Pun Salad

We are in a pre-revolutionary situation because the regime — by which I mean not the Biden administration but the American constitutional order itself and the principal institutions associated with it — is being made to compete for the loyalty of Americans against individual politicians (Donald Trump), particular political organizations and movements (BLM), and less well-defined political tendencies (right-wing identity and left-wing identity). There has always been partisan fanaticism, and there have always been demagogues. When loyalty to a political leader or a political movement supplants loyalty to the regime, the nation grows dangerously close to revolution in proportion to the degree to which such tendencies are general and widespread.

When some significant share of citizens feel themselves more closely identified with a particular politician than with the constitutional order per se, then you have the conditions for a coup d’état and a caudillo; when some significant share of citizens feel themselves more closely identified with a party or a movement than with the constitutional order per se, then you have the conditions for a more broad-based revolution. The first gets you an Augusto Pinochet or a Francisco Franco, and the second gets you a Russian Revolution or a French Revolution — both of which eventually produced caudillos of their own, meaning that they ended up in much the same place.

As far as the events of January 6 go, the “stolen election” fiction was a moral-permission slip for acting on loyalties (and the social demands associated with such loyalties) that long preceded the 2020 election and will long outlast it. Some of these revolutionists invaded the Capitol, but the more important ones work there. And what they hope to do is to achieve what Lenin wanted: “unrestricted power based on force, not law.” The legal pretexts feverishly dreamt up by such ghoulish amoralists as Rudy Giuliani were exercises in publicity, not exercises in law. The lawyers are the marketing department of the revolution.

The 1619 Project, which might already be embedded in school curricula near you, reinforces the racial monomania of those progressives who argue that the nation was founded on, and remains saturated by, “systemic racism.” This racial obsession is instrumental; it serves a radical agenda that sweeps beyond racial matters. It is the agenda of clearing away all impediments, intellectual and institutional, to — in progressivism’s vocabulary — the “transformation” of the nation. The United States will be built back better when it has been instructed to be ashamed of itself and is eager to discard its disreputable heritage.

The 1619 Project aims to erase (in [historian Gordon S.] Wood’s words) “the Revolution and the principles that it articulated – liberty, equality and the well-being of ordinary people.” These ideas are, as Wood says, the adhesives that bind our exceptional nation whose people have shared principles, not a shared ancestry.

The Times says “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” flows from “slavery and the anti-black racism it required.” So, the 1619 Project’s historical illiteracy is not innocent ignorance. Rather, it is maliciousness in the service of progressivism’s agenda, which is to construct a thoroughly different nation on the deconstructed rubble of what progressives hope will be the nation’s thoroughly discredited past.

On September 28, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky shared the results of a new study that appeared to confirm the need for mask mandates in schools. The study was conducted in Arizona over the summer, and published by the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: It found that schools in counties without mask mandates had 3.5 times more outbreaks than schools in counties with mask mandates.

The significance of that finding should have raised eyebrows, according to The Atlantic's David Zweig. "A number of the experts interviewed for this article said the size of the effect should have caused everyone involved in preparing, publishing, and publicizing the paper to tap the brakes," he wrote in a new article that explores the study's significant flaws. "Instead, they hit the gas."

We hear a lot about privilege these days, particularly “white privilege.” Now, I think white privilege is a thing. My problem with the concept isn’t that it’s fake, but that it’s not nearly as explanatory as those who denounce it think it is. Like systemic racism, it’s an important factor for some things, a minor factor for things, and utterly irrelevant to a whole bunch of things. For instance, If you think “white privilege” explains everything, your essay on the causes of American slavery might make a lot of worthwhile points. But your essay on the causes of World War I is gonna need work.

Anyway, I googled “examples of white privilege” and one of the first results was this article, “10 Examples That Prove White Privilege Exists in Every Aspect Imaginable.” Now, I think the headline is sophomoric click-baity garbage and the whole thing is written with a lot of indefensible hyperbole. But some of the examples have merit. The first is that white people, broadly speaking, are more likely to have a positive relationship with the police. Again, there are all manner of caveats one can raise, but sure, fair enough. Another is that white people can “learn about my race in school” (the author, Jon Greenberg, is writing in that popular first-person confess-my-white-sins mode so popular today among those obsessed with the souls of woke folks). I can raise so many more caveats, but I get the point.