all.
13 Comment by J. Meng on 6 November 2008:
@12 Etienne Gervaise: I will say what you suppose: WE ARE NOT A CHRISTIAN NATION. We’re we ever, being founded by hysterically anti-Catholic heretics? Thus, in the disorder of things since 1607, there was room in the political spectrum, at one time or another, for the likes of one whom we know as Barack Obama. We just happen to be the generation upon which the curse fell. The farther we move from our Lord Jesus Christ, the ramshackle state of things political or economical does not surprise me. Since the supernatural has been outlawed from America (especially, by the ACLU), I get a kick out of those trying to explain, secularly, the mess we’re in. All one has to do is read some of the Old Testament to find out what happens to a nation (i.e., Israel) that abandons God and His Law. Oh, yes, Obama is just one apect of the divine chastisement coming our way.
14 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 6 November 2008:
@13 J Meng
I am indeed familiar with Deuteronomy 28 — the blessing and curses concerning a nation’s relationship with their Creator. I am also familiar with the Gospels in which our Lord promises tribulations. I fear nothing, becuase perfect love casts fear out.
By the way, I recommend you visit Jamestown VA. It’s fun to hear the tour guides tut-tut as they mention Englishmen praying 3 times a day in 1607. They did that despite Indian attacks and a once-in-500-year drought. The anti-Catholic stuff came with the non-conformists in Massachusetts 17 years later.
15 Comment by J. Meng on 6 November 2008:
@14 Etienne Gervaise
Yes, well, it just wasn’t Deuteronomy 28 I was alluding to: there is also: 4 Kings 17:6-18; 4 Kings 25; and 2 Paralipomenon 36. Our times fit those, especially, since we have a president-elect and various congressmen who either favor or ignore the right to life of the unborn and favor the recognition of the perverse activities of homosexuals.
Yes, I have visited Jamestown in 1980 and saw some of its foundations under water (James River), which showed the shifting of the river bed over the centuries. Yes, the Puritan landing at Plymouth was definitely anti-Catholic, but that isn’t to say that the “gentlemen” of Jamestown were in love with Catholics, either.
16 Comment by J. Meng on 6 November 2008:
Correction: In my first paragraph I meant to write: who either favor abortion or ignore the right to life of the unborn… Sorry.
17 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 6 November 2008:
@16 J Meng
Any and indeed all civilizations that practices child sacrifice ceases to exist. There are numerous examples in the Bible; Egypt and Israel for two. But something else has to go wrong first, because tolerance — a word absent form both the Old and New Testaments — of said sacrifice is only a symptom. Abortion in the US today only marks the beginning of the end. The faithful must remain in the world, but not be of the world, and the remnant preserved by God will go on.
We truly have the leaders we deserve, and occasionally someone righteous speaks up and is mocked by the Mainstream Gutter Press. It is discouraging, but the damage is already done. Stopping abortion will not undo the damage. And there will be bloodshed. It might be the blood of martyrs.
18 Comment by Jon I. on 6 November 2008:
@ #11 Etienne Gervaise
If the MSM fails then O.B. or any other twin party President will find an excuse to prop up “those insightful, caring patriots who have ever struggled for the benefit of the average American.”
If it were up to me, we would have 20 more guerrilla wars with third-world nations, as long as journalists promised to be on the front lines, reporting the “facts”. I have previously met in “higher education” more than one would-be journalist who literally made my stomach cramp. I told each of them that I admire the Russians for knowing how to deal with their kind, though they had no idea what I was talking about. God knows I regret not doing the same to them at that very moment.
19 Comment by Jon I. on 6 November 2008:
Excuse me, I meant B.O.
20 Comment by EE Roberts on 7 November 2008:
“The election of Barack Obama is a fluke, as well as a phenomenon. No great achievement is ever attained without a strong dose of luck, but Obama’s luck throughout the 2008 campaign was exceptional. Indeed, it was nearly incredible.”
I don’t see the election result as a fluke at all, nor do I see it as the result of luck. It is indeed an achievement, but it is the achievement of the “news” media, which inundated the electorate 24/7 with the most intense campaign of prosetilyzation I’ve ever seen. Obama was the object of a nonstop adoration and anointing by every single media outlet for the last 30 days of the campaign.
Maybe it could be said that Obama was lucky to have the media in his corner, but that would be to overlook the obvious fact that he was handed the election by means of the totally corrupt electoral process which gives us all of our presidents and whose results are always completely independent of input by the electorate. The media’s wholesale endorsement was just a necessary component of the fraud which always takes place in a presidential election.
Maybe someday we can get past the ridiculous notion that our rulers are elected and simply face the fact that they are inflicted upon us by means of sham primaries, in which the candates are handed up, and baldly fraudulent “vote counts” which are simply manufactured and made to appear as plausible ratios which jibe with the media’s claims of public support for the candidates.
It was obvious that the rulers were going to give the boobs a change of brands. To do otherwise would have made their shell game too obvious for our TV addicted, dumbed down populace to ignore. They just went a little overboard this time in turning up the emotional volume in the process of appointing their figurehead.
21 Comment by EE Roberts on 7 November 2008:
Re- Joseph Salemi’s #10:
“We should remember that GWB was an alcoholic who went through a twelve-step program for recovery. These twelve-step programs have a tendency to produce some of the most robotic, android-like people in existence.”
Nonsense. Bush may have gone through a high priced treatment center or three, but his claim to contact with God came from one of the megachurch “evangelicals” so popular with GOP pretenders to Christianity. W is still an alcoholic, if he ever was and nobody “goes through” a 12 step recovery program. That part of your statement shows that you know too little of 12 step programs to even have an informed opinion of them. The anonymous fellowships do not produce robotic android-like people. That is a total mischaracterization, though it would describe Bush and his faux-Christian, fake conservatism very well.
Blaming W’s vapid, rudderless evil on AA is entirely uncalled for, as is your mischaracterization of people who belong to those fellowships. Many Christians recover from addiction in 12 steps fellowships. Bush is about as far from being typical of recovering addicts in 12 step fellowships as it’s possible for anyone to be. He’s much more typical of members of a megachurch cult of personality. Now, there is where your model of robotic, android-like people can be found.
22 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 7 November 2008:
Mr. Meng #13. Absurd. To blame the American decline on its Protestant foundations, you have to explain why European Catholic countries are even worse and why American Catholics
have always been a majority on the leftist side. Let’s not be silly.
Learn something about American history.
23 Comment by D Simmons on 7 November 2008:
The white kids who were Obama’s original base care not for morals or ethics, they are status seekers first and foremost. Review the book “Stuff White People Like”, written by and about the kids who put Obama over the top. You give them a little too much credit, these kids would pull the wings off of flies if it put them a notch above the “uncool.”
24 Comment by Bruce on 7 November 2008:
Hurrah for professor Wilson !
Funny how many Papists were eager to join a country of heretics.
25 Comment by David N. on 7 November 2008:
Rick #3
When LA Mayor Tom Bradley almost was elected Governor of California in 1982, O.J. Simpson got the idea that he could win high political office. This is from a book titled “Raging Hearts” that was published right after the Brentwood murders. O.J. changed his mind after Gary Hart was forced out of the 1988 Presidential race. Simpson decided his private life would be a problem if he ran for office.
26 Comment by Robert on 7 November 2008:
“To blame the American decline on its Protestant foundations, you have to explain why European Catholic countries are even worse and why American Catholics
have always been a majority on the leftist side.”
Europe is better on some things than America. They do not kill their children at the same rate and they don’t engage in polygamy to the same degree. But professor Wilson is right that protestants do much better when the institution they protest against is strong, and let’s be honest when Catholics have not been right down embarrassing in the last century, they have been for the most part cowards to the nth degree. Let’s not forget that it was Catholic schools that gave us the french revolution just as American education has given us the recent revolt. We have been in tight spots before but in times like these, everything seems diminished — because it is !!!
27 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 7 November 2008:
EE Roberts@21
I understand that many persons who have gone trough AA or the other twelve-step recovery programs based on it are defensive and protective of the concept. And I did not say that all of those in these “fellowships” were robotic or android-like.
I personally know six persons who have gone through twelve-step programs for drink or drugs (and, yes, you do go through a sequence in order to complete it–that’s why they are called “steps.”) All of these persons, to some degree or another, demonstrate a rigidity of thinking and a sclerosis of imagination. If you haven’t been a drunk for eight years, and you still refuse to have a friendly glass of sherry once in a while after dinner, in my book you are behaving robotically.
I never said that all that is wrong with GWB comes from his fight with alcoholism. His political views, his leadership style, and his capacity for making major mistakes are all due to something other than a bourbon bottle. But a great deal of what is wrong with America today is due to the penchant for groupthought that our “recovery” programs promote. And I don’t say they are all bad… just that we should see their potential for freezing the human personality.
28 Comment by Senor Doug on 7 November 2008:
“Review the book ‘Stuff White People Like’, written by and about the kids who put Obama over the top. ”
Not so fast. Christian Lander is a Steve Sailer fan, and the whole point of his site is to skewer whites for being so obsessed over status games with other whites that they forego their group interest.
29 Comment by Tom Flinn on 7 November 2008:
If Europe is worse than America it is because they REJECTED the Catholic faith, not because of it. Catholics came to America and established churches, schools and a civilization before there were any English, protestant or otherwise. The English Catholics were anxious to go to a “land of heretics” because they were being persecuted by another band of heretics in England. The ones who came probably felt they had a better chance here with their own colony (Maryland). That ended when the puritans used the religious and civil liberty granted to them by Lord Baltimore to once again persecute Catholics when the protestants were numerous enough to gain control of the colony. I don’t believe our country has gone wrong JUST because of its protestant founding, but a bad seed takes a long time to come to fruition and the Enlightenment seed in the founding was strong. I don’t necessarily think most Catholics in this country have supported “leftist” causes unless one considers supporting things like labor unions and the like automatically makes one leftist. Besides, the kind of Catholicism we have had in this country from almost the beginning has been tinged with Jansenism and “Americanism.” It’s no surprise to see we have not influenced the country in a better direction.
30 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 7 November 2008:
Look folks–the last thing we need now is to renew the Thirty Years’ War between Protestants and Catholics. The issue before us is the cultural and biological survival of the Western peoples. Everything else is just froth on the surface.
31 Comment by J. Meng on 7 November 2008:
@ #22 Mr. Wilson, forgive the length of my response to your remarks, but it should establish the fact that Protestantism (coupled with English Anglo-Saxon conservatism) has brought political and economic disaster in its wake to America. In the first place, we live in an environment of naturalism, brought about by the Protestant Revolt of the sixteenth century. As Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre explains, “it can seem strange and paradoxical to qualify Protestantism as being naturalism.” Luther never exalted the intrinsic good of nature, since, according to him, nature is incurably fallen and concupiscence is invincible. Nonetheless, as Archbishop Lefebvre notes, ‘the excessively nihilistic look that the Protestant casts onto himself results in a practical naturalism: by dint of depreciating nature and exalting the force of ‘faith alone,” one relegates divine grace and the supernatural order to the domain of abstractions….Nature is not restored by grace, it remains intrinsically corrupt….[man] collapses fatally, in naturalism….And this naturalism will be applied especially to the civic and social order: grace being reduced to a fiduciary sentiment of faith, the Redemption now consists only of an individual and private religiosity, without a hold on public life. The public order, economic and political, is therefore condemned to live and to develop itself outside Our Lord Jesus Christ.” Such is the enduring legacy of the Protestant Revolt. It overthrew the Social Reign of Christ the King when it repudiated the authority of the Catholic Church, in which is found the means for social order, and social order is based on supernatural truths and justice. By its renouncement of authority, what the Protestant Revolt gave us was the lie called the “sovereignty of the people” grounded in the false idea of “private judgment”. It was a logical conclusion and used to the detriment of society by the philosophes of the Age of Enlightenment, which was a definite cause of the French Revolution. Through this revolutionary dynamism came the secularization of society and the pursuit of wealth for its own sake. As Dr. Thomas Drolesky expounds, “The entire American regime is built on a web of Protestant and Judeo-Masonic lies. Catholics have been so uncritically immersed in these naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian lies for so long that even the believers among them look at the world in merely naturalistic terms, convincing themselves that there is something short of Catholicism that can serve, at least as a ’stopgap measure,’ as the foundation of personal and social order. Catholics prone to the ‘leftist’ bent of naturalism and those prone to the ‘rightist’ bent of naturalism may disagree about many of the ‘details’ of naturalism. However, both sets of Catholics are united in their quest to find some secular, religiously indifferentist, nondenominational or interdenominational means to create a ‘better’ world, looking to the farce of electoral politics as the focal point in this quest [I might add, that one man was instrumental in leading Catholics astray in this regard, bishop John Carroll]….A nation that is founded and sustained on a web of naturalistic lies must degenerate over the course of time.” Keeping the supernatural (Christ the King) from the affairs of men leads only to decline and fall. This is exactly what Protestants do and have been doing for nearly 500 years. The election of Barack Obama is just another logical step in this decline.
32 Comment by J. Meng on 7 November 2008:
@ #26 Robert, Would you please clarify your statement, “Let’s not forget that it was Catholic schools that gave us the french revolution…”
33 Comment by Andrew G. Van Sant on 7 November 2008:
J. Meng @31:
According to an article in Today’s Washington Times, Obama received 54 percent of the Catholic vote (45 percent of the white Catholic vote), but only 45 percent of the protestant vote (34 percent of the white protestant vote). 78 percent of (religious, I presume) Jews, 73 percent of “other faiths,” and 75 percent of non-religious voters voted for Obama. [Apparently, "other faiths" excludes Catholics, born again/evangelicals, non-evangelicals (?), protestants, and Jews.] The total Catholic vote was flipped to Obama by Hispanic Catholics.
34 Comment by Andrew G. Van Sant on 7 November 2008:
Oops! Correction to my comment @33:
I said 75 percent of non-religious voters voted for Obama. That should be 75 percent of unaffiliated religious voters voted for Obama.
35 Comment by Robert on 8 November 2008:
#32 “@ #26 Robert, Would you please clarify your statement, “Let’s not forget that it was Catholic schools that gave us the french revolution…”
Mr. Meng,
I did not mean very much with that statement except to defend Dr. Wilson’s assertion that the term “Catholic” is not evidence that B. F. Skinner was completly right or wrong about environement being the determing factor in human behavior.
Pat Buchanan once told me that he met Daniel’Ortega’s foreign minister at a White House reception and discovered that he too had attendded Gonzaga.
I remember being at a reception for the Abbot of a famous monastery in Europe and watching some rude businessman making the rounds introducing himself to others and asking them their name and “what do you do?” Most folks were dressed in jackets and dresses so it was a little disconcerting when he approached the Abbot dressed in full Black Benedictine habit and said ( as he had said to all the other guests,) “hello, what is your name and what do you do?”
The Church is indeed a Thing and not a theory. But it is a Thing in spirit and truth and no serious Catholic uses his religion as a badge to belittle or a stage to demonstrate pride. Dr. Wilson is more friend to Catholicism than foe, and should be respected for his wise words and short comments. I to am an admirer of Archbishop Lefevre, had the grace of meeting him three differnt times. As our current Holy Father, Benedict said of him some months ago, he was a great and venerable man of the Church (probably a saint) but not all of his followers are, anymore than all those bearing the name “catholic” are followers of Christ in spirit and truth. That is all I meant.
36 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 8 November 2008:
Arguing about abstruse religious points at this late stage of the game is like debating the arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. The survival of Western biological and cultural identity is at stake. Do we really have the time to argue about the relative merits of faith and good works, or the Fatima consecration, or the Social Kingship of Christ?
I say this as a traditionalist Roman Catholic. The gooks are in the wire, folks. This isn’t the place for recriminations about the Protestant Reformation.
37 Comment by J. Meng on 8 November 2008:
@ #36 Joseph Salemi,
Sir, with all due respect, you apparently did not get my point. If you did, you would have understood that my narrative gave the historical reasons why Western Civilization is at stake. My point was that ideas, good or bad have consequences. I ask you, if restoring the Kingship of Christ is not the solution to the crisis at hand, what is? Voting in 2012 for the lesser of two evils, again?
38 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 8 November 2008:
Mr. Meng, #31. Without Protestantism there would have been a greatly retarded settlement of North America and there would be no such thing as the United States. Thus, it seems pointless to belabour the damage done to the U.S. by Protestantism. A Catholic United States could not have existed. On the whole, Protestantism, where not corrupted by the poisonous stream of New England post-Calvinism, has been a healthy and conservative influence in America. So was Catholicism until the late 19th century when it became the vehicle of immigrant resentments and European issues and attitudes.
39 Comment by Tom Flinn on 8 November 2008:
#37. Mr. Meng
Exactly.
40 Comment by Bob Johnson on 8 November 2008:
>I ask you, if restoring the Kingship of Christ is not the solution to the crisis at hand, what is? Voting in 2012 for the lesser of two evils, again?<
I honestly don’t know what you could be talking about.
If…
Kingship of Christ = Kingship of Pope
…Then I can state with firm confidence that even the Vatican doesn’t see things your way.
Please see the Guardian link above.
Try to take consolation from the fact that you never could’ve made the Saudi Arabians, Southerners, et al, bend their knees to your crazed vision anyway.
41 Comment by Robert on 8 November 2008:
Mr. Meng : “if restoring the Kingship of Christ is not the solution to the crisis at hand, what is? Voting in 2012 for the lesser of two evils, again?
Mr. Johnson :”I honestly don’t know what you could be talking about.”
Yes, to Mr. Meng and too bad for Mr. Johnson. Herein lies the difficulty for our “Changing World” of the West.
42 Comment by Tom Flinn on 9 November 2008:
#40, Bob Johnson: “…crazed vision…”
There is another word for Mr. Meng’s “crazed vision:” Christendom.
43 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 9 November 2008:
Somebody once said, “behind every great fortune is a great crime.” I think that can also include “behind every presidential victory is a great crime.”
Judging by the stories I’ve heard regarding the Obama “truth squads,” and other assorted vile cell groups, and covered-up election fraud in various precincts, it might be that we’re in for Cromwell’s Commonwealth Part II. Generals will enforce their vision of morality and collect (extort) taxes.
44 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 9 November 2008:
Re: Dr Wilson @#38
“A Catholic United States could not have existed.”
Please explain why you believe this. Don’t forget, the then-Southern colony of Maryland had a large Catholic population even before the Revolution.
As a Catholic (and no, not a ‘leftist’ one), it frustrates me when these discussions devolve where epithets like ‘papist’ start being thrown around.
Another posted was quite correct to say Dr Wilson has long been a Protestant defender of Catholicism. In fact, over the years it seems to have been a reoccurring theme in his writing.
45 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 10 November 2008:
J. Meng@37
The phrase “restoring the Kingship of Christ” is a concatenation of words that sounds wonderful in the abstract , but which in the world of Realpolitik is simply irrelevant. I have had this argument over and over with my traditionalist Roman Catholic friends.
Other that actually converting masses of individuals to the Catholic Faith, there isn’t any practical way to implement (or even imagine) the restoration of this “Social Kingdom of Christ.” And such individual conversions are slow, piecemeal, and complex. What are we Catholics supposed to do–drag everyone to the Rhine River and forcibly baptize them, the way Charlemagne did with the Saxons?
The plain fact is that what there is of a political Right in the United States is composed of persons of several religious confessions, and some people of no religious faith at all. I am impatient with this traditionalist Catholic insistence that we have to convert everyone in the movement to our way of thinking before we can accomplish anything. In combat, do you ask the soldier next to you in the trench about his religious opinions? Or are you only concerned that he be brave, and a good shot?
46 Comment by jfxgillis on 10 November 2008:
Clyde:
Well, here’s one problem with your diatribe.
After 28 Feb, Obama won primaries in RI, VT, NC, OR and MT.
Second, and more substantively, as a lefty/progressive who nevertheless is the proud owner of a typewritten and signed letter dated mid-1990s from your late colleague Dr. Samuel Francis (the subject of which, ironically, is Hillary Clinton), I fail to understand your greivance that a supposed radical ideologue has just won the presidency.
You should be glad if that’s the case because you and your Rockford Institute colleagues are also ideologues. And that opens the real possibility–for the first time in 44 years–that both the political conflict and the political discourse in the USA will be as it should be: A clash of ideological worldviews.
What’s the alternative? A President McCain as empty of ideology as President George W. Bush? A President Hillary Clinton as empty of same as her empty husband President Bill Clinton?
Are you not sick to death of the soft, yielding nothingness of non-ideological leaders giving lip service to your concerns verbally while undermining and polluting them with half-measure policies?
If, as you imply, Obama is a radical cosmopolitan progressive, as a radical provinical reactionary you should be grateful at the very least for the emergence of a worthy adversary ….
47 Comment by jfxgillis on 10 November 2008:
Chilton:
Oooops. Sorry. I meant “Chilton,” not “Clyde.” Read a bunch of your takes at once and got confused.
48 Comment by Ken Zaretzke on 10 November 2008:
Andrew van Sant @33
Yes, Hispanics–Catholics all–went heavily for Obama, far more than went for Kerry. It’s especially surprising since the talk during the primaries was that Hispanics wouldn’t vote for a black man. I suspect that the Hispanic aversion to blacks, such as it is, may have been overridden by their aversion to having a woman in the White House. Hispanics are by far the most “chauvanistic” group in our society–at least the illegal immigrants are.
49 Comment by TJF on 10 November 2008:
I would suggest that, before people agree to use the term ideologue in a positive sense, they make it very clear what the word means. Apart from being used to refer to Condillac’s psychological philosophy, an ideology generally designates a water-tight system of interlocking principles that explain the whole world, combined with an action plan for implementing the system. In this sense, communism, Nazism, libertarianism are ideologies, whereas the set of ideas generally shared by Tories in 1800 is not. I have known ideologues but they are for the most part unbearably stupid and shrill. My old friend Erik v. Kuhneldt-Leddihn used to argue for conservative ideology, but he was deliberately and provocatively misusing the word to mean something like political philosophy. I assume that is what jfxgillis is referring to. The trouble is, though, that the word has so many foul associations. Ideologies tend to have names ending in -ism. I reject all “isms”, including Thomism and Aristotelianism, because even in those cases, the ism seriously distorts the principles of Thomas and Aristotle. Robert Bellarmine was a world-famous Thomist Jesuit in his day (16th century), but he fought hard against an attempt to erect Thomas into an infallible teacher.
It is not simply bad ideas that afflict the United States, but the bad character of the people: We are a smug, lying, cowardly, hedonistic, and bullying nation. We lie to ourselves about nearly everything, and if we ever do hear the truth we insist upon demonizing the teller and silencing him. It does not matter what such people believe or say or even, I fear, how they vote. God in his mercy can save them, but the rest of us can do nothing but watch them live, as Calvin said of the Anabaptists, like rats in straw. The real meaning of this election is the sorry condition of the American character. What Clyde Wilson used to refer to as the “degraded Yankee character” is now the degraded American character.
50 Comment by jfxgillis on 10 November 2008:
Doctor Fleming:
Thanks for the response. I took “ideology” from both the Minogue defintion cited above and I also agree with how you defined it. (I also meant “diatribe” in a more archaic sense).
I would say ideologies are intended to do as you say: Comprehensively explain the world and human nature and suggest rules for social organization consonant with those explanations BUT ALSO that all ideologies (and their consequent rules) are doomed to failure because human nature is too complex and contradictory to be explained by model. I know I have a progressive ideology but unlike most progressives, I know it will fail.
I would dispute your claim that early 19th century Tories were not ideologically driven. They were, I would say, mostly beholden to a worldview that clung to explanations derived from hierarchical feudalism that had been cumulatively compromised by the rise of Mercantilism–which that compromised Toryism could survive–but then by Capitalism–which it couldn’t.
We all have to have an ideology although each person’s ideology is unique in one sense, that of being informed by our unique learning and experience. Yet ideology is useless unless and until it gathers with it others of like-but-not-exactly-like mind, whether it’s the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church or the contemporary Green Party in Germany … or the Rockford Institute.
You may not like to be described as a Thomist or Aristotlean–but that’s what you are. That does not mean that Thomas or Aristotle are infallible, they most certainly are not. That is merely to say that you believe their principles bear up longest before crumbling.
51 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 10 November 2008:
I am honoured toi have been even momentarily mistaken for the estimable Chilton Williamson.
52 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 10 November 2008:
Jacques Maritain also objected to the terms “Thomism” and “Thomist.” He especially disliked being called a “neo-Thomist.” He said that, if anything, he was a paleo-Thomist.
53 Comment by Robert Bruce on 10 November 2008:
Have to agree with Robert on the AA thing. Bush it has been said exhibits classic symptoms of being a dry drunk, so his trip to AA might not have been a total success. Those Texan megachurch folks are as close to classic clut zombies as you can get. That is the ones that are not just there to gain respectability.
54 Comment by Robert Bruce on 10 November 2008:
cult zombies
55 Comment by Michael Ezzo on 10 November 2008:
My assumption is that what TRI (including the astute man who wrote this essay) stands for cannot be called ideology since they are not ideas at all; they are simply Divine Gifts.
Pardon my diverging here, but I just want to say that while I agree with Mr. Salemi (#36), I think Fatima should be excluded, insofar as its message (the possible annihilation of various nations) is quite a matter of concern for all men, even non-Christians.
56 Comment by EE Roberts on 11 November 2008:
“If you haven’t been a drunk for eight years, and you still refuse to have a friendly glass of sherry once in a while after dinner, in my book you are behaving robotically.”
Mr. Salerno, you obviously do not understand the nature of addiction. An addict can remain free of the compulsion to use drugs just so long as he or she abstains from the use of drugs. Declining your offer of a glass of sherry may amount to robotic behavior in your book. I can’t see it that way.
I see it as an example of being concerned for one’s own health and well being. Maybe you could give them the benefit of the doubt instead of concluding that they were brainwashed by an anonymous 12 step fellowship. That’s entirely up to you, of course.
“I never said that all that is wrong with GWB comes from his fight with alcoholism. ”
No, you said that his imbecilic behavior was likely the result of having “gone through” a 12 step program. I knew what you said and responded to what you said.
In my own opinion, Bush is an arrogant fool. He has probably always been an arrogant fool and I doubt he’s that way as a result of any of his associations with people in any anonymous fellowship. It’s far more likely that he’s an arrogant fool as a result of being born to two arrogant fools. With parents like his, he had little chance of turning out otherwise.
57 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 11 November 2008:
EE Roberts @ 56
You know, when you presume to argue with someone, accuracy counts.
My name is Salemi, not Salerno. That carelessness on your part is already a bad sign.
From your post: “…you said that his imbecilic behavior was likely the result of having ‘gone through’ a 12 step program. I knew what you said and and I responded to what you said.”
No, that isn’t what I said. Here are my exact words from post # 10:
“These twelve-step programs have a tendency to produce some of the most robotic, android-like people in existence.”
I brought this up as a possible explanation for Bush’s intransigence and rigidity when following what he thinks is the right course. I said nothing about his being “imbecilic.” I hate what Bush has done to the country, but I don’t think that he is a mental defective.
When you say that I “obviously do not understand the nature of addiction,” you betray your adherence to the therapeutic assumptions of all these twelve-step, self-help programs. It’s not the glass of sherry, the line of cocaine, or the puff of tobacco that makes one an addict, although that is the myth that AA and similar recovery programs promote. This is a pernicious myth that fuels all our puritanical frenzies, from Prohibition to the current anti-tobacco mania and the truly tyrannical Drug Wars.
You claim that “An addict can remain free of the compulsion to use drugs just so long as he or she abstains from the use of drugs.” Well, to me that’s not being free from drugs at all. That’s just as great an enslavement as when you were shooting the stuff up your arm.
To be fair, AA has done some wonderful things. But it does have an extremely rigid and unbending view of human nature, and it frequently exacts a price for its successes. There is no one more sclerotic than someone who has been “reformed.”
When someone turns down my offer of a glass of sherry, I don’t press him any further. I just drink the sherry myself.
58 Comment by Jay on 4 December 2008:
Great article, very well composed and insightful. I brought my two youngest sons, ages 8 and 11, with me to the polls. While waiting in line we witnessed open electioneering and boisterous behavior by the obvious Obama supporters. All of this was supposed to be against the rules but no one was challenged or told to maintain order. When we approached the voting terminal my sons said almost in unison” Daddy, please don’t vote for Obama, he’s scary”.The youth of America are paying attention and they all haven’t been brainwashed yet. All of my children attend Catholic schools and my eldest, age 18, is a registered Republican attending college in D.C. He is not happy but knows he just has to work even harder now because the deck is stacked even higher against him. He feels he is at a disadvantage being a Caucasian male in America. Time as they say, will tell.