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The New Misogyny

By Christine Rosen

Thursday, December 16, 2021

 

A new form of misogyny is taking hold in contemporary culture. It comes in the guise of a liberationist philosophy, a transformational movement dedicated to open-mindedness. Its advocates believe they are ushering in a world in which one can be whomever one chooses to be. And in doing so, they are treating womanhood itself—the defining feature of half of humankind—as though it is a disposable commodity.

 

Under the dictates of this new dispensation, anyone, regardless of physiology, must be allowed to lay claim to the biological realities of the female body. Anyone should have the right to call themselves a woman.

 

The misogynistic nature of this revolution has escaped proper scrutiny precisely because it is understood as progressive—as literally better than everything that has come before. And it casts everything that has come before as suspect: All forms of social organization and every idea that denies this movement’s claims have been deemed retrogressive and actively harmful to the forward march of greater rights for all.

 

This is an audacious form of woman-hatred, especially since it comes in the guise of opening up womanhood, of extending its benefits to all. But by doing so, it becomes nothing less than an assault on what it means to be a woman. And it is not being understood as such by its advocates and their fellow travelers because of a potent combination of two factors: First, people’s fears of being labeled bigots, and second, a genuine and commendable effort to extend compassion and care to a very small minority.

 

That compassion has largely been met with hostility. It is becoming increasingly clear that the new misogyny shares one feature with the old: contempt for women. The difference is that the contempt is now coming from the radical extremes of the trans movement. As the signs carried by trans activists who recently protested a women’s conference in the UK read, “Suck my dick you transphobic cunt.” This is not progress. This is misogyny.

 

These radicals insist on redefining women in masculine terms. Women are as tough as men; they are not biologically different from men; indeed, many of them were born men, came of age as men, and, despite having lived in the guise of women for but a scant portion of their lives, feel entitled to take positions of power away from women. Even motherhood must be acknowledged as something men should be allowed to claim as their own.

 

Classic misogyny claimed that men were better than women merely by dint of being born male. The new misogyny insists that being female isn’t an essential biological fact but a mutable identity, something anyone can be. It gives men permission to say to women: We can be women, too.

 

This flies in the face of all history and experience of Homo sapiens. Biological differences between the sexes are real; indeed, those differences make it possible for us to exist. Literally. But today’s radical egalitarians do not like the consequences and choices that flow from that fact and are currently attempting to erase it from our collective cultural experience.

 

Acknowledging the distinction between biological sex and how one expresses one’s gender identity is not the issue. That cultural battle has largely been settled in favor of greater acceptance of fluidity in gender expression. No, this is something more radical, and it is poised to turn a nascent fourth wave of feminism into a form of female cultural erasure.

 

Feminists have long argued that although men and women are fundamentally different, they deserve equal treatment as a matter of human rights. “Ain’t I a Woman?” was the plaintive demand of feminist Sojourner Truth. The trans-rights movement answers that demand with: There is no such thing as a woman.

 

And so women now find themselves unwittingly forced into the position of revanchists, trying to reclaim territory they long ago won in their struggle for equality.

 

* * *

 

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, the pioneering British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft memorably insisted that women were rational beings, as capable as men and as deserving of opportunity. “I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties,” she wrote. “Virtue can only flourish among equals.” The men of her time were not easily convinced; Horace Walpole called Wollstonecraft a “hyena in petticoats.”

 

Yet by the 19th century, the emergence of what is now called “first-wave feminism” had made gains, particularly around the demands for female suffrage. The feminism of the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, embraced the idea that women were different from men but no less equal. Indeed, they often invoked women’s supposedly superior moral sense to argue for an expansion of their rights in the political realm.

 

In the 20th century, so-called second-wave feminism focused on extensions of these public rights, such as the right of women to make money while working in a job of their choosing, to obtain lines of credit in their own name, and to serve on juries. By the 1960s, feminists were also winning battles for greater reproductive rights, reform of divorce and marital-rape laws, protections against domestic violence, and equal pay and educational opportunities. Many of those rights were enshrined in federal laws, such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

 

This second wave, though more radical in some ways, still often invoked women’s unique qualities as women as justification for seeking political power. “The personal is political,” a phrase much in use in the 1960s and 1970s, signaled that commitment. In their efforts to combat misogyny and sexism in politics and culture, second-wave feminists created new, women-only spaces (such as domestic violence shelters) and developed theories about women’s leadership styles as more cooperative and inclusive than men’s. And the battle against sexism waged by the second wave still acknowledged the biological realities of being a woman, even if a few outré figures insisted that those realities also potentially limited women’s opportunities; a radical thinker named Shulamith Firestone dreamed of a day when women would be liberated from biology through the widespread use of artificial wombs, for example.

 

By the 1990s, third-wave feminists extended the feminist critique further, coopting previously sexist tropes and misogynistic language such as “bitch” and engaging in a more “sex-positive” approach to womanhood. They were critical of their second-wave feminist mothers; many rejected the label “feminist” entirely. Culture, not politics, was their chosen battlefield.

 

Within every wave of feminism, women struggled among themselves with biological essentialism and the attendant questions it raised. Did the ability to become pregnant and give birth hamper women’s ability to succeed in society, for example, or did it create an imperative for society to offer special protections for them? Feminist theorists continue to argue about whether defining women in any way related to biology reinforces the very thing that has been used to justify the oppression of women for centuries.

 

Despite considerable disagreement, however, no one before had denied women the reality of their own biological existence. Rather, the argument that triumphed and made women in the Western world some of the freest people on earth was that whatever differences existed, women were of equal value to men in public life, and their immutable qualities (including motherhood) were as central to human flourishing as the immutable qualities of men.

 

Today, a fourth wave is emerging, but it does not resemble anything like the feminism of the past, because it contains within it the radical notion that biological sex differences are not real.

 

* * *

 

Its early iterations can be found in the 2000s, when women’s-studies departments at universities began recasting themselves as gender-studies programs. To study women is to acknowledge the realities and limits of biology. To study gender is, according to its most radical proponents, to study the limitless experience of any number of self-defined identities.

 

The godmother of gender theory, Judith Butler of UC Berkeley, argues in her book Gender Trouble that “male” and “female” are merely arbitrary, constructed categories, a binary based not on any biological realities but rather on oppression. Gender is a performance, a game anyone can and should play, and any efforts to create special protections for women or acknowledge the limits of physical differences between men and women are merely excuses made by the patriarchy to hoard power. Everything is socially constructed, including the physiological experience of bearing children (which Butler describes not as a miracle but as “the compulsory obligation on women’s bodies to reproduce”).

 

Instead, Butler argues that by not recognizing biological realities, “the culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.”

 

But how open is that future if it requires everyone to adhere to a dogma that denies biological realities? Butler and her many acolytes have taken literally Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” In her landmark 1949 book, The Second Sex, Beauvoir observed how social and cultural forces shape one’s perception of oneself and the public’s idea of what a woman is and should do. Hers was a plea for greater understanding—by men, social institutions, and women themselves—of the fact that the experience of being female created unique challenges and insights not always understood or respected by the other half of the species. However revolutionary its aims, Beauvoir’s analysis was grounded in biological realities.

 

By contrast, anyone who believes that biological realities root women in a particular experience is, according to the new dispensation, a “TERF,” or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Butler went even further, calling anyone who argued for sex-based rights (and sex-exclusive spaces such as women’s prisons, rape crisis centers, and the like) a fascist: “The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our time. So the TERFs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism.”

 

* * *

 

There are many people outside the academy who are eager to embrace such radical ideas because by doing so they believe they will help trans people, whom they also believe to be at serious risk. Reporting on a recent protest by trans activists against Netflix (for airing a Dave Chappelle comedy special they think is transphobic), Variety noted that among the protestors was the creator of the series Transparent, Joey (formerly Jill) Soloway. “Trans people are in the middle of a holocaust,” Soloway declared. “Apartheid, murder, a state of emergency, human rights crisis, there’s a mental health crisis. There’s a suicide crisis, a bullying crisis, an anxiety, depression, self-hatred state of emergency crisis.”

 

If this were true, tolerance for dissenters from the new orthodoxy would rightfully be seen as a serious moral error. Perhaps that is why trans activists insist that compulsory acceptance of the idea that biology is a figment is a necessary stop on the road to true tolerance. Colin Wright has observed at Quillette that “as more and more people refer to themselves as trans, nonbinary, two-spirited, and gender-non-conforming, there’s been a push to realign the objective reality of biological sex to match one’s subjectively experienced gender identity. In the emerging view, the very notion of males and females existing as real biological entities is now seen as obsolete.”

 

This is a more extreme claim than saying that sex exists on a “spectrum” or that gender is a fluid category that allows for a range of expressions. As Wright notes, according to the reigning trans ideological posture, “a person may literally reimagine their biology, as if by alchemy, by merely stating so.”

 

Embracing this is not optional. Trans activists insist on the transformation of words and their meaning so as not to offend the extremely small minority of people who identify as women but were not born female. To show proper respect, we are told that women are no longer women, but “people with vaginas.” Women are not mothers, but “birthing people” or “chest-feeders.”

 

The new misogynists have cleverly coopted the language of feminism and its emphasis on misogyny. Trans activists denounce what they call “transmisogyny” and discuss the implications of the “cotton ceiling.” The latter phrase is a reimagining of “glass ceiling,” the supposedly invisible barrier to women’s career success that second-wave feminism devoted a great deal of energy to shattering. By contrast, the “cotton ceiling” refers to women’s underwear, and, as the BBC described, the phrase is “intended to represent the difficulty some trans women feel they face when seeking relationships or sex.” Planned Parenthood of Toronto hosted a workshop devoted to the cotton ceiling; its director described the session as exploring “the ways in which ideologies of transphobia and transmisogyny impact sexual desire.”

 

These changes have happened quickly, most noticeably in the transformation of the meaning of words we have used for generations. The results have been jarring. A Huffington Post headline from October read, “California Governor Signs Law to Improve Outcomes for Black Birthing People and Babies.” The Centers for Disease Control under the Biden administration embraced the trend, encouraging “pregnant people” to get COVID vaccinations in late September.

 

Similarly, in September, the British medical journal the Lancet advertised its latest issue on social media with the quote “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.” Lest you think these new semantic rules are equally applied, a few days earlier, the Lancet had no problem promoting an article about prostate health with the following statement: “About 10 million men are currently living with a diagnosis of prostate cancer—making it a major health issue.” It is only women whose bodies have been erased and replaced by “bodies with vaginas.”

 

The deliberate sowing of confusion about what to call men and women was also on display when the Biden administration announced that Rachel Levine, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, was made a four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The administration boasted that Levine was both the first transgender appointee to reach this rank as well as the “first female four-star admiral.”

 

But Levine in fact is not biologically female (she transitioned in 2011, when she was in her forties, but lived most of her life as a biological male). She identifies as a woman, and it would have been more appropriate to say she was the first woman to achieve that rank, or more precisely, the first trans woman. But the use of the word “female” by the Biden administration was purposeful. It is meant to elide distinctions based on biological realities, denying half the population its unique characteristics, all while those who use the term are patting themselves on the back for their inclusiveness and tolerance. No wonder the announcement prompted cynicism; as one observer noted on Twitter, Levine’s appointment proved that “anything women can do, biological men can do better.”

 

This is not an argument for denying Levine her right to identify as she chooses. But dehumanizing biological women by turning them into abstractions such as “bodies with vaginas” and “people with cervixes” is not striking a blow for tolerance and equality. It is the bureaucratizion of misogyny.

 

And it spares no one. This fall, the American Civil Liberties Union chose to honor Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the anniversary of her death by removing the word “woman” from something she had said during her confirmation hearings. The doctored statement now read, “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person]’s life, to [their] well-being and dignity.” Just a year ago, the ACLU had published the same quotation with the word “woman” still intact.

 

The effort to transform words and their meaning is part of a broader effort to police behavior regarding who can and cannot speak for women and their experiences. Just as an earlier generation of activists made use of “queer theory” to pursue a political agenda that called for “queering” normal spaces and activities (to chip away at “normativity” in hopes of eventually erasing the concept of “normal” entirely), today’s activists seek to use language to confuse what is understood as average or normal while also policing the behavior of others.

 

* * *

 

This effort extends beyond semantics. It also demands the destruction of female-only spaces. If, as trans activists demand, we accept that someone born male can identify as female, then we must also accept that they should have access to women’s spaces. Contrary to what progressives claim, however, this idea is neither popular nor justified by historical precedent. When women understandably object, citing concerns for their own physical safety or privacy, they are not listened to respectfully, nor are their concerns treated seriously. Rather, they are called bigoted.

 

Transphobia is also wielded as a weapon against anyone who challenges born-male people competing as women in sports competitions. Trans women with significant physical advantages, like the mixed-martial-arts athlete who identifies as female and pummeled a born-female competitor while wearing an “End Trans Genocide” T-shirt, are using the biological advantages that come from having been born male (and experiencing male puberty) against women. Women are losing out on college scholarships, membership on Olympic teams, and careers in professional athletics because trans women who compete with a significant physiological advantage are beating them (in the case of mixed-martial-arts competitions, quite literally). 

 

Trans activists tend to downplay the idea that trans-female athletes compete at a significant advantage compared with born-female athletes. Yet trans women have clearly figured this out. University of Pennsylvania student Lia Thomas, who is biologically male and competed as a male in NCAA Division I swimming for three years, now identifies—and competes as—a woman. Not surprisingly, she is obliterating female competitors thanks to the great physiological advantages she has as someone who was born male and went through puberty as a male, with the resulting increase in strength, muscle mass, and bone density. “Thomas blasted the number one 200 free time and the second-fastest 500 free time in the nation,” SwimSwam news reported after a recent meet, where Thomas broke Penn’s existing women’s swim records. As a male, Thomas was one of many good but not exceptional swimmers. But by competing as a woman, Thomas has now become an Olympic-caliber athlete. And her extraordinary boost in status comes at the expense of female athletes whose training and determination can never overcome Thomas’s obvious physical advantages. 

 

The absurdity of calling this situation a blow for equality was captured well in a recent episode of South Park called “Board Girls.” The episode features a character, Heather Swanson, who transitioned from male to female two weeks earlier and goes on to win every female sports competition in the town. Sporting a full beard and a masculine physique, she trounces the wife of “PC Principal” in the town’s “strong woman” competition. Her comeuppance comes in the form of the “board girls,” an all-female board-games club that destroys her in competitions that do not require physical strength.

 

South Park was parodying something that our nation’s cultural elite have embraced uncritically: the notion that the way to stop the stereotyping of women as the weaker sex is to have women’s desires, interests, and accomplishments represented by people who were born male.

 

This extends to the workplace, where people born male are now granted the moral authority to speak on behalf of all women. Consider a recent profile of Natalie Egan in Elle. Egan, a self-described failed former “tech bro,” transitioned to female and soon rebranded herself as the voice and face of gender equality in the workplace. “It wasn’t just because she was trans,” Elle notes. “It was because, having left the identity of a successful white man behind, she was experiencing marginalization and vulnerability.” Egan’s executive coach says Egan “really had the experience as a woman of not being taken seriously, and not being acknowledged as an equal.”

 

Egan now enjoys lucrative invites as a keynote speaker at women’s networking events and is selling an app, Translator, that “works with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Human Resources departments at companies like Claire’s and ViacomCBS.” Good for her, but Egan’s handful of years living as a woman does not automatically grant her the authority to speak on behalf of women in the workplace.

 

Most disturbingly, the new misogyny demands that women conform to trans ideology in even the most intimate situations: the people to whom they feel sexually attracted. Trans activists insist that desire itself is socially constructed, and so can be deconstructed to conform to trans demands for acceptance.

 

A much-lauded new book, The Right to Sex, by the Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan, begins with an unusual disclaimer: “At birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made.” She goes on to ask, “Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vagina? Or are we first attracted to ways of being in the world, including bodily ways, which we later learn to associate with certain specific parts of the body?”

 

In other words, sexual desire and sexual preference are merely learned behaviors, roles we can take on and discard as we please. “Some bodies are for other bodies to have sex with,” Srinivasan states. But not every body. To the gay man who expresses “disgust at vaginas,” she asks, “Is this the expression of an innate, and thus permissible revulsion—or a learned and suspect misogyny?”

 

In practice, this approach to desire has led to the policing of sexuality on a grand scale, particularly of lesbians, who insist that they are attracted only to women with female sex organs. The BBC recently interviewed lesbians who had been threatened and labeled transphobic because they acknowledged that they were sexually attracted only to biological women. As the reporter notes: “They described being harassed and silenced if they tried to discuss the issue openly. I received online abuse myself when I tried to find interviewees using social media.”

 

The sex-shaming is driven by a small number of activists who have outsize influence thanks to social media and cancel culture. “I’ve had someone saying they would rather kill me than Hitler,” a 24-year-old lesbian woman told the BBC. “They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a room with me and Hitler.” Her crime: “She says she is only sexually attracted to women who are biologically female and have vaginas. She therefore only has sex and relationships with women who are biologically female.” As a result, she has been called transphobic, a TERF, and a “genital fetishist” by trans activists.

 

Another lesbian activist told the reporter, “Lesbians are still extremely scared to speak because they think they won’t be believed, because the trans ideology is so silencing everywhere.” “This word ‘transphobia’ has been placed like a dragon in the path to stop discussion about really important issues,” another said.

 

In a recent interview with the libertarian UK magazine Spiked, lesbian activist Kate Harris was blunt about what is happening: “At its very heart is misogyny. It’s so regressive, so misogynistic and so homophobic. It reinforces all the old stereotypes that we thought had gone.” Harris notes emphatically that this is not an argument for intolerance against trans people. “We want every single child to grow up being what he or she wants to be, not tied down by pink or blue gender roles,” she says. “I have fought for 50 years for people’s right to do what they want. Wear a dress! Call yourself Ariadne! But don’t say you are a woman. And don’t say that I am transphobic if I don’t want to have sex with you because you’re a man with a penis wearing a dress.”

 

* * *

 

At its root, misogyny is a hatred of the things that give women their unique power and their unique vulnerability—the biological differences that make women as a group physically weaker in hand-to-hand combat, for example, but powerful enough to perform the labor of pregnancy and childbirth. And to outlive men. One of feminism’s salient achievements was arguing that those unique qualities did not make women morally, intellectually, legally, or politically inferior.

 

The new misogyny in effect says that it does. It claims that since everyone who wants to be a woman does not have to be born that way, it’s offensive and bigoted to believe the biological facts that flow from the truth that one is—as the title of feminist Adrienne Rich’s 1976 book put it—Of Woman Born. It forces on society a lie about women and enforces it through illiberal intimidation. It is neither tolerant nor liberating.

 

Spiked reported on a recent feminist human-rights conference in the UK, where women, many of them survivors of male violence, had convened to discuss issues such as rape, domestic abuse, and sex trafficking. Trans activists picketed and tried to shout down speakers, including women who had organized to protect other women from rape in a Kenyan refugee camp. Trans activists claimed the conference “puts the lives of our trans and non-binary friends in danger” because it focused on the needs of those born female. 

 

One of the most prominent critics of trans activist extremism, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, has been attacked relentlessly on social media by activists after she tweeted support for a woman who had lost her job for saying biological sex was real, and for supporting lesbian activist Magdalen Berns, who had argued publicly that lesbians should not be called bigots merely because they aren’t sexually attracted to trans women. As Rowling wrote in a statement on her personal website, she has dealt with “threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned.” 

 

In late November, however, Rowling posted on Twitter that police had to get involved after trans activists posted pictures of themselves in front of her house with her address clearly visible in a blatant attempt to dox her. She noted how many women she’s spoken to, including many with no public profile, who “have been subject to campaigns of intimidation which range from being hounded on social media, the targeting of their employers, all the way up to doxing and direct threats of violence, including rape.” She added, “None of these women are protected in the way I am. They and their families have been put into a state of fear and distress for no other reason than that they refuse to uncritically accept that the socio-political concept of gender identity should replace that of sex….I’ve now received so many death threats I could paper the house with them, and I haven’t stopped speaking out. Perhaps—and I’m just throwing this out there—the best way to prove your movement isn’t a threat to women, is to stop stalking, harassing and threatening us.”

 

Genuine tolerance for trans people doesn’t require the erasure of the characteristics that half of the population believes to be intrinsic to their sense of personhood. Erasing women to inaugurate a “new normal” regarding gender is destructive, not tolerant. And it offers no recognition that what might be acceptable for adults (trans-friendly bathrooms) could be uncomfortable for vulnerable women (domestic violence shelters) or for children.

 

An extremely small minority is not merely demanding tolerance to live as they choose; they are demanding that the overwhelming majority conform to the language and practices they insist upon, or else be labeled evildoers. They demand that everyone declare and perform their own gender preferences and pronouns and proclivities with no regard for privacy or restraint.

 

It’s a strange bargain: not, in the tradition of previous eras of feminism, to extend the rights and protections of womanhood to people born male who now want to live as women, but rather to denigrate the very category of woman, both in language and in function, by claiming it for themselves. The disrespect is staggering. And so is the danger.

Elizabeth Warren Says It’s Time to Destroy the Supreme Court

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

 

In the Boston Globe, Elizabeth Warren writes that she now supports destroying the Supreme Court:

 

To restore balance and integrity to a broken institution, Congress must expand the Supreme Court by four or more seats.

 

Some oppose the idea of court expansion. They have argued that expansion is “court-packing,” that it would start a never-ending cycle of adding justices to the bench, and that it would undermine the court’s integrity.

 

They are wrong. And their concerns do not reflect the gravity of the Republican hijacking of the Supreme Court.

 

Why “four or more”? Because Elizabeth Warren likes three of the current justices and dislikes six of the current justices (one of whom has been there for more than thirty years; two of whom have been there for more than 15 years), and because adding four or more new justices would ensure that the people she likes would have a majority.

 

That’s it. That’s the case.

 

Warren’s apologists will explain that this is just a “messaging bill.” And they’ll be right. It is a messaging bill. And Warren’s message is that she’s a tyrant.

 

When this idea was last mooted — by FDR in 1937 — a Congress filled with supermajorities from the president’s own party chose emphatically to reject it. The Chair of the House Rules Committee described the plan as “the most terrible threat to constitutional government that has arisen in the entire history of the country,” while Joseph O’Mahoney, who never met a plank of the New Deal that he disliked, told a friend that it “smells of Machiavelli and Machiavelli stinks.”

 

The Senate Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, proposed that the idea “violates every sacred tradition of American democracy” and “all precedents in the history of our government,” and runs “in direct violation of the spirit of the American Constitution.” Such a move, it submitted, would represent “an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country” and “make this government one of men rather than one of law.”

 

In conclusion, the Senate insisted that the measure “should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” By presenting its parallel, Senator Warren is telling us something about herself. We should listen.

The March of the New American Leninists

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, December 16, 2021

 

Steve Bannon, the recently indicted Trump sycophant and ex-Breitbart jackass, sometimes describes himself as a “Leninist.” I believe him. And he isn’t alone.

 

For Vladimir Lenin, a revolution required three preconditions: The masses had to be unwilling to accept the status quo, the ruling class had to be unable to enforce the status quo, and, as a result of the first two, there had to be an outbreak of political fervor and activity among the masses. Once these conditions were satisfied, Lenin would be ready to move on to the question of revolutionary instruments, which in his case were war, terror, and executions.

 

(It is worth keeping in mind that Bolsheviks wanted to outlaw capital punishment, and Lenin overruled them: “How can you make a revolution without executions?”)

 

Americans are a little sentimental about revolutions, because we had one of the very few good ones. But the revolutionary family tree gets pretty ugly pretty quickly: The American Revolution helps to inspire the French Revolution, with its purges and terror; the French Revolution provides a model for Lenin and his gang; the Russian Revolution informs the Iranian revolution. The line from the Boston Tea Party to the Iran hostage crisis is not a bold, straight one, but it can be seen, if you want to see it. Revolutions are dangerous, often in ways that are not obvious at the time and become understood only decades later.

 

Lenin, who wrote about the world in terms of capital-H History, was also a practical man. (Hence the terror and the executions.) And so he probably would have understood, as Steve Bannon and others of that ilk (from Bernie Sanders to Eric Zemmour) understand, that there are additional practical considerations.

 

One of those, which we can see emerging in the United States on both sides of the political aisle, involves a question of loyalty. Loyalty is very much on the minds of American political partisans, with each side denouncing the other as “traitors” and “seditionists” and “insurrectionists” and the like. If you are not used to the intellectual compartmentalization required of an American politician, it can be jarring to hear, e.g., Senator Sanders demanding “revolution” at 10 a.m. and denouncing “insurrection” at 10:15 a.m.

 

But the most relevant issue involving loyalty is this: 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.

 

There are reasons for hope. Donald Trump failed to overturn the 2020 election, and the republican spirit remains alive in such robust institutions as the jury-trial system, as Charles C. W. Cooke notes.

 

This being the United States of America, our revolutionary fervor is driven in some non-trivial part by cynical profit-seeking, with media figures as superficially different but fundamentally identical as the daft galaxy of Fox News and MSNBC pundits feverishly working to convince Americans that our society and our institutions are not in need of reform but are in fact so irredeemably corrupt that they must be overthrown. These arguments are made almost purely for commercial purposes — there isn’t a lot of money to be made from sensible conversations about incremental reform — but their influence extends well beyond the balance sheets of their corporate parents. I used to say, with unwarranted confidence, that the real world isn’t Twitter, and Twitter isn’t the real world. That turns out not to be true.

 

There is plenty of cynicism at work in the media business, but it would be wrong to think that figures such as Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow create revolutionary fervor on their own — they are only supplying a preexisting demand in the market. They do not create demand any more than Purdue Pharma or Pornhub do. The ultimate source of the revolutionary fervor is in the people themselves, in the “masses,” as the creaky old Marxists still call them.

 

Lenin would understand our situation. He might even be a little bit proud.

The Public-Health Mafia

By Philip Klein

Thursday, December 16, 2021

 

The public-health community is behaving like the Mafia. They come offering protection. They control the politicians. And they threaten businesses that don’t accede to their demands.

 

Led by boss Anthony Fauci, and comprising many federal, state, and local officials, they have exploited the Covid pandemic to orchestrate a campaign of fear and intimidation to consolidate their power, and they have no plans to give any of it up.

 

The protection racket is based on the conceit that if we simply do as they command, we will vanquish Covid. It started with the now-infamous “15 days to slow the spread” and the effort to “flatten the curve” to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. This quickly turned into six weeks and then months of rolling lockdowns and, in some areas, more than a year of closed schools.

 

Vaccines, they assured us, were to be the end point of the pandemic. But a year after they became available, and eight months after they have been widely available, the medical Cosa Nostra still insist that people who are fully vaccinated — and boosted — need to wear masks in public (even though they initially convinced people that masks were ineffective).

 

When the policies that they propose do not produce the promised results, and as one variant after another surfaces, the response is to argue that we have shown insufficient respect to them and that we need to make amends by being more loyal to their guidance.

 

It is not only the public to whom the public-health mafia offers protection but also politicians. Any politician who defies the orders of the public-health community can expect blistering media coverage whenever there is a surge in cases, as has been the case with Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Politicians who follow public-health guidance might not be protecting their constituents from the virus, but they are protecting themselves from getting blamed, as with New York governor Kathy Hochul, by operating with the imprimatur of the family. Recall how it was common to blame Donald Trump for the hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths on his watch. But President Biden, who has deferred to health officials, is spared any blame, despite the fact that more people have died of Covid under Biden.

 

“His two big promises were to get Covid behind us and to get rid of Donald Trump,” NBC’s Chuck Todd said on Sunday. “Covid’s not behind us, and Donald Trump’s still lurking. It’s not his fault, but is that why we’re in this no-man’s land here for him?”

 

And herein lies the essence of the control over political leaders. The current Covid surge, while openly reported on, isn’t being framed as Biden’s fault, because he has agreed to defer to the experts. He is granted protection, and any blame for the persistence of Covid is targeted at those who are challenging his mandates.

 

To be clear, it is perfectly appropriate for public-health officials to present the best and most up-to-date evidence to decision-makers and advise them on what they believe to be the best course of action to fight the spread of infectious diseases. But it is the role of elected leaders to weigh any such advice against other priorities.

 

Unfortunately, too many leaders have uncritically ceded authority to public-health officials, myopically focusing on reducing Covid spread over all other priorities — including economic well-being, religious observance, social interaction, and the education and mental health of children (who face virtually no threat from the virus). And they continue to do so — even though following the advice of these so-called experts has not shut down the virus.

 

This week, New York’s Hochul, citing the health commissioner, implemented a more severe statewide mask mandate, attributing it to a post-Thanksgiving surge despite the state’s 82 percent adult vaccination rate. Under the new rules, all offices, restaurants, stores, and businesses of any kind will be required to confirm vaccination status for all or force everybody to wear masks. Hochul’s policy calls for masking two-year-olds and requiring proof of at least one dose starting at age five.

 

Failure to comply carries steep fines for businesses. But beyond the fines, there is a further threat that is left unsaid. That is, political leaders, egged on by health officials, already showed that they could shut down businesses with the stroke of their pens. The press release announcing the new mandate claimed it was to “prevent business disruption.” All new mandates carry an underlying whiff of “Nice business there; shame if something were to happen to it.”

 

While some, frustrated by the never-ending Covid restrictions, have rallied around the cry to “Fire Fauci,” the reality is that doing so would not make much of a difference. If history has taught us anything, it’s that if one boss gets taken down, another will pop up in his place.

 

What needs to change is that elected leaders have to learn to stand up to the public-health mob.

 

Last week, another Democratic governor, Colorado’s Jared Polis, provided a better example.

 

“The emergency is over,” he said. “You know, public-health [officials] don’t get to tell people what to wear; that’s just not their job. Public-health [officials] would say to always wear a mask because it decreases flu and decreases [other airborne illnesses]. But that’s not something that you require; you don’t tell people what to wear.”

 

It’s time for more leaders to break up this public-health mafia.

There Is No Reason for Anyone Else to Pay Your Student-Loan Debt

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

 

The strangest thing happened to a friend of mine on the night of his 18th birthday. There he was, lying in bed after an evening of celebration and revelry, when, all of a sudden, a strong and insistent man broke in through the window of his apartment, kidnapped him, and forced him to take out $70,000 in student loans. Alarmingly, the saga didn’t end there. Despite my friend’s urgent protestations, this man personally escorted him to his college matriculation, sat with him while he chose his classes, and then spent four years ensuring that he not only attended them, but benefited from them as much as was practically possible. And here’s the worst part: Despite having put my friend through this rotten ordeal, this dastardly man has steadfastly refused to transfer responsibility for the loans to the good ol’ American taxpayer. Can you believe it?

 

I joke, of course. But I’m afraid that this is how the people who demand that the “federal government” must pay off their student debts are beginning to sound to the average American: as spoiled, selfish, delusional, buck-passing grifters, who spend their days searching for reasons to balance their budgets on the backs of the less fortunate. “Cancel my debts!” they shout. And the rest of us ask, “Er, why?”

 

The core problem the loan-forgiveness advocates have is that their cause is motivated by nothing more noble than a desire to have more money. The movement’s more skilled supporters attempt to abstract this away a little, naturally — “If I didn’t have to pay my loans,” they say, “I’d have more money to spend on consumer products, which would have a beneficial macroeconomic effect”; “If I didn’t have to repay my loans, I could get on the property ladder”; “If I didn’t have my loans to pay, I would be less anxious about money” — but, as is abundantly obvious to everyone on the outside, these are ultimately just different ways of saying the same thing: “I would like to have more cash.”

 

Anyone can do this. If I didn’t have to pay my mortgage, I’d have more money to spend on consumer products, which would have a beneficial macroeconomic effect. Ipso facto, the federal government should pay my mortgage. If my plumber didn’t have to make the payments on the F-150 he uses to transport his equipment, he would be more readily able to buy a home. Ipso facto, the federal government should pay off his truck.

 

“Ah,” cry the loan-forgivers, “But that’s different!” Is it, though? Why? It seems pretty simple to me. I benefit from my home; I should pay it off. The plumber benefits from his truck; he should pay it off. Students benefit from college; they should pay it off. “Yes,” comes the response. “But taking out loans is the only way to pay for college, which is so expensive!” Okay, and the same is true of housing and of cars. “But education is a human right!” Well, even if we accept that, by that way of thinking, so are housing and transportation. “But college is less affordable than it used to be, thanks to an unholy combination of federal subsidies and strict controls on supply!” May I introduce you to the real-estate market? “But my going to college is good for everyone!” No, it’s really, really not.

 

Recently, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez griped about her own loans. “I’m 32 years old now,” she said. “I have over $17,000 in student-loan debt, and I didn’t go to graduate school because I knew that getting another degree would drown me in debt that I would never be able to surpass. This is unacceptable.” Why? Which part of this, exactly, is “unacceptable”? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has debts because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took on debts in order to pay for the education that she received — an education that has landed her a plum job in Congress. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t have more debt than she would have had if she’d borrowed more than she did, because, aware of the tradeoffs, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demurred. I cannot see the problem. Are we really supposed to believe that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s having some more letters next to her name would be of such extraordinary benefit to the nation at large that the rest of us should gratefully pony up and pay for it? Give me a break.

 

If there is anything “unacceptable” about Ocasio-Cortez’s situation, it is that she seems genuinely to believe that she is a victim. As a member of Congress, Ocasio-Cortez makes $175,000 per year, and as has been widely reported, she is doing sufficiently well to have bought herself a Tesla. And good for her! In all sincerity, I wish her great riches and happiness. But that she would even consider asking for help in repaying the $17,000 worth of debt from which she’s already benefited considerably? That is obscene.

 

Just pay your bills, slackers. Everyone else has to.

Gone Too Far

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

 

As cable television broadcast the scenes of Trump supporters breaking past police lines and even smashing their way into the Capitol on January 6, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., texted Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff: “He’s got to condemn this sh** ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.”

 

A little later, Don Jr. texted again: “We need an Oval office address. He [then-president Trump] has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.”

 

It’s that last statement that reveals the whole truth of January 6 for Trump’s supporters. Donald Trump’s claims of massive election fraud (only in the states he lost, btw) were treated by people around him as a kind of naughty habit that had to be tolerated or indulged. When the people who treated these claims very seriously started acting like they were true — when they tried to “Stop the Steal” by interrupting the ceremony in which Congress certifies the results of the presidential election — then it had “gone too far and gotten out of hand.”

 

For those few hours, several people in the conservative media world who had influence with the president tried to intervene on behalf of reality. “Please, get him on TV — [the Capitol riot is] destroying everything you accomplished,” Brian Kilmeade texted Meadows.

 

Also Laura Ingraham: “The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”

 

“Can he make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol?” pleaded Sean Hannity.

 

Just as Tucker Carlson had once traveled to Mar-a-Lago to ask the president to take the Covid-19 pandemic more seriously, these Fox hosts were intervening with a man who they knew took television seriously, more seriously than his constitutional duties.

 

Hearing the texts read aloud at this late date in the year does provide a sense of clarity. Many of Trump’s lies before this seemed to have little cost at all. Many of them had been brazened out until they produced a kind of success. The lies that Trump told that day to that crowd had produced this specific, televised disaster. Unfortunately, it was a predicted disaster. But almost everyone knew it was wrong while it was happening. It took effort to forget.

 

In the months after January 6, the politically correct move for Trump’s cable-news apologists has been to ignore the fact that the people who set about “investigating” the supposed vote fraud have turned up nothing of consequence or merit. Or, it has been to focus obsessively on the potential involvement of the FBI or other intel agencies in the riots, to speculate about who may have been planted as agent provocateurs in the crowd. This is worth inquiring about, especially after the FBI’s cack-handed work trying to instigate a kidnapping plot against Governor Whitmer went south.

 

But the riot at the Capitol happened because President Donald Trump simply lied, and lied, and lied. On that very day he lied about what the vice president’s powers were. “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people,” he told the crowd.

 

Presidents have a duty to protect the Constitution; on that day Trump was subverting it. Even as the ugly scenes were unfolding, Trump seemed to be instigating the crowd even further, as if he were trying to put more coercive pressure on his own vice president. He tweeted:

 

Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!

 

There is a kind of partisan kick-reflex that is surely active in many people reading this. The reflex kicks: The Left is at war with the Right. It kicks again: Stop punching to your right. It kicks again: Stop trying to police the Right and stop trying to make it respectable to the Left.

 

But it’s not them I care about. It’s simply the truth. Treating Trump like a baby whose feelings had to be coddled at the end resulted in Ashli Babbitt’s getting shot as she tried to break into Congress against a lawful order to desist. He could no more Stop the Steal than make Mexico pay for the wall. But, pay for his actions? Some people did.

One of These Riots Is Not Like the Other

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

 

Why make such a big deal about January 6?

 

Sean Hannity, radio host and off-the-books Donald Trump adviser, demands to know. After all, Hannity points out, there have been scores of riots, some of them deadly, over the past couple of years. Why fixate on that one?

 

Sean Hannity apparently believes that he has the dumbest audience in America.

 

The sacking of the Capitol on January 6 by a gang of enraged Trump acolytes acting on the president’s complaint that the election had been stolen from him is different from other riots because of its particular political character. Stealing Nikes is one thing, and stealing the presidency is another. Hannity knows this. Most of you know this.

 

But, apparently, some people need to have it explained to them.

 

Consider: There were 21,570 homicides in the United States in 2020. If one of the victims had been the president of the United States, we would have made a pretty big deal about it. It would have been on the news. There might have been congressional hearings. Why? If we take Sean Hannity’s view, then we should treat such a murder as one murder among the thousands of murders the United States sees in a typical year.

 

But, of course, we do not treat the murders of political leaders that way. We even have a special word for such murders — assassination — because they are different from your average Saturday-night recreational shoot-’em-up in Chicago.

 

Likewise, nobody would care about Hunter Biden’s shenanigans if his father were the president of an office-supply company instead of the president of the United States.

 

We care especially about the killings of political leaders not because these men and women are special people whose lives are valuable in a special way. I am sure Abraham Lincoln’s family mourned him in much the same way as any other murder victim’s family would — but the nation was convulsed because of the political consequences of the assassination.

 

Even Sean Hannity knows this is a problem. That is why he — along with fellow Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade — texted Trump’s chief of staff to ask the president to try to put a stop to the riot. It is strange that these people, who today insist that Trump had nothing to do with the violent events in question, believed at the time that he was in a position to stop them.

 

(Incidentally, isn’t it at least a little improper for hosts on a so-called news network to be acting in such an advisory capacity? Didn’t CNN dump Chris Cuomo for precisely that — advising the New York governor?)

 

What has been clear to some of us for a long time — and what is becoming more difficult to deny every day — is that the events of January 6 were part of an attempted coup d’état, one that proceeded on two fronts: As the rioters occupied the Capitol and disrupted the process of certifying the Electoral College votes, Trump’s legal minions sought madly for some pretext upon which to nullify the election. Meanwhile, Trump allies occupying several points on the far-right tail of the bell curve of glue-sniffing madness hatched all kinds of supplementary schemes, some of them involving the military.

 

A riot that is part of a coup d’état is not very much like a riot that is part of a coup de Target.

 

It is true that some of the disorder of the past few years has had a distinctly political — revolutionary — character. The CHOP/CHAZ episode in Seattle is one example. But planting your flag on a Seattle sidewalk is a very different thing from having the president of the United States and his official allies make a serious effort at an autocoup — an effort that is, we should very much keep in mind, ongoing, with Trump-aligned Republicans working to take over election-management offices and to continue their effort to delegitimize the 2020 election through lies and conspiracy kookery.

 

There is a place in the jails and prisons of California, Washington, and Illinois for the criminals who rioted and looted in their cities, burning businesses and carrying out all manner of havoc. And there is a place in Florence, Colo., for the people who tried to overthrow the government of the United States on January 6.

 

I am ecumenical enough that I hope to see justice done in both cases.

Limited Government Is Back in Fashion. Can Republicans Make the Most of It?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 13, 2021

 

In 2019, First Things magazine published an open letter that captured a dominant sentiment on the American right. “Against the Dead Consensus” sought to bury the “warmed-over Reaganism” that passed for conservative thought and policy in favor of something more muscular. That something was and remains elusive, but what the letter rejected was plainly specific: the “fetishizing” of “individual autonomy.”

 

Thus, the American right joined the left in the race to get ahead of what seemed like an emerging bipartisan sentiment in favor of activist government. As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait noted, forces were at work that would “eventually render abstract appeals to small-government conservatism obsolete.” More and more voters were tempted by the promise of an expansive, overweening public sector that imposed itself on American lives—even if they disagreed on the forms that imposition should take. The era of big government was back, and it was here to stay.

 

What a difference a pandemic makes.

 

We’re now closing in on the start of the third year of the global coronavirus outbreak and, with it, the continuation of all the extraordinary interventions into private life that are starting to feel terrifyingly normal. Couple that with unified control of government in the hands of a party that is perfectly willing to use the crisis to advance its long-sought but entirely unrelated policy objectives, and you have a recipe for a political backlash. At least, that’s what the polling suggests.

 

Gallup’s polling in 2019, which had indicated to Chait that an irreversible shift against limited governance was underway, has already reversed itself. In that year, only 41 percent of adults said the government was “trying to do too many things” while 54 percent said the public sector “should do more to solve problems.” Today, the tally has flipped to a more historically familiar form; 52 percent of Americans say government is doing too much while just 43 percent disagree. A complimentary ABC News/Washington Post poll published last month found that six-in-ten Americans are concerned that Joe Biden is doing too much to increase the size and role of government—a figure that includes roughly 30 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents, and nearly all Republicans.

 

At the moment, these voters are woefully underserved by both major political parties. The American political establishment has abandoned the “dead consensus” around limited government at a time when that political orientation is desperately needed and sorely missed.

 

Today, checks on overreach at the federal or state level are largely left to the courts to mete out. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which interpreted its Trump-era congressional mandates so broadly that it thought it could abrogate the rights of property owners, was tossed aside by the federal bench. If the Supreme Court follows the precedents established in lower courts, the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates for federal workers and medium- to large-sized employers will meet the same fate.

 

Judges have compelled the chief executive to enforce the laws he doesn’t like and to pare back his attempts to legislate from behind the Resolute Desk. Judicial efforts to save liberty from the designs of imperious politicians have been even more vigorous at the state level—a condition that led Vox’s Ian Millhiser to mourn the ways in which the judiciary is “destroying America’s ability to fight pandemics.” This crucial impediment to the ambitions of heedless politicians cannot survive if American political culture does not support it. It’s fortunate that polling suggests voters do still believe in limited government, even if their representatives don’t.

 

Meanwhile, if the voting public sought to send a message to the activists in American government last November, the message was not received. The schools are still closing—ostensibly to protect the least vulnerable demographic from the ravages of COVID, but also to preserve “mental health” and promote “kindness, community, and connection,” largely in service to the demands of public-sector unions. The country’s most panicky governors are still imposing onerous burdens on employers to stem the tide of a pandemic that can now be mitigated by highly effective vaccines and antiviral therapies.

 

The federal government is still desperately trying to tack several trillion dollars onto the national tab. That ambitious agenda includes provisions that would require banks to provide the IRS with data on accounts that receive more than $10,000 per year in deposits outside wages and tips. It would seek to block the provision of grants to child-care providers that are primarily houses of worship or that provide sectarian education—essentially, an effort to starve religious institutions and force them out of the childcare business. Its own advocates promote this legislation as a means by which the government may, at long last, establish a cradle-to-grave welfare state. If ever there was a time for small-government conservatives to stand athwart history, it is now.

 

But some are still in thrall to the shadows that danced across the wall during the Trump years. Sen. Marco Rubio has sought to bridle national conservatism with the aim of riding it back into political relevance. The American Conservative’s Declan Leary highlights yet another speech in service to the senator’s ambitions, describing Rubio’s newfound philosophy as one that “acknowledges that what the 21st Century requires is not an immediate and reflexive conservatism.” Rather, it necessitates “a robust and ambitious activism to rebuild the kind of social-economic order that invites and deserves defense.”

 

In other words, no one is willing to defend the old conservatism anymore. No one cares for modesty, liberty, the entrepreneurial spirt, and the free markets in which it can thrive. Voters don’t seem to agree. They are no longer inclined to reward activism in government, and they’re not making the same careful distinctions between right and left activism the solipsists on the nationalist right prefer.

 

As the Wall Street Journal’s Elliot Kaufman astutely observed, if those on the right rediscovered the virtues of status quo ante conservatism, it would not be because they are a thoughtless lot tethered to “ossified Reaganism.” It would be a logical response to the demands of the electorate amid a spasm of “restrictions on personal liberty.” America needs conservatism; the boring old sort that isn’t revolutionary but preserves that which needs preserving. If trends continue, first principles may win out over First Things, but not if Republicans don’t give voters that option.

The American State Cult

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

 

Conservatives used to say: “America is a Christian nation.” Everybody knows what they meant by that, even if many people pretended not to understand. We are not a country with a national church or a national faith. We are — or were — a “Christian nation” in the sense that the United States grew out of a Christian civilization and found its political basis in Anglo-Protestant liberalism. The Founding Fathers and the influential men of the Founding generation were — like almost everybody else in the colonial era — almost exclusively Protestant Christians, albeit Protestant Christians of varying degrees of orthodoxy and observance. Thomas Jefferson’s religious eccentricities are well-known, and George Washington, a parish vestryman, rarely entered a church once his public career no longer required it of him. Back when the states had established churches, there was never any practical possibility that any of them would have been anything other than Christian. None of this necessarily argues that Christianity should have some special place in American political life beyond the predominance that comes naturally to a religion that still speaks, at least notionally, for two out of three American adults. In that sense, to say that America is a Christian nation should be no more controversial than to say that France is a European nation. Japan is Japanese, even though not everyone who lives in Japan is ethnically Japanese, of Japanese origin, born in Japan, or even a Japanese citizen.

 

But even though 65 percent of U.S. adults identify themselves as Christian, I am no longer convinced that Christianity is the dominant religious faith of the United States. What most of us profess may be Christianity, but what Americans corporately practice is an imperial cult, a religion that puts the state and its officers at the center not only of national political life but national moral and spiritual life. I do not know many Americans, including very devout Christians, who are losing any sleep about the filioque or transubstantiation, and nobody who is much interested in dispensationalism other than those with a professional interest in the subject.

 

But there are millions of Americans, tens of millions and maybe more than 100 million, who grieve, lament, and despair when they believe that the wrong man has become president of these United States. Just at the moment, many of those many grieving millions are people who believe themselves to be devout Christians. You’d think that these Bible-reading people would know a golden calf when they see one.

 

Here is an example of the sort of thing I am talking about, from Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician who is going to run for a Senate seat from Pennsylvania, a state with which he has only the lightest of connections. The good doctor spells out his political agenda thus: “I’m here to promise you one thing: I am going to help reignite the divine spark inside every American and empower us to live better lives.”

 

Set aside the comical notion of this ridiculous dork taking over for Pat Toomey — what in hell does that gibberish even hope to mean?

 

Dr. Oz is a fairly interesting figure on the religion front. He is a Muslim of Turkish background, and served in the Turkish army. There was a split in his family between the more traditionalist Islam practiced on his father’s side and the more secular attitude of his mother’s family. He married into a family of Swedenborgians — more on them in a second — and his mother-in-law is a minister in a Swedenborgian sect. When Dr. Oz decided to run for the Pennsylvania seat, he needed an address in Pennsylvania, and the one he chose is in the town of Bryn Athyn, which is the center of  the Swedenborgian church. That is probably a matter of pure convenience — Dr. Oz’s address in Pennsylvania is his in-laws’ home — but his association with the Swedenborgian church (or cult, as many Christians would have it) is more than a matter of convenience. He has spoken in interviews about his embrace of Swedenborgian beliefs and his incorporation of what he describes as a Swedenborgian approach to patient relations in his medical practice.

 

The main contemporary organ of Swedenborgianism is the Bryn Athyn–based General Church of the New Jerusalem, which operates Bryn Athyn College. (Bryn is Welsh for “hill,” as in nearby Bryn Mawr.) Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a mystic who claimed to have special revelations and a unique personal commission from Jesus Christ to reform Christian doctrine. He published an influential book called Heaven and Hell (which is not just a great Ronnie James Dio song!) in 1758. The Swedenborgian churches established in the United States (the General Church of the New Jerusalem is an offshoot from an earlier sect) were part of that great 19th-century burst of religious entrepreneurialism in the United States, which gave us everything from Mormons to Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, Disciples of Christ/Church of Christ, and the Southern Baptist Convention. (The late-18th-century split of the Methodists from the Church of England was a portent of this effervescence.) The spirit of capitalism was very much at work in the church-planting sector in those years. The United States is still probably the best place in the world to start a technology company or a cult.

 

(The word cult, as Cultish author Amanda Montell reminds us, comes with heavy emotional baggage and no generally agreed-upon definition. I don’t intend to use it here in a derogatory way. There’s an old joke that a religion is a cult plus time and money. I’m sure the Swedenborgians are very nice people. Similarly, I can’t see joining the Mormon church, but I want to have Mormon neighbors.)

 

Why did Americans start all those churches? The New World was vast beyond the comprehension of the first pilgrims who landed in New England, and Americans were very far removed from Canterbury — to say nothing of Rome or Jerusalem. As waves of revivalism and awakenings convulsed North America beginning in the early 18th century, it was only natural that believers would start looking for local seats of power and meaning — the First Great Awakening was arguably the first truly “national” experience of the American colonies and an important factor leading to the American Revolution. Here, we can blame the Puritans, at least a little bit: By rejecting church hierarchy and episcopal authority, insisting upon the ability of every properly educated believer to interpret Scripture for himself, they created cultural conditions that almost guaranteed the kind of religious innovation — the start-up mentality — that would lead to the vast multiplication of what they would have recoiled from in horror as heresies. This is deeply embedded in American culture: Our first public-education law, which bears the splendid name of the Old Deluder Satan Act, was written with a mind toward educating Christians up to a level that would allow them to engage directly with Scripture, thereby (the thinking went) giving them an intellectual inoculation against European popery and Anglican crypto-popery. The Puritan enthusiasm for Hebrew came from the same source — not, alas, from any particular tender feeling toward Jews, and Puritan clergy were educated in Greek, where possible, for the same reason.

 

Armed with literacy and a smattering of theology, looking upon the vastness of America, culturally alienated and physically distant from the institutions of British and European Christianity, Americans looked for spiritual anchors. And unlike their British and European cousins, those Americans did not have monarchies and other ancient institutions to which they might cling. Having ceased to think of themselves as essentially British, they were not part of an ancient nation with a deep foundation in blood and soil. Americans are a particular people — much more so than we often appreciate — but they are not a particular people defined by a shared ethnic history, which is why a Korean can become American but an American cannot become Korean, even if he moves to Korea, speaks Korean, takes Korean citizenship, etc. A big piece of our national identity is a set of generally shared political beliefs (incorporating a religious premise: that men are endowed with their unalienable rights not by the state but by God) and political documents (the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) which have for us a totemic character as well as legal and political significance.

 

And so, from the very beginning, we were in a peculiar position: that of a nation founded in religious ferment but having political documents and a shared political faith as central elements in our national character. France is on its Fifth Republic, there was an England long before there existed what we now call the United Kingdom, there was an Italian nation long before there was an Italian state, the Chinese people have had many different forms of governmental organization, etc., but the United States isn’t really the United States without the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Politics in the United States is culture war — inevitably.

 

Depending on how you count, the United States has either a few hundred or several thousand Christian denominations — and there are millions of self-professed American Christians who are associated with no particular church, practicing their own eccentric choose-your-own-adventure models of Christianity, and, beyond there, is the one-third of Americans profess either some other religion or no religion. What that means (among other things) is that Americans looking for a national basis of spiritual and ceremonial life cannot find one in any particular religious mode except one: the imperial cult. Of course, we don’t call our state cult that (or even generally acknowledge the imperialistic and sacramental qualities of the state), and we don’t acknowledge it directly the way the Romans do or even indirectly the way the English do by making their monarch the head of their national church. (National churches are always and everywhere in the Christian world the spiritual wreckage of earlier efforts to reconstitute pagan imperial cults.) But if you doubt that we have a genuine state cult, ask yourself how it is that a man running for a Senate seat from Pennsylvania can launch his campaign by promising to “reignite the divine spark” without getting laughed across the river back to Delaware?

 

Instead of laughing at this sort of thing, it is precisely what Americans expect of Senate candidates, House candidates, gubernatorial candidates, and, above all, would-be presidents. Joel Osteen and David Remnick both have written about the “Joshua Generation”; Osteen’s sermon was about Christian devotion, while the Reverend Remnick’s New Yorker homily was about Barack Obama.

 

Every presidential candidate has, for years, promised that his election would lead to a national spiritual revival. Sometimes, the restorationist thinking it put into obvious language (“Make America Great Again”) and sometimes it is part of an explicitly messianic campaign (looking at you, Barack Obama), but it is an element even of the campaigns of such modest republicans as the late Bob Dole, who, no less than Barack Obama or Donald Trump, sought moral histrionics from the American people, demanding “Where’s the outrage?” and offering himself as the necessary instrument (and personification) of their righteous wrath.

 

 

(This is not a slight to Bob Dole: The debased Republican Party of 2021 would have to hike up a very steep and difficult hill to look him in the eye. Bob Dole may have ended his days selling credit cards and erection pills, but next to Lindsey Graham he looks like Abraham Lincoln.)

 

My friend and colleague Jay Nordlinger, reading Dr. Oz’s “divine spark” nonsense, did a very fine job suppressing an eye-roll that no doubt would have seemed like a bit much if Linda Blair had done it in The Exorcist. “Isn’t anyone willing to balance the budget?” he asked.

 

The difference between a Republican who says that he is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and a Republican who says that he’s going to balance the budget is that somebody might believe the first guy.

 

A nation that looks to its politicians to provide spiritual nourishment needs that nourishment badly — and it is going to starve.

 

It is also going to face endless political disappointment and misgovernment. It is important to bring the right tool to the job: Bananas are great, but you can’t hammer in a nail with one.