A Comment About Mob Violence

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Let me lay out my assumptions right up front, before making the point I want to make.

  1. The President didn’t incite violence. His comments were within the boundaries of appropriate political discourse, whether or not he was correct in the views he expressed about the election. (In fact, I’m sure he was partially, though not wholly, correct.)
  2. I categorically condemn mob violence, and this instance is no exception: everyone who broke the law should be charged, tried, and, if convicted, punished. Whatever the motives of the lawbreakers (and I don’t know who they are or why they did what they did), I reject any claim they might have to legitimacy in their actions. Lock them up.

There. I hope that’s sufficiently clear. Now here’s the point of this post.

For months, businesses have been destroyed by lawless mobs. Billions of dollars of damage have been done to the private property of American citizens as shops were burned, windows smashed, stores looted. Through it all, the President called for a restoration of law and order, and offered federal support in that effort. In each instance he was rebuffed.

Because the destruction of private property and livelihoods doesn’t matter to folks on the left.

The Capitol break-in didn’t endanger anyone’s livelihood: no one will go out of business because of it, no Senator or Congressman will miss a paycheck or lose his life’s savings because thugs broke in to the building and damaged the nation’s property. Democracy, the Constitution, and the nation were not at risk.

The optics were terrible. But the optics were also terrible when Mainstreet USA was burning; the difference is that we didn’t see that, because the left didn’t care, and so didn’t want us to care either.

By all means prosecute the thugs who broke the law in D.C. this week, and good riddance. But remember that, when it came to demanding justice for regular American citizens faced with the loss of their jobs, businesses, incomes, and savings in the hundreds of Antifa and BLM riots this past year, it was the President who was calling for an end to the violence and the protection of regular American citizens. And the left fought that at every turn, choosing to side with lawlessness and the mob.

So to anyone who couldn’t be bothered to stand up for regular American citizens all summer long — and that’s essentially everyone in mainstream news and every Democratic politician at the state and federal level: go back and report on the tragedy of all those shuttered businesses and destroyed lives before expressing your faux outrage over this most recent event. And explain to me why all those people didn’t matter while they watched their hopes and futures burn.

Into the Great Unknown

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What we can say with certainty about the incoming government is that the values it brings into office are antithetical to our own. We know that: it’s a matter of public record, and we understand the fact of it even if we may be unsure of the magnitude of our disagreement. The incoming administration and the new Democrat-controlled Senate will wish to transform the country in ways we loathe. This much is certain.

Beyond that, we don’t really know very much. Systems composed of people are complex, responding and adapting in ways that are hard, often impossible, to predict. Sometimes a single individual, event, or virus can shift the entire political equation in unforeseen ways. We just don’t know; those who speak with certitude about the future demonstrate a lack of wisdom proportionate to their confidence in the predictions they make.

How will the Democrats deal with the deep schism within their own party? Will a 50-50 Senate allow the kind of radical changes many of us fear the Democrats will try to pursue? How long will Biden be able to maintain the fiction that he’s capable of carrying out the functions of his office, and how will his seemingly inevitable departure take place? What will happen in 2022 as a result of what seems likely to be poor decision-making from the Democrats over the next two years? How will our relationship to China evolve and/or deteriorate, given the leverage our adversary quite probably has over Biden’s corrupt and degenerate son?

We don’t know. We could win in a landslide in 2022. The Senate could be stymied by one or two prudent and/or cowardly Democrats who think it wise to avoid doing something so profoundly stupid as packing the Supreme Court, bringing in a new state, or opening the borders. Or they might do everything we fear, and America could be entering a new dark age. For that matter, China could share another virus with us, the next one worse than the current one to which we’ve grotesquely over-reacted.

We don’t know. So the fight goes on.

Don’t burn bridges between yourself and true allies. Find points of agreement on the right and lean into them. Encourage optimism in the face of the unknown. Avoid people who are too quick to accept and preach defeat: they don’t know the future any better than we do, and there’s nothing to be gained, neither strategic advantage nor honor, by surrender.

Be wary of people who argue for strategic losses, who say it’s better to lose the next fight because it sets us up to win later. The future becomes exponentially harder to predict as it recedes in time and as the chain of events lengthens. Fight for the most conservative plausible win in every case, because we really don’t know where a loss will take us. Keep it simple: try to win each battle as it comes up.

Most Americans hear only one side, that of a smug technocratic left ignorant of history and consumed with hubris. It is up to conservatives — people like us — to expose normal Americans to the facts and ideas they won’t otherwise hear, but that they will usually find persuasive because conservatism is closer to the truth, closer to what actually works and has been shown to work.

So now we go into the unknown together. And there are a lot of us.

We The People are failing our Government

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Airplanes fly because the people who design them understand physics. They know how pressure changes as air flows over a curved surface. They understand lift and drag, and how force and mass relate to each other to determine acceleration. They’re experts in the science of materials, in finite element analysis, in instrumentation and control systems and combustion and ten thousand other arcane details of science and design and manufacture.

None of this means that they get it right every time, as Boeing’s recent travails remind us. But they get it right often enough to make air travel the safest means of transportation.

Imagine for a moment that all those aeronautical designers and engineers were hired by people who knew nothing about aeronautics, and who were neither competent to evaluate the resumes of their potential hires nor to evaluate the work done by them once they were hired — and, worse, that the candidates for the positions knew that their interviewers were clueless. How would that affect the quality of the men and women employed? How would it affect the viability of air travel once a generation or two of wholly unvetted “engineers” had been allowed to fiddle with the existing designs?

Our founders gave us a government. It is a complicated yet elegant machine composed of interlocking parts intended to work simultaneously in concert with and opposition to each other. It was created by men who were experts in the theory and practice of government, men who had diagnosed the failures of numerous prototypes and, based on those diagnoses, designed a new form of government, a constitutional democratic representative union of independent states: a republic with formal restraints on both the reach of the government and the whims of the people.

We the people are tasked with hiring the men and women who staff the critical positions in that government. If we know little of how our government was intended to function, we have no sound basis for evaluating the people we vote into office nor the policies they propose. Today there is ample evidence that we are a nation of civic ignoramuses. How many understand what the much-maligned electoral college is, how we got it and why it’s important? How many understand the damage done by the 17th Amendment to the carefully balanced tension between the House and Senate? How many are equipped to see the sheer lunacy of the Green New Deal’s call for a broad usurpation of our rights as citizens? How many understand even the idea of a constitutionally limited central government that is not merely prevented from performing certain tasks, but rather that is constitutionally authorized to perform only a small number of specific tasks?

We are failing to provide a competent civics education to our children, and have been for generations. We have a population ignorant of the most basic aspects of government but which we nonetheless exhort to vote, as if merely standing in the booth were the totality of civic duty. A large proportion of the electorate has the legal right to vote, but lacks the moral standing to do so because it knows nothing about the thing for which it has a sacred duty of stewardship.

We can not blame the children for the failures of their teachers, who themselves know next to nothing about the nature of our government. I don’t know what it will take to trigger a rebirth of pride and interest in our nation’s history and in the framework on which it was built and the ideas behind it. But if we reach the point where we’re analyzing the wreckage following the crash, it will be too late.

Brexit

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I’m not generally a fan of “direct democracy.” I like our system of constitutionally-constrained representative democracy, and the way it tries to keep both the people and the reprobates they elect from straying too far from the Founders’ plan. When the people are allowed to vote directly on specific issues, it’s good to know that there are safeguards in place to prevent the kind of rookie errors that turn rich countries into Venezuela.

(One more reason to a appreciate the crop of excellent judges this President has installed.)

But when the government asks the people to vote on something that is within their constitutional prerogative, it seems to me that that government should respect the consequence of that vote and the expressed will of the people. When the matter at hand is as momentous as a basic question of national identity and sovereignty, as it was with the British referendum, then the government should not only respect the vote, but should act promptly and in good faith to execute the will of the people.

So no, I don’t think that years of stonewalling followed by a call for another vote, for a rephrasing of the question, for just a little common sense you filthy peasants don’t you know what you’re getting us into is appropriate. The British people spoke, and they should be heard — and if they aren’t, they’ll have been robbed of their sovereignty by an establishment that apparently feels a greater allegiance to the Continent than to that musty old relic of a country that elected them.

Britain once ruled the world. Britain stood alone against the German war machine. Britain can work out the details of the Irish border, and survive the temporary confusion of renegotiated trade deals. Her people have demanded their independence. They should get it.

A Thought About Single Parenting

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I brought Darling Daughter back to college this week; the nest is, once again, empty. I don’t expect her to spend next summer at home as she did this year: she’s a sophomore now, and it’s reasonable to assume that my days of having a child in the house, other than for a brief visit, are over. And I’m okay with that.

I’ve been a single parent these past eight years, and I have some thoughts about the challenges of being a single parent. In particular, I’ve been thinking about the special challenge of being an only parent, someone raising children without the benefit of a partner, even a separated partner, who remains a continuing presence in their children’s lives. I know this is far less common than divorced or separated parents, but I know of several cases, and I’ve been thinking about them.

I believe that people come in precisely two sexes, male and female, that men and women are different, and that children benefit from the presence of both a mother and a father in their lives. Boys learn how to be men by watching their fathers, and how to relate to women by watching their mothers and fathers interact; the protectiveness and concern they develop for their mothers will, some day, be expressed toward the other women in their lives. Girls learn how to be women by watching their mothers, and how they should be treated by men by watching how their fathers treat their mothers. Their fathers are the first men in their lives and, we hope, show them the love and protectiveness they should expect in their future relationships.

As a father raising children alone — but I didn’t raise them alone. One of the wonderful things about being a man raising children is that children have friends, and the mothers of your children’s friends feel an irresistible urge to take care of your kids for you. Single men are perceived as generally incompetent on the domestic front (and for good reason), and that incompetence is assumed to extend to child-raising — and, most pointedly, to the raising of daughters. (I raised five sons; my youngest is my only girl.) It takes a stubborn man to resist the efforts and contributions of concerned mothers, and I never was that stubborn.

My children benefited, and continue to benefit, from the influences of other people’s mothers. That works for motherless boys and girls: while mothers are unique and irreplaceable, other mothers can nonetheless shower children with their maternal attention, giving the boys the tenderness and care fathers often fail to provide, while offering the girls the feminine understanding and support fathers rarely even recognize is lacking.

Similarly, young men in fatherless homes can experience the influence of a male role model outside of the immediate family. Extended family, friends, coaches — there are established surrogate male role models for boys without fathers.

The greatest challenge, I think, is for mothers raising daughters without the benefit of a male partner — even an often absent male partner. Because of the different natures of men and women, it’s difficult for young women to safely experience the attention of men: girls don’t have the options of surrogate fathers comparable to the surrogate mothers both boys and girls can enjoy.

None of this is intended to imply that mothers are less important than fathers; far from it. But I think there are more ways for motherless children to experience the maternal influence than there are for fatherless girls to experience the paternal influence.

I don’t have any thoughts about how to address that.

“Hate” is a Crutch

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I am confident that people who know me in real life will tell you that, while I exhibit at least the usual complement of flaws, odd quirks, and irritating peccadilloes, being hateful is not numbered among them. That’s probably because I’ve been fortunate, and can’t think of anyone who has seriously wronged me or wronged someone I love. Hate simply isn’t an emotion I experience, and the word is not one I use.

I would like to believe that this is true of most people — that they don’t really feel hate much, if at all — and that the word is simply too casually used.

Certainly it is overused. It has become a convenience for some to label a difference of opinion as an expression of hate. This hurts everyone, simultaneously undermining the language, denigrating the person or group so labeled, and forestalling any possibility of discussion and understanding.

We can disagree about even important matters without hate being a factor. We can favor open borders or controlled borders, high minimum wages or no minimum wages, legal same-sex marriage or only traditional marriage, socialism or free markets, free abortion or no abortion — any of these extremes or anything in-between. We can vote Democrat or Republican, have Bernie stickers on our cars or wear Make America Great Again hats, embrace a rainbow of sexual promiscuity or prudishly advocate abstinence, fully accept the apocalyptic claims of the global warming alarmists or be skeptical of their science or the policies they advocate, be an enthusiastic supporter of the trans movement or think it’s a bunch of faddish nonsense, oppose the private ownership of guns or be a pro-gun fanatic in favor of no regulation at all.

None of these positions requires that someone be hateful, and it’s small-minded, presumptuous, and rude behavior to ascribe hate to someone simply because he or she disagrees with your position on these issues — or, indeed, on the vast majority of issues.

I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t hate: how much of your life you want to devote to hating is your business, not mine. I’m saying you shouldn’t accuse other people of hating based on something as superficial as their opinions on topics about which you happen to think differently.

By far, most of the claims of “hate” I hear and read suggest more to me about the person making the claim than about the ostensibly hateful object of the accusation. I think it most often reveals that the accuser is shallow, lacks self-awareness and empathy, is uncharitable, and/or cynically uses the ugly label to silence people whose arguments he or she is unwilling or unable to engage.

Too readily smearing others as “haters” seems itself almost… well, it certainly isn’t an act of love.

Restoring the Patriarchy

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I think it would be a good idea. Oh, not the legal aspects of it: with two narrow exceptions, I think men and women should be treated the same under the law. Rather, I think we should restore the cultural aspect of patriarchy, the idea that the father has a special authority and a special responsibility within the home, and that men in general have special obligations within society.

Men are, in general, more powerful (by which I mean more powerful than women; all the comparatives here refer to men relative to women, because there are only two kinds, male and female). Men do most of the creating and most of the destroying, impose most of the structure, cause most of the mayhem. Men are the principal actors in society by virtue of their greater drive and aggression and strength, their lesser interest in people, their greater interest in things and in the manipulation and control of things.

Biology made us that way. We don’t have to like it, but not liking it doesn’t make it untrue.

The problem with pretending that men aren’t more powerful than women, or that this isn’t an intrinsic quality of masculinity, is that by ignoring this reality we necessarily ignore the responsibility of managing it. Pretending that little boys aren’t, by their very natures, more aggressive than little girls discourages us from teaching little boys to channel that aggression into positive and productive pursuits. The aggression doesn’t go away, as the mean streets of Baltimore and Chicago sadly attest every single day.

We know how to discipline young men, how to shape the expression of their growing power. We do it by imposing a beneficent authority upon them, an authority that they can look up to and respect, that itself exhibits the kind of self-control and nobility we wish to see them express.

What does that authority look like? It looks like a father — a father, or the martial surrogate for a father represented by the military. Most pointedly, it looks like a father who embraces his role as the primary leader and disciplinarian.

Our culture is moving in the wrong direction as regards the sexes. It encourages men to be ashamed of their strength, women to be ashamed of their vulnerability, and both to deny that these traits are natural and intrinsic to the respective sexes. Under the illusion of freeing men and women from artificial constraints, it urges women to behave with less caution even as it erodes the cultural constraints on male behavior that served to keep men in check.

We are in denial, and would be better served by greater honesty about the fundamental differences between the sexes, and the unique role fathers play in raising rough boys to be gentle men.

Intemperate Speech a Cause for Concern

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I wish our President were a little more self-controlled in his speech, but it seems to me that there is a significant difference between, on the one hand, a man — even a President — who is prone to spouting off ungraciously, and, on the other hand, virtually an entire national press and punditry united in making scurrilous and unfounded accusations against the duly elected President.

One intemperate man is an unfortunate demonstration of flawed character. The nation’s press engaging in a concerted effort to promote a false narrative is something else, and, for those who actually value the idea of democracy, something much more significant. (After all, if the Russians’ modest efforts to influence the election are a serious concern, how much more serious must be concern about the influence of a grossly biased and inaccurate — or even deceptive — mainstream press?)

It is the fashion to erupt in righteous fury with every clumsy, inarticulate, or just plain rude comment from our President. I’m still waiting for the expressions of outrage from the public, and contrition from the press, that should follow two years of false accusations of treasonous complicity with a hostile foreign power.

We strain at boorish gnats, while swallowing the mendacious machinations of a corrupt Fourth Estate. Trump will be gone in five years. The smugly corrupt press and opinion-making elite will still be with us. That is a legitimate reason for some righteous fury.

It’s Time for Feminism to End

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Feminism began with goals that were both laudable and achievable — and it achieved them: women are today the legal equals of men. For decades now, since that legal equality was achieved, feminism has been harmful to women.

Feminism has always had its destructive aspect, its misguided insistence that women adopt male practices that, for reasons of simple biology, work against women. The sexual realities for women are different — completely, ineluctably different — from those for men, and encouraging women to disregard those realities harms women. Women aren’t men, and they can’t act with the casual disregard for responsibility and consequences that nature has gifted to men as an unfortunately viable option.

There is another, more subtly corrosive quality to feminism. In an era when people talk of “safe spaces” and worry about “micro-aggression,” feminism has unwittingly removed the cultural safeguards that made it possible for women to comfortably coexist with men in public spaces. The quotidian gestures of male chivalry — opening and holding doors, walking on the street side of the sidewalk and the down-side of the stair, refraining from vulgarity and profanity in mixed company, etc. — have long been resented and denigrated by feminists as lesser examples of toxic masculinity. That’s a mistake, and one with consequences: these gestures serve as an assurance to women that men are aware of the differences in physical power between the sexes, and choose to harness that power in token acts of protection.

Has feminism made women safe from men? No, as the “me too” refrains make clear, it has not. Human nature in the realm of sex is deeply wired and impossible to change quickly, if at all. What is possible is the accretion of social patterns of behavior that create safeguards for women, patterns that encourage safe behavior by both men and women. Feminism, having achieved its legitimate legal goals, has left as its only purpose the destruction of femininity and, along with it, the social safeguards that protected women.

It’s time for the feminist movement to accept victory and go home.