Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War

Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America.

Is There Any Solution?

It's Bill Schneider, who used to be on CNN back in the day, with Bernard Shaw and Judy Woodruff. He's an okay guy who can turn a phrase, probably more of a weak "Cold War Liberal" than anything (but now maybe "woke"). I never really heard what happened to him at CNN, whether he was fired (unlike Jeffrey Toobin). 

In any case, this is interesting, although I doubt I'm alone when I say I don't care if there's a solution, since the left will create problems just to find solutions, and f*ck the regular people in "flyover country." 

So screw 'em either way. 

FWIW, at the Hill, "How the American system failed in 2020: Pandemic politics":

Is there any solution to the deep and bitter polarization in American politics? There is. But it’s not working.

The solution is supposed to come in the form of a crisis. In a crisis, Americans pull together and rally behind a common cause. Right now, the United States is experiencing the biggest public health crisis in over 100 years. More than 320,000 Americans have died, and the death toll continues to rise. Nevertheless, the country seems more divided than ever.

American government usually works well in a crisis — when an overwhelming sense of urgency breaks through blockages and lubricates the system. Under the right conditions, barriers fall away, and things get done. We are seeing it happen now with the economic stimulus bill.

Back in 1957, the country was shocked when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first space satellite. It led the federal government to become deeply involved in education — something that had always been regarded as a local responsibility. It also happened after the 9/11 crisis. The devastating terrorist attack overwhelmed the country’s deep political divisions. The evidence? For nearly a year after 9/11/01, a majority of Democrats approved of the job George W. Bush was doing as president.

The era of good feeling came to an end a year later, in September 2002, when the Bush administration announced the “rollout” of the invasion of Iraq. With the decision to go to war, all the old divisions came roaring back. It was Vietnam all over again.

Politicians are always hyping issues to try to turn them into crises — an environmental crisis, a debt crisis, an education crisis, an energy crisis. Or they declare “wars” on things — a war on poverty, a war on crime, a war on drugs, a war on inflation, a war on terror. Without a crisis or a “war” to rally public opinion, the system won’t work. It wasn’t designed to.

The pandemic certainly qualifies as a crisis. Thousands of Americans are dying every day. The economy has come to a standstill: no travel, no dining out, no public entertainment, no gatherings with friends and neighbors. Why is that not a crisis?

The answer is: because President Trump has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the crisis — and so have his supporters...

Blah, blah...

It's the same old stupid bull. "Never let a crisis go to waste," some idiot once said.

And to think, I used to respect this guy.

Josie Canseco in Little White Bikini

 At Taxi Driver, "Josie Canseco Flashing in Little White Bikini."

Also, at the Other McCain, "Do You Have Enough Ammunition?"

Anthony Quinn Warner: Bomber Died in Downtown Nashville Blast, Authorities Say (VIDEO)

At the Tennessean, "Nashville explosion: Anthony Warner died in explosion, was 'bomber,' authorities say." 

Watch this morning's officials' press conference here.

Dead (Once-Treasured) Diners

It's happening all over. 

At NYT, "The Treasured Diners and Hidden Haunts That Covid-19 Closed for Good":

We gather today to mourn the 150-year-old restaurant that served up platters of fried chicken and creamed corn to Abilene, Kan. To bid farewell to the New Orleans cafe that was a destination for huge crab omelets and endless conversation. To raise one last glass to the tavern in Cambridge, Mass., where the regulars arrived at 8 a.m. and the Austin diner where Janis Joplin nearly sang the neon lights off the walls.

They were local landmarks — watering holes, shops and haunts that weathered recessions and gentrification, world wars and the Great Depression, only to succumb this year to the economic ravages of the coronavirus. This is their obituary.

Thousands of businesses have closed during the pandemic, but the demise of so many beloved hangouts cuts especially deep. They were woven into the identity of big cities and small towns, their walls lined with celebrity photos and Best Of awards. Some had been around a century. Others, like the Ma’am Sir Filipino restaurant in Los Angeles, needed just a few years to win the hearts of their neighborhoods.

Their closures have left blank spaces across the country as owners liquidate their memorabilia and wistful customers leave social-media tributes recalling first dates and marriage proposals. And there are new worries: If these institutions could not survive, what can? And who will be left standing, to hold our memories and knit our communities together, when this pandemic is over?

RTWT.

Also on Twitter: 

I picked up breakfast at our diner today, caught up with the owner like always, and asked how she’s doing. She shook her head as her eyes welled above her mask. I knew what that meant. She turned her back to her staff saying she didn’t want to cry in front of her employees.

She, like millions of others, is desperate for help from the federal government. She said the first round of PPP saved her business, but that was a long time ago and she’s on the brink again. She has followed the rules & spent money to build outdoor dining, but winter is here.

We all have done our best to support small businesses this year, but it’s not enough. It is infuriating that it took Congress this long to get a relief bill and unconscionable that the President sits on it while our friends and neighbors fight for their lives. Shame.

 

Ms. Kendra's Christmas

On Twitter (and photo here). 

Also, "Having a very pink Christmas!! (VIDEO)."

Barbara Palvin

At Drunken Stepfather, "BARBARA PALVIN TIT OF THE DAY."

BONUS: "ALYSON STONER OF THE DAY."

How Christopher Lasch Repudiated the Radical Left

While at the same time excoriating conservatives and libertarians for their "neoliberal" economics, with its free markets that actually helped kill the nuclear family.

Interesting. 

See, "HOW LASCH LEFT THE LEFT."

And his magnum opus, at Amazon, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations. 

Thomas Ricks, First Principles

Thomas Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country.

Barnes Carr, The Lenin Plot

At Amazon, Barnes Carr, The Lenin Plot: The Unknown Story of America's War Against Russia.

Jennifer Delacruz's Sunday Forecast

She's back in her home studio, for ABC 10 News San Diego:

The Rise of Political Sectarianism

Actually, this is just new and even more dramatic terminology for our growing domestic cold war and political polarization.

It's Thomas Edsall, a tried-and-true leftist, at NYT, "America, We Have a Problem":

Viewing recent events through a Trump prism may be too restrictive to capture the economic, social and cultural turmoil that has grown more corrosive in recent years.

On Oct. 30, a group of 15 eminent scholars (several of whom I also got a chance to talk to) published an essay — “Political Sectarianism in America” — arguing that the antagonism between left and right has become so intense that words and phrases like “affective polarization” and “tribalism” were no longer sufficient to capture the level of partisan hostility.

“The severity of political conflict has grown increasingly divorced from the magnitude of policy disagreement,” the authors write, requiring the development of “a superordinate construct, political sectarianism — the tendency to adopt a moralized identification with one political group and against another.”

Political sectarianism, they argue,

consists of three core ingredients: othering — the tendency to view opposing partisans as essentially different or alien to oneself; aversion — the tendency to dislike and distrust opposing partisans; and moralization — the tendency to view opposing partisans as iniquitous. It is the confluence of these ingredients that makes sectarianism so corrosive in the political sphere.

There are multiple adverse outcomes that result from political sectarianism, according to the authors. It “incentivizes politicians to adopt antidemocratic tactics when pursuing electoral or political victories” since their supporters will justify such norm violation because “the consequences of having the vile opposition win the election are catastrophic.”

Political sectarianism also legitimates

a willingness to inflict collateral damage in pursuit of political goals and to view copartisans who compromise as apostates. As political sectarianism has surged in recent years, so too has support for violent tactics.

In a parallel line of analysis, Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, and Peter Turchin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, contend that a combination of economic and demographic trends point to growing political upheaval. Events of the last six weeks have lent credibility to their research: On Sept. 10, they published an essay, “Welcome To The ‘Turbulent Twenties,’” making the case that the United States is “heading toward the highest level of vulnerability to political crisis seen in this country in over a hundred years.” There is, they wrote, “plenty of dangerous tinder piled up, and any spark could generate an inferno.”

Goldstone and Turchin do not believe that doomsday is inevitable. They cite previous examples of countries reversing downward trends, including the United States during the Great Depression:

To be sure, the path back to a strong, united and inclusive America will not be easy or short. But a clear pathway does exist, involving a shift of leadership, a focus on compromise and responding to the world as it is, rather than trying desperately to hang on to or restore a bygone era.

The Goldstone-Turchin argument is based on a measure called a “political stress indicator,” developed by Goldstone in his 1991 book, “Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World.” According to Goldstone, the measure “predicted the 1640s Puritan Revolution, the French Revolution of 1789, and the European Revolutions of 1830 and 1848.”

Goldstone wrote that

popular mobilization is more likely when the population is experiencing declining material conditions, plus urbanization and youth; when social competition for elite positions become heightened, political polarization and factionalism will be more likely as groups struggle for power and positions; and when state expenses fall behind revenues, as states become less capable of meeting expected demands and thus less legitimate, as well as more likely to enter conflicts with elites over taxation. And I argued that only when all of these factors coincide does a state face rising risks of major upheavals.

Turchin, in a 2017 book, “Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History,” graphed political stress in this country, showing that from 1970 to 2012 it shot up sharply, increasing fortyfold. In the eight years since then, stress has continued to surge, Goldstone wrote, “as income inequality, political polarization and state debt have all risen further.”

While the United States is particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval, Turchin argues, a disaster “is not foreordained. On the contrary, we may be the first society that is capable of perceiving, if dimly, the deep structural forces pushing us to the brink.”

There's still more at top, but here are links to a couple of those research pieces, "Political Sectarianism in America," and "Welcome to the 'Turbulent Twenties'."

'Totally Not Kidding. We've Done It'

From Sarah Hoyt, at Instapundit, "PLEASE REMEMBER YOU’RE AMERICAN. IT’S IMPORTANT."

Human Remains Found at Site of Nashville 'RV' Bombing: Sources

The remains were possibly too shredded to ultimately identify the body.

At ABC News, "Human remains found at site of 'intentional' Nashville RV explosion: Sources."

PREVIOUSLY: "Nashville Christmas Bombing 'RV' Photo."

Dissident Women's Studies Ph.D. Speaks

It's Samantha Jones (not her real name, to protect against leftist death threats, apparently), at New Discourses, "A Dissident Women's Studies Ph.D. Speaks Out."

It's the second half of her piece that's most interesting, for example:

One of the most urgent needs is the development of a grassroots movement for intellectual diversity on campus, spearheaded by students, alumni, parents, and concerned citizens. I hope that existing conservative, centrist, or libertarian organizations can help to facilitate this movement by providing organizational and logistical support at campuses throughout the country. Everyone should take a close look at their state’s public universities’ Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity initiatives to see if intellectual diversity is included. If it is not, then the obvious first step is to advocate for the inclusion of intellectual diversity. Concerned taxpayers, students, parents, and alumni, working with the elected officials in those university districts, if necessary, need to ensure that universities have intellectual diversity in humanities and social sciences course offerings. If intellectual diversity is included in the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity initiative (in my experience, most of these initiatives include at least a brief reference to intellectual diversity), then work can be done to survey students to see if they feel that intellectual diversity is represented, particularly in their humanities and social sciences courses. Heterodox Academy has published relevant survey data on the dearth of intellectual diversity in these fields.

If America has any chance of continuing the classical liberal values upon which it was founded, then students who have a commitment to these values have to enter the teaching profession—as doctoral students in education, as administrators, and as public school teachers. Critical pedagogy, and more specifically critical race theory, are the dominant discourses controlling all levels in American schools of education, so students need to tread lightly and assent, at least outwardly, to Critical Social Justice ideology. Once in the classroom, however, teachers should reject all pressures to teach Critical Social Justice, and especially critical race theory, because it is an inherently racist ideology and because it instantiates the problem—racism—that it purports to solve. Critical race theory also needs to be resisted because it, as its own proponents assert, “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” (Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction). Teachers should take a stand for fighting racism within liberalism, not by adopting critical race theory. If there is not already a nonprofit organization devoted to assisting non-woke students to enter the teaching profession—again, at all levels, as professors of education, as administrators, and as public school teachers—then one should be organized immediately. This could also be a special project for existing right- or libertarian-leaning organizations.

Another important project should be the revival of Western civilization and Great Books courses, at all levels of education, but most critically in the universities. In 1964, 15 of the 50 premier universities in America required students to take a survey of Western civilization. All 50 offered the course, and nearly all of them (41) offered it as a way to satisfy some requirement. (Source: New York Post, by Ashley Thorne “The drive to put Western civ back in the college curriculum,” March 29, 2016). But since 1987, when Jesse Jackson led 500 students around Stanford University protesting the requirement that undergraduates take a course in Western Civilization, which they denounced as Eurocentric, white-male indoctrination, most colleges have eliminated Western civ courses for diversity or multiethnic course requirements. An excellent example of a Western civ curriculum can be found in the James Madison program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, which is dedicated to “exploring enduring questions of American constitutional law and Western political thought.” Another avenue is to look into funding institutes for education in Western civilization as a new department at extant colleges and universities.

I would love to see crowd-sourced funds used to construct a beautiful classical building adjacent to one of the ugliest college campuses in the country, preferably one composed entirely of postwar Brutalist buildings. I imagine that students whose spirits are continually depressed by attending classes in the midst of such hideous architecture would feel intrigued to enter such a beautiful building. Once inside, they might learn that there is, in fact, such a thing as beauty; that it matters, and that Critical Social Justice ideology can never build anything beautiful; it can never, in fact, build anything at all—it can only destroy. Once inside that building, students might become interested in registering for a course on Western civilization, a course in which all thought is permitted, in which no one is threatened with cancellation: a microcosm of what a university environment used to be. In this way, we might plant and nurture the seed of resistance to the increasing totalitarianism of Critical Social Justice.

In the long term, it is going to be necessary to create more universities devoted to classical education, not indoctrination into Critical Social Justice ideology, as well as more K-12 private and charter schools in the classical tradition because university schools of education have been training “social justice” educators for decades now, so Critical Social Justice ideology is now in the K-12 public schools. At a policy level on this problem, we need avenues for teacher certification outside of the existing teacher colleges, which are wholly committed to critical pedagogy and other failed approaches. Forcing every licensed teacher (usually for state jobs) to undergo ideological training to gain licensure is not only a problem but should be illegal. At the personal level, my advice to everyone with kids who can afford to do so is to pull your kids out of the public schools immediately and enroll them in private schools, or home school. Although home schooling has already begun to come under attack, it is still a viable option—at least for now. In the future, homeschooling will come under increased scrutiny and I believe there will be attempts to render it illegal. I realize that not everyone can afford to home school or send their kids to private schools (many of which are not safe from Critical Social Justice, either). I strongly recommend that all parents emphasize the value of vocational training programs for their children as avenues to career paths that pay well and offer a great deal of autonomy.

My hope is that new immigrants to America will increasingly speak out against Critical Social Justice ideology as an American instantiation of what is called, in other contexts, tribalism—a form of corruption that has damaged many countries. Far from being a bastion of white supremacy, America’s liberal values are what have attracted people from all countries to undergo great hardship to come here, precisely because this is one of the few places in which ordinary people can exercise their talents to achieve a standard of living that is impossible in most of the world. It is my fervent hope that more American college students—especially the “woke” who rail against their own country as evil—would be required to spend a semester abroad in a developing country in order to gain some much-needed perspective on the struggles people face who were not fortunate enough to be born into such an “oppressive” place as America.

Lastly, I have focused mostly on academia and education because this is the sector I know best, but I strongly urge everyone, from all walks of life, to embrace your sense of humor (a quality that is conspicuously absent in woke culture). Wokeness should continue to relentlessly mocked and parodied through meme culture (Andrew Doyle’s Titania McGrath is a great example). Just as important: Be courageous. Stand up for the beliefs that have made America a great country. If you hear people treating others as members of groups, articulate the importance of treating people as individuals. As Jordan Peterson put it, “The smallest minority is the individual.” If you encounter people treating others badly because of their gender or skin color, say that this behavior is morally wrong. If you see people attempting to “cancel” others, articulate why this is a terrible way to treat others. If you witness attacks on freedom of speech and advocacy of censorship, or if you meet people who are in favor of “hate speech” laws, or laws to combat “misinformation” (a code word for non-leftist ideas), articulate why freedom of speech is an absolutely essential and non-negotiable value. If you hear people discussing why they think socialism is great, take a stand for free markets and the prosperity they have produced. If you hear people calling for retributive justice and political violence, push against it and discuss why violence is never acceptable. If you encounter attacks on meritocracy, make a case for why merit is essential to the advancement of individuals and societies. I think a lot of liberals, like me, generally, if not naively, assumed that the liberal values underpinning America would simply continue throughout our lives, but these values are under attack and they need to be vigorously and unapologetically defended. Our civilization is at stake and the hour is late.

RTWT.

Nashville Christmas Bombing 'RV' Photo

At the Metro Nashville Police Department.

And at Memeorandum, "Exclusive: Nashville explosion witness remembers chilling warning from the RV: ‘A bomb is in this vehicle’."

Christmas Women

At Drunken Stepfather, "STEPLINKS OF THE DAY."

Also, at the Other McCain, "Super Hot: Christmas Naked Rule 5!"

'Die Hard' is Definitely a Christmas Movie

At the Other McCain, where the inimitable Robert Stacy McCain regales us with Merry Christmas Eve movie-aficionado insights. 

See, "‘Happy Trails, Hans’: What Is Everybody’s Favorite Christmas Movie Really About?"

Jennifer Delacruz's Christmas Forecast

Well, I doubt Ms. Jennifer will be under your tree, but have a Merry Christmas in any case!

At ABC News 10 San Diego:

Claire Lehmann, et al., eds., Panics and Persecutions

At Amazon, Claire Lehmann et al., eds., Panics and Persecutions: 20 Quillette Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age.