This. Os is actually a good poster when he really talks about a topic. I'm not in the D&D to find people that agree with me. I'm here for actual good debate and discussion. I mean even people that align with your viewpoint on a particular topic may not actually be on your side either. That's personally what I'm looking for when I check this section of the BBS. What do you guys actually think about stuff? It's your perspectives I care to read, especially if I disagree, when it's not done to be deliberately contrarian for internet points and is coming from a sincere place.
look. all I did originally was share something I thought might be of interest--to you or to other posters. Then I got criticized for not discussing it. Fine. I tried discussing it. Now here we are. If we have different ideas about discussion we should just end this here. ok no. just plain old-fashioned understanding. If you're not getting the main point of the essay -- which I understand to be his argument that liberals and conservatives BOTH need to band together and fight the various entities that he groups under "Marxists" (but which you can label any way you want)--then that's where it ends. there's no "meta-textual" anything going on here. As the expression goes, I can try to explain it to you but I can't understand it for you. Hazony's essay has already generated a fair amount of discussion, and if you would like a fair summary of it, no "meta-textual" bullshitt involved, take a look at https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/yoram-hazony-marxism-obliterating-liberalism/ : Hazony explains persuasively why left-liberals have no choice but to ally with conservatives against the new Marxists. If they don’t, they will be destroyed. . . . Liberals will have to choose between two alternatives: either they will submit to the Marxists, and help them bring democracy in America to an end. Or they will assemble a pro-democracy alliance with conservatives. There aren’t any other choices. That's it. That's Hazony's basic argument.
I understand Hazony's argument. It's actually pretty simple. What I'm doing is challenging it. That said I was actually thinking about Hazony's argument while I was taking care of something else. I get that he is worried that forces that he calls "Marxist" but what he means is actual "Political Correctness" is danger to the forces of the Conservatism and classic Liberalism. What he misses though is that the gravest threat to Conservative thought is Trump. The gravest threat to Liberal thought is Trump. Conservative intellectuals such as George Will, Andrew Sullivan and Bill Krystol have spoken about this and as in the words of Will Trump is "defining deviancy down." The Republican party has pledged itself to Trump and as such is no longer a party of ideals. Again in the words of Will: "A political party’s primary function is to bestow its imprimatur on candidates, thereby proclaiming: This is who we are. In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies," The threat to the liberals of both current progressive stripe is obvious but to classical Liberalism that Hazony talks about is very much there too. Trump and his movement is anti-Intellectual. It is the latest incarnation of the "Know Nothings" populist and nativist. While Hazony might be upset at Princeton cancelling Woodrow Wilson Trump himself shows a disdain towards the idea of intelligentsia and academic elites that Princeton is. This is very much inline with populist movements and is expressing itself in the dangerously anti-scientific views we see expressed. Trumpism isn't just anti-Intellectual but authoritarian. We've seen Trump not only publicly attack critics with crude childish insults but seek to use the power and authority of the presidency to do harm those who oppose him. To paraphrase Will again, Trump is a man who is both ignorant of the Constitution but also has no respect for the Constitution. For someone like Hazony who is an Edmund Burke fanboy that should be very concerning. Hazony and others can continue to fight the long running battle against "Marxist" supposedly out to stamp out classic Liberalism but they are blinding themselves or worse allying themselves to a movement that looks down upon intellectuals and has no respect for free thought.
https://www.newsweek.com/richard-sp...biden-disavows-useless-traitorous-gop-1527555 creator of the alt-right endorses joe biden.
I appreciate your having stuck with this discussion. I think it's fine to challenge Hazony's argument--I'm not sure how much of it I agree with myself. But, I do not think Trump is the threat you say he is. Bear with me . . . . What I mean by that is, Trump will be gone soon--in either four months or four years. And, the Republican party will forget him soon enough, like a bad dream. But Marxism/political correctness/wokeness/etc etc will be here permanently. Someday soon--it might be next year, it might be twenty years from now--the liberals Hazony is describing will wake up and realize that the real threat all along was the Marxism/political correctness/wokeness brigades. I think he is right about that.
The people who religously supported Trump will still exist. The underlying issues will still exist that led to many Americans believing Trump is a genuine competent leader. We are just going to repeat the same mistakes of we don't address the underlying issues that made people trust Donald Trump. This country isn't in a healthy place if a large contingent of people look at Donald Trump and see someone who is competent enough and civl enough to be our Head of State and manage the world's largest bureaucracy.
piece by John McWhorter in the Atlantic, excerpt at Reason: https://reason.com/2020/09/01/some-...se-they-dont-believe-progressive-orthodoxies/ excerpt: The charges levied against many of these professors are rooted in a fanatical worldview, one devoted to spraying for any utterances possibly interpretable as "supremacist," although the accusers sincerely think they have access to higher wisdom. A white professor read a passage from an interview with a well-known Black public intellectual who mentions the rap group NWA, and because few of the students knew of the group's work at this late date, the professor parenthetically noted what the initials stand for. None of the Black students batted an eye, according to my correspondent, but a few white students demanded a humiliating public apology. This episode represents a pattern in the letters [that I have gotten], wherein it is white students who are "woker" than their Black classmates, neatly demonstrating the degree to which this new religion is more about virtue signaling than social justice. From the same well is this same professor finding that the gay men in his class had no problem with his assigning a book with a gay slur in its title, a layered, ironic title for a book taking issue with traditional concepts of masculinity—but that a group of straight white women did, and reported him to his superiors…. Very few of the people who wrote to me are of conservative political orientation. Rather, a main thread in the missives is people left-of-center wondering why, suddenly, to be anything but radical is to be treated as a retrograde heretic. Thus the issue is not the age-old one of left against right, but what one letter writer calls the "circular firing squad" of the left: It is now no longer "Why aren't you on the left?" but "How dare you not be as left as we are."
