Enjoying the view from Limbo
At the end of the Peloponnesian War, in 404 B.C., Sparta appointed a ruling committee in Athens, the group which came to be known as the Thirty Tyrants. At the time, Socrates, a private man but a figure of considerable repute and controversy, was sixty-five years old. His most famous student prior to that time, the divisive iconoclast Alcibiades, had already been assassinated...
Yesterday, I visited National Review, the preeminent source of “conservative” opinion — by which I merely mean the source least likely to be mistaken for a profiteering clown show — for my roughly tri-weekly scan of the homepage teasers. (I almost never read anything there, of course, apart from the occasional Armond White film review. I have a life.) This time, one teaser...
I just read this headline from the Daily Bolshevik, aka The New York Times: “After Record Turnout, Republicans Are Trying to Make It Harder to Vote.” The point of the story, of course — the thrust of mainstream American “news articles” being contained in their headlines, designed as they are for immediate effect on the functionally illiterate and terminally impatient majority of “readers”...
Socialism mistakes productivity for greed. Capitalism concedes the point, and proceeds to mistake greed for virtue. Socialism believes there can be no freedom as long as there is private property ownership. Capitalism believes the legal right to hold material goods in one’s own name is a sufficient condition of freedom. Socialism asserts that it is wrong to judge men as better or worse...
Has ever a man built a more solid reputation as a principled non-conformist within an environment dominated by opportunistic conformism, only to demolish that reputation in order to sell himself as spare parts, in a shorter span of time? Has ever a man been more rhetorically effective at publicly attacking false declarations of “conservatism,” only to turn around and become the biggest abuser...
Most of Joe Biden’s voters were people who believed they could not live another day in a country controlled by Donald Trump and his Republican handlers. Most of Trump’s voters were people who believed they could not survive in a country controlled by Biden and his Democratic handlers. A country in which ninety percent of the voting population is divided into two groups...
Of all the relationships I lost due to Trumpism, the two cultists with whom I had previously maintained the most personal and friendly interaction (and who initially shared my contempt for Trump and his appeal), but who succumbed most completely to the allure of idolatry — the group paranoia, the inability to communicate respectfully with anyone outside of the cult, the susceptibility to...
Anti-elitism, as an abstract tenet or populist mantra, fosters anti-intellectualism, which in turn engenders a disregard for historical precedents and precursors — this last, the blindness to precedent, being an indispensable gear in the machine of progressivism. I have called Trumpism a cult — never meant figuratively. I have written of ten signs of any cult that are all easily applicable to Trumpism....
As soon as you concretely identify the finish line you are seeking, you begin to tire, until the last stages of the race, as your mind increasingly anticipates that approaching line, come to define exhaustion itself. For upon telling yourself, “I only need to make it to that point,” the soul immediately calculates how much of its energy will be needed to travel...
If you think there will be a political solution to today’s problems, you are a part of today’s problems. Tyranny in the modern style depends for its perpetuation and expansion on the continued faith of the oppressed in the very political mechanisms that have been used to oppress them. In the aftermath of the Trump-fomented riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th,...
Follow: