Devin Nunes, after a couple of weeks of promoting Russian disinformation about Ukraine, said the other day that 90% of the media is corrupt. Does he really believe it? It wouldn't surprise me if he does. He seems egregiously incapable of acknowledging facts that don't fit his preconceptions, and if the media mostly presents facts that don't fit, then obviously it follows that 90% of the media must be lying for corrupt purposes. And so he's more likely to believe sources of information that fit his preconceptions no matter that any neutral person would see those sources as crackpot.
But if you tell him that he believes Russian propaganda, he'll say you believe corrupt establishment media propaganda. If you tell him he's acting like somebody who's in a Trump personality cult, he'll say, no, you are in a cult. In fact he accused Democrats of that last week in one of his more bizarre speeches. If you tell him that Trump is a con man and a mobster, he'll say, so what, Joe Biden is just as bad. On one level, this is just a cynically motivated deflection, on another it reflects what lots of people really believe: The Republicans are bad, but the Democrats are worse. And if you're conservative, why not pick the bad guys who treat you with at least a little bit of respect.
Steve Bannon, I'm sure, sees Devin Nunes as a witless but useful idiot. Bannon is neither witless or credulous; he's strategic and shrewd. But together Nunes and Bannon represent two sides of the same coin--one credulous and manipulable, and the other shrewd and strategic. Without the former, the later can achieve nothing. Together they represent an illiberal mindset that has been metastasizing since the 90s, particularly in the Western democracies. This is something Liberals need to understand better than they do if they have any hope of preserving what's best in the Western Liberal Order.
On some days I am pessimistic about preserving the Western Liberal Order, but optimistic on others. I think Western Liberalism is a real advance of the human spirit, but it is currently going through a rough patch. More than a rough patch actually. It's in deep crisis in large part because of weaknesses most Liberals do not understand. Chief among them is Liberalism's metaphysical shallowness. So in what follows I try to find a way of articulating what I see as the values complex that shapes the Nunes/Bannon "mind" in their addressing the typical Liberal. This is not an attempt to get into the individual minds of either men, but rather to understand the worldview or ethos that shapes their behavior and attitudes.
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You Liberals argue, my Nunes/Bannon cutout would stipulate, that a secular state is needed to provide a neutral context to adjudicate conflict in a pluralistic society where people with all kinds of different values have to coexist. You argue that separation of Church and state insures that no one religion dominates so that all faiths--and unbelievers--can feel that they belong. You Liberals argue that this is how an open, pluralistic society works, that you need to have a neutral secular state to mediate between competing groups with different values. But we, shaped in the Nunes/Bannon worldview, say that the "secular" state is not neutral and that it does not mediate. It promotes an empty, consumerist nihilism and eviscerates and hollows out the soul of the nation.
If you Liberals counter by saying this is the way the founding fathers set it up, we say they were wrong to do so. They were Enlightenment elites who had no idea about or respect for the lives or ordinary people. They did not understand what gives their lives meaning, and what motivates their behavior. Adams was shrewder than Jefferson in that regard. But as a group the Founding Fathers sowed the whirlwind, and they were aghast to learn by the 1820s with the emergence of Jackson that they brought into being energies that they could not control.
We believe that the founders' mistakes were corrected after the Second Great Awakening after which Christian evangelical fervor reinvigorated the American spirit. The core sense of American identity, the identity of "real Americans", does not come from the constitution and its foundation on the rule of law. We "real Americans" are more Jacksonians than Jeffersonians. And so for us the law has no validity if it is not a reflection of and a reinforcement of the customary social order and its common sense values that are grounded in a sense of the divine order. And we feel no compunction about breaking the law when it does not align with what we most deeply believe.
If that customary social order was in its earlier phases white supremacist, maybe so. But we'd sincerely argue it's not about being white or brown or black; it's about the American values that give real American lives their meaning, and those values have a European heritage, and guess what, most Europeans were and are white. Non whites are perfectly welcome to join us in celebrating our European values, but, please, stop trying to promote the ridiculous idea that the West is no better than the rest. That's just a stupidly self-defeating bit of multi-cultural political correctness that is at the heart of our current decline. America will lose to China or Islam if you Liberals don't wise up.
You Liberals fetishize facts. Everybody knows that any set of facts can be interpreted in any number of different ways. That's why God created lawyers. But the only facts that matter to us are the ones that support our sense of meaning and purpose. And if some facts contradict what we believe to be true, they must be wrong or misunderstood. There are all kinds of "facts" that have been proven wrong.
To provide an example you Liberals might appreciate, the scientific consensus in the 19th century held as fact that because women's brains were smaller than men's bains, they were unable to think as well as men. A liberal feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton refused to accept that as "fact". Sometimes what you know deep down, as Stanton did, is more important than what the so-called scientific community thinks. Who's to say that what you Liberals insist on as "fact" will be rejected or reinterpreted when new information comes to light?
Science is great when it sticks to engineering; it gets out way over its skis when it pretends to think it knows better about other things--including things like climate change. They should worry more about the engineering challenges rising temperatures may or may not cause.
You Liberals, in your smug, inflated perception of yourselves, think you represent sanity and truth, but you just represent a particular interpretation of the facts that is saturated in a decadent, attenuated mode of thinking whose limitations you are incapable of recognizing. Nietzsche understood this decadence. Yeats, Eliot, and Pound understood it in their way. Heidegger did, and so did Julius Evola. And now someone like Dugin in Russia does, too.
You Liberals are nihilists whether you know it or not. Yours is a worldview that promotes disorder and meaninglessness because its thinking is founded in disorder and meaninglessness. You try to compensate for this with ideas about the rule of law, but Liberal law is founded on nothing except humans' cutting deals with one another to serve their petty interests. The law is a whore bought and paid for by special interests.
Intellectual liberals think they are so sophisticated to be able to face the hard, nihilistic truth and that we conservatives cannot. They are so smug in their accusing us of believing in spaghetti-monster fictions. Their nihilistic, "fact-based" narrative is the real fiction, but they are too smug to recognize it. And in their smug sense of superiority, they want to destroy those of us who stand for the tried-and-true traditional American values and religion they despise as naive.
But the sense of meaning and purpose we derive from our values and our religion is more important to us than facts, which are just inert and meaningless if they don't contribute to or support our beliefs. You can't tell me that my facts are wrong, because to tell me that is to tell me that my life has no meaning or purpose, and obviously it does, so, equally obviously, your facts must be untrue,a fabrication, a lie. You lie because you hate us and want our destruction. Therefore, you are our enemy, and nothing you say, no matter how seemingly irrefutably true, can be trusted.
And so because you Liberals want to destroy us, and will lie and cheat to do so, our survival requires that we not play fair either. And so, sure, we lie and cheat, too, but we're just playing the game you Liberals set the rules for. It started with the Warren Court, and that's why we have to protect ourselves by insuring a conservative judiciary, and we will ram our judges down your Liberal throats just as you rammed Roe v. Wade down ours.
Is it really so crazy to think this way? Who's to say what's normal or true, regular or irregular? As Gordon Sondland pointed out last week. Who's irregular? The people like Taylor and Yovanovich who think they are regular are really the irregular ones. As John Kennedy said the other day on FOX, Fiona Hill has her opinion about whether the Ukrainians hacked the election, but other people have different opinions. Who's to say who's right? So when in doubt, I'm going with the people on my team. You believe you're right, that normalcy will return once you get rid of Trump, but that is naive beyond belief. The times, they are a changing, bro.
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You think democracy is so great. Well is it really? Our electing Trump is the perfect demonstration of why democracy has no future. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of Democracy. Xi and Putin and Erdogan understand that, and America is going to continue to slide into irrelevance if it continues to insist on remaining a Liberal democracy. The world is too complicated for democracy. And so we will use democracy to destroy democracy. We are going to use the vulnerabilities of the open society to destroy it. It is our patriotic duty as Americans to destroy democracy so that we can continue to compete on the world stage. Good riddance.
You think Trump's is a demagogue, so what? His value lies in his being this Mount-Rushmore-sized extended middle finger to the corrupt nihilistic Liberal Establishment. He's a blunt instrument useful in pushing over what will soon crash of its own dead weight. Do we care whether the Russians tampered with our elections? No. Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And, quite frankly, we feel more kinship with Russia's aggressive assertion and defense of traditional Western values than we do with squishy, nihilistic Liberal values. We can learn from guys like Putin and his "Rasputin", Dugin, and in the short run at least, I'm willing to accept Putin's help. Does that make us traitors? Only if you think loyalty to a corrupted, decadent order is worthy of one's fealty.
That's why we defend Trump. Not because we like him, but because he's the first step toward a new alignment with other nations who derive their identity from the Western Christian tradition and its values. You don't understand that yet, do you? Llberal Democracy is all but dead, and all I'm doing in my support of Trump is helping to put the stake in its heart to finish it off. People like Bill Barr get it. People like Bill Bennett and Newt Gingrich get it.
They don't like Trump anymore than we do. But they're all in their different ways laying the foundation for the new thing to come. You see them as dishonest; we see them as men on a mission. They will do what is necessary to achieve it, and the last thing they care about is maintaining their good reputation among Liberals and the establishment media.
What is the Liberal mission? There is none except to defend sodomy and infanticide and who knows what comes next. Incest? Liberalism is a spent force, and it's only a matter of time before more vigorous cultural energies push it aside. Trump is just the first wave. Others like him, but smarter and less vulgar, will follow. Get ready for it.
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This is the pessimistic view. In a future post I'll try to refute it on its own terms. Not that that will change anything.