The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. Remember, they were the ones who characterized constitutional disputes as culture wars (see Justice Scalia in Romer v. Evans, and the Wikipedia entry for culture wars, which describes conservative activists, not liberals, using the term.)Professor Tushnet doesn't bother to put in links. I found the Wikipedia entry for "culture wars," and it traced the term to "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America" by the sociologist James Davison Hunter. That was published in 1991, 5 years before Scalia, in Romer, wrote of the "Kulturkampf" ("culture war").
Does the war metaphor matter? Is there some idea that whoever called it a "war" first is — after the war ends — properly treated like a conquered enemy?
Tushnet continues:
And they had opportunities to reach a cease fire, but rejected them in favor of a scorched earth policy. The earth that was scorched, though, was their own. (No conservatives demonstrated any interest in trading off recognition of LGBT rights for “religious liberty” protections. Only now that they’ve lost the battle over LGBT rights, have they made those protections central – seeing them, I suppose, as a new front in the culture wars. But, again, they’ve already lost the war.). For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.Tushnet is getting flak for that Germany-and-Japan reference:
Well, that certainly provoked people (or rather, one parenthetical comment did). Does "taking a hard line" mean, as (you can't understand how hard it is to avoid snark here) various online sources put it (Google "tushnet nazis" -- I can't figure out who said it first), that I want to treat conservative Christians like Nazis (with war crimes trials, presumably, or legal disqualification from office, or something -- when Godwin's Law kicks in, there's no telling what's being implied).Again, Tushnet won't provide links, but I can understand not wanting to boost the websites that are hating on you. But hate begets hate, and leaning into the war metaphor has consequences. I remember blogging — the day after the Court decided Obergefell — that it was a time for love and saying "Better get on the love train, people, before it's too late!... You can stand there on the platform and stomp your feet as it leaves without you, but now would be a good time to get on board and show some love." I know some religious people can't do that, but politicians had a chance and a choice to make, and those who chose to keep fighting have provoked the winning side to ask how do they get hold of their victory and to wonder how they would have been treated if they had lost.
And by the way, it seems to me that after what Germany and Japan did in WWII, the way we treated them was extraordinarily benevolent.
ANYWAY: Tushnet declines to say what he means by "hard line" other than that it "will vary with the circumstances" and that he opposes the kind of "religious liberty" laws that I think, ironically, Justice Scalia himself would have opposed.
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219 comments:
1 – 200 of 219 Newer› Newest»The difference in the way progressives threat Christians and Muslims is breathtaking.
It's almost like they despise civilized people, and sympathize with a group more the more uncivilized it is.
Like Daniel Greenfield said in an article a while back, the left assigns value to its victim groups based on how disruptive they are to society. It is a very reliable metric. This is why Native Americans are at the bottom of the left's victim list although they should be quite high. They aren't disruptive.
Treat, not threat. Boo spellcheck.
The Liberals and Leftist activists kept talking about reasonable accommodation and "no slippery slope" until they got everybody onto the slope.
My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all.
Marriage is a bond between a man and a woman had no normative pull at all?
Human beings with penises use the mens' room has no normative pull at all?
Really?
The nice thing to keep in mind is that the side that loses the culture war always has the option of starting a real war.
The side with the anthropology degrees should definitely make life utterly unbearable for the side that overwhelmingly does the dangerous and violent jobs in our society. Who do I have to pay off to ensure that the progressives get this ball rolling just a little bit faster?
But the war’s over, and we won.
No - the "court of public opinion" battle has been won, but that was inevitable. Only nuanced arguments could've won that battle and nuanced arguments don't win anything, ever.
But the real war's just getting started.
"And by the way, it seems to me that after what Germany and Japan did in WWII, the way we treated them was extraordinarily benevolent."
That was my thought too--because of the Cold War, as well as the fact that the enemy had been so completely vanquished, we determined it made more sense to help them get back on their feet and only punish those who were found guilty of war crimes after a trial.
As for the Civil War, news for Prof. Tushnet--we tried the Reconstruction approach, and found keeping a standing army in place to fight off low-level violence for a decade was more than we could stomach. What should we have done instead--daily hangings, confiscation of property and a cleansing of white people from the South?
It's also perverse to treat your "culture war" opponents like an "enemy"--and a great way to lose your own allies who may see it more as an honest disagreement. I'm probably more to the left on a lot of those culture war issues, but I find the sneering "we won, you lost" attitude disgusting and makes me less likely to want to associate with my "allies".
"Marriage is a bond between a man and a woman had no normative pull at all?"
He said "liberals regard[ed that] as having no normative pull at all." It's a matter of orientation. If you are a liberal, you just feel no attraction to that. Try to understand that the pull you feel is your orientation and not everyone feels that way.
"Who do I have to pay off to ensure that the progressives get this ball rolling just a little bit faster?"
A contribution to Hillary! wouldn't hurt.
I'm on the love train now Althouse.
Love Trumps Hate.
And since the culture wars are over and you've won, as I keep hearing, why not lay down your arms and stop fighting?
The idea that the war metaphor is carried out so far is sad.
No conservatives demonstrated any interest in trading off recognition of LGBT rights for “religious liberty” protections.
How exactly would he have suggested that such a "trade-off" be structured and enforced? It's not as if there is a contractual agreement to be made that can be enforced in a court down the line. It's incredibly disingenuous to suggest that that is possible, or that such protections are not already in our constitutional and other legal protections without needing to trade anything for them. (And I say that as someone who was vocally in favor of gay marriage long before it became trendy.)
Those 6 points have done more to lead me to revisit my Nevertrump stance more than anything else.
The gays are much nicer and more benevolent than the right wing Christians and Republicans ever were.
"The difference in the way progressives threat Christians and Muslims is breathtaking."
Well, one group they genuinely fear while at the same time consider them participants in their "victim Olympics". The other group fits nicely into a group they can feel no guilt about hating (after all, Christians are the oppressors in that same Olympics) and no fear of real retaliation. What are Christians going to do, forgive them???
"But the real war's just getting started."
If that's what you are threatening, why should liberals stand down. It makes taking that "hard line" on you even more appealing. I would prefer for everyone to behave kindly toward one another, but you are revealing that you would be hardcore if you won, so I think that those who won do need to be vigilant about their victory and to step up and claim it.
After Obergefell, asking people to get on the love train was like asking them not to strip and finish off the wounded after Agincourt.
However, the long-term consequences of such absolutist, triumphalist behavior, are that if the situation ever reverses (and somehow it always does), you are toast.
Why I like governments of laws, not men.
To the extent that the Left has won the culture wars, they have made the United States less of a republic and more of an oligarchy.
"Marriage is a bond between a man and a woman had no normative pull at all?".....
"If you are a liberal, you just feel no attraction to that."
***********
So, you claim to speak for all liberals, eh....
The "war" isn't over.
There is front after front after front forever into forever.
Because it isn't really a culture war, it is a tribal/class war.
Culture is a front, a set of banners, a set of fortified positions covering critical assets, like women and children.
One side or the other will challenge areas of the other that are hard-coded for identity or survival, usually the same things.
The nature of this war at this point makes me wonder if the whole thing shouldn't be an actual war, in the good old violent way. It was cleaner then.
Awesome. He focuses on selective exclusion enacted by liberals to favor transgender homosexual and transgender/crossover rights. Then again, "good Americans" seem unbelievably tolerant and even supportive of the "final solution" in order to progress the feminists' dysfunctional revolution, and renting women's bodies and redistributing men's sperm in order to normalize transgender/homosexual behavior and compensate for unwanted outcomes (e.g. evolutionary, social dysfunction) of feminism.
The rest of his post argues that one shouldn't compromise in advance. Yet, he criticizes the other side for not caring about religious liberty until after they lost. Pot meet kettle.
"If that's what you are threatening, why should liberals stand down. "
Because liberals cant win this one. They are unable to fight that way, it isn't in their nature or skill set.
Surrender completely, Althouse explained.
Oh and it's interesting that the other thing Tank asked,
"Human beings with penises use the mens' room has no normative pull at all?"
....was given a good leaving alone by the Lady Perfesser.
Why?
The time Germany got the hard-line treatment was after 1918, not after 1945. That went well.
Tushnet seems to think that the culture wars are over. They aren't. They never will be. Liberals have too much fun inventing new culture wars and fighting them.
Glad Tushnet published this. What an idiot. Now the whole country knows what HRC will do if she wins. Payback. Repression. Investigations. Lawsuits. Crushing dissent.
And the best thing here is that he has completely unmasked the idea of a neutral federal judiciary for the Dems. The judiciary is another political branch for the Left.
And I hope Kennedy sees this. Tony, they used you. Now do the Walk of Shame at HRC's SOTU.
This, along with everything else that's going on, indicates to me that things are probably going to get a lot worse in this country before they get better. This country has become more and more polarized, and now we have people declaring cultural war. Anger is the order of the day. The next few years are going to miserable.
This is the same mistake that conservatives made at the turn of the century thinking that the political-economic war had ended and that democratic capitalism (for lack of a better term) had won. "The era of big government is over." Calling these societal debates "wars" creates the false assumption that they have beginnings and ends. They do not.
No liberals or "moderates" seem interested in reconciling moral and natural imperatives. It remains to be seen how long people will tolerate the State-established pro-choice religion (i.e. "church"). The political upheaval is evidence that people do not support class diversity schemes (i.e. racism, sexism), selective exclusion ("="), abortion rites (or planned parenthood), anti-native policies (e.g. refugee crises, mass emigration), redistributive change (i.e. monopolies, devaluation of capital and labor), predator protection (e.g. transgender privileges), etc.
What Big Mike said at 1:08.
"The looser in the culture wars"
Uh,that'd be pretty much everybody, it's just that most of them haven't figured it out yet.
I see Tushnet is getting fitted out for his face-stampin' boots. Make sure they're durable - remember, they need to last forever!
The problem with his logic is there is a thing called the Constitution that explicitly requires Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech. If the "hard line" violates those freedoms, that essentially nullifies the Constitution. This not only makes all the victories of the Supreme Court essentially moot since those victories rely on the Constitution as the basis, it leaves open the question of why the losers should respect the winners victories or, for that matter, the government. The Constitution was designed to allow disputes to be settled in a way that was deemed fair so even the losers could respect the process even if they did not like the result, and it was designed to make some things always off limits so everyone knew what the worst case scenario was. Without the Constitution we are back to the good ole days of might makes right. Mr. Tushnet should be well warned that there is a higher authority than the Supreme Court and its concept of opening arguments involve gunfire. You do not want that. Even if you win you will lose.
But, hey, tolerance and diversity or something.
The more critical point is that the concessions, the "victories" are over matters, and through methods, that are fundamentally destructive of both survival characteristics and social capital, both of the victors and the vanquished.
The "victory" leads to unsocialized children, untrained in useful (to others) skills, both practical and social. I have seen this directly. There is no repair possible here, as we know from 50 years of attempted education "reform".
It also leads to long term infertility, and lifelong futility. Those most socialized in the modern ways are the least likely of all to breed. Gays and transgenders are non-reproducing to any significant degree, and a population with large numbers of either, as desired by the "victors", who would like all to be thus. Or even of "liberated" women.
Such a population will die out in short order. I see this here, now in highly advanced San Francisco. They don't breed, and die childless. There is no-one after them.
"And since the culture wars are over and you've won, as I keep hearing, why not lay down your arms and stop fighting?"
Because the losing side insists on continuing to fight.
As we learned in Iraq, the war isn't over unless the victory is defended.
"The time Germany got the hard-line treatment was after 1918, not after 1945. That went well."
As I recall, the Germans decided they were in the wrong all along and despite having their own economy wrecked and losing millions of their people, their monarchy, all their colonies and a lot of their land, they were more than happy to pay reparations. Sort of like how cultural conservatives will happily accept defeat and move on with their lives, content to accept that they are bigots and morons for believing things that the "right" people think are wrong.
"The problem with his logic is there is a thing called the Constitution that explicitly requires Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech."
This isn't much of an obstacle. The constitution, as we have seen demonstrated over and over, is a matter of 5/4 on any given matter on any given day.
He ends his post with this: Of course all bets are off if Donald Trump becomes President.
Seriously, that should be an inkind donation to the Trump campaign. If there was anything to get the National Review and small government conservatives on board that post might do it.
Yes, as a political matter, the anti-gay-rights side should completely surrender. If it doesn't, the pro-gay-rights side has to be vigilant about its victory.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
I have had occasion in my life to tell a liberal person that what they believe, what they feel in their soul to be the truth, what their world revolves around, has no effect upon my own self, my actions, my thoughts, my beliefs, my politics, my spoken words, or any other aspect of reality outside their own heads, and that they need to find a way to demonstrate that their beliefs conform to reality. Usually I've had to state this when they begin othering and demonizing and dehumanizing and delegitimizing me, often in quite casual conversations. I point out that the Scientific Method, the falsification of the Null Hypothesis, Occam's Razor, and other simple tools are much more reliable methods of understanding the truth of things, and that if they can't use such tools they are simply members of a cult.
When I have had to resort to this apparently exceptionally rude behavior to stop an onslaught of doubleplusungood declarations from that liberal, they can't seem to understand that other individuals may differ from themselves, and denunciations pour forth upon me, which I treat as water flowing off a duck's back. And they usually can't tell me how they determine truth from falsehood. Usually I smile, laugh, and finish with a "No, thank you!" or "Good luck with that!" in a polite tone of voice, and exit the experience.
It is a sad, yet a strangely fun, thing to do.
That's brave talk for a one-eyed fat man.
Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.)
Wow, amazing words to come out of the mouth of a Harvard law professor! Yet again, another example of Harvard lawyers being complete assholes.
It would behoove any lefty who thinks it's time for a "real" culture war to start looking at election maps, especially by county. When one looks at such maps, you discover an amazing fact: There are no blue states (except Massachusetts). There are only blue cities. The non-urban areas basically everywhere, go red or purple. It's not like the US Civil War where "those folks way down there" are up to no good & they can be somehow geographically quarantined. The divisions are there, in every state.
While we're on the subject of violence, I'd also like to remind Prof Tushnet of who owns the guns in this country. The liberal fantasy that the police & armed forces will stand with them in the culture wars are just that --- fantasy! You know what about 60+% of the enlisted men in the Armed Forces call Bible thumpers? Mom & Pop.
The politics of Final Solutions. The goal is to remove minds from human bodies. A bullet works fast or a sharp sword cut.
LBJ preferred using bullets to remove JFK's mind.
What good do you possibly hope to achieve by continuing to fight against gay people?
It's really very stupid at this point.
I'm not saying it's stupid to follow what you may believe is a religious requirement, but it is stupid to pursue this in the political arena.
Really Althouse? The losing side keeps fighting? That's delusional and I don't use that word lightly.
A Democratic president, post-2016 with a Senate majority (51, not 67 senators), will nominate their version of Roland Freisler to the Supreme Court.
This storm is just breaking loose.
"The gays are much nicer and more benevolent than the right wing Christians and Republicans ever were."
Uuuuhhhhhh. Please read our hostess' comment on where you stand depends on where you sit.
From over here you are REALLY full of shit, and I support gay marriage.
Static Ping:
They excised "Posterity" from The Constitution after receiving religious instruction from gods in the twilight zone. Logically, liberalism is simply a philosophy characterized by variance or deviance from a natural or established norm. It cannot and refuses to reconcile moral and natural imperatives other than through a pro-choice (i.e. selective) religious/moral doctrine.
Who keeps fighting against gay people? And how is it possible to keep the religious requirements out of the political arena at this point? I believe that Steve and Adam moved it to the political arena the moment they decided to sue old lady florist for declining their wedding ceremony.
I say scorch the earth. If we can't live the way we want then neither can they.
That comment works for both sides, although, if the Left thinks they've won then they should want to protect their new territory. I say let's burn the fucker down.
"What good do you possibly hope to achieve by continuing to fight against gay people?"
That the human race may continue, and thrive.
Well, when he cited Wikipedia, he lost me. I thought this was supposed to be an academic.
It's like Facebook's defense of their bias. They said that they only carry stories from "trusted sources" like the New York Times (In the bag for Hillary) and the BBC, (likewise).
The culture wars were not won at the retail level, but declared victorious at the wholesale level -- that's why they continue. They'll be concluded when the retail side is respected in argument and outcome.
Those who think they've legitimately earned victory in the culture wars are only deluding themselves.
n.b., I'd rather not fight culture wars -- as we have more important issues at hand -- but sadly, the culture wars are interested in me.
I'll also note that reality always is the final arbiter of victory. Glorious cultural victories that result in a culture that cannot survive its challenges will die. It is simply a matter of whether the people realize this and change before it is too late, or if they die as true believers. Even if you wipe out all your enemies, defeat always looms. This is a historical fact that is ignored at one's peril.
Professor Althouse: ""And since the culture wars are over and you've won, as I keep hearing, why not lay down your arms and stop fighting?"
Because the losing side insists on continuing to fight.
As we learned in Iraq, the war isn't over unless the victory is defended."
Really? Seems simplistic. There are different kinds of victories. Example: how the Soviets handled East Germany, how the US handled West Germany. Ditto North and South Korea.
If (as I believe) the militant gay community used Obergefell as a basis to attack every last outpost of differing belief, it was a scorched-earth strategy for very high stakes. Because cessation of shelling on the battlefield is a long way from shaking hands in the village street, and that middle zone of interaction is where the long peace is won or lost. When the gays decided it was a good idea to persecute hapless small businesses over wedding cakes and floral arrangements, is when they totally lost the likes of me.
It comes down to a strategic discipline, a sense of proportion, and common decency.
And this is why I constantly criticize Althouse's support of an over-large federal government. She is not serious about federalism, her protestations notwithstanding.
Her goals require such a Leviathan.
The gays are much nicer and more benevolent than the right wing Christians and Republicans ever were."
Growing up as a precocious Lefty in northern Alabama, I had the opportunity to interact with lots of right wing Christians and Republicans in not always friendly political discussions.
In my move from the far Left to the middle Left to Conservatism in the very blue DC area, & having interactions with many left-liberals, gays, & gay liberals along the way, I can tell you one thing: they aren't nicer. Not at all. Matter of fact, they're downright mean when crossed, & unlike the Christians, you can't hold them to any Divine injunctions to forgiveness & "love thy neighbor as thyself".
Ann Althouse said...
"Marriage is a bond between a man and a woman had no normative pull at all?"
He said "liberals regard[ed that] as having no normative pull at all." It's a matter of orientation. If you are a liberal, you just feel no attraction to that. Try to understand that the pull you feel is your orientation and not everyone feels that way.
What is your point? Liberals could not see that "Marriage is a bond between a man and a woman" had any normative pull? Are they ignorant of everything that happened more than two years ago? This is fact, not Tank's orientation.
Like the proverbial French rooster, always crowing too early and up to his knees in shit.
What he is trying to say is: "Once we snuff the Enlightenment, and make sure that people are only free to discuss approved ideas, where do we go with out new power?"
My guess is straight to the same kinds of Hell on Earth that these same kinds of people produced in the Soviet Union and Red China.
"n.b., I'd rather not fight culture wars -- as we have more important issues at hand -- but sadly, the culture wars are interested in me."
As Instapundit says over and over - culture is upstream of politics - and economics.
If you want politics and economics according to your preferences, win the culture war.
Everybody cuddles on the couch for an evening in when Brokeback Mountain comes on The Romance Channel. That's from its normative pull.
Althouse equates Americans who are religious with Iraqis who are religious.
IEDs a big problem in Madison, Althouse?
Ann Althouse said...
If that's what you are threatening, why should liberals stand down. It makes taking that "hard line" on you even more appealing. I would prefer for everyone to behave kindly toward one another, but you are revealing that you would be hardcore if you won, so I think that those who won do need to be vigilant about their victory and to step up and claim it.
It's not what I'm threatening - I'm way too lazy to fight a culture war - it's reality. This is going to play out in the courtrooms for a long time to come. The idea that winning in the court of public opinion seals the deal is naive. People who want to be nice to the transgendered, for instance, by insuring they can pee in whatever restroom they prefer, ultimately have to have that desire validated by the courts in order to insure that no trans individual, anywhere in our great nation, ever has to suffer the shame and degradation of peeing in the public restroom that corresponds to their biological gender. Then, when the courts say "transgendered people have a constitutionally protected right to make where they please" or whatever idiotic thing the courts say, victory will be declared again. But then we'll immediately be back to the courts to define "transgendered," and to decide how to determine whether somebody is actually transgendered or just pretending. And since being transgendered is entirely based on what a person says they feel, the question can't ever be answered. So it'll never stop. The lawyers will get richer, the ninnies will scream "bigot!" and the rest of us will be much, much dumber for having had to witness it all.
Or to put it another way: The pro-chocie side "won" in 1973. So why is everybody still fighting?
Althouse said: Yes, as a political matter, the anti-gay-rights side should completely surrender.
How are you defining complete surrender in this context? Does it mean stop trying to mount legal obstacles to overturn Ogberfell (sp?) or attempting legislation that would be contrary to it? If so, I would agree and it seems like this has nearly happened, though that decision is still less than a year old.
If it means, however, not resist being personally involved in gay weddings if you have personal objections (note - I do not have such objections personally), not seek to protect the religious or speech freedoms of people who disagree, not object to gays cruising for sex in public bathrooms (there was an article on Slate earlier this week calling this homophobic), not object to people of the opposite biological sex in your child's locker room, etc., this is a big problem, IMO. There's always somewhere else it can be taken, always a slippery slope. There's no end to what you would be surrendering in that context.
"And since the culture wars are over and you've won, as I keep hearing, why not lay down your arms and stop fighting?"
Althouse : "Because the losing side insists on continuing to fight.
As we learned in Iraq, the war isn't over unless the victory is defended."
Victor Davis Hanson says a war is over when one side knows it is defeated. He is an expert on war.
Since they have won the culture wars, I am sure that from now on, they will be happy to put these issues up for votes!
I'm caving on not voting for Trump due to cunts like him.
And like many victorious armies, the Left is prone to overreach and downfall. It's one thing to argue that if gay people want to marry each other, that's their business. It's quite another to say private individuals have to support this regardless of their personal beliefs.
And what about other fronts on the culture wars? Are we leaving out the campus speech codes, safe spaces, and chronic illiberalism of the anti-free speech movement? Because that war is far from over, and judging from the split on the Left I'd say their victory is in doubt.
So since they are afraid of elections, they are simply admitting, the way Althouse has in so many words, that they have usurped the institutions from the electorate! Love Wins!
It's turtles all they way down, and they have grabbed the court and planted the flag in their turtle. "Below this turtle, there are no more turtles, and woe betide he who looks under it!"
Noam seems quite happy in:
Noam Chomksy: America is an empire in decline
"I'm caving on not voting for Trump due to cunts like him."
To each his own, but the amount of influence on my own opinions or decisions that I would grant to someone like Tushnet is precisely zero.
"The pro-choice side "won" in 1973. So why is everybody still fighting?"
Because of this - victory isn't victory just because someone says it is -
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/american-abortion-rate-decline/395960/
If Trump is the super genius Adams says he is, he paid this guy to write this.
Unless transgender/homosexual and transgender/crossover orientations represent a progressive condition, there are two actual threats to human civilization: denigrating individual dignity (e.g. [class] diversity) and debasing human life (e.g. abortion rites/reactive parenthood, clinical cannibalism/planned parenthood).
The actual concern with transgender privileges is predator protection, progressive/perpetual confusion (i.e. indoctrination), degrading women and men with rented bodies and commercial sperm sales, etc.
I wonder what came first, the feminists' dysfunctional revolution, or the quasi-normalization of transgender behaviors. It seems likely feminists are hiding their misdeeds behind the transgender and other causes, who are hiding behind a pro-choice religious establishment.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Strangely enough, it's also the price of tyranny.
Tushnet speaks for a lot of people. He does not exists in a vacuum. It's like the Rodney King first trial. "Was this particular blow excessive?" asked 100+ times. Who could say which was the exact blow that was excessive. But still King ended up beaten to a bloody pulp.
#LoveImposesACarthaginianPeace!
As Clausewitz almost said, you should always look for a way to make your enemy your bitch.
"The pro-choice side "won" in 1973. So why is everybody still fighting?"
It never won hearts and minds, just in the field of law. Which can change just like that.
Interestingly, before Roe the dividing lines on abortion were a lot more muddled--a lot of conservatives were pro-choice, and liberals (particularly ethnics) were pro-life. It was the rise of the women's movement that made "pro-choice" a more solidly liberal thing, and the association of conservatives with Christian groups that made pro-life more conservative.
Guy named Don Bacon running for the House in Omaha. His TV ads tout him as a pro-life conservative.
I voted today. Roe v Wade wasn't on the ballot.
I know some religious people can't do that, but politicians had a chance and a choice to make, and those who chose to keep fighting have provoked the winning side to ask how do they get hold of their victory and to wonder how they would have been treated if they had lost.
Last I checked, we lived in a democracy where politicians represented people. It seems like more and more we keep hearing people resentful that there are people in a fucking democracy, after all, that are willing to represent "losers."
theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/american-abortion-rate-decline
The same thing happened after the leftists aborted several million Jews, Chinese, Russians, South Africans and other unwanted and inconvenient individuals. However, human babies are a renewable resource. The abortion fields can theoretically continue indefinitely.
That was published in 1991, 5 years before Scalia
Google ngram shows a first occurrence in 1893, a couple of blips in 1927 & 1935, then the fad taking off in about 1990.
Three threats: denigrating individual dignity, debasing human life, and catastrophic economic misalignments historically caused through government manipulation of capitalist economies.
As long as the left seeks its victories through the court, they are never going to be secure. Live with it Althouse,
Going beyond matters of mere survival, or of salvation, if you are religious - as a matter of pure politics -
The "gay", and now transgender, side is intimately connected with the socialist-corporatist nomenklatura. Thats why the courts and the media approve of them. Their issues are one of a solidly unified web of issues that defines what is in effect a tribal group. The result is, for instance, if one approves of "gay' issues, the pension fund chicanery I have found in earlier posts (and any number of other things the nomenklatura is up to), are positive, progressive policies, or at least necessary evils. This web cannot be broken, history doesn't have a good lesson here.
One can complain, and kick back on occasion, but its futile. The truth is all of us are in one tribe or the other, for better or worse, in sickness and in health.
Gay rights in the form of securing benefits is not about liberty, its about imposing burdens on others to your benefit. How that got to be "liberty" in a law professor's mind tells you everything we need to know why people don't give a shit if Trump burns it all down.
Somebody at Ace of Spades had a great quote:
"If you think this is about bathrooms, you're missing their point. Every knee must be made to bend - it's not about the knee, it's not about the bending, it's always about the making"
These fascists don't give a shit what they make us do, just that they have the power to make us do something. Why can't the Left live and let live?
Odd, I don't recall ever being offered a truce, or a middle ground on the gay marriage thing, or the abortion thing, or the health care thing.
The next front will be churches. Obviously, the Catholic Church is discriminating against gays by not marrying them. We can't allow that.
"But the Constitution," someone objects.
The Constitution.
Fernandinande:
So the phrase pops up when progressives are ascendant. And recently they are VERY ascendant.
The last couple times we got a global depression and a world war. I am laying odds for a repeat of history.
Forgive me while I expound a theory. Gays like drama.
Here: winning Obergefell meant, in my view, that the gays had won their big victory. A smart strategy would be to consolidate the victory by showing magnanimity to the vanquished, and deploying a gradualist policy that secured the gains without antagonizing the losers.
But in fact it became an excuse for a dance in the end zone, complete with curb-stomping of those nasty Christians who were too stupid and hateful to accept the full gay program. It was not enough to grant the winners "civil unions," which gave them at law all that they claimed. It had to be "marriage," a word long understood to be a bond between man and woman, and now to be "appropriated" (may I say so?) for new and better purposes, and to hell with those who objected.
Throw in some mediagenic lawsuits and demonstrations over the Horror! of random hapless disagreement by florists and bakers. Every last damned detail of civic engagement had to be immediately and absolutely conceded.
Which gets to my point. The gay (and indeed the whole Dem Victim) community is very much bound to, skilled in, dramatic technique and staging. The oppositions; the lonely hero and the overbearing tyrant; the moral simplifications and the breathtaking musical score. With a terrific victory in the third reel.
Seriously. Finding the real intellectual core and moral structure of their arguments requires that you first dig away the poisonous overburden of emotion on which they depend.
This is not "wrong," it is just how they operate. Plan accordingly.
Rae:
The middle ground was offered as civil unions. It was rejected by the Leftists.
My wife was actually sort of shocked into a little bit of sense when I mansplained to her that the laws were not about keeping transgenders out of bathrooms, it was about keeping potential rapists (who are not transgendered but other men) out of bathrooms. the idea that a man who was not transgendered would want to use a women's room as a venue for rape never fucking occured to her because she had been so thoroughly sucked into their rarrative. Later she tried to explain this comment to other friends and they just laughed at here and couldn't figure out what she was saying.
These people are our future.
Colonizers will be colonial. Always telling the natives how backwards they are.
First they did it with religion, now sexuality, next... we'll see.
I'm not saying it's stupid to follow what you may believe is a religious requirement, but it is stupid to pursue this in the political arena.
Why?
Because politics is being used to violate their religious beliefs, often in petty and cruel ways that show bad faith?
Because the "hard liners" are already lining up to prevent dissenters from employment with explicit religious tests that they only apply to people they don't like? And that this is already being implemented on college campuses?
Because generally 5/4 decisions by un-elected people is not how laws are typically decided in a healthy democratic republic? Nor for that matter are they decided by fiat by un-elected bureaucrats?
Because they truly believe that if not reversed the country is doomed and would very much want to avoid that?
Because they truly believe that the victors would very much love to send them to the camps and trying a political solution is preferable to violating their heartfelt beliefs or shooting people?
Your position is not a serious one.
"It's almost like they despise civilized people"
They despise their parents and anyone like them. That's why there's no consistency. It's not about what they are for but who they are against, as long as its a slap in the face of the people they don't like.
If you *are* trans, you can get your birth certificate changed in NC and use whichever gender is on the new birth certificate. And yes, as Ted Cruz said - the issue isn't about trans people at all, it's that predators will take advantage of the Charlotte ordinance, which is why the NC State legislature passed HB2.
It truly isn't about anything but forcing somebody else to obey. The NC governor actually wins the backbone award for the week.
Tushnet declines to say what he means by "hard line"
He means the same things they've been doing for decades: discriminating against people with different political ideas, and teaching students (and others) to hate them. Since they've been doing this for decades already the blatantly self serving excuse "they chose this even after we won" is revealed as a lie.
Non-leftists, even apolitical centrists, need to note this and start discriminating against left wingers in turn. Without intervention soon every space including private business will be as infected as the toxic campus is now. There will be two differences however: non-leftists will not have tenure and the left wing vindictiveness has no limit.
This is why it is important to label these ignorant hillbillies as being ignorant hillbillies. We have to make then understand that they will be marginalized and ostracized as long as they respond to that part of the Republican Party (currently the dominate wing) that do these dog whistler appeals.
To each his own, but the amount of influence on my own opinions or decisions that I would grant to someone like Tushnet is precisely zero.
I want a press that isn't utterly snowed by a hack like Ben Rhodes. If Hillary is elected, that simply will not change.
I want the President to have his powers questioned heavily. If Hillary wins, that is not going to happen.
Trump is an abysmal candidate. He's a clown and a buffoon.
But he will force our institutions to actually do something.
Assuming they can. As has been pointed out, journalism is effectively dead as they hire young morons who think they're brilliant.
Because the losing side insists on continuing to fight. As we learned in Iraq, the war isn't over unless the victory is defended
No, the WINNING side (in this case, the secular left), are the ones insisting on continuing to fight. Once the gay marriage thing was settled, the same people fighting insisted on starting a new battle over unisex bathrooms. North Carolina is just playing defense.
Your perception, in this case, is the complete opposite of reality.
Hard for me as a non-lawyer to get interested in this. However it did illustrate one important point: It is critical to defeat Hillary to avoid appointing judges who think "liberal thought' is more important than the law.
A lot of misleading statements floating around in these comments, not least from the professor herself. Is it really the conservatives who insist on continuing the culture war? Because from where I sit, those bakers and photographers aren't the ones going out of their ways to tell gay marriage clients they won't serve them. It's the gay clients who insist on making a point, instead of going down the street to someone else. So if they get pushback, that's on them, not on the bakers. So I call BS on the idea that the right is perpetuating the culture war. The only way that's true is if you assume that the right should absolutely and utterly capitulate to whatever the SJWs demand today. Hogwash.
The other falsehood is that the right made no attempt at compromise before the SCOTUS decision. Utah, about as red a state as you could possibly have, passed a law respecting religious freedom and gay union before the decision was handed down.
That the SJWs immediately moved on to the idea of letting 0.00001% of the population use a different bathroom if we don't want to be Jim Crow again tells you all you need to know about who's driving these wars.
And, professor, something to consider.
A lot of people don't like gay marriage. Some of them are uneducated. Many of them are armed. A lot of them feel extremely alienated from modern American society.
If you won't take their views seriously, they will seek less legitimate means of having their grievances aired.
The GOP, sadly, went to Trump.
Imagine what angry, armed men who vastly outnumber their perceived foes might do.
Ann Althouse said...
Because the losing side insists on continuing to fight.
Of course this is 100% false. It's because the winning side moved the goalposts demanding even more. And should the losing side give in again the winning side will invent a new issue.
"I'm not saying it's stupid to follow what you may believe is a religious requirement, but it is stupid to pursue this in the political arena."
This is an extraordinary statement from our host. I think you need to clarify this.
Where should we pursue this, other than in the political arena? Do we not have a right to pursue this in the political arena? Or do you just not *want* us to pursue this, our rights be damned?
Do you not think we feel about this as strongly as you do? Would you have stopped pursuing this if the political winds were blowing in the other direction?
And yes, there are arenas other than the political to pursue this, but we're not *quite* there yet. The breakup won't be about gay rights, but it may very well be about freedom of religion.
Proud of allies like once,Althouse?
civil unions. It was rejected by the Leftists
The Leftists support "=" or selective exclusion a la reactive and planned parenthood, [class] diversity, progressive wars, impulsive regime changes, etc. However, there is evidence that people are progressively suspicious of their selective or variable principles. Liberals have a pro-choice religious problem.
Yes, as a political matter, the anti-gay-rights side should completely surrender. If it doesn't, the pro-gay-rights side has to be vigilant about its victory. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Ahh, the old right side of history thing again. In case you haven't noticed (and you haven't), we're all accepting gay marriage, whether we like it or not. Those of us on the right are quite accepting of the law. In other words, we already have completely surrendered, for the most part. And please don't cherry-pick a couple of media-frenzied examples of the opposite, because they're remote instances at best.
That aside, it is YOUR side that's picking the fight about unisex bathrooms, NOT ours. So please, take credit for continuing the fight, and stop with blaming conservatives for what your side wrought.
It's infuriating to me that someone with an obviously high level of intelligence can believe something so inherently incorrect just because it fits her worldview.
Oh ok. So violence, then. Killing? Killing, I guess. Ok.
Me personally, I'm not going to get violent over most of the stuff you Lefty idiots apparently care so very much about. I don't own a business so you can't take that away from me. If you want to attack families and pass rules that endanger and harm children, you know, I'm not a fan but personally it won't harm me--my nephew's the closest child to me and he's getting old enough that he can handle most of the dangers you guys are all too happy to put him in under the cover of "tolerance." Others will suffer, but I'm coming around to the idea of disassociation. You won, it's your country. Good luck with it. My voice doesn't matter, my concerns don't matter, my views don't matter, I get it. Oh, you still want/demand my money, of course, and I'll still pay whatever taxes I'm forced to, but not a penny more.
Now when you finally decide you'll come take my firearms...violence. Tushnet and his kind don't worry about their personal safety (it'll the the cops and soldiers they'll expect to get hurt enforcing their laws), but if there's any justice in the world people right now are listening and will remember that people like him who kicked things off.
It's a good thing that love won.
Your perception, in this case, is the complete opposite of reality.
I'm pretty sure she's trolling, rallying support for Trump. That's really the only explanation for being so completely wrong about this.
Blogger Ann Althouse said...
"And since the culture wars are over and you've won, as I keep hearing, why not lay down your arms and stop fighting?"
Because the losing side insists on continuing to fight.
As we learned in Iraq, the war isn't over unless the victory is defended.
You're confusing battles for wars.
The battle was won, the war rages on. As you may have noticed, we decisively won the battle and many battles, in Iraq. Ultimately, we lost the war. Why? Because we surrendered and quit the field, thanks to Obama.
So, this is the lesson learned. Keep declaring victory as Obama did. Please. Because I want to win.
I'm gay, Althouse. Stop speaking for me, as if you're my bloody surrogate.
What the Hell is it with you lefties that you think you can just stand in and speak for other people? Think you're that much smarter than everyone else, eh?
Well, I'll make it perfectly clear to you. Being gay, conservatives treat me far better than you miserable lot. Why? Because I'm not a leftie. To lefties, that's all that REALLY matters. They don't care what perverted habits you have, up to and including throwing people off buildings for being gay and allowing mass Muslim immigration, full of people who hate gays, as long as they do what the left wants, which is attack Western Christian Culture.
I'm on the other side, Althouse. And you really have no idea how many people hate your progressive, no-fun-zone, zero humor, zero reality, ultra-feelings, totalitarian nonsense. That would include about every other gay I know, by the way. The ones who aren't against you are entirely ambivalent, because the left is no fun to be around. Ever. The left cannot fight. It can only talk. Trump is proving this rather handily.
You're coming out and saying you need to keep oppressing Christians, because otherwise they might think they have any leeway at all to practice their religion.
Practicing religion? Hah! That's for MUSLIMS. Not you Christians. What a joke.
North Carolina wants to accommodate people without shifting the burden of policing and protecting predatory males and females.
Look, we hillbillies are stupid but we learn.
You smart Lefties have a heck of a good time laughing at us and patting yourselves on the back for "winning" and getting to marginalize regressive, backward people you don't like. We hillbillies note that you don't seem to do that with certain groups...equally backward groups...equally fundamentalist groups..."hardline" Muslims, for instance.
Why is that? Much of it is just that your multiculti mush brain won't allow you to criticize foreign mores (and that you instinctively like anything that's opposed to your own white American culture)...but that's not all of it. In the back of your Lefty brains you know the hillbillies won't chop off your heads. You call us Nazis and say we're dangerous, but you don't really believe that. You certainly don't act like you believe it. Muslim head choppers, though, you're afraid of. You leave them alone for the most part, and even when you don't you certainly don't publicly crow about how great it is to force them to comply with your worldview. You're afraid of them.
Having more votes than the Left doesn't matter. Having tradition and valid different POVs doesn't matter--the Left's views are correct, always, as the Media and Academy reminds us daily. Fine. Fear still seems to matter just a bit, though. That's the lesson. Not exactly what you'll learn on Schoolhouse rock, but here we are.
Blogger I Callahan said...
Because the losing side insists on continuing to fight. As we learned in Iraq, the war isn't over unless the victory is defended
No, the WINNING side (in this case, the secular left), are the ones insisting on continuing to fight. Once the gay marriage thing was settled, the same people fighting insisted on starting a new battle over unisex bathrooms. North Carolina is just playing defense.
Your perception, in this case, is the complete opposite of reality.
We keep losing the battles because we don't play like they do.
See how quickly they've moved on from homo sex to perverts in the bathroom? They'll declare this fight over soon enough and move on to NAMBLA.
We should be fighting to re establish States rights. Want to make sodomony illegal? Go for it. We should fight to make States rights more powerful. Want to make abortion illegal? Go for it.
We should stop playing defense and start playing offense. Let them defend federalizing everything.
We have to move the window to the right, we can't hope to hold it steady and merely keep it from moving to the left further and further.
@I Callahan: The beauty of the "right side of history" thing for progressives is that by definition if it didn't succeed, it wasn't progress. So they can disavow all the stuff their forebears supported that was soundly rejected, such as eugenics, Stalinism, etc., and just flush it down the memory hole.
"History to the defeated may say, 'alas," but cannot help nor pardon." Auden wrote the, but then rejected as a filthy lie. He was at the forefront of recognizing that the "right side of history" argument was nonsense. And somehow I, a conservative Christian, can appreciate his poetic genius and insight, despite the fact that I apparently hate him because he was gay. Strange.
What's initially interesting here is how blind the automatic defenders of this piece are to its ugliness. What's that favorite prog word again? "Mean-spirited". Yes, that's it. The tendency toward projection, and lack of self-insight in liberal crusaders has become a wonder to behold.
But more interesting to me is the confident belief that there has been a "victory" here, a consolidation of defensible territory, in the sense that what's going on is a real change in norms in a robustly stable society, now settling back down to a new stable equilibrium after the minor disruptions that attend (inevitable) progress. Remarkable. My dear "liberals", look around you. We are in Clown World, and Clown World is not a stable state.
(See also, buwaya puti, above. Buwaya is one of my faves here, but I often wonder if AA has a clue what he's going on about.)
Georgia leadership did the right thing and stood on separation of the Church and State in bathroom customs that were not a big deal. People in the South after Sherman and colonial status in Reconstruction seldom had bathrooms to fight over until 50 years ago.
But North Carolina had bad leadership that intentionally painted itself into a corner where the State was defending the Church from Sinners who are represented by the Federal Army that won the war.
That was too easy for the Liberals. Do the NC guys want to lose another Lost Cause?
Atlanta may get some big Charlotte events again.
"Stupid to follow this in the political arena."
Yep. Cruel neutrality in a nutshell right there.
Ann Althouse said...Yes, as a political matter, the anti-gay-rights side should completely surrender. If it doesn't, the pro-gay-rights side has to be vigilant about its victory.
What do you not have now that you want, Professor Althouse? What additional things do you want? Be specific. Is this transgender bathroom/lockeroom stuff part of the pro-gay-rights side? I guess it is. Ok, win that, too. Crush NC, force employeers nationwide to accommodate whatever demands people calling themselves transsexual may have, sure, fine. Then what?
What will it fucking take? Point to a society or nation that has what you want so that I can have some idea of when you'll be happy. Sweden? San Francisco? What do you want?
"If that's what you are threatening, why should liberals stand down?"
LOL. If that's what LIBERALS are threatening, why should repubs stand down? But suddenly their attack is suddenly a defensive gesture?
Face it, non-Lefty people, homosexuals and transexuals (and all the rest of the LGBTQI* whatever) are the "backbone of society." You aren't. They matter; you don't.
No conservatives demonstrated any interest in trading off recognition of LGBT rights for “religious liberty” protections.
civil unions? No one suggested those? Naah.
Susan:
She's right. Sort of. Kind of. Maybe. The issue has been improperly framed. Also, pay attention to people's priorities. The lesson is that secular "carrots" are in greater demand than reconciliation of moral and natural imperatives.
HoodlumDoodlum:
All is fair in war... on Christians, men, women, babies, Republicans, science, etc.
Georgia leadership did the right thing and stood on separation of the Church and State in bathroom customs that were not a big deal. People in the South after Sherman and colonial status in Reconstruction seldom had bathrooms to fight over until 50 years ago.
But North Carolina had bad leadership that intentionally painted itself into a corner where the State was defending the Church from Sinners who are represented by the Federal Army that won the war.
NC fought on the feds drastically overstepping their authority. You should be thanking them.
Too many "conservatives" always say "This isn't the hill to die on" without once noting what hill is the one to die on.
The French thought the Maginot Line was the line that would stop the opposition. Guess how much good it did.
The Wehrmacht's strategic objective when it invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 was to destroy the Red Army in a series of encirclement battles. The Germans believed that the destruction of the Red Army in these mighty "kesselschlachten" would inevitably cause the Soviet state to collapse sometime in the autumn of that same year. What the Germans didn't understand is that fighting and winning battles is not a "strategy" in the proper, correct sense of the word. It is an operational plan for achieving one's strategic goals. The Germans were always confused about what war at the strategic and operational levels entailed. Their confusion was largely due to Germany's geographical position as a Mitteleuropan state: they were literally in the middle of the the continent, which resulted in the strategic dilemmma of having to plan and fight wars on two fronts, i.e. on their eastern and western frontiers. Their solution to the problem was to develop a strategy of winning battles: first on one front, then on the other. It was the strategic-level equivalent of defeating one's enemy "in detail" on the battlefield. But this strategy proved to be flawed, fatally so, in both World Wars. Basically it subordinated strategy to operational-level considerations, when in turn subordinated operations to tactics; when fact tactics and operations are meant to serve strategic objectives. This is not a means of achieving strategic victory, it is a plan for winning a lot of battles. But the Germans were too wedded the dogma of the battle of annihilation, which had already failed spectacularly in the Battle of the Marne in 1914, to see this. They were blinded by their dogma. In June-November 1941 the Germans won all the battles. They drove all the way to Moscow. They destroyed immense Red Army formations and killed and captured millions of Red Army soldiers. Yet they did not bring about the collapse of the Soviet state. They did not destroy Soviet morale or the will of the Soviet people to resist. They did not win the war. Why?
Hint: it wasn't the Russian winter that stopped the Germans and it wasn't totalitarian ruthlessness on the part of the Soviet state that kept the Soviet people fighting.
Similarly, in the Vietnam War we won all the battles. ALL of them. But North Vietnam won the war. Why? Consider the response of the NVA Colonel when Col. Harry Summers remarked that we won every single battle against the NVA. "That is true," replied the NVA colonel; "it is also irrelevant."
What does all this have to do with the topic at hand? Just this: "Kulturkampf" should not be translated as "culture war"; it is properly translated as "culture struggle" or "culture battle."
The left is winning, has won, all the battles. But that, I submit, is irrelevant.
I also submit that if you're going to write in terms of a culture "war" in the context of a "we won/you lost" paradigm, you should know what you're talking about.
Anne you had better reign in that "war" stance of your fellow progressives. First the demographics is against you, your group is completely outnumbered by Christians and muslims. Second "war" doesn't befit your group when in physical or manly confrontation, a more feminine world is your group's miilieu. Stick to the cunning, vigilance and verbal which has done you well the past 50 years, because when the fox is confronted by a raging lion all the cunning and words are rendered useless and the fox will whimper and withdraw.
It's obvious this "love" you progressives profess is a charade, lot's of hate coming from Tushnet. Also the progressives hatred for Christiamity has been evident the last 50 years in movies, on campuses and in literature, so stop the phony tolerance ( anti-hate)stance.
Mark Tushnet does not know the first thing about war. The most fundamental truth is that a war is only over when the enemy lacks either the will or means of resistance. Neither of these things are absolutely true, certainly partially true though.
"You lost get over it," the way it lost, namely a loss on technical points against the expressed will of the voters, eats up the design margin in a functioning society, possibly a fatal move.
It works on rules and good will. The latter is needed to make the former matter.
So what we have is no rules and no goodwill, now.
Yes, as a political matter, the anti-gay-rights side should completely surrender. If it doesn't, the pro-gay-rights side has to be vigilant about its victory
Oh, Althouse, you're just looking for an excuse to keep on fighting because it's so much fun. Admit it and get on with your life.
"This is why it is important to label these ignorant hillbillies as being ignorant hillbillies. We have to make then understand that they will be marginalized and ostracized as long as they respond to that part of the Republican Party (currently the dominate wing) that do these dog whistler appeals."
You lefties are hilarious. Since YOU value group identity, you think everyone else does. We already know that, you damned fool. And guess what? We're still here. You have no bullets left in your gun.
How many rhetorical bullets have you fired at Trump, by the way? I'm talking about your side in general. Killed him yet? Are those marginalization rounds working?
""If you *are* trans, you can get your birth certificate changed in NC and use whichever gender is on the new birth certificate."
I don't doubt it's possible to do that, but doing so elevates a lie over truth.
First, birth certificates from even a few decades ago never refernce "gender"; they invariably refer to sex. People used to know the difference, but in our Brave New World there is no difference: and, no, it's not the old, ignorant "gender is sex, but the new ignorant "sex is gender." How do I know? The Justice Dept told me so.
But if you're truly convinced that sex is gender, perhaps birth certificates should be modifyable ex-post-facto to reflect one (or more?) of the dozens of Facebook-recognized gender identity options?
Second, a birth certificate is a birth record, a record of facts as perceived at the time of birth. Unless it is obvious that someone made a mistake, altering them is deeply Orwellian (in that "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." Histories change as new histories are written, yet historians manage to refrain from altering primary documents. The U.S. Constitution has been extensively amended since its initial adoption; must we therefore destroy the original?
Perhaps there will be problems with predators in womens' rooms, or boys in girls' locker rooms, but even beyond that, it is demanded that we admit that what is not so, is so, and that on demand the past must be altered to fit present conceptions of what could have, or should have, or might have happened in the past "Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia"). Or what we see in the present ("Do you still see four fingers Winston, or is it five?").
And then comes Mark Tushnet to say "Well, yes, we won and you lost and that's just what we demand."
Well, if that's the gauntlet that's been thrown down then, no, the wars are not over.
The part that pisses me off is the fact hat if we ever manage to move somewhere else and create a new civilization based on our values, and leave the Left behind...in an incredibly short period of time the Leftists will come to our new civilization and immediately start trying to re-impose all of the shit we left behind.
Because the losing side insists on continuing to fight.
Careful..at one time that described YOUR side, and might again one day.
So, reconciliation of moral and natural imperatives is not the goal. That explains a lot. Everything, really.
Ann Althouse said...What good do you possibly hope to achieve by continuing to fight against gay people?
I never fought against gay people to begin with. My state never had a referendum on gay marriage, but if we had I'd have voted for it. I haven't supported any anti-gay laws and I've been skeptical of laws like GA's "Pastor Protection Act" that allegedly provide protection for people's religious beliefs.
That's not enough, though.
It's not enough because I tolerate the views of people who you characterize as "fighting against gay people." I don't think most of their views are out of bounds. I don't think they should be marginalized, boycotted, shunned, and silenced. I don't think their different POVs are shameful. I don't think they're morally equivalent to Nazis or even to 1950's era segregationists. The Left does. The Left says that ChicFil-a is out of bounds. the Left says that an $800 dollar donation to the wrong side of a ballot initiative years ago is enough to make you an enemy of the people and get you fired. That's what it takes.
That's your side, Professor. That's Tushnet's side. Scalia's dead, so now you can all stop pretending to give a shit about what others might think, right? You won! You're free to grind your opponents into dust while you simultaneously call your opponents bullies.
Why do your law students think a centrist like yourself is some kind of serious conservative? You don't treat all conservative legal material with utter contempt. That's enough to make you an outlier--a strange case. Apply that example to the nation as a whole. Tushnet's saying that the Media and culture generally should be more like your colleagues and treat non-Left ideas with contempt. You're apparently on board (w/r/t pro-gay issues, anyway) and don't see any contradiction in those two different reactions (you disliked the idea that your colleagues are so pro-Left that students think you're Right).
Honestly, though? It's fine. The Left thinks anyone who's not Left is stupid and evil, and that anyone who doesn't fully agree with the Left is not deserving of even basic respect. Who is surprised by this? It's whining when we point out examples of this kind of treatment form the Media, but here a prominent academic suggests stepping up that treatment along all cultural fronts, and you're on board. Fine.
What the hell is a Tushnet?
rhhardin nails it!
I would just add that surrender in the face of a "win" accomplished via means corrosive to our republican way of life, should not be validated by acquiescence.
Yes, as a political matter, the anti-gay-rights side should completely surrender. If it doesn't, the pro-gay-rights side has to be vigilant about its victory.
If I had said 20 years ago:
"Yes, as a political matter, the pro-gay-rights side should completely surrender. If it doesn't, the traditional values side has to be vigilant about its victory."
You would have called me a hater.
This is the result of the whole "modern" attitude towards families and social obligations -
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/27/baby-bust-millenials-birth-rate-drop-may-signal-historic-shift.html
Note the specially large fall in white womens' fertility. This is not the result of a biological problem, this is not the result of an absolute lack of resources (this is the USA, there is no lack of resources). This is, I firmly believe, entirely the result of psychological/social factors, cultural memes, fashion. This is fortified by inclusion of this fashion meme within the set of ideologies of the dominant politico-economic tribe.
The LGBT alphabet soup is an essential component of the antinatal, antifamily, hedonistic worldview, inseparable. If its OK to be gay, or to pretend to be something one isn't, its OK to avoid being a mother or a father. You have no responsibilities to your family, clan, nation or ancestors. R S McCain is instructive on how this happens.
Fashion is killing you Americans off.
There are honorable ways to be wiped out. Global cataclysms causing famines, eradicating plagues, genocidal invaders. But to die out as a result of a fashion is a shameful way to go.
Blogger Ann Althouse said...
What good do you possibly hope to achieve by continuing to fight against gay people?
It's really very stupid at this point.
I'm not saying it's stupid to follow what you may believe is a religious requirement, but it is stupid to pursue this in the political arena.
I have never considered fighting against gay people until recently when a very vocal and politically powerful group of them started making it obvious that they no longer consider it possible to coexist peacefully with people who have religious beliefs that oppose the open practice of homosexuality.
"Marriage is a bond between a man and a woman had no normative pull at all? Human beings with penises use the mens' room has no normative pull at all?" As AA womansplained, no. Not for liberals, therefore no pull.
Prog logic: If "anti-gay-rights" people don't fight they acknowledge defeat; too bad for them, boo hoo. If they don't stop fighting, the left will have to defend its victory, too bad for the right, boo hoo.
Since you've won the culture wars, and you want to be sure your victory stays well-defended, surely you (I mean, Althouse) wouldn't mind putting Obergefell and Roe to a vote in statewide referenda.
Still, Tushnet performs a very valuable service. It shows that every legal argument Progs make, every attempt to square their preferences with the Constitution, every appeal to stare decisis, every move to derive SSM from the 14th, and so on and so forth, is done in bad faith. Law is Prog tool and nothing more. Only power matters to them.
The people with the guns are the winners. Let's not forget that. Everything else is just talk
HoodlumDoodlum: What additional things do you want? Be specific. Is this transgender bathroom/lockeroom stuff part of the pro-gay-rights side? I guess it is. Ok, win that, too. Crush NC, force employeers nationwide to accommodate whatever demands people calling themselves transsexual may have, sure, fine. Then what?
Then, they discover that they're still not happy. Their problem is still not solved. So, they go where every "anti-discrimination" crusade ends up going, only faster. Sniffing out the wreckers, and the crimethinkers, who are holding back the glorious dawn. Then, time and public resources will have to be poured into the anti-LGBTQABCXYZ equivalent of fighting "structural racism", "the patriarchy", "white privilege" (and school-children propagandized), ad infinitum.
Love Wins they shout as they shutter the bakery.
Love Wins they holler as they picket some CEO's house.
Love Wins they bellow as they force you to comply.
Is that your ideal, you Love Wins lovers?
That's the future? A transgender-worn platform shoe stomping a hillbilly's face, forever?
Ann Althouse said...
What good do you possibly hope to achieve by continuing to fight against gay people?
No. Just fascists who happen to be gay.
Or any leftwing fascist for that matter.
"I'm on the other side, Althouse. And you really have no idea how many people hate your progressive, no-fun-zone, zero humor, zero reality, ultra-feelings, totalitarian nonsense. That would include about every other gay I know, by the way. The ones who aren't against you are entirely ambivalent, because the left is no fun to be around. Ever. The left cannot fight. It can only talk. Trump is proving this rather handily. "
You sound well-versed in fun and humor...
And speaking of the problem of purporting to speak for other people, you seem to know a lot about that too.
No Safe Spaces for hillbillies. No Safe Spaces for religious folk. Oh, it harms your conscience to comply? Guess what, your conscience is a Nazi, your conscience is a hater, your beliefs, traditions, and mores are not just wrong but in fact outside the bounds of civilized society. You will not be tolerated.
Love wins!
The culture wars are wars WAGED by the left. Conservatives are merely defending against the onslaught. And its not "gays' its what is male/female. Suddenly because GAYS think that social constructs are more valid than biology WE have to think so too or else we are fighting against gays.Why dont you just accept a premise? Well, I dont agree with it. But the person who holds the premise IS GAY? SO WHAT?
Wow. Talk about being doomed to repeat it. Incredible that people who pride themselves on being so educated are so ignorant of the potential consequences of their actions. It's all on history's sufferance, folks. And when the day comes (hopefully, after I'm gone) that the current system fall apart, as it surely will, your judicial fiat is going to mean less than nothing. That, my friends, is why you do the long work of building social consensus.
Good luck with the head choppers, Europe. Good luck with demography, Leftists. Good luck fighting math and inventing the resources to pay for your ridiculous demands, liberals.
Good luck convincing anyone to have a public spirit, respect for their fellow citizens, or belief in the core civil values that have animated and undergirded this nation now that you've decided to treat people with whom you disagree (and who in fact may constitute the majority of Americans) as conquered enemies, Professors.
Don't forget: you're calling me a defeated Nazi with hateful, uncivilized views who deserves no respect whatsoever now, but you'll be around next Tuesday to ask me to kick in some cash for your various social improvement and welfare projects. Good luck with that, too.
The feminist/transgender alliance remind me of the anti-native faction that characterizes pro-native as anti-immigrant or in some manner xenophobic. They use pro-choice as a crutch to avoid arguing the merits of their positions and their likely consequences, as well as reconciliation of moral and natural imperatives.
"In War: Resolution
In Defeat: Defiance
In Victory: Magnanimity
In Peace: Goodwill"
W.S. Churchill, "The Second World War" (Moral of the Work)
Wise words.
Military thinkers like to joke that every discussion concerning what constitutes an enemy's strategic center of gravity inevitably arrives at the same end: in every war the ultimate strategic center of gravity is the will of people to continue fighting.
Yes, this is what qualifies as a joke among military thinkers. It has the virtue of being more or less true. Victory in war is confirmed by the people who express their will by either continuing the struggle or refusing to continue the struggle. You may have destroyed their armies, you may have destroyed their cities, but if you haven't overcome their will to fight you haven't won.
In the end, winning hearts and minds is the only way to sway the will of the people in your favor. Totalitarian states believe you can achieve this goal through terror; or by killing everyone, or almost everyone, or very large numbers of everyone--by the application of solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. The German plan for the USSR following its collapse was to first enslave and then annihilate the Slavic race in its entirety and repopulate the lands of the Soviet state with Germans.
Is the Left winning our hearts and minds?
It's infuriating to me that someone with an obviously high level of intelligence can believe something so inherently incorrect just because it fits her worldview.
Althouse has an irrational love of irrationality, and believes that feelings trump facts.
Here, I'll post this clip from A Man for All Seasons again.
Substitute "a decent respect for the opinions of fellow citizens" for "law" in that clip. Why treat one another civilly? Why respect and tolerate the views of people with whom you disagree? Why make a moral distinction between groups of fellow citizens with whom you disagree and an enemy you have defeated in war? Well, consider what happens when you don't.
We have, in this nation, a tradition of getting along together pretty well. Compared to other nations of similar vintage we do very well indeed. What happens when the views of people like Tushnet prevail? What happens when tolerance and comity are replaced by forced compliance and open, flagrant disrespect for fellow citizens? Do you guys really want to find out?
Remember how in the late '90s we were told that we had reached "The End of History" and we'd won? Then history came back with a vengeance on 9/11/2001, and we found that the whole "End of History" thing was an illusion, a mirage. We still had enemies out there who hated us and didn't want to be part of Western civilization. That's what that whole "we won the culture wars" thing sounds like to me. Nothing is ever really over unless you're willing to liquidate all of your enemies, and even then, after enough time passes, new enemies arise. Stalin and Hitler liquidated their enemies, and yet, where are the Soviet Union and the Third Reich today? Any victory in the culture wars is only temporary, and anyone saying otherwise is engaged in an extreme exercise in hubris. Nemesis awaits.
The people with the guns are the winners. Let's not forget that. Everything else is just talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIxetRsd_2c
So. I was the one that originally recommended the Tushnet articles to Ann, because I thought she would clearly argue that comparing Christians to Nazi's was wrong.
Instead, she's here in the comments telling us to surrender and let the LGBT side run rampant; and that if we choose to fight we deserve.... what, actually?
I'm curious here. See, I'm Mormon. We know, no one better, what it is like to have views on marriage the federal government wants to stamp out.
So Ann: Tell me, do I have Davis v. Beeson to look forward to again? The Edmund Tucker act? Do you think that it would be right and moral for the U of Wisconsin to expel all Mormon students and any other Christian who refuses to "support equality!" as defined by your LGBT friends?
Tell me, when should we be allowed to resist the gaystapo? When they are burning us on a cross and calling it a "measure to promote tolerance by removing hatred?" Would it be all right to fight back then? Or have we lost and never more are we allowed to disagree or fight back? We are enslaved to the gays, right?
After all, if bakers and others are compelled to work for the gays, it's not too far to go before we can just enslave anyone who disagrees or dissents from "Gay Rights über alles!" Because bigots and haters don't deserve rights anymore, correct? We waived our Constitutional rights when we disagreed with tolerance and love.....
The narrative is that men won't be allowed in ladies rooms, but the 'transgendered' will be. Like they have to carry an ID card, or even are required to resemble women.
The other part of the narrative is that your birth certificate identifies your 'gender', and not your sex.
They really are mad, these Leftists.
We have, in this nation, a tradition of getting along together pretty well. Compared to other nations of similar vintage we do very well indeed. What happens when the views of people like Tushnet prevail? What happens when tolerance and comity are replaced by forced compliance and open, flagrant disrespect for fellow citizens? Do you guys really want to find out?
Look how many on the Left agree with Tushnet's article. Even cruelly-neutral blogresses agree with him!
I think we actually do need to fight this out again.
The gay lobby won't be happy until everyone is blowing them.
buwaya: The LGBT alphabet soup is an essential component of the antinatal, antifamily, hedonistic worldview, inseparable. If its OK to be gay, or to pretend to be something one isn't, its OK to avoid being a mother or a father. You have no responsibilities to your family, clan, nation or ancestors. R S McCain is instructive on how this happens.
Fashion is killing you Americans off.
I don't think it is simply "fashion" that leads to low fertility (though it is certainly the case for some segments). There are other stressors involved. (I live in an area with a remarkably high white fertility - three, four, even five-child families are common. Not Amish, not Mormons, Christian but not "trads" by any means, politically liberal.) But that's a subject for a long discussion.
I live among heavily family/clan/ancestor-aware whites, including my own kin, who are, again, mostly just "cultural" Catholics, and a lot of them - sigh - more or less "liberal". So we're out here. But another pathology must be stressed: whites are actively vilified for expressing any pietas toward "family, clan, nation, or ancestors". Usually this is instigated by other whites (and I've yet to really figure out what the fuck is wrong with these people), but happily joined by some vindictive non-whites looking after their own interests (who are at least being rational, if jerks). I don't think most younger whites have any sense of how recent this all-out attack on their own culture and history is, but I do sense that, even in there culture-deprived state, they're starting to dimly sense something very wrong going on here, and are getting angry about it.
Wow, read that guy's post. He's up front about his views, I'll give him that.
Related: Remember that doctrine is a way to empower our allies and weaken theirs. Conservative decisions on class-action arbitration should be understood as part of a long-term project of defunding the left. Much of the current Court’s voting rights jurisprudence strengthens Republican efforts selectively to shrink the electorate. Similarly with campaign finance jurisprudence. I don’t mean that these doctrines are consciously designed by the justices to have those effects, but outsiders – academics and activists – should understand that that’s what they do. (Nor do I mean that the efforts always succeed – see Evenwel for a failure.)
Are you comfortable with a fellow law scholar's having that view, Professor Althouse? The Law is, to this guy, just a tool to use against the people he doesn't like. It's a tool to fight conservatives, and so legal opinions that serve those ends are good and legal opinions that don't serve those ends are bad and should be overturned. That's the law, according to Tushnet. Why have law at all, though, if that's it purpose and function?
A jurisprudence of “wrong the day it was decided.” Liberals should be compiling lists of cases to be overruled at the first opportunity on the ground that they were wrong the day they were decided. My own list is Bakke (for rejecting all the rationales for affirmative action that really matter), Buckley v. Valeo (for ruling out the possibility that legislatures could develop reasonable campaign finance rules promoting small-r republicanism), Casey (for the “undue burden” test), and Shelby County. (I thought about including Washington v. Davis, but my third agenda item should be enough to deal with it.) Others will have their own candidates. What matters is that overruling key cases also means that a rather large body of doctrine will have to be built from the ground up. Thinking about what that doctrine should look like is important – more important than trying to maneuver to liberal goals through the narrow paths the bad precedents seem to leave open.
And that's exactly the kind of shit that might make me vote for Trump. That's saying a lot! It's all about a solid 5th vote on the Court--that's all these Leftist assholes care about. Stare decisis? Fuck that, we won. Overturn it all! Caring about precedents and a proper respect for the role of the judiciary (and letting the people decide political issues, etc)...all of that was just what the Left said when they didn't have the power to do what they really wanted. Now that they do, well, sorry buddy.
Power. Tushnet's POV is just about power. The "victorious in the culture war" POV is about nothing but power. Ok, noted.
Roughcoat:
That's a good point. My parents noted that more people are today celebrating the defeat of Germany's socialists, than were forced by Soviet communists to attend government ceremonies. You can only use methods that employ secular "carrots" (i.e. material incentives) and selective coercion (e.g. occupation) to control or direct people's behavior with progressive reductions.
The escalating cycle of lunacy in the US -- whereby activists win one victory and then cast about for something else more extreme to agitate for, salami-slicing their way to the realms of pure madness -- is one of the reasons I bought a house overseas (next stop: residence permit, because most countries aren't as dumb as the US about immigration).
Even if Trump wins, this won't end. For a lot of these people, it's their job, so there's no way they'll ever decide they're finished. I owe the Fatherland my loyalty, so I'm not about to renounce citizenship (also, the exit tax). But I genuinely cannot imagine raising a family here. This is only one of the many reasons (I've talked before about my disgust with the attitude struck by our civil servants). But it is a reason.
Big Federal Government supporting Ann Althouse does not want victory. She wants capitulation.
It's a little upsetting to learn that someone like Professor Althouse seemingly agrees that it's ok to treat people "on the other side" of the culture war the way Tushnet thinks they should be treated. Professor Althouse, who considers herself a centrist. Professor Althouse, who prominently called for civility and civic-mindedness in the midst of contentious events in her own state and city.
By default I guess I assume that people I think of as normal, moral, good people would stand up for me if I was ever wrongly accused or unjustly treated. I don't really have much reason to think that's the case any more, though. I'd like to think I'd stand up for someone else, but I know now if I was unfairly accused of being a racist, or a sexist, or a homophobe that I can't count on self-described centrists like Professor Althouse for help against the Leftists. That's disheartening.
Are we going to have to support plural gay marriages?
Are we going to have to support plural gay marriages
That's just crazy talk...repeat after me...there is no such thing as a slippery slope.....
"Althouse:"I'm not saying it's stupid to follow what you may believe is a religious requirement, but it is stupid to pursue this in the political arena."
Then square why religious freedom is in the First Amendment to our founding political document. Tell us others pursing secular notions of liberty automatically get the upper hand.
Show your work.
When did Althouse become the Borg queen?
I can't help thinking, though, that the outraged reaction is just an indication that -- to extend one of the historical examples I used -- like the Japanese soldiers who were stranded on islands in the Pacific and didn't know the war was over, so too many people on their side haven't yet come to terms with the fact that they lost the culture wars.
Yup, just can't wait for all those old conservative hillbillies to die off! What a great attitude.
Hey, quick question--did we demand that the stranded Japanese soldiers who fought on after the war was over finance our war effort against them? I mean, that's what you're doing, right? You're saying that the conservative hillbillies are too far out of the mainstream (Leftist) culture to be listened to or granted any kind of respect at all, but you're still demanding that they pay the bill for all your programs, right?
The good news: When the bills (that Althouse authorized by her vote for Obama) can no longer be paid, the culture wars will really get going.
"Are we going to have to support plural gay marriages" Nothing to stop it but custom and a few old farts. "Trouples" have been a gay thing for over a decade, at least in the real avant-garde areas. Althouse will do her "I can't believe" act, but fall in line with demands for capitulation pronto, fabricating some new way equal protection or substantive due process or whatever demands it. Progs like the slide down the slippery slope.
Re: HoodlumDoodlum:
Yup, just can't wait for all those old conservative hillbillies to die off! What a great attitude.
Hey, quick question--did we demand that the stranded Japanese soldiers who fought on after the war was over finance our war effort against them? I mean, that's what you're doing, right? You're saying that the conservative hillbillies are too far out of the mainstream (Leftist) culture to be listened to or granted any kind of respect at all, but you're still demanding that they pay the bill for all your programs, right?
Well it was historically the case that the victor in a war extracted an indemnity, cf. the Franco-Prussian war, which the French lost, after which they had to pay a massive indemnity to the German Empire. To loop this back around to Japan, one of the issues that pushed Japan towards militarisation and radicalisation in the 1910's and 20's was that after the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese expected to receive an indemnity from the Russian Empire, but in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Portsmouth (brokered by the US, as it happens), the Russians absolutely refused to pay an indemnity (probably because it would have destroyed their already tottering economy) especially after losing a very expensive fleet. The Japanese weren't well positioned to absorb the costs of the war either, which caused some hardship. But it was also seen as a racial humiliation by the US and the other Western powers, which -- I think -- accounts for some of the turn you see between the late Meiji and the end of Taisho. Away from friendly relations with the Western powers, and towards an explicitly anti-White ideology that showed up in full force during the War.
Kulturkampf, from Brittanica:
Kulturkampf, (German: “culture struggle”), the bitter struggle (c. 1871–87) on the part of the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck to subject the Roman Catholic church to state controls. The term came into use in 1873, when the scientist and Prussian liberal statesman Rudolf Virchow declared that the battle with the Roman Catholics was assuming “the character of a great struggle in the interest of humanity.”
Bismarck, a staunch Protestant, never fully trusted the loyalty of the Roman Catholics within his newly created German Empire and became concerned by the Vatican Council’s proclamation of 1870 concerning papal infallibility. The Roman Catholics, who were represented politically by the Centre Party, distrusted the predominance of Protestant Prussia within the empire and often opposed Bismarck’s policies.
Angelyne,
There are different patterns of fertility for different populations.
Even among US white people this varies a lot. Even within subsets of the same sort, famously Reform/Non religious vs Hasidic Jews, and etc.
Some interesting notes from S.B. Fishmans essay in the American Jewish Yearbook, 2014 -
https://books.google.com/books?id=CHV3BQAAQBAJ&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&dq=hasidic+fertility+4.1&source=bl&ots=Sw6drXA7_Z&sig=keElu70XIyoIEUmBPWOzZ53UD-0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj9oaC8tNDMAhUP8GMKHVDSCWEQ6AEIOjAE#v=onepage&q=hasidic%20fertility%204.1&f=false
Orthodox New Yorkers have a fertility rate of 2.5, Non-Orthodox 1.5. Since demographic replacement is 2.15, this explains a lot. Culture drives fertility, powerfully so.
The same pattern is seen among educated people of all kinds - education for women, generally, reduces fertility, in the US and other advanced countries, to well below replacement. Its been in the census figures for decades, that the best way to avoid grandchildren seems to be to send the girls to graduate school.
"I'm not saying it's stupid to follow what you may believe is a religious requirement, but it is stupid to pursue this in the political arena."- Ms. Althouse
But the political arena will now shape how society looks and functions. That used to be in large part by churches, but we are in a post Christian age.
We are beginning to see the end game for the homosexual movement. As gender identity becomes the new "civil right", gender confusion will damage future generations of younger and younger children in the government run schools. At a time when children face many emotional storms, a strong family provided a safe haven to weather those storms. As the family disintegrates, children will be even more defenseless.
As has been mentioned, civil unions were offered as a compromise, but as I was debating gays on other blogs in 2008 it became apparent that there was no compromise.
They were not about to accept civil unions, and even if they had, it wouldn't have ended there. We now have SSM in this country and it hasn't ended there.
I'm not sure whether Ms. Althouse is that naive or just a a willing pawn of the left-- projecting a reasonableness that only exists in her imagination.
Having said that, this is a battle, spiritual in nature. The battle is against "principalities and powers."
Ann Althouse said...
Yes, as a political matter, the anti-gay-rights side should completely surrender. If it doesn't, the pro-gay-rights side has to be vigilant about its victory.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
The Left doesn't believe in liberty. They just don't. Liberty means freedom of choice. Liberty means freedom of belief. Liberty means freedom of action. The Left does not believe in those things. The Left believes that they won the culture wars and therefore they should be able to use the law to force compliance (and restrict non-Leftists' liberty).
What do you want, Professor Althouse? Tushnet says what he wants--he wants the Court to overturn rulings that restrict the government's ability to regulate political speech, to apply a formula based on data from 50 years ago against states determining their voting laws, to impose whatever programs they want under the name of affirmative action, to remove the ability of the states to impose any restrictions on abortion, and to allow disparate impact lawsuits to completely shape employment & other law in whatever form liberals desire. What do you want? What will make you content, culture-war-wise? What is an example of a nation or society that's your end goal?
Ta Nehisi Coates wouldn't give me a number--he wants reparations for slavery and discrimination but he won't tell me how much I'm supposed to pay.
You keep referencing this war and I'd like you to tell me, with specifics, what victory looks like to you.
Blogger wholelottasplainin' said...
"Althouse:"I'm not saying it's stupid to follow what you may believe is a religious requirement, but it is stupid to pursue this in the political arena."
Then square why religious freedom is in the First Amendment to our founding political document. Tell us others pursing secular notions of liberty automatically get the upper hand.
Show your work.
The 14th amendment trumps the first. Sooner or later the Left will decide that freedom of speech, guaranteed by the first amendment, is trumped by the 14th amendment.
The constitution supposedly requires that all states have a republican form of government, yet the feds say that North Carolina can't even decide to restrict the use of ladies rooms to females.
Balefagor said...Well it was historically the case that the victor in a war extracted an indemnity, cf. the Franco-Prussian war, which the French lost, after which they had to pay a massive indemnity to the German Empire.
Right, but in the case of WWII, the case that the author cited as examples of when taking a "hard line" worked, the U.S. didn't. That's my point. We spent billions on the Marshall Plan and rebuilding Japan. We are to this day paying tons of money to defend Japan. His example of hard line treatment working is exactly wrong--we fought a total war against Germany and Japan but once the war was won we treated those nations extremely well! We had our own motives for doing so, of course, but we didn't say "we won...now pay us."
The Left is all about taking my money. They've got big plans and they need my money to make 'em happen. Since I'm not on the Left, though, they say they don't have to treat me with even basic respect, since my views and beliefs are deserving of nothing but derision. They still expect my money, though. Gotta pay for all those Sandra Fluke birth control bills, to educate all those illiterate illegal immigrant kids, all those plumbing bills we'll get when we have to retrofit every school in America just to make sure a few hundred transgendered adolescents aren't in any way made to feel different. The country has a lot of bills, and I'm expected to pay 'em. I'm not expected to have a voice in polite society, though, since I'm like a defeated Nazi or some crazy Japanese soldier fighting on in some jungle somewhere--I should know my place and just shut up. Not to worry, though--people like me will be dead soon anyway, and who really needs us? All we did was found this country, defend it, care for it, and make it what it was--I'm sure the Left can take it from here.
Regarding Germany and Japan, those nations were reduced to bone-flecked ash, with their women prostituting themselves to the Western occupation forces in exchange for food, and their being exterminated entirely from the Warsaw Pact areas. Russia is STILL sitting on land confiscated from Germany and Japan.
I wouldn't say Germany and Japan were treated very well at all, regardless of the Marshall Plan. I also wouldn't say that they weren't treated better than they could have expected.
But I WOULD say that it reveals a lot about Tushnet, that he can view domestic politics through this lens. Ann Coulter was fired from National Review for saying a lot less than this about Muslims on 9/12/2001.
Gahrie wrote: The part that pisses me off is the fact hat if we ever manage to move somewhere else and create a new civilization based on our values, and leave the Left behind...in an incredibly short period of time the Leftists will come to our new civilization and immediately start trying to re-impose all of the shit we left behind.
This is known as Texas.
buwaya: Culture drives fertility, powerfully so.
The same pattern is seen among educated people of all kinds - education for women, generally, reduces fertility, in the US and other advanced countries, to well below replacement. Its been in the census figures for decades, that the best way to avoid grandchildren seems to be to send the girls to graduate school.
Oh, indeed. I'm not disputing those general claim re fertility. But, as you point out, there's nothing peculiarly American, or even Western, about those correlations. But the active celebration of the demographic demise of one's own kind, and the active vilification of one's own history and culture, does seem to be an co-pathology peculiar to the West.
Wouldn't it be nice if the SCOTUS cared as much about its legitimacy as it does expediency? That ship sailed! Winning!
"The battle is against "principalities and powers."
Yes, I have thought about this. What creates and sustains these memes, these intellectual fashions? Where do these shared ideas come from? What makes a fashion, well, fashionable?
The same goes for political ideas. Some things come out of nowhere, some brain, and for some reason persuade others in a cascade. The same idea may have been expressed earlier, elsewhere, but gone nowhere. Why this, now, and not something else? Why communism?
It is a very mysterious thing, truly.
Considering some ideas that have at one time or another become fashionable, I'm not dismissing the suggestion that we are dealing with a supernatural cause.
it is stupid to pursue this in the political arena.
The more I think about this, the more it ticks me off. The left has shown that it will not stop with a victory at one level, but will proceed to the next step in the process, and the next, and the next, until they have achieved total annihilation of opposition. It may well be that the political fight is lost, but if no stand is taken there, do you really expect us to believe that the priests will be safe in their pulpits? That the parents will be safe opting their children out of the anal sex instructions in fourth grade? What recourse will they have, if the law doesn't protect them? The good will of people like Tushnet?
Historically, the demand for unconditional surrender in a war is accompanied by the nuclear option or its equivalent of overwhelming force on the part of the victor. In this case, I don't think the left are the ones holding the nukes. As can be seen in the responses here, we may not be as far from this culture war turning into an actual war as we may think. We may very well end up with another civil war on our hands sooner rather than later if this keeps up.
"I don't trust Tushnet on the facts."
Well he cited Wikipedia, how much more authority do you want?
"But the active celebration of the demographic demise of one's own kind, and the active vilification of one's own history and culture, does seem to be an co-pathology peculiar to the West."
This one is easy. This is the result of the left-wing anticolonialism of Lenin, perpetuated as ancient left-wing dogma and carried through the institutions in the Gramscian march. It acquired various elaborations and extensions in the process.
The active vilification (and erasure) of ones own history and culture, and replacement by some alien or manufactured one is not unique to the western expression of Marxism. The Soviets did some, Mao certainly did a great deal of this, and such extreme copyists as the Khmer Rouge and the North Koreans more so. Its also true of the Muslim conquest if you want to go back that far - see Naipaul.
Tushnet is a radical leftwinger who openly espouses using the law to promote socialism. So, excuse me if I question his willingness to have a cease fire. Since when and his comrades ever shown any desire for rapprochement? And his history of the culture war here resembles a Howard Zinn account. It's been the left that has been waging this war; they started it (for good or bad).
If the right had said a decade ago, "Okay, we'll recognize SSM but you'll have to let those with deeply held religious views to opt out of having to participate in the weddings" does anyone think the left would have stuck to the agreement? Please, they would have said okay at that time but then demanded more. There was no middle ground here. The left wanted it all.
Question for Althouse: You cite Scalia (in Smith) but forget the overwhelming support for the RFRA which essentially overturned Scalia. Did you support RFRA?
Dr. Althouse: Yes, as a political matter, the anti-gay-rights side should completely surrender. If it doesn't, the pro-gay-rights side has to be vigilant about its victory.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Too bad the pro-gay-rights victory has jack shit to do with liberty, then.
Does anyone remember this, from long long ago:
There's a difference between disagreeing with people, like newscasters on Fox News that I think are incorrect in their analysis of the days events, and people that threaten to kill you for putting a cartoon image of Mohammad in a bear suit [which is what "South Park" did]. And that's a line that we too often forget. And it's very easy to dehumanize -- and I will say in this room, I would imagine [Glenn] Beck and [Sarah] Palin are easier punching bags -- and we think of it as, 'Oh, my God, I'm so scared if they take over.' . . . And you know what, we will be fine. . . .
I think we always have to remember that people can be opponents, but not enemies. And there are enemies in the world. We just need the news media to help us delineate. And I think that's where the failing is, that the culture of corruption in the media doesn't allow us to delineate between enemies and opponents.
That's Jon Stewart speaking to an NPR audience way back in 2010. He was pointing out the difference between enemies and opponents. He might even have believed it! Here we are in 2016 and to Tushnet and friends we non-Lefty Americans are the enemies. Not opponents to be opposed in a civilized way within the normal political framework of this nation--no. We're enemies to be defeated, crushed, and thrown out of society. Maybe we can still live here, sure; but we can't speak in public, can't have our viewpoints aired--no, we're too extreme for that. Germany today outlaws pro-Nazi speech (books, etc). Does anyone doubt for a moment that the Left in the US would happily outlaw all sorts of speech? They talk about punishing hate speech (meaning any speech the Left doesn't agree with on the topic of gender, homosexuality, etc), punishing "global warming deniers," and so forth. Tushnet doesn't specifically mention outlawing speech but he does talk about overturning restrictions on campaign finance reform...and we already know from the Citizens United case that the Left will happily use campaign finance law to do things like ban books if given the chance.
When you consider your own fellow citizens enemies, at what will you stop to defeat them?
The Left doesn't believe in liberty
Tell me about it...they all want to bring back serfdom.....for some reason they believe that they will be the new nobility....
Ok, you won, we lost. How do you guys act when you lose? What's that quote? Oh yes!
"Burn this bitch down!"
That's it, right? Or that's only ok when you do it?
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