We All Live on Campus Now

From Andrew Sullivan, a.k.a, "RawMuscleGlutes," at New York Magazine:

"The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke."https://t.co/iHY9xqjNps via @intelligencer

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) February 9, 2018

The 'Lowest Day' of Trump's Presidency (VIDEO)

It's Lou Dobbs and Ann Coulter, two of the right-wing media's biggest anti-immigration hardliners. (Remember Dobbs was fired from CNN for his comments on illegal immigrants.)

I mentioned the other night that folks like Michelle Malkin and Laura Ingraham weren't going to let the president slide on amnesty, and Coulter's arguing for the death of this presidency, right now. Watch:

CNN Talking Heads Have Completely Lost It Over President Trump's 'Shithole Countries'

I've blogged this story already, "President Trump Asked Why We Should Take Immigrants from 'Shithole Countries'," and "African Nations Angry as President Trump Disses 'Shithole Countries' (VIDEO)."

Just now I checked CNN's YouTube page to see if any of their people were actually saying "shithole countries" on the air last night. So far I've only seen Anderson Cooper use the word (at the video below), although I did catch Ana Navarro literally lose her shit over the president's "shithole" remarks.

This is unreal.

At the link, "Navarro: No other way to interpret Trump's comments." (She's wearing an "I Am An Immigrant" t-shirt on the air as well, which of course provides BIG credibility to her vicious unhinged rant, sheesh.)

And watch Mr. Anderson practically start bawling on air, signalling his virtue about how he just loves all those poor Haitians down there. (*Eye-rolls.*)

African Nations Angry as President Trump Disses 'Shithole Countries' (VIDEO)

Following-up, "President Trump Asked Why We Should Take Immigrants from 'Shithole Countries'."

At CBS This Morning, Debora Patta, in Johannesburg, South Africa, refers to "expletive" countries.

President Trump Asked Why We Should Take Immigrants from 'Shithole Countries'

I don't know sometimes. All the problems in the world and the biggest political blowout is whether or not the president actually said "shithole countries."

I broke my boycott of television news this morning, as I was getting my son ready for school at 7:00am, and tuned into CBS This Morning. They led with it, although they would not say "shithole" on the air, with the generic "expletive" countries used in instead. Hilariously, though, now the Washington Post is having to defend itself for actually using "shithole" in it's coverage.

I guarantee you the president knows what he's doing. Stable genius indeed.

At WaPo, via Memeorandum, "Trump attacks protections for immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries in Oval Office meeting."

And at the New York Times, "Trump Alarms Lawmakers With Disparaging Words for Haiti and Africa."

Trump lashed out at Haitian and African immigrants in WH mtg w lawmakers on DACA, asking why US should take people from "shithole countries." WH isn't denying it https://t.co/gxWNsn8pHv

— Julie Davis (@juliehdavis) January 11, 2018

Strangled by Identity

This is great, at National Affairs:

My latest in National Affairs, with @RWBhandari https://t.co/oT18A3MGLz

— Thomas Hopson (@thomasehopson) January 2, 2018

American politics is overwhelmed by bitterness and rancor. The norms that structure the work of our constitutional system are everywhere under attack. Partisan loyalties now seem to determine not only people's worldviews and policy priorities but also what facts they will accept or choose to treat as lies. The rhetoric of animus and apocalypse is the everyday parlance of both parties, particularly when each talks about the other. And although this polarization may have its roots inside the Beltway, its toxicity pervades the public.

None of this began with Donald Trump. It was all there in the culture wars of the Obama years and in the deep divisions of the Bush era. It is systemic. Our political dysfunction in this century looks less like a failure of individuals and more like a corrosion of our entire political culture and its institutions.

Many observers of this problem, especially on the right though increasingly on the left as well, tend to explain it by resorting to critiques of "identity politics." But identity politics is something we tend to see others doing while failing to recognize that we are doing it ourselves. And because we tend to miss the breadth of its scope and reach, we fail to see not only how central it is to the trouble with our politics but also how it might be overcome.

Identity politics is not just a problem of the left. It is a way of thinking that pervades our self-understanding. Our rancorous political conversation now consists of three competing theories of identity in America — three stories of how our differing backgrounds should shape our common political life. One of these (espoused by a significant swath of the left but increasingly co-opted by an influential minority on the right) treats politics as a continuous struggle across racial lines, and so conceives of coalitions on racial grounds. Another (advanced more commonly on the right in our time) insists that the principled distinction in our politics is not between racial groups but along the legal line of citizens versus non-citizens. Finally, the third theory of identity (espoused by some elites of both parties, and barely aware of itself as a theory of identity at all) views the other two schools of thought as pernicious and proposes its own form of identity defined by an ideal of cosmopolitan dignity.

Each of these theories, as practiced, is unstable. And each rejects the other two as un-American without really quite understanding them. It is this problem — our country's conceptual blind spot on identity — that drives so much of our present polarization. To be sure, disagreements over identity are a causa causans of why Republicans and Democrats can barely get along. But it isn't only that the two sides speak different languages; it's that our political languages fall short of our political needs.

The solution is not a new and improved theory of identity, although in time the country could use one. Instead, a practical solution would require us to begin by pivoting from philosophy to institutions. It is all well and good to debate the various theories of identity. But our leaders should also focus on building and sustaining those institutions that can concretely ground a functional civic life — one that works in practice even if it sometimes seems as though it couldn't work in theory. To begin this work, we should seek to better understand the quandary of American identity, so that we might rise above it.

More.

'It’s Okay to Be White'

Well, it should be. It should be okay to be whatever natural color or ethnicity you are.

But not on the left. The left hates whiteness. And it hates anyone who doesn't toe the hateful race-bating white supremacy line.

At Instapundit, "SO I GUESS IT’S NOT OKAY. GOOD TO KNOW. ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ Signs Posted At Harvard Law School, Denounced by Dean."

Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.

From one of the country’s most admired political thinkers, an urgent wake-up call to American liberals to turn from the divisive politics of identity and develop a vision of our future that can persuade all citizens that they share a common destiny.

In The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla offers an impassioned, tough-minded, and stinging look at the failure of American liberalism over the past two generations. Although there have been Democrats in the White House, and some notable policy achievements, for nearly 40 years the vision that Ronald Reagan offered—small government, lower taxes, and self-reliant individualism—has remained the country’s dominant political ideology. And the Democratic Party has offered no convincing competing vision in response.

Instead, as Lilla argues, American liberalism fell under the spell of identity politics, with disastrous consequences. Driven originally by a sincere desire to protect the most vulnerable Americans, the left has now unwittingly balkanized the electorate, encouraged self-absorption rather than solidarity, and invested its energies in social movements rather than in party politics.

With dire consequences. Lilla goes on to show how the left’s identity-focused individualism insidiously conspired with the amoral economic individualism of the Reaganite right to shape an electorate with little sense of a shared future and near-contempt for the idea of the common good. In the contest for the American imagination, liberals have abdicated.

Now they have an opportunity to reset. The left is motivated, and the Republican Party, led by an unpredictable demagogue, is in ideological disarray. To seize this opportunity, Lilla insists, liberals must concentrate their efforts on recapturing our institutions by winning elections. The time for hectoring is over. It is time to reach out and start persuading people from every walk of life and in every region of the country that liberals will stand up for them. We must appeal to – but also help to rebuild –  a sense of common feeling among Americans, and a sense of duty to each other.

A fiercely-argued, no-nonsense book, enlivened by Lilla’s acerbic wit and erudition, The Once and Future Liberal is essential reading for our momentous times.

Safe Spaces and 'Ze' Badges at College (What a Total Nightmare)

From Maddy Kearns, at the Spectator U.K., "Safe spaces and ‘ze’ badges: My bewildering year at a U.S. university: Fear of causing offence on campus is stifling free thought – as I’ve found to my cost" (cached):

This week's cover: Campus tyranny pic.twitter.com/K9nsg8Ofbb

— The Spectator (@spectator) August 23, 2017

As a child in Glasgow, I learned that sticks and stones might break my bones but words didn’t really hurt. I’m now at New York University studying journalism, where a different mantra seems to apply. Words, it turns out, might cause life-ruining emotional trauma.

During my ‘Welcome Week’, for example, I was presented with a choice of badges indicating my preferred gender pronouns: ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ or ‘ze’?

The student in front of me, an Australian, found this hilarious: ‘Last time I checked, I was a girl.’ Her joke was met with stony silence. Later I realised why: expressing bewilderment at the obsession with pronouns might count as a ‘micro-aggression’. Next stop, ‘transphobia’.

It was soon obvious to my fellow students that I was not quite with the programme. In a class discussion early in my first semester, I made the mistake of mentioning that I believed in objective standards in art. Some art is great, some isn’t, I said; not all artists are equally talented. This was deemed an undemocratic opinion and I was given a nickname: the cultural fascist. I’ve tried to take it affectionately.

After a year on campus, on a course entitled ‘Cultural Reporting and Criticism’, I still feel unable to speak freely, let alone critically. Although it doesn’t apply to my own course, friends have told me about ‘trigger warnings’ that caution they are about to be exposed to certain ideas; the threat of micro-aggressions (i.e. unintended insults) makes frank discourse impossible. Then there is the infamous ‘safe space’ — a massage-circle, Play-Doh-making haven — where students are protected from offence (and, therefore, intellectual challenge).

During class discussions, I’ve learned to discreetly scan my classmates’ faces for signs that they might be fellow free-thinkers. A slight head tilt at the mention of Islamophobia, a gentle questioning of what exactly is meant by ‘toxic masculinity’. I was thrilled to see a scribbled note — ‘This is utter shit’ — on someone’s copy of one of the reading requirements, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (an introduction to queer theory). In this way, I found the members of my secret non-conformist book club.

We met in a disused convent in Hell’s Kitchen and discussed campus-censored ideas. We read Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe, Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus and Walter Benn Michaels’s The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. We were a diverse group: a Catholic woman, a black conservative man, an anti-theist neoconservative, a Protestant libertarian, and a quick-witted Spanish contrarian. We were united in agreeing that we should be free to disagree. We made our own unsafe space, and at the end of each meeting, we were invigorated and parted on good terms.

It seemed to the members of my book club that academia is losing its way. It is riddled with paradox: safe spaces which are dangerously insular; the idea of ‘no absolutes’ (as an absolute); aggressive intolerance for anything perceived as intolerant; and censorship of ideas deemed too offensive for expression. It’s a form of totalitarianism and it’s beginning to infect British universities, too.

The morning after the US election, New York was bluer than ever. My classmates were in tears, including one professor. Protesters chanting ‘Not my President’ took to the streets as cries of ‘How did this happen?’ ‘What will we tell our children?’ and ‘What a terrible day for [insert identity group]!’ echoed down NYU’s hallways.

Two weeks later, I spent a slightly surreal Thanksgiving with my friend’s family in the DC area. My friend’s father is the former Republican senator and twice presidential candidate Rick Santorum. As I stuffed my face with turkey, I couldn’t believe my luck. Santorum’s insights into the new administration were as close to an insider’s scoop as any student journalist could hope for.

I was sure that, despite their differences in outlook, my classmates would be fascinated to hear about what he had to say. But before I had mustered the courage to share my experience, I received the following email from a professor: ‘Dear all, hope you are all recovering well from any encounters with Trump-supporting relatives over Thanksgiving. I should be all right myself in a day or so.’ Naturally, when this professor asked me, ‘How was your first Thanksgiving?’ I chose to speak exclusively about marshmallow yams.

This is daft, certainly. Even funny, in a macabre way. But it also raises a serious point: the university experience in America is now not one that will adequately prepare students for real life. In real-life democracy, people disagree — and normally they don’t die or suffer emotional injury because of it. In normal life, there’s no reason not to like someone with whom you disagree politically. On campus, opinions are often ontology: you are what you think. But this is dangerous logic: if I hate what you think, I must hate what you are...

Still more.

And welcome to my world, Ms. Maddy, my leftist campus nightmare. (I'm going back to my campus nightmare tomorrow, with our school's "College Days" return orientation and department meetings, oh joy.)

ESPN Pulls Announcer Robert Lee from UVA Football Game Because American Politics is FUBAR

Here's Clay Travis, at Outkick the Coverage, "MSESPN Pulls Asian Announcer Named Robert Lee Off UVa Game to Avoid Offending Idiots ." (Via Memeorandum.)

I can't even any more. Like I've said before, I can't even.

And Travis was on Tucker's last night:

President Trump Puts 'Shrinking Base' Before 'National Healing'

There's so much to question about this report at the Los Angeles Times. Is Trump's base really "shrinking"? It wasn't particularly big in the first place, at around 40 percent. And why are we having a "national healing" over Charlottesville? It's not that different from the police massacres in New York and Dallas, where BLM supporters hunted down to policeman for execution. It's the national double standard that we live with today, and it's what's dividing the country. That, and the Obama administration's 8-year campaign of race grievance-mongering.

At LAT, "Trump shuns healing gestures, redoubling support for Confederate memorials and slamming fellow Republicans":

President Trump, increasingly isolated, appears caught in a cycle of anger and provocation as he pushes wider the nation’s longstanding racial and cultural divide to solidify his dwindling base of populist political support.

The latest examples came Thursday: Trump further inflamed the incendiary debate over the nation’s Confederate memorials, saying American culture was “being ripped apart” by their removal; lashed out at some perceived Senate enemies; and repeated a religiously offensive myth about an American general using bullets bathed in pigs’ blood to kill Muslim terrorists.

His fusillade came throughout the day on Twitter even as critics, including in Trump’s party, implored him to instead try to unite the nation. As the restive president ostensibly vacationed at his golf club in New Jersey, his unnerved aides were left to deal with the fallout from his tweets and verbal blasts in the days since Saturday, when white separatists provoked deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va.

For Trump, the challenge of governing has grown ever more daunting since he took office in January without the usual bounce of popularity for a new president. As his support has declined, he has relied more on his most ardent supporters, who generally are white, older, nonurban and deeply conservative.

Yet by his efforts to please the hard-right activists, the president is pushing mainstream supporters further away. Polls show his job approval rating below 40%, sometimes dipping into the low 30s, and they suggest his core support — the people who say they will never abandon him — amounts to about 1 in 4 Americans.

That base, together with some more moderate voters who hoped Trump would use his impulsiveness and business instincts to shake up Washington, allowed him to eke out a narrow electoral college victory against an unpopular Hillary Clinton. But governing has been a struggle, diminishing Trump’s leverage over congressional Republicans the more they fear his unpopularity will imperil their majorities.

Trump struck back hard with his Twitter finger Thursday from early morning on, all but endorsing the Republican opponent of Jeff Flake, a GOP senator from Arizona who has criticized him, and assailing local efforts to remove monuments to Confederate heroes.

After news broke of a terrorist attack in Barcelona, Spain, the president repeated a dubious myth he previously invoked on the campaign trail, to much criticism, about a general who used bullets coated in pigs’ blood to execute insurgents in the Philippines in the early 20th century​; to followers of Islam, pigs are impure.

“Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught,” Trump tweeted. “There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!”

Trump’s quick condemnation of the Barcelona carnage as a terrorist attack, and his suggestion that Muslims were at fault, came before Spanish authorities had released conclusive information. As such, Trump’s rapid response contrasted with his slowness in calling out the white supremacists in Charlottesville — blame he rescinded on Tuesday, when he said “both sides” were culpable for violence there — and contradicted his claim in that instance that he only comments on such incidents after all the facts are known.

Trump still has not called the fatal attack in Charlottesville, in which a car driven by an alleged white supremacist plowed into a crowd, an act of terrorism...

Still more (FWIW).

This Week's Cover at the 'New Yorker'

Okay. That's it.

I'm out for the rest of the day. You'll get books, babe, and weather reports today, and then maybe back to politics tomorrow.

Our society's gone insane.

Well, shit. pic.twitter.com/cUjFDwJdUc

— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) August 17, 2017

#Antifa is the Resurgence of Anti-War Movement, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter

From Brandon Darby, at Breitbart.

That is it. That is exactly it.

The Real Race War

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine:

The tragedy in Charlottesville could have been an occasion to stop and consider how the tolerance for politically correct violence and politically correct hatred is leading the nation towards civil war. Instead the media and the political left have turned this incident into the biggest fake news story of the summer, transforming its real lessons into a morality play that justifies war against the political right, and against white people generally.

The organizers of the “Unite the Right” demonstration in Charlottesville were repellent racists. But they came to defend a historic monument honoring a complex man and cause, and not to attack it or presumably anyone else. They applied for a permit and were denied. They re-applied successfully in a petition supported by the local ACLU. If they had come to precipitate violence, why would they have gone to the tedious trouble of applying for a permit? Who knows what – if anything – would have happened if that had been the end of the story and no one had showed up to oppose them.

What “Unite the Right” actually demonstrated was that the assortment of neo-Nazis, pro-Confederates and assorted yahoos gathered under the banner of the “Alt-Right” is actually a negligible group. This was a national show of strength that actually attracted all of 500 people. Compare that to the tens of the thousands who can readily be marshalled by two violent groups of the left – Black Lives Matter and Antifa – and you get an idea of how marginal “white supremacists” are to America’s political and cultural life.

Yet “white supremacy” and its evils became the centerpiece of all the fake news reporting on the event, including all the ludicrous attacks on the president for not condemning enough a bogeyman the whole nation condemns, and that no one but a risible fringe supports. Talk about virtue signaling! Omitted from the media coverage were the other forces at work in precipitating the battle of Emancipation Park, specifically Black Lives Matter and Antifa, two violent leftwing groups with racial agendas who came to squelch the demonstration in defense of the monument.

Unlike the Unite the Right demonstrators, the leftist groups did not apply for permits, which would have been denied since there was another demonstration scheduled for that park on that day. But why should they have applied for a permit, since the havoc they had previously wreaked in Ferguson, Berkeley, Sacramento, Portland and other cities, was accomplished without permits, while their criminality was presented by the media as “protests,” and their rioting went completely unpunished.

In short, there were two demonstrations in Charlottesville - a legal protest by “Unite the Right” and an illegal protest by the vigilantes of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Who started the fight is really immaterial. Both sides were prepared for violence because these conflicts are already a pattern of our deteriorating civic life. Once the two sides had gathered in the same place, the violence was totally predictable. Two parties, two culpabilities; but except for the initial statement of President Trump, condemning both sides, only one party has been held accountable, and that happens to be the one that was in the park legally.

What is taking place in the media accounts and political commentaries on this event is an effort by the left to turn the mayhem in Charlottesville into a template for their war against a mythical enemy – “white supremacy” – which is really a war on white people generally. The ideology that drives the left and divides our country is “identity politics” – the idea that the world consists of two groups – “people of color” who are guiltless and oppressed, and white people who are guilty and oppressors. This is the real race war. Its noxious themes inform the mindless, hysterical hatred for President Trump, and the equally mindless support for racist mobs like Black Lives Matter and Antifa. It is a war from which no good can come. But it won’t be stopped unless enough people have the courage to stand up and name it for what it is.

Charles Krauthammer Slams President Trump's Tuesday Press Conference as 'Moral Disgrace' (VIDEO)

I actually saw the headline at Free Beacon first, "Krauthammer Spars With Ingraham on Trump’s Presser: It ‘Was a Moral Disgrace’."

But I had to watch it for myself, and Fox News posted the full exchange to YouTube. I get it. Trump's supposed to rise above. He's supposed to be "presidential" and non-equivocating. And I love Charles Krauthammer too. I really do. But on this one, Laura Ingraham's got a better pulse on the politics. She's especially correct that no matter what Trump said he was going to be pilloried by his opponents, people who hate him on both the right and left. It's pretty riveting.

From last night:



PREVIOUSLY: "President Trump Criticizes 'Alt-Left' Groups in #Charlottesville (VIDEO)."

President Trump Criticizes 'Alt-Left' Groups in #Charlottesville (VIDEO)

I've had a long day working on my materials for my classes. Plus, I did some puttering around again this afternoon at my used bookstores. I'm a little tired. But tuning in to the news makes me even more tired. I'm tired of all the identity politics all the time. Seriously, it's physically, emotionally, and intellectually draining. I'd prefer not to deal with it, because there's very little truth involved in what most people are saying.

Here's the headline at the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "A Combative Trump Criticizes ‘Alt-Left’ Groups in Charlottesville."

I obviously think both sides should be criticized. There's no defense of neo-Confederates and Nazis, clearly. There shouldn't be a defense of radical left "antifa" groups either, although all kinds of folks --- including major mass-media types --- are praising "alt-left" activists for "standing up" to racism.

I can't even any more. This is just too stupid. America has become too stupid as a country. The beltway and coastal elites, along with the fake news MSM, are leading the country down to the lowest common denominator. And we're talking really low. Handball against the curb low. And to think, I'm reading elevated history and philosophy (like Bertrand Russell!) and I have have a sense of near helplessness and futility in hoping to personally turn things around. But then, no worries. I'm a professor. Some students will take away some knowledge and wisdom from my classes this fall. The SJWs won't learn at thing, of course, and I can't help them. They're truly a lost cause.

In any case, here's some video for you. I'm going to blog more books tonight. That's what's keeping me sane. Books, and bikini babes, heh.



PREVIOUSLY: "Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?"

It’s Not Just Google — All of Silicon Valley Has a Trust Problem Now

That's for sure.

At Instapundit, "MY USA TODAY COLUMN: It’s not just Google — all of Silicon Valley has a trust problem now. “When a gigantic corporation that controls our data and knows us intimately takes a controversial political stance, it ought to make us worry”."

Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?

So far, it's a cold civil war, waged on the battlefields of politics and culture. But things are heating up, seriously.

Here's Robin Wright, at the New Yorker, "The recent unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, after a white-supremacist rally has stoked some Americans’ fears of a new civil war":

A day after the brawling and racist brutality and deaths in Virginia, Governor Terry McAuliffe asked, “How did we get to this place?” The more relevant question after Charlottesville—and other deadly episodes in Ferguson, Charleston, Dallas, Saint Paul, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria—is where the United States is headed. How fragile is the union, our republic, and a country that has long been considered the world’s most stable democracy? The dangers are now bigger than the collective episodes of violence. “The radical right was more successful in entering the political mainstream last year than in half a century,” the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in February. The organization documents more than nine hundred active (and growing) hate groups in the United States.

America’s stability is increasingly an undercurrent in political discourse. Earlier this year, I began a conversation with Keith Mines about America’s turmoil. Mines has spent his career—in the U.S. Army Special Forces, the United Nations, and now the State Department—navigating civil wars in other countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, El Salvador, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. He returned to Washington after sixteen years to find conditions that he had seen nurture conflict abroad now visible at home. It haunts him. In March, Mines was one of several national-security experts whom Foreign Policy asked to evaluate the risks of a second civil war—with percentages. Mines concluded that the United States faces a sixty-per-cent chance of civil war over the next ten to fifteen years. Other experts’ predictions ranged from five per cent to ninety-five per cent. The sobering consensus was thirty-five per cent. And that was five months before Charlottesville.

“We keep saying, ‘It can’t happen here,’ but then, holy smokes, it can,” Mines told me after we talked, on Sunday, about Charlottesville. The pattern of civil strife has evolved worldwide over the past sixty years. Today, few civil wars involve pitched battles from trenches along neat geographic front lines. Many are low-intensity conflicts with episodic violence in constantly moving locales. Mines’s definition of a civil war is large-scale violence that includes a rejection of traditional political authority and requires the National Guard to deal with it. On Saturday, McAuliffe put the National Guard on alert and declared a state of emergency.

Based on his experience in civil wars on three continents, Mines cited five conditions that support his prediction: entrenched national polarization, with no obvious meeting place for resolution; increasingly divisive press coverage and information flows; weakened institutions, notably Congress and the judiciary; a sellout or abandonment of responsibility by political leadership; and the legitimization of violence as the “in” way to either conduct discourse or solve disputes.

President Trump “modeled violence as a way to advance politically and validated bullying during and after the campaign,” Mines wrote in Foreign Policy. “Judging from recent events the left is now fully on board with this,” he continued, citing anarchists in anti-globalization riots as one of several flashpoints. “It is like 1859, everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.”
To test Mines’s conjecture, I reached out to five prominent Civil War historians this weekend. “When you look at the map of red and blue states and overlap on top of it the map of the Civil War—and who was allied with who in the Civil War—not much has changed,” Judith Giesberg, the editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era and a historian at Villanova University, told me. “We never agreed on the outcome of the Civil War and the direction the country should go in. The postwar amendments were highly contentious—especially the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides equal protection under the law—and they still are today. What does it mean to deliver voting rights to people of color? We still don’t know.”

She added, “Does that make us vulnerable to a repeat of the past? I don’t see a repeat of those specific circumstances. But that doesn’t mean we are not entering something similar in the way of a culture war. We are vulnerable to racism, tribalism, and conflicting visions of the way forward for our nation.”

Anxiety over deepening schisms and new conflict has an outlet in popular culture: in April, Amazon selected the dystopian novel “American War”—which centers on a second U.S. civil war—as one of its best books of the month. In a review in the Washington Post, Ron Charles wrote, “Across these scarred pages rages the clash that many of us are anxiously speculating about in the Trump era: a nation riven by irreconcilable ideologies, alienated by entrenched suspicions . . . both poignant and horrifying.” The Times book reviewer noted, “It’s a work of fiction. For the time being, anyway.” The book’s author, Omar El Akkad, was born in Egypt and covered the war in Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and the Ferguson protest as a journalist for Canada’s Globe and Mail...

Folks can see why I was so fascinated with El Akkad's book. I highly recommend it. Here, Omar El Akkad, American War.

And keep reading Wright's piece, here.

The Left Exploits the #Charlottesville Tragedy

From Joseph Klein, at FrontPage Mag, "Hypocritical left excuses its own violence while taking aim at Trump."

The Poison of Identity Politics

Following-up, "President Trump Repudiates White Supremacists: 'Racism is Evil' (VIDEO)."

An excellent editorial, at WSJ, "The return of white nationalism is part of a deeper ailment":

As ever in this age of Donald Trump, politicians and journalists are reducing the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday to a debate over Mr. Trump’s words and intentions. That’s a mistake no matter what you think of the President, because the larger poison driving events like those in Virginia is identity politics and it won’t go away when Mr. Trump inevitably does.

The particular pathology on display in Virginia was the white nationalist movement led today by the likes of Richard Spencer, David Duke and Brad Griffin. They alone are to blame for the violence that occurred when one of their own drove a car into peaceful protesters, killing a young woman and injuring 19 others.

The Spencer crowd courts publicity and protests, and they chose the progressive university town of Charlottesville with malice aforethought. They used the unsubtle Ku Klux Klan symbolism of torches in a Friday night march, and they seek to appear as political martyrs as a way to recruit more alienated young white men.

Political conservatives even more than liberals need to renounce these racist impulses, and the good news is that this is happening. The driver has been charged with murder under Virginia law, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions opened a federal civil-rights investigation and issued a statement condemning the violence: “When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.” Many prominent conservatives also denounced the white-nationalist movement.

Mr. Trump was widely criticized for his initial statement Saturday afternoon that condemned the hatred “on many sides” but failed to single out the white nationalists. Notably, David Duke and his allies read Mr. Trump’s statement as attacking them and criticized the President for doing so.

The White House nonetheless issued a statement Sunday saying Mr. Trump “includes white supremacists, KKK, Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups” in his condemnation. As so often with Mr. Trump, his original statement missed an opportunity to speak like a unifying political leader.

Yet the focus on Mr. Trump is also a cop-out because it lets everyone duck the deeper and growing problem of identity politics on the right and left. The politics of white supremacy was a poison on the right for many decades, but the civil-rights movement rose to overcome it, and it finally did so in the mid-1960s with Martin Luther King Jr. ’s language of equal opportunity and color-blind justice.

That principle has since been abandoned, however, in favor of a new identity politics that again seeks to divide Americans by race, ethnicity, gender and even religion. “Diversity” is now the all-purpose justification for these divisions, and the irony is that America is more diverse and tolerant than ever.

The problem is that the identity obsessives want to boil down everything in American life to these categories. In practice this means allocating political power, contracts, jobs and now even salaries in the private economy based on the politics of skin color or gender rather than merit or performance. Down this road lies crude political tribalism, and James Damore’s recent Google dissent is best understood as a cri de coeur that we should aspire to something better. Yet he lost his job merely for raising the issue.

A politics fixated on indelible differences will inevitably lead to resentments that extremists can exploit in ugly ways on the right and left. The extremists were on the right in Charlottesville, but there have been examples on the left in Berkeley, Oakland and numerous college campuses. When Democratic politicians can’t even say “all lives matter” without being denounced as bigots, American politics has a problem.

Mr. Trump didn’t create this identity obsession even if as a candidate he did try to exploit it. He is more symptom than cause, though as President he now has a particular obligation to renounce it. So do other politicians. Yet the only mission of nearly every Democrat we observed on the weekend was to use the “white supremacist” cudgel against Mr. Trump—as if that is the end of the story...

Still more.