Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism, talks about the why liberal institutions like the New York Times have proved so vulnerable to capture by the hard Left. He wrote about this recently for Quillette.
Published on August 21, 2020
PODCAST 105: Yoram Hazony on the Challenge of Marxism
I didn’t find too much to disagree with. My simplifies explanation is that the left draws it’s decision Ohio from feelings. Acceptance is a feeling and thus they are more prone to virtue signaling. Lastly, if you cave into crazy on the little things, it’s a habit by the time the big things arrive and thus, you get Portland. 10yrs ago those anarchists would have been thumped and The NY Times would have pointed to them as bad news.
I have a small quibble. I would lay the current Progressive impulse at the feet of Foucault, and his nihilist rejection of actual truth in favor of personal truth. The Enlightenment ideal has been replaced with various beliefs that boil down to “Everyone knows that _______ is true.”
Universities were converted to deconstruction and critical theory a generation ago, and their clueless graduates, ignorant of history and philosophy, are now running things. No dissent is tolerated, and heretics are excommunicated.
We know where this leads.
This is a beautifully written piece that everyone interested in democracy and freedom should read. As our actual human nature is rational and free willed, this is frankly the only course to follow. A very clear explication of how we organize politically in the west. We really don’t want what Marxism is offering … nay… imposing .
I like my two-party system. I’m confused, however, on how to reconcile the traditional conservative Republican Party with it’s current manifestation under Trump and his cronies. If anything, it seems that our current Administration has successfully demonstrated that our Constitution is really just a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” based on an historical handshake. They have shown us that greed, corruption, and patronage are our current basis of government.
By demonstrating how thin our espoused belief is in our Constitution and rule of law, is not the current administration giving full support to the idea that we don’t want a two party system? Doesn’t gerrymandering and voter suppression which guarantees one party remains in control support Mr. Hazony’s argument that we are moving towards a one-party, non-democratic society?
It seems to me that the push toward only one point of view is allowable is all around me, not just by Marxist control of academia and media, but also by the modern Republican Party. What’s a person to do?
I sometimes feel that I am the only one here who believes this, but I don’t agree that the Republican Party is under Trump and his cronies in any way. There is neither control, nor sway, nor hypnosis by or under Trump and his cronies.
The GOP, the party of Cruz and McConnell, hate Trump’s guts. They are not his cronies. They never have been.
Trump, and such cronies as he may have, are like a pack of mangy, flea-bitten dogs that have gotten into the GOP’s house because one of the children (a voter) left the door open.
The GOP is stuck with Trump for now, but they are not with Trump. The GOP has reached an accommodation with him because there is no alternative, but they pray every night when they go to bed that he will die in his sleep. This has not changed since the 2016 Republican National Convention. (You surely remember how that went.)
Trump is not leading the GOP anywhere. To the extent that anyone is even attempting to nudge the party in any particular direction - it is Republican voters.
Not Trump.
(Welcome, by the way.)
Thank you for your response. My worries extend beyond Trump and cronies. I also am concerned about gerrymandering (both parties) and voter suppression to guaranteeing one party’s dominance. I used to live in a community dominated by the Republican Party. The Republican primary was the true election. Consequently we never had any discussion around our community’s problems and how they might be solved. Concerns had to first be identified as such by our elected officials. If not so identified, then they were not addressed. For example: So what if we had constant, and often extreme, water rationing? Uncontrolled growth was a good thing. Running out of water was not a concern.
Welcome. As a point of clarification, what is your definition of voter suppression? To my knowledge the requirements to vote have been in place for a very long time and only someone who is not a US citizen would be unable to acquire the most basic of docs to prove their right to vote.
Push back I think. We do the best we can with what we have, hope for the best, prepare for the worst, clean up a mess here and there, and get up the next day and do it again!
Always open to new suggestions but so far this is best I’ve come up with.
Eliminating polls is an example of voter suppression. Dodge Kansas moved a polling station outside the city limits, increasing the difficulty for low income voters with limited means of travel. Purging voters rolls of names similar to names of felons like in Florida. Allowing you to use a concealed carry identification card but not your college student identification card at polls like in Georgia.
Isn’t that a case of concealed carry IDs being restricted to people who are residents of the state that issues them, and college IDs are not?
Hmmm. What about vote harvesting like in CA? Poll removal has happened in both Republican and Democrat run districts. Purging voter rolls are state laws that both parties agreed to, the fact that we have had deceased people and their pets vote indicate we need to keep rolls cleaned, not saying the process can’t be improved. Foreign nationals can get a student ID, it simply isn’t enough to prove citizenship and right to vote whereas conceal carry is based on underlying docs that only a citizen can acquire.
Again, not arguing against cleaning up processes and voter management but both sides leverage whatever is expedient and at the end of the day if you have the basic docs, you can vote…
Hazony seems to think that all Whigs are liberals and all liberals are Whigs. He calls Wilson a liberal but Wilson was an archetypical presbyterian whig grandee who distrusted the governed, imprisoned dissenters, re-segregated the US civil service and dreamed of a one world government run by Presbyterians like himself.
It was truly amusing to hear an Israeli and Brit ruminating about where it all went wrong for the Whig variety of liberalism.
In political science terms, the nationalist populist faction in the US withdrew their consent to be governed by Wilsonian Whigs in 2016 and the internationalist populist faction is currently withdrawing their consent to be governed by what they take to be a creature of the nationalist faction.
Both have withdrawn their consent to be governed by either the Democratic or Republican faction of the now Weimar-like governing regime in the US.
Whiggism is a political system finely tuned in favor of an oligarchy based on wealth, power and social status. After American whiggism completely severed it’s connection with the governed in the US in the mid-1960s it set the clock running on its demise. The time on the clock has expired.
It’s now time for something completely different.
All this is much more like Germany between 1921-32 than people seem to realize.
Hazony neglects to mention that jewish groups had been lobbying for immigation reform since the early 20th century. And that they had a decisive role in pushing through the Hart-Cellar act of 1965. It was not just certain portions of the anglo protestant elites who pushed for this change.
Liberalism is ultimately responsible for its apparent demise . Increasingly secularists western society, infused with liberal values has concluded that having achieved enlightenment ,we no longer need to talk about the origin of those ideas ,ie teach them to successive generations . The notion that all ideas can co exist in harmony ,under one roof is increasingly proving to be fiction . Insisting on the adoption of our western values by would be immigrants and rigorously teaching at least some basic liberal arts classes to all students ,particularly in college and university is essential to give new generations a sense of perspective .In fact unless each generation is forced to rediscover these liberal values ,they will just be diluted and replaced by more motivated and focused ideologies .
Fully agree. The Frankfurt School, Foucault and Derrida are principally responsible for illiberal critical theory and cultural Marxism, and their deconstructionist objectives, to pull down the values of Western civilisation. Here is something less known about Foucault (and Althusser, de Beauvoir and other): they applied their concepts of episteme and power as a social construct to sexual matters to posit views on ‘sexual power’: they argued that the setting of the age of consent at 16 (15 in France) was artificial, a consequence of wrongly applied social and sexual power by those in power; they held that children were therefore capable of giving consent; they were both key signatories to a petition in the early 1970’s to the French Parliament to permit sexual relations with children. Fortunately the petition was unsuccessful.