Meek Mill’s story demonstrates the often excessive nature of probation in America, @nilabala3 writes via @usatodayopinion: https://t.co/54bxmeJsFB
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) April 25, 2018
Day To Night #GUCCI pic.twitter.com/rRuKeBdvfT
— Jessica Simpson (@JessicaSimpson) April 24, 2018
Syracuse University's Theta Tau fraternity suspended over ‘extremely racist’ and 'homophobic' video. https://t.co/hD5URz2zb6 pic.twitter.com/l38Njcp6tj
— ABC News (@ABC) April 19, 2018
Syracuse University suspended its chapter of Theta Tau after a video of an initiation ceremony showed members spewing hate speech. pic.twitter.com/rIpMtNdVsq
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) April 20, 2018
'Another scalp': Shania Twain APOLOGIZES after lefty outrage mob attack https://t.co/oEQtACRH7k
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) April 23, 2018
“You know what? The Cold War affected us, too, It’s not going to be free to win this war, but it may be worth it."--CA farmer https://t.co/i4HB6qgfuu
— Virginia Dare (@vdare) April 22, 2018
You might assume walnut grower Mike Poindexter would be regretting his vote for Donald Trump.More.
Since the inauguration, immigration officials have raided his Selma, Calif., office and China has slapped tariffs on his walnuts to retaliate against President Trump’s protection of steel, aluminum and manufacturing.
But you’d be dead wrong. Like many other farmers in the rural and conservative San Joaquin Valley, Poindexter, 46, is holding as steadfast as his trees.
“It’s not about sticking through thick and thin,” he said. “What is our other option? In California, they’re not willing to back [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein because she’s not liberal enough. They don’t have anyone who’s palatable to us.”
So, if Trump thinks a trade war will improve the market for U.S. goods, so be it, Poindexter figures. “You know what? The Cold War affected us, too,” he said. “It’s not going to be free to win this war, but it may be worth it. I don’t think you’ll have farmers go out and vote for Democrats over tariffs.”
Poindexter’s stoicism echoes across the farms of the San Joaquin Valley, where rural and suburban voters strongly supported Trump and where they regularly send Republicans to the House of Representatives. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield is in his sixth term, and fellow Republican Devin Nunes, farther north in Tulare, is in his seventh.
“If I’ve gotta take a few bullets getting caught up in the cross-fire, but after four years or eight years — however long he spends in office — we’re on a better trajectory as a country, then it’s all parred up,” said Matt Fisher, a fourth-generation citrus grower in Arvin, near Bakersfield. “I did my part, so to speak.”
Jeff Bortolussi grows half a dozen fruit crops at the eastern edge of Kingsburg, where he contributed to his precinct’s 70% tally for Trump.
He lives in the house where he grew up, and eagerly invites a visitor on a driving tour around a mile-square box of country roads to show off the spring crop: peaches and nectarines the size of a baby’s fist, almond and walnuts still too small to see, reedy blueberry bushes, leafy grape vines and trees pregnant with apples, pomegranates, clementines, persimmons and figs.
It’s that kind of diversity — California grows more than 200 crops — that could soften the impact of tariffs on the state. And it’s what differentiates California’s $45-billion agriculture industry from frustrated farmers in the Midwest, who heavily depend on a soy crop that faces tariffs of 25%. (A tariff raises the price for Chinese importers, making the U.S. crop less competitive.)
Bortolussi is as patient about politics as he is with his crops.
“A lot of this stuff needs to play out,” he said. “I think a lot of it is posturing, and his way of communicating, his ‘art of the deal.’ We really don’t know what’s going on.”
Even almonds, California’s second-largest agricultural export to China, may not suffer from tariffs as much as first thought, Bortolussi says. “The almond crop this year is going to be a little off, because it got a little freeze,” he said. “So, if the tariffs are going to affect almonds, this may be the year when it will have less effect.”
Last year, California sold $1.1 billion worth of nuts — almonds, walnuts and pistachios — to China, its third-largest foreign customer, according to the state Department of Food and Agriculture. China also bought more than $240 million in fresh citrus and table grapes from California in 2016, according to the department's data...
My latest — On Earth Day, you shouldn't feel guilty about your plastic trash https://t.co/EmVTAkSCYW via @usatodayopinion
— David Mastio (@DavidMastio) April 20, 2018
When I began the project of describing this movement in the 1980s, the emergence of the left as a mainstream force in America’s political life was fairly recent and inadequately understood. Conservatives in particular often failed to appreciate the anti-American animus of the left and its apocalyptic goals. At the same time, conservatives imprudently accepted the left’s deceptive claims to be “liberal” and “progressive,” ascribing to it idealistic intentions that masked its malignant designs. The contents of these volumes were conceived as a corrective to these false and disarming impressions. This is the ninth and final volume of my writings about progressivism, a movement whose goals are the destruction of America’s social contract at home and the defeat of American power abroad.I'm looking forward to reading this volume.
The primary source of this confusion is the fact that left-wing politics are based on expectations of an imaginary future rather than assessments of a usable past. The left’s primary focus is not on practical improvements based on an analysis of previous practices, or a conception of the limits imposed by human nature, but on changes designed to satisfy the moral prejudices that make up the leftist faith.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the left’s quest for “equality,” which is the organizing principle of its “transformative” proposals. Equality before the law is a foundational principle of American democracy and its pluralistic community. But this is not the equality proposed by the left, which demands instead an unrealizable and destructive equality of outcomes. In the real world human inequalities of talent, intelligence, physical attributes and application are immutable facts of life, which result in inequalities of wealth and power. The seeds of social inequality are planted in the human genome and are nourished by disparate cultures, which include circumstances of birth and upbringing that governments cannot control. Attempts to establish such control have invariably resulted in the most repressive regimes in human history, and in the end have failed to produce either equality or wealth.
The ideal of an egalitarian future is doomed to failure because it is unanchored in any human reality. It is sustained as an ideal because it allows advocates to regard themselves as revolutionary pioneers of a “better world.” It further prompts believers to devalue the present and dismiss the past, which allows them to distance themselves from the destructive results of their social experiments. Thus progressives habitually dismiss the disasters they have engineered, however epic in scope, by attributing the monstrous results to inadvertent “mistakes,” when they were in fact the logical consequences of their Utopian ideas.
When the Soviet socialist system collapsed, progressives created an artificial distinction between the ideal, which they called “real socialism,” and the disaster, which they called “actually existing socialism.” This allowed them to avoid any recognition of their role in the human catastrophe they had supported and served for generations. Consequently, the experience had no lessons for progressives because in their self-absolving view it wasn’t “real socialism.” This delusion has now been passed to the next generations as a result of the left’s infiltration of America’s educational system and its transformation into a training and recruitment center for collectivist causes and ideas.
The current term leftists use to describe their Utopian vision of the future is “social justice” rather than communism or socialism.
The new name is part of a familiar process by which the left attempts to shed the disasters of its past. One would be hard-put to distinguish the goals encapsulated by “social justice” from the communist attitudes of previous generations. Like communism, “social justice” is a promise of harmony and redemption. Like communism it describes a future in which inequality, poverty, bigotry and the timeless corruptions of the human spirit are miraculously rectified by political parties and the state. Like communism, “social justice” requires for its realization a remake of humanity. Like communism, therefore, it can only be achieved through the destruction of individual freedom, and the thwarting of normal human desires and interests in order to achieve an allegedly greater social good.
The bloody history of progressive experiments during the 20th century should have buried the illusion that human beings can be transformed into creatures radically different from what they have been for the five thousand years in which their actions have been recorded. Human societies are reflections of the human beings who create them, not the other way around. Inequality, bigotry, hypocrisy and greed are elements of a genome that thousands of years of evolution have failed to alter or repair. As a result, progressive states dedicated to “social justice” have flooded the earth with the corpses of innocents who stood in their way, and created poverty and misery on an unprecedented scale. Yet the religious fantasy of a liberated future persists to this day among an alarming array of constituencies, and the left’s assault on individual freedom proceeds as though these historical tragedies had never taken place.
The tenacity of the progressive illusion and its imperviousness to experience are natural effects of its religious nature. The solace provided to believers through hope in a redeemed future is as existentially crucial as a belief in God or in life after death. It makes relinquishing the illusion as devastating as a loss of religious faith. How else explain the persistence of a fantasy that has proven so destructive?
Since the industrial revolution, the progressive illusion has been encouraged by advances in technology that might seem to augur human possibility without limit. Yet to date these advances, however impressive, have not led to dramatic improvements in human behavior — specifically its moral dimensions — let alone the degree of improvement that Utopian visions require. Meanwhile, the same advances have produced new technologies of totalitarian control along with vastly amplified means of destruction that serve to magnify human barbarism and put into question the very survival of civilization.
Half a century ago Friedrich Hayek described “social justice” as a mirage. Hayek observed that there is no entity called “society” to redistribute wealth, or to re-calibrate the social order. There are only individuals belonging to political factions that vie for power and then wield it through their power in the state. “Social justice,” therefore, is necessarily the work of individuals driven by the same greed, prejudice, and habits of deceit that created the injustices progressives propose to repair. In its real-world practice “social justice” is, and can only be, the self-justifying rationale of a new despotism—worse than the old because its first agenda is a war against freedom, in particular the freedom of individuals to resist the social redeemers and their plans.
This was the conclusion I reached forty years ago under the influence of Hayek and the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, and why I resolved to devote the second half of my life—and eventually the nine volumes of this work—to analyzing and opposing this destructive cause.
In 1976, the Nobel-prize winning economist, F.A. Hayek, published The Mirage of Social Justice, the second volume of his magnum opus Law, Legislation and Liberty.1 Despite being widely regarded as the definitive critique of social justice, today one would be lucky to find advocates of social justice in the academy who are familiar with the name ‘Hayek’, let alone those who have read him. Among classical liberals, libertarians, and conservatives alike, Hayek is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century whose The Road to Serfdom represents one of the most powerful arguments against socialism ever written.2 But those in the academy who have perpetuated socialist ideas since the 1980s have practically ignored it. In this article, I will argue that this unwillingness to engage with the ‘other side’ is not only endemic in the radical intellectual schools that have overtaken literary studies, but also that it is symptomatic of their entire way of thinking which, being hermetically sealed and basically circular in its argumentation, has no language to deal with critics beyond reactive moral condemnation.
Many universities and colleges currently advertise literary theory courses which purport to introduce students to a range of different approaches to literary texts. On paper, it looks like as many as ten or fifteen different approaches. The labels proliferate: new historicism, cultural materialism, materialist feminism, ecofeminism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, structuralism, poststructuralism, race theory, gender theory, queer theory, postmodernism … the list might go on. This extensive list of labels seems to signal genuine range and diversity; however, in terms of their ideas, these approaches are somewhat narrower in scope and focus than one might expect. Virtually every approach listed here lays claim to be ‘radical’, which is to say politically of the left or even hard left – with roots in Marxist theory – hostile to capitalism, the Enlightenment, classical liberalism, liberal humanism, and even to the West itself. Virtually all are also committed to ‘social justice’. It must be noted that, since about 1980, these labels accurately register the genesis of literary studies as a discipline, but what they do not register is that, as they were rising, dissenting voices were systemically hounded out of the academy.
For example, in 1985, Sir Roger Scruton – now famous as a philosopher and public intellectual – wrote a book called Thinkers of the New Left in which he was strongly critical of continental theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and others.3 In stark contrast to the sometimes-wilful obscurantism of those he critiqued, Scruton wrote in plain prose and expressed ideas with clarity. Perhaps precisely because it laid the ideas bare, the book was greeted with howls of derision, and viciously attacked by scholars who had become disciples of Foucault et al. The publisher, Longman, was threatened with boycotts and risked being sent to the academic equivalent of the gulag if they did not stop selling the book, going as far as withdrawing copies from bookshops. As far as I can see, one thing that the episode did not produce is an intelligent response to any of the criticisms Scruton raised or, indeed, a single moment of critical self-reflection from any of those who had reacted so angrily. In effect, he was shut down and chased from academia.
In another infamous case, in 1988, Richard Levin, who was a Professor of English at the State University of New York, published an article in the PMLA – one of the premier journals in literary studies – outlining some of his problems with recent feminist studies of Shakespeare. The gist of Levin’s critique was that feminist readings of Shakespeare all seemed to reach similar conclusions. In his own words, ‘the themes employed in [feminist] interpretations are basically the same. Although the terminology may vary, these criticisms all find that [Shakespeare’s] plays are about the role of gender in the individual and society’.4 Now, one might expect a firm rebuttal to this charge from the scholars he was critiquing, and rightly so, but this is not what Levin received. Instead, the following year, a letter was published in the PMLA signed by twenty-four literary critics lambasting the journal for having the temerity to publish such an essay.5 It was not so much an academic response, but the public denunciation of a heretic – made more chilling because so many of the signatories worked on the Reformation, an era in which such burnings at the stake were de rigueur. Professor Levin, they argued, should not even be teaching literature. I remember when I first read of this episode while conducting research for my doctorate;6 I was not only appalled at Levin’s treatment, but also confounded by the utter refusal of these twenty-four scholars to engage in substantive argument. I remember it as a moment of profound disillusionment with the profession I was about to pursue, and it marked a turning point in how I would view the work of some of those who had signed it. Years later, during a podcast interview, I asked one prominent Shakespearean, who is strongly associated with the radical new approaches of the 1980s (but not a signatory of the letter), if he remembered Levin.7 The answer I got back was, ‘no one paid any attention to him; Levin was nowhere’. Again, I was struck by reasoning that seemed based entirely on what Aristotle would have called ‘ethos’, that is, the judgement of the person’s character as opposed to their arguments.8
If one understands the underlying theories, then it is not difficult to see why this happens. Despite significant differences, all the approaches I listed above assume that:
1. There is no universal human nature.Once this basic structure is understood, one can quickly see that the extensive list which seems like it represents a diverse range of approaches, in fact only promotes different flavours of a single approach. All that changes from one to the next are the specific groups of oppressors and oppressed as well as the structuring principle to which all individuals are invisibly in thrall. One might begin to represent it as follows...
2. Human beings are primarily a product of their time and place.
3. Therefore, power, culture, ideologies, and the social institutions that promulgate them have an extraordinary capacity to shape and condition individuals.
4. In Western societies, since these institutions have been dominated by people who were predominantly rich, straight, white, and male it has tended towards pushing the particular interests of rich straight white men to the detriment of all other groups.
5. Furthermore, these rich straight white men have done this by acting as if their sectional interests were universal and natural – a flagrant lie.
6. Importantly, however, few if any of these rich white straight men were consciously aware of doing this, because they were themselves caught in the matrices of power, culture, ideologies and so on.
7. Where subordinated groups have gone along with these power structures, they have been exploited and the victims of ‘false consciousness’.
8 Now is the time to redress this balance by exposing the ways in which old texts have promoted the sectional interests of the rich straight white men and by promoting the voices of the historically marginalised groups.
"Either you are with the oppressed & therefore on the side of the angels, or you are implicitly supporting the side of the oppressors, & a damnable & unrepentant sinner. It is a straightforward binary moral choice & its missionaries will take no prisoners" https://t.co/RguleLqPbd pic.twitter.com/oLD9WIFdGD
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) April 16, 2018
It Is Too Bad I Have Been Silenced https://t.co/Fyl26sxuhq
— Alexandra Petri (@petridishes) April 21, 2018
Alexandra Petri is a genius. A column like that is so much more than a joke one-off— she nailed at least 3 current issues while simultaneously parodying his pretentious tone AND the nonsense use of lynching metaphors. Blows me away.
— Emily Nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) April 21, 2018
Every day I have to exist in this so-called free country of America, I fear that I may pay the ultimate price: not having column space in EVERY publication. Think carefully, America. Is it not a fearful thing to ask that people refrain from expressing every provocative thought that occurs to them? Is it not a hideous imposition that you are free to say anything you wish, but sometimes people will respond by saying they would not care to read what you have written, and do not think you ought to be given a large platform from which to express your haphazard thoughts, and they would rather not work with you if you have repeatedly suggested they are sub-human? We have been cast into the pit of Tartarus by many tiny hands! I cannot (metaphorically) breathe!
When I walk out each day onto the street (of ideas), I quake with fear that the (thought) police (who determine who gets to appear on panels with corporate sponsorships) may take me aside and silence me for good. Every morning, I wonder whether I will be able to go home to my family (as a columnist in a magazine or newspaper with a wide circulation). I live with this fear every day, and I can imagine nothing more chilling...
