I would like to ignore MSNBC’s racist, vicious African-American host Joy Reid. She deserves to be ignored. Sometimes, however, I can’t help myself, as with the her tweet above from last night. If someone respectable wrote that, my head might explode. The tweet’s not so far from Reid’s usual warped point of view that it prompts that reaction, thankfully. Still, I am forced to observe and ask…
1 Who is she tweeting to? What kind of Americans regard religion, family, law enforcement, the military, and love of country outdated and obsolete values?
2. This increasingly appears to be to be the attitude of the majority of the Left. If it isn’t, then Democrats certainly gave the impression it is, based on their studied contempt when such institutions and values were evoked in the President’s speech. If they were communicating what they don’t really believe, then they were lying. If they really oppose those values that they scowled about, then Republicans should remind voters of who is running against them this year: people who think like Joy Reid.
3. Since when is “nationalism” a sinister word and concept, especially when it is defined as Reid defines it: religion, family, rule of law, national defense, and love of America? Reid labeling those Fifties values is just false history: Every President up to Obama made those same values essential to the vision of America they projected.
Wrote Ann Althouse in part on her blog, regarding the New York Times Reidish critique,
Was Trump’s SOTU theme “nationalism”? Was it devoid of values?…Individualism is a value, and the whole speech was expressive of the value of individualism….
Freedom is a value. Trump spoke of it in connection with our kinship with freedom-loving people in foreign countries: We “stands with the people of Iran in their courageous struggle for freedom”… Freedom is a universal value that we share with good people all over the world and that “gave birth to a special place called America.”…Self-government is a value. The “yearning… to live in freedom” led to “a revolutionary idea: that [Americans] could rule themselves.” By instituting a system of self-government, Americans “light up the world.”
All old-fashioned, irrelevant, defunct, discredited values from those racist Fifties, right, Joy?
4. Why is someone who is openly anti-America, anti-police, anti-family, anti-armed forces, anti-religion—we already know she is anti-white and anti-male—given a TV show? What does it say about MSNBC, and by extension, NBC, that they allow a woman to use their communication platforms to promote such bile? It says to me that they are irresponsible, and courting a racist, anti-American audience.
5. Supporting, enabling, of encouraging Reid, and rewarding her employers for doing so is unethical. The country’s values that disgust her guarantee that she can issue such counter-cultural poison at will. They do not ensure her a TV audience or a lucrative job selling hate, which is what she does.
________________________
Pointer: Instapundit
Ethics Alarms 
I had a client event last night so I could not watch SOTU. I also agree that religion, family, and pride in one’s country are values that should not be scoffed at. However, I do feel comfortable scoffing at a President who purports to care about family (he’s on his third with numerous affairs) or religious values given just about everything he has said on TV and print over the last 30 years. To sum up: message good, messenger bad.
Talk to his children about how he views family. I think he cares deeply about family irrespective of the number of wives he has had. When you start condemning the many who are absent baby daddies to multiple women or the women that have multiple absent baby daddies then you can speak from the moral highground.
Wives are family too. Hard to separate.
I don’t disagree that wives are family. However, assuming he does not believe in family values cannot be supported by the number of spouses a person has had. One of the great contradictions in society is that matriarchs with multiple partners are provided for and without condemnation, often being held up as heros as a single mother but patriarchs are roundly condemned and considered cads.
What is important to assess in determining one’s family values is how the individual supports and nurtures the offspring to grow into compassionate and productive adults.
I accept the fact that good character is absolutely necessary to be a great leader. I also know that all great leaders have character deficiencies because they are human. All epic heros have a character flaw. If they did not, we could not learn and grow from them.
However, assuming he does not believe in family values cannot be supported by the number of spouses a person has had.
You missed the part about numerous affairs, many of which Trump publicly bragged about. Good family men don’t do that to their kids.
One of the great contradictions in society is that matriarchs with multiple partners are provided for and without condemnation, often being held up as heros as a single mother but patriarchs are roundly condemned and considered cads.
As the son of a single mother, I’d really like to know what society you’re describing.
accept the fact that good character is absolutely necessary to be a great leader. I also know that all great leaders have character deficiencies because they are human. All epic heros have a character flaw. If they did not, we could not learn and grow from them.
I really hope you’re not implying that Trump is either a great leader or an epic hero. That would be embarrassing.
Trump has treated his kids well. His various partners…not so much, not unlike oh, Clinton, JFK, FDR (wheeled to a girlfriend). Also not unlike the Prince of Wales.
As someone who spends a lot of time around single moms in the state’s biggest city, I have seen that society. I turn my nose up at it as a lifestyle and an accepted practice (multiple women with multiple kids by multiple guys they never even considered marrying), but I’ve seen it.
As someone who is very close friends with two single moms, I can tell you both of them are good strong people. Heroes? I dunno. Possibly. One married and had a child early, then her husband started to beat her. The other’s husband just walked away from her and their two kids. I am also friends with two single dads, and the same is true, although one is somewhat more “heroic” as a fireman who lost his wife to cancer. The other is another lawyer whose wife and he called it quits after 7 years and she moved to the Carolinas to “start over.” I applaud single parents of either gender, especially when that status isn’t really their fault.
Dunno if Trump is a great leader. He is certainly a high achiever. Epic hero? Washington and Jackson, probably, possibly also Teddy Roosevelt, maybe Eisenhower. Dunno about Grant, who was a great officer but a mediocre president, or Lincoln, whose life involved little risk to self. Trump isn’t an epic hero.
Chris, we all come from different perspectives. You ommitted the most important statement that was made.
Do I believe that single mothers are incapable of raising children well — No. We do in fact laud them for their sacrifice. Many wear it as a badge of honor. We do not put single fathers on the same pedestal. I did not say that your mother did not instill family values on you. My statement was specific relating men and women who routinely engage with multiple partners and sire or give birth to kids. These kids have little to no understanding of family. As a result many wind up having tremendous difficulty having long term relationships.
It is damn frustrating when you miss the most important point and that was the lessons the children learn is what determines family values.
My point about epic heros was simply to show we all have failings. As an English teacher you know that all heros in the classics have a fatal flaw but that never diminished their leadership in every situation.
Example: Elizabeth Taylor had affairs, was married and divorced more times than Trump. Was she an effective leader in the crusade to bring the issue of AIDs to the forefront of publc conscience?
I know you hate and despise Trump on policy grounds. That’s fine. But, to trash him for a message to which you would otherwise agree is simply demonstrates a closed mind.
Sparty, I’ve had the good fortune of being married to my first and only wife since 1975. Trust me, there’s a great deal of good fortune involved in that outcome. I have tons of decent friends and relatives who’ve been divorced once or twice or more. They’re all fine people. Just weren’t as lucky as I’ve been. So far. “C’est la vie,” say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.
At least The Donald divorces his wives when it’s time to move on, unlike Bill Clinton. Frankly, I thinkk there’s something to be said for that.
I think there is a huge difference between someone whose marriage doesn’t work out, and someone who has serial affairs while married (and then keeps dumping the existing wife for a new model). Trump is a pig. Other leaders are pigs too, but that’s not a defense and we’re talking about Trump right now. If someone like Trump talks to me about family values, I reserve the right to laugh in his face. And if that someone is not the President, he risks getting throat-punched as well.
If Reid had made your point – family values good, but hard to hear from this guy, I’d be right there with you (save the throat punching). But, as Jack said, Reid said the message was bad.
Which of these are so terrible – church, family, military, police, national anthem.
Did you read my original post? I didn’t say there was anything bad in the message.
Correction: Tragic hero not epic.
The serial cheating, (along with “grab ’em by the pussy,” “blood coming out her eyes or wherever,” and the stories of 19 women who’ve come forward about his sexual assaults), however, DOES fly in the face of his “family values” rhetoric.
He didn’t mention family values. He mentioned family. Trump is criticized for involving his family in his professional life too much.
Only those family members that he didn’t cheat on and throw out like garbage. A spouse — or in his case spouses — counts as family.
Like, say, Thomas Jefferson. In politics and leadership, we have to evaluate the message irrespective of the messenger, but to your point, yes, this is why I resolutely reject the Policy, Not Character approach to leadership.
Reid, however, was attacking the message.
“I resolutely reject the Policy, Not Character approach to leadership.”
But we know, that there has to be some component of Character when evaluating a chief executive.
Trump has no character and he doesn’t believe his own message anyway. He just cares about winning.
Like Hillary?
Can we once talk about the person at issue? When we’re talking about a D, I don’t bring up Republicans to discuss.
I just don’t get why this is even an issue on this post. As I noted a while back, FDR was a total hypocrite, cynic and manipulative sociopath. He talked inspirationally about the Four Freedoms, then handed over millions of Middle Europeans to Stalin. Seems to me your comment is like defending someone who says, “There go the Democrats, embracing that phony Freedom of Speech again!” by saying, “Yeah, but FDR didn’t believe in it anyway, so there’s that.” Seems like gratuitously attacking the messenger when he’s doing the right thing. What’s the difference whether the messenger is sincere, if the message being delivered from a place of influence still can do good?
You’re essentially embracing the crazy resistance logic that because you don’t like Trump, it doesn’t matter whether he’s successful or not in strengthening the country, because he’s only doing it to win.
Well thanks Jack! I really appreciate you explaining to me what my thoughts are! I mean you’re wrong, but A for effort.
Do I really need to remind you of the numerous posts where you complained that Hillary Clinton has no business purporting to be a champion for female rights and women’s issues generally?
OK, I’m not putting up with that crap.. Here, I’ll explain something else to you: the Presidency is a JOB. Got that? The job has certain requirements, and one is defining and supporting healthy societal values. Now, to GET that job, the President has to convince enough people that he is qualified. Then, such matters as hypocrisy, fake values and the rest are important. NOBODY, and I mean nobody, voted for Trump under any misconception about his ethics or values. I wrote til I was blue that his lack of values made him unqualified, but that’s irrelevant since he got the job.
He was very clear who he is…UNLIKE Hillary Clinton, who poses as a feminist champion and is an enabler of sexual assault. With me so far?
Now, just as Andrew Jackson was not obligated to, once President, promote dueling, and Jack Kennedy, once President was not obligated to promote sexual predation, and LBJ, once elected, was not obligated to advocate cut-throat politics, and indeed all of them were obligated to do the opposite, and DID. Was Lincoln obligated to never promote the value of education because he was not schooled? Was he obligated not to support the 13th Amendment because he had said that blacks were inferior to whites? No, and no.
Trump is doing his JOB, which he was duly elected to do. While a serial rich-guys trophy wife habits do not embody respect of family, they do not disqualify the President from doing his job. Hillary, in posing as what she is not, is claiming qualifications for values she neither holds nor lives by.
You’re a lawyer. You should be able to see the material difference there. And if she was President, her fake marriage and her fake concern for the victims of sexual assault would then make her an imperfect messenger as well, but it wouldn’t make the message less valid, not excuse her, as President, from making it.
Glad I could clear that up for you. Ask any time.
Did you delete my comment or did it just not post?
Damn — I don’t have the energy to repeat it here, so let me sum up. Your argument appears to hang on this weak “job” distinction. But they both have jobs. They are both public figures and — rightly or wrongly — Hillary Clinton is the most well-known female politician/leader in US history. (Eleanor Roosevelt is a close second, but Clinton wins the award as former First Lady, Secretary of State, and Presidential candidate.) She still has a “job” to promote all those things that President Trump discussed in his speech. And I say I can dismiss everything he says about family and religion just as I can dismiss everything she says about women’s rights — because they are both charlatans.
That’s called being fair and consistent. Unless the President does a huge public “Come to Jesus” speech, everything he claims to promote should be ridiculed. Same with the former First Lady.
“Unless the President does a huge public “Come to Jesus” speech, everything he claims to promote should be ridiculed.”
Clarify.
So if he claims to promote family values, family values should be ridiculed, or HE should be ridiculed? Because right now, it seems that Left’s consensus is to ridicule the family values…or at least if we take Joy Ann Reid’s comment to be an accurate gist of the consensus.
But I’m not letting go of the point: A President’s extolling of national values is meaningful because he is President. Trump, like Clinton, took pains to avoid the draft: that doesn’t mean that he assertion of the value of the military is insincere, or that it should be discounted.
God, how many times do I have to hammer this point: what a President did before becoming President is irrelevant to how his performance in office, including his statements, should be taken? US Grant gave up drinking as soon as he was elected. Could he extol the virtues of moderation and sobriety as President without 19th Century Spartan punching him in the throat? Nothing says that a leader cannot promote values that he was unable to or unwilling to embrace as a younger man. Garfield was a thug and a wastrel; Arthur was a political hack; so was Truman. Cleveland was frequented houses of prostitution and paid someone to take his place in the Union Army.
SS’s complaint is a special anti-Trump standard.
At the top of this rabbit hole I stated that the message was good but the messenger was bad — I don’t think I could have stated that any more clearly. This is not about the “Left” or the “Right.” It is about demanding character in our leaders. I think you and I are on the same page on that Tex.
I never delete comments unless I’m banning the commenter. Let me see if it was caught in the spam bin…nope. I’m sorry…it happens to me, too.
I don’t agree with your point Jack, and it doesn’t apply here anyway. People can have done things in the past and seek redemption. Or at least say they were wrong. Trump has done neither. Messages are meaningless if people don’t believe the messenger. And, even worse, it further erodes our institutions and polarizes the country because no one is willing to stand up and declare that the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.
The election is redemption. The President is speaking for the nation; he no more needs to believe what he advocates in the best interest of his country than a lawyer had to believe what is in the best interest of his client. FDR was a complulsive liar and a sociopath. So what? The country was inspired by him, and he was a terrific leader.
Stop making me defend Trump! I can’t stand the guy. But he has as much reason and justification to promote good values as any President, and if he succeeds on behalf of the nation, I couldn’t care less what his real values are, and neither should you.
Ack! I can’t handle it. This is just so simple. People will model their behavior based on what the messenger is saying. So, let’s say Trump gets divorced again and marries wife No. 4. That will be deemed acceptable and, perhaps even worse, as epitomizing family values. Society just became worse because we didn’t have a better spokesman!
Now that’s right.
Then, such matters as hypocrisy, fake values and the rest are important. NOBODY, and I mean nobody, voted for Trump under any misconception about his ethics or values.
Hopelessly naive. I know many people who did just that, and said so.
I have never suggested otherwise. It’s beside the point, that all, when discussing Reid and the philosophy she apparently champions.
So this makes him remarkable in some way as POTUS? Kennedy, Clinton, FDR — and on and on — could be cited, but you did not bother to be honest in this regard. A cheap shot. Go ahead and hate Trump if you like — he’s not exactly my fave, either — but do not, do not, denigrate him as the only President who has broken our moral laws of marital fidelity. Start with Jefferson and move forward from there. You’re just really, really angry: more anger and you’ll be among those who deny our history to make your hatred more palatable. And as a result, become yet another Hilary. Shame on you. Thought you were smarter than that.
Well, I’m not angry about anything. If you want me to say that people who cheat on their spouses have no business talking about family or religion, I will happily do so. You can go through everything I have ever written here and you won’t find me defending or excusing Democrats for this kind of conduct. I’m consistent — unlike the rest of you.
The Democrats seem to have a lot of embarrassing aunts. Reid is one of the worst.
I agree.
Though I’ll trade you three Joy Reids and throw in a Al Sharpton for one Hannity and two of the Fox&Friends crew.
Oh, Joy is worth the Gateway pundit and Jeffrey Lord at least. I like BIG trades: how about Joy and Lawrence O-Donnell for Hannity and Ann Coulter, with a wacko to be named later?
1. The left, who else? You know, the Chablis-sipping, smoked-almond eating sophisticates who smugly dismiss religion as superstition when they don’t outright attack it, who think the traditional family is such an outdated concept, who think law enforcement are just bullies who hunt young black men for fun, who think the military is a dangerous concept, and who think this country is great…as long as they’re in charge, when someone else is, not so much.
2. The Democrats loathed GWB, and that was starting to show toward the end of his presidency, but they were moving left of left then and have had ten years to keep moving.
3. Well, that depends. Nationalism started to become a really dirty word in Europe after WW2, when the whole continent acquired a serious guilt complex about the nationalism that had just served as the basis for fascism. The idea started to spread here in the early UN days, but didn’t really catch on due to our location. It started to spread more with the cyber age, when the oceans were less a barrier. A lot of the left has now come to admire the European way of doing things, which includes a downplaying of national identity.
4. MSNBC appeals to those same people in #1.
5. Yup. Frankly I think of the 1950s as a sane time in American history. Rock and roll and surfer culture were just emerging, but hadn’t yet acquired the dark side of sex and drugs. The interstate system was emerging and travel was becoming easier. The West Coast was starting to really boom but hadn’t become the Left Coast yet. The Bronx was still as much Italian as anything else and you could get pasta and wine on Arthur Avenue without being the victim of a drive-by. Life was all sharkskin jackets, drive-ins, juke boxes, ice cream sodas, and tailfins on the cars. You saluted the flag, you stood for the national anthem, you turned out when the parade passed because that’s what you did and no one thought to ask why.
It was also the time when gang culture was starting to emerge, both among young people (the Fordham Baldies and the Redwings ruled sections of the Bronx and wouldn’t hesitate to rough you up [but usually not kill you] if you took a wrong turn) and adults (pilots from WW2 who still felt the need for speed and became the basis for the Hell’s Angels, the Pagans, and so on). It was also the time when everyone was expected to marry, right after high school if you weren’t going to college, but certainly right after college, and if you didn’t, people wondered aloud why. It was also the time when if you were gay you hid it or you ended up dead. Most importantly from Joy’s view, most likely, it was the time when her people were kept separate and apart, and beat up or murdered if they stepped out of line.
She bears no particular love for that time or what it stood for, and she isn’t going to let the rest of us forget it. I’m not sure that I, as an Aspergian who had trouble fitting in, should have any particular love for that time, when I would probably have been regularly ostracized, beaten up, and ended my life either murdered or as a rootless drifter dead of exposure. However, I can see that time for what it was and why, and I don’t bear any particular hate for the values at the time. There is no value in my so doing.
At this point there is both money and power to be amassed by the race-based grievance industry, though, to the point where it can be profitable to both hate your own country and seek to undermine both it, and the pillars that hold it up. An atheist can raise his profile favorably by suing over a war memorial, where he would have been laughed out of court once. Serial sex addicts are free to feed the addiction now, when they would have been shunned and women would have been warned away from them then. It’s now encouraged to use the national anthem for cheap political theater rather than a quick expression of basic loyalty, and it’s kept Colin Krappernick in the spotlight one more year after he might have otherwise been cut from the 49ers and disappeared into oblivion as just another pro athlete whose time had come and gone. A radical, anti-police politician who previously wouldn’t have a prayer now might, and a military hater like Chelsea Manning is now a potential Senator. The only way to snuff out someone like this woman is to make her schtick unprofitable. Not sure that’s possible given the tilt of the country, though.
It was so the time when the civil rights mlvement started
Steve-O
5. Jack recently mentioned that COTD’s did not require 1,000 words or more to qualify. Your take on the 50’s and its transitioning was right-on and something that needs to be introduced to the generations in between then and now. I hereby nominate this section.
Didn’t another leftist “pundit” complain that mentioning the flag, the national anthem, the Bill of Rights, God, etc. was “divisive”? The ACLU whined about the number of times he said “America”.
Not sure who you may be thinking of, but Senator Merkley tweet:
“Hmm. National anthem line makes me wonder about the sincerity of [Trump’s] calls for unity.”
What a stupid musing.
Jack,
“They do not ensure her a TV audience or a lucrative job selling hate, which is what she does.”
No, but her ratings do.
Church, family, police, military, the national anthem.
Of course lefties and Democrats hate all of them.
Churches are just for homophobic Bible Thumpers and pedophiles and white rednecks. Except black churches and mosques, which are fantastic.
Family? Give me a break. It’s the redoubt of the patriarchy. Who needs fathers? Single mothers are better, or gay couples.
Police are murdering black men daily.
The military are a bunch of knuckleheads killing Muslims for sport.
The national anthem? Haven’t you seen an NFL game?
She’s spot on, not an outlier.
Wow.
Wow? Where did he go wrong? Well, maybe there’s some room for those very laid-back Christian denominations that don’t require much and are ok with gay marriages and for synagogues as long as they don’t get too close to Israel. But the Catholics and other strong, definitive denominations are right out.
I think you’ve lost your mind. She is not SPOT ON — she apparently like you, enjoy all the benefits of being an American but find it somehow fun or “intellectual” to criticize everything that has made it great.
Question for you to answer to me: If this country is all so horrible, corrupt, grotesque, why does everyone around the world want to live here?
Sorry, you’re an idiot, and you have lots of company. Enjoy being an outlier. Just stay there.
See Bill, this is why you need to work on your tongue-in-cheek retorts. You almost had ME convinced you were possessed by Pazuzu-Joy with that last comment.
Yikes! Hah!
Sorry E2. I do like your strong retort to standard issue leftism, though.
Still not sure my impersonation of a standard issue lefty’s true beliefs is that far off the mark.
Takes me back to the 2000s, when Democrats were feinting in the isles over the coming “theocracy” under George W. Bush, because he invoked religion in speeches and quoted the Bible.
And then someone actually did a thorough analysis of political speeches, and discovered that Bill Clinton had quoted (and misquoted) the Bible and invoked religion more than Bush did, and in fact more than any other modern president. That old confirmation bias’ll get ya.
Not a fan of Bill either.
Kinder, Kuche, Kirche.
Travail, Famille, Patrie.
Where have I heard that before?
We have good reason to distrust the utterers of such worthy slogans, regardless of how meritorious their words may seem without historical context.
Not everything festooned with Swastikas is Nazi. They may be Sioux, or Bengali, or even Latvian. But when you hear the same words and sentiments as from the leaders of Vichy, it is valid to question the ideology behind them, and look at them with a jaundiced eye.
I just read the speech text.
“Together, we are rediscovering the American way. In America, we know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of American life. The motto is, “In God We Trust.” (Applause.)”
That’s an invocation of shared values wielded AGAINST authoritarianism, not in service of it. When statists blather about liberty, unity, values and justice, it’s always the carrot dangling from the stick of a bigger and more controlling government. That’s how you get Reigns of Terror and Secret Police.
I don’t know whether or not Trump is a statist at heart, but I approve of the above paragraph as the antidote to oppression.
Bingo.
Travail, Famille, Patrie replaced Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Just as “In God We Trust” replaced “E Pluribus Unum”.
Gott Mit Uns.
Sadly, true. Just as those who use Trump’s words always leads to extermination camps and disappearances.
In fact, neither is always true. Usually, I’ll grant. Both should be looked at with a jaundiced eye, as they’re usually the words of political snake oil merchants.
Look at the results, not the words.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DPm6iez8Gpg
“Sadly, true. Just as those who use Trump’s words always leads to extermination camps and disappearances.
In fact, neither is always true. Usually, I’ll grant. Both should be looked at with a jaundiced eye, as they’re usually the words of political snake oil merchants.”
K. When Trump starts hauling us off to camps and we have disappearances, I’ll consider these comments to be sage wisdom that I am wrongfully disregarding as hysterics, hasty generalizations and non sequiturs.
By the by, equating “In God We Trust” is a substantively different message than “God With Us” (at least the more nefarious interpretations), so nice try there also. What is this … 0 for 3?
Because the antidote to totalitarians who appeal to cultural values is to not appeal to cultural values.
Another swing and a miss.
Just so we’re clear though, Sue Dunim wants us to assume that the slogan first hinted at by Wilhelm II and latched onto by the National-Socialists to “put women in their place” translates as “Children, Kitchen, Church”. So Sue Dunim wants us to hastily associate Trump’s allusion to WIDE RANGING topic of family values to a specific prescriptive program of the Nazis to encourage women to go back to “traditional” roles….
I don’t need to elucidate to anyone here how this reasoning is deeply flawed.
So is, generally speaking, all recourse to the ‘Nazi’ accusation argument. But since it is a feature of your-plural world definition (the very image of ontological malevolence) you cannot avoid it.
This presages though the need to go into the terms, to understand what they mean, what they meant, why people thought in those terms, and what values they expressed, and why they must begin once again to think in those terms.
What Sue might wish to broach, but is likely incapable of broaching coherently, is that there are ideological struggles in our present which have to do with bringing forward a counter-proposal to the liberal docrtrines that live in you-plural and certainly in you-singular.
For example, they may have very much to do with the role of woman as mother, in the family, and with the family at the center of the national identity. To that can be added a genuine metaphysical and religious identification which, for you and certainly in these blog-conversations is 99.5% inconsiderable. *You-plural* have no metaphysical position that is seen as ‘really real’. Therefor, what does ‘Church’ mean? It could only have meaning if it served the American civil religious definitions.
However, on the fringes of the world-of-ideas there are people who are thinking in these terms (famille, patrie, la femme, l’homme, l’iglise, et cetera) vis-a-vis Europe and the Europe-descended, and are working to reestablish ‘identity’ through these metaphysical and religious means. And then in conjunction with what is meant by ‘blood and soil’. Off-limites to you perhaps.
And not as phantasies but as *real things*. Real things that mold culture. And all of this is outside of the scope of her parameters of though and, I regret to say, yours as well. (For example you ridicule Richard Spencer who is working, ideologically, within these areas very intelligently and coherently).
Thus, her discourse becomes a sort of rehearsal-parody of all that you are not allowed to think about and what <you will not think about. .
Steve O writes: “Yup. Frankly I think of the 1950s as a sane time in American history. Rock and roll and surfer culture were just emerging, but hadn’t yet acquired the dark side of sex and drugs. The interstate system was emerging and travel was becoming easier. The West Coast was starting to really boom but hadn’t become the Left Coast yet. The Bronx was still as much Italian as anything else and you could get pasta and wine on Arthur Avenue without being the victim of a drive-by. Life was all sharkskin jackets, drive-ins, juke boxes, ice cream sodas, and tailfins on the cars. You saluted the flag, you stood for the national anthem, you turned out when the parade passed because that’s what you did and no one thought to ask why.”
To be able to define and describe the present in America is a feat all to itself! And I suggest that no one can do it. I suggest that this is because the definition of America has hit a wall and gone *splat*. Opinions will be offered but they seem always tendentious and partial.
What one can say is just that: no one knows how to define it and the reason is because American Identity is in crisis. Further things can be said and they are common-sense ones: The crisis will worsen; the reigning government (the powers-that-be, the state, the Deep State, the corporate and military structures) have many good reasons to put forward and enforce a definition, and they will rely as many do on those ‘patriotic’ definitions that attend ‘the American civil religious’ declarations about what America is, but these will all fail because they are PR/Propaganda terms and ‘false impositions’. They are not felt to be true.
The very idea of America as the Noble Nation that won the world peace in the Postwar ll era … is now more or less crushed. This ‘patriotism’ will not be able to reassert itself if only because America is on the verge of losing its neo-imperial status. E Michael Jones’ speaks of America and ‘the slow but sure dissolution of the American empire’.
And to understand some aspect of that dissolution externally one can, with profit, turn one’s attention to the internal dissolution and, at the very least, attempt to describe it accurately and fairly. But that, right there, is quite a battle! People are fighting, brutally, over their pet definitions. Certainly and quite obviously right here on this Blog.
But what seems really quite stupid, here, is the useless narrowness of the poles and the definitions offered by each pole. In this Spartan goes to ideological battle with Isaac. It is a silly, really silly, very limited, very inaccurate, very non-helpful, and non-insightful argument that takes place within a silly, mindless, prefabricated and limited range. In this, I suggest so very humbly, one can see and understand one of the core problems in Amerca: shallow definitions offered by people who have very little interest in really understanding *what is going on and why*. And you are simply not going to be able to rely on the same narrow Left-Right definitions. The Empire is beginning to fracture, and the internal structures within people are now cracking. And you: each one of you here, now, is part of the problem insofar as *identity* is coming unraveled in your very selves. Since none of you (to speak generally but honestly) have any real base in ‘ideas’, you seem unable to offer much useful commentary at all. Except the appeal to a fractured American ‘patriotic’ identitarianism. But it is just that which not only is coming apart, I suggest that it has come apart. It is no longer functional as an ideal. It will not be resurrected as an ideal. Thus, Americanism of this sort and the Americanopolis as historical project and perverse ideal, is dying.
You don’t know what to do, you don’t know where to go, you don’t know what to create, and you can barely articulate *values* that arise, truly and originally, within yourselves and your own community. Your empire is aimless in an ideal sense. If you attempt to cling to the false idealism at a national/propaganda level the nation will, inevitably, stumble. It will precipitate a crisis. And yet it needs a crisis in order to attempt to reclaim ‘unity’ of the sort that can support a propaganda mission.
The ‘real alternative’ is introspection and really getting down to the brass-tacks of ideas and working out new definitions; new powerful definitions that can help American people within their specific regions recover themselves, their sense of self, and their identity. But that too is amazingly demanding! Because your nation veered off course when it opted to become an empire and destroyed the Republic in the process. You live now in the outcome of these incredibly destructive choices but are unable to see how you are affected by them; determined by them; victims of them! Not only do you not see you will not to see. And active choice, an active obstinacy of tragical proportion.
And when even the most mild definitions touch on ‘travail, famille, patrie’ are ideologically off-limits to you! Oh and God-help-us should anyone mention any idea which resounds on ‘blood & soil’. But here is very nicely illustrated one significant aspect of The Problem, and the problem that will dog you until you perform *true introspection*: you cannot define yourselves except through false-idealisms and prefabricated Americanist terms of the sort used by Hollywood and in propaganda offices! Anything else, I gather, leads into a scary definitional zone which is just too hard to even think about!
To understand ‘dissolution’ in our present is anything but simple. To understand what is dissolving and from what to what can only be described by a mind on the outside looking in. I always notice —- here — people who are sort of news-junkie commentarors: they see all the events of the present as each event or event-cluster passes by, carnivalesque, before them. But they understand no part of it! and have not the intellectual tools to arrive at understanding. And yet *you* are the intellectual class of your nation!
But what is required? A free mind, a mind unencumbered the intrusion of the politically correct, one that can think and reason outside of the categories offered by ‘the American civil religion’, and a healthy, functional conservatism with real bases in ideas, that is not cuckservatism and a hand-maiden to the Marxist intellectual overlord. This statement will be met with silence or ridicule, no doubt, but I am only trying to perform my assigned role! 😉
“In this Spartan goes to ideological battle with Isaac.”
I did? When did that happen?
The only “ideology” I am advocating for here is that our leaders be remotely decent people. And if they aren’t, they probably should not talk to be about family, religion, or any sort of “value” at all.
I humbly (sic) beg apologies. I had your image in mind but I should have wrriten Sue-Isaac.
(I am trying to keep my word-count to under 10,000 per thread topic so please excuse my brevity here.)
that our leaders be remotely decent people
Too generous—they should be exemplary people. But correct.
if they aren’t, they probably should not talk to be about family, religion, or any sort of “value” at all.
100% misguided, ahistorical, and wrong.
“…I am advocating for here is that our leaders be remotely decent people. And if they aren’t, they probably should not talk to be about family, religion, or any sort of “value” at all.”
I tend to agree with you in theory, Sparty. I would like everyone -but leaders most of all- to be decent people.
But that ship has sailed, if it ever really was in port (or even launched) People are flawed, no matter their politics.
Implying that they are (or should be) estopped from talking about values they may or may not embody is a strange take, though. That is not how things work… ever.
No one could be a leader is such was the societal expectation… in any society that has ever existed.