"In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the G.O.P. was the party of the traditional moral order, many individualists, rebels and eccentrics found themselves aligned with progressives. Today the reverse is true. The left is now widely seen as the schoolmarm of American public life, and the right is associated with the gleeful violation of convention. Contemporary social pieties are distinctly left wing, and progressives enforce them with at least as much moral ardor as the most zealous members of the religious right... Today’s left-wing cultural program represents the tastes and worldview of an insular class of often white progressive elites, who now sit to the left of nonwhite Democrats on any number of social issues, including race....
"The right’s new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called 'Middle American radicals,' or M.A.Rs. This demographic, which makes up the heart of Mr. Trump’s electoral base, is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people, and it is characterized by a populist hostility to elite pieties that often converges with the old social conservatism. But M.A.Rs do not share the same religious moral commitments as their devoutly Christian counterparts, both in their political views and in their lifestyles.... They 'unapologetically place citizens over foreigners, majorities over minorities, the native-born over recent immigrants, the normal over the transgressive and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.'"From "What Comes After the Religious Right?" by Nate Hochman, a fellow at National Review (NYT). The teaser on the front page is more compulsively clickable:
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This isn't news. All political groups twist as a screw or an ever shifting yin-yang relationship.
When the left zeitgeist is freedom the right zeitgeist is law and order.
- The left often has valid points but is out of power and gearing up for a run.
When the left zeitgeist is NEW laws and NEW order the right zeitgeist is freedom.
- The right often has valid points but is out of power and gearing up for a run.
Rules are there for a reason. Yes.
Rules are there to be broken. Yes.
Sane calibration and balance is hard.
Trump ran on two main issues:
1. Stop illegal immigration
2. Stop shipping our jobs overseas
What part of that is "radical"?
'unapologetically place citizens over foreigners, majorities over minorities, the native-born over recent immigrants, the normal over the transgressive and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.' Four of five are true. "majorities over minorities" is padding, a lie added for the sake of the narrative.
They 'unapologetically place citizens over foreigners,
check
majorities over minorities,
you mean, like democratic rule? check
the native-born over recent immigrants,
you mean, citizens over aliens? check
the normal over the transgressive
check
and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.'"
well, CHECK!
I know that I’m no elite as I live in Omaha and didn’t go to an Ivy League school, but what’s wrong or bad about putting American citizens and our country first? Isn’t that the first duty of any legitimate government?
Serious Question:
Whatever happened to: The upcoming permanent progressive Majority?
How 2020 Killed Off Democrats’ Demographic Hopes
“The joke is that the GOP is really assembling the multiracial working-class coalition that the left has always dreamed of,” says David Shor, a Democratic polling and data expert who developed the Obama 2012 campaign’s internal election-forecasting system.
Trump, whose approval rating was historically low throughout his tenure as president, increased his support among Black men and Hispanic voters in key swing states, while maintaining his hold on white non-college educated voters. Democrats’ House majority shrank, thanks in part to losses in the suburbs, and split-ticket voting all but disappeared, dooming Democratic Senate candidates in rural, Trump-friendly states..the future for Democrats now looks, well, bleak.
“We have an election system that makes it basically impossible for Democrats’ current coalition to ever wield legislative power,” says Shor. “We are legitimately in a position from here on out where we would need to get 54 percent of the popular vote — which we did not even accomplish this time — for multiple cycles in a row, for us to be in a position to really pass laws."
Right, but wrong. Small-c conservatives emphatically do not trust the GOP.
The right’s new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called "Middle American radicals"...
Mr. Donald Warren is talking from his nether orifice. Like most modern sociologists, he's likely to be a miseducated minor functionary peddling specious conclusions drawn from questionable data. As for the National Review, the less said the better. The current state of our society ought to have sent its editorial board into a cloister of penitent monks as contrition, but there they sit as arrogant and irresponsibly NeverTrump as ever.
"They 'unapologetically place citizens over foreigners, majorities over minorities, the native-born over recent immigrants, the normal over the transgressive and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.'"
Unapologetically! Imagine that! The gall!
Of course, the very fact that this is considered "radical" illustrates the extent of prog cultural hegemony.
I was a liberal all of my life until the last ten years, when the lunacy began to accelerate. Some of us can't abide the far left's attempts to destroy and degrade everything that held this nation together.
Nate Hochman graduated from college with a BA in Polysci - last year.
I'm sure he's a nice young man.
It's also nice that the people at National Review and the Times give him a platform to use his writing skills to promote their views. His Mother must be proud.
Myself, I can't say that I'm particularly interested in what this recent child has to say about the grander issues of American political life.
>The left is now widely seen as the schoolmarm of American public life, and the right is associated with the gleeful violation of< convention.
Now, which of the other planets is he referring to, again?
>Contemporary social pieties are distinctly left wing, and progressives enforce them with at least as much moral ardor as the most zealous members of the religious right...<
He must have been out there on one of them the last few years when we on earth were watching Democrat-sanctioned Left wing scorching of cities, wholesale Democrat coddling of criminals, etc.
It’s globalism (high wages for labor are economic inefficiencies to be ground down even as we pretend we aren’t) vs populism ( allow me the dignity of a decent paying job and let me live my life.)
Everything else seems to be just noise.
Here is another article from a person who does not know anyone who owns a truck.
"The right’s new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called 'Middle American radicals,' or M.A.Rs. This demographic...is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people, and it is characterized by a populist hostility to elite pieties... They 'unapologetically place citizens over foreigners, majorities over minorities, the native-born over recent immigrants, the normal over the transgressive and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals."
Lightly edited for focus related to my comment...
So much to unpack here.
1. Donald Warren is a sociologist who wrote a book on "middle american radicals" in 1976 (https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Center-Americans-Politics-Alienation/dp/0268015953) - so we are looking at statements made 40 years before Trump became President. In other words, the terminology used here is OLD and being re-purposed
2. The description of lower and middle income white americans appears to be describing a plurality population bloc. So why should their views be considered radical exactly?
3. They are stated to place the views of majorities over minorities....what does that mean exactly? THat popular views are more popular than less popular views? What a nonsensical statement.
4. They are stated to place "fidelity to the homeland over cosmopolitan ideals" - is that another way of saying they place national identity over transient narrowly-held elite ideas that may not be in the best interests of the nation?
...
This is the type of elitest intellectual drivel that I find ridiculous to read. For what it's worth, I come from a near-poverty single mother household and am now master's level degree and elite by income and white collar profession...so by it's very words, this article should be written for me.
Religious conservatism was only one part of the old conservative movement, and not the ideology of the leaders of the movement, who were more in tune with free markets and deregulation. There's more continuity between the new and the old social and religious conservatives than the author thinks. It's the laissez-faire rhetoric that's been dropped. Lost also has been the sense of a secure governmental foundation to return to. The feeling now is that politics and the bureaucracy are irredeemably rotten, but that notion was also implicit in the earlier conservatism though it wasn't the focus of thinking and feeling.
I'm reading a bio of DeGaulle. He went to church on Sunday, never cheated on his wife, and was a conscientious parent. One of his his children had Down's Syndrome. She stayed at home and he was loving and attentive towards her. He was a flaming libertine compared to his wife. His wife disapproved of divorce. Before the war, she would not entertain Petain and his wife at their home because Petain had married a divorced woman. She encouraged her husband to outlaw mini-skirts.....DeGaulle was completely wrong on any number of issues, but his stony morality allowed him to endure the froth and foam of the times and, on important occasions, he was right in his righteousness. He looks a lot better than the students who toppled his government in the sixties.....They were into sexual liberation. The young men of that era were especially enthusiastic about sexual liberation. They considered attempts to regulate sexual morality a form of fascism. One of the student leaders accused a Dean of his school who had been an active member of the Resistance of being a Nazi. The Dean's offense: he had sponsored a swim club that segregated the sexes. Daniel Cohn-Bendit authored an article in which he admitted or even bragged about in engaging in sex with kindergarteners under his care. (He later claimed the article was written as a provocation.)....My own feelings are that if you have to put the balance at one end or the other, the DeGaulle side of the seesaw is the way to go. In any event, I would much rather have a father like DeGaulle than Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
Well, the religious right and the progressive left are really just two factions of the mid-19th century radical pietist, who became the late 19th century Progressives, then around 1920, split into the evangelical, still following Christianity and the social progressives, who took up Marxism as their ideology. The rest of us are kind of just getting beaten about in the middle. The two factions hate each other because they are of the same base ideology that the State should enforce morality, which must be displayed overtly.
So that they've flipped is not surprising. The Progressives used liberalism as a cudgel against the more dominant religious right, but no longer feel the need to give deference to classical liberalism, or anything else, and now set to dictatorship by government bureaucrat.
Murray Rothbard offered this short description in a forward to a book by Lysander Spooner:
"But by the nineteenth century, unfortunately, such was not the case. Most pietists took the following view: since we can't gauge an individual's morality by his following rituals or even by his professed adherence to creed, we must watch his actions and see if he is really moral.
"From there the pietists concluded that it was everyone's moral duty to his own salvation to see to it that his fellow men as well as himself are kept out of temptation's path. That is, it was supposed to be the State's business to enforce compulsory morality, to create the proper moral climate for maximizing salvation. In short, instead of an individualist, the pietist now tended to become a pest, a busybody, a moral watchdog for his fellow man, and a compulsory moralist using the State to outlaw "vice" as well as crime.
"The liturgicals, on the other hand, took the view that morality and salvation were to be achieved by following the creed and the rituals of their church. The experts on those church beliefs and practices were, of course, not the State but the priests or bishops of the church (or, in the case of the few orthodox Calvinists, the ministers.) " Source:https://mises.org/library/lysander-spooner-libertarian-pietist
For 20 minutes starting at the offset, Murray Rothbard explains the radical pietist prior and into the Civil War in an old early '80s lecture.
https://youtu.be/o2ndkCvHGj4?t=1106
I have three degrees and voted for Trump. The writer needs to get out of his bubble.
Pity the sped teachers who work with these kids. Meltdowns and violence are just part of the territory.
And what fun, to have them mainstreamed into your kid's class, because Inclusion.
The modern model of governance is derived from a residual characterization of the old order. The governing spectrum ranges from independence to totalitarianism, from individual freedom to authoritarianism, the left-right nexus is leftist in a progressive order. Conservativism is an ideology of moderation. Progressivism is an ideology of monotony. Liberalism is an ideology of divergence. The new religion is notably ethical and sickly constrained, attributable to leverage derived from diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry) and redistributive change in the pursuit of single/central/monopolistic/minority capital and control.
It's not a new order. It's a social media echo chamber. I was just out scything the front yard (since it was raining and not suitable bicycle weather) and men were in charge. No social medium.
“Today’s left-wing cultural program represents the tastes and worldview of an insular class of often white progressive elites….”
“Middle American radicals,' or M.A.Rs. This demographic, which makes up the heart of Mr. Trump’s electoral base, is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people…”
Got it: white people continue to be bad, whatever their politics.
Ann—Thank you for reading that so I don’t have to.
What literal crap. The USA has not had a morality based President since Truman. Politicians are the worst of the worst. Drinking and womanizing is a normal activity in leadership. But as DJT showed, we did not elect him to be a legalistic religious prude.
He’s right of course. The Leftism of the 1960s had a strong libertarian component; today’s Left has a strong Puritan bent.
In any event, I would much rather have a father like DeGaulle than Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
Men like DeGaulle may be wrong, but a world of men who live like them would have enough of a margin of safety that it wouldn't matter.
The free market system worked pretty well, until we decided to include the very large, very thieving and very unfree China in that system.
It’s globalism (high wages for labor are economic inefficiencies to be ground down even as we pretend we aren’t) vs populism ( allow me the dignity of a decent paying job and let me live my life.)
Everything else seems to be just noise.
tim in vermont, succinctly stated.
I'm wondering if the people who reacted negatively so far to this article actually read it. I'm guessing they didn't.
Ann, you do realize that that "teaser" image isn't on the actual OpEd page, and hasn't been since I checked it this morning?
As a subscriber to NR, I am disturbed by the large proportion of the articles they publish that are written by callow, just-out-of-college, teacher's-pet "fellows" like Mr. Hochman, by older but inexcusably shallow, doctrinaire, I'm-sticking-to-my-principles-consequences-and-national-interest-be-damned "classical liberals" (Charlie Cooke, Kevin Williamson), and by dead-wood, out-of-touch, Reagan/Cold War nostalgists like Jay Nordlinger, who seems not to realize that the 1980s are over. Something there is really out of whack.
“ Ann, you do realize that that "teaser" image isn't on the actual OpEd page, and hasn't been since I checked it this morning?”
Yes, it’s on the front page, as I said.
The left is now widely seen as the schoolmarm of American public life...
That is one of the more ludicrous characterizations I have seen published over the last several decades, and I've encountered some loo-loos. Unless the lady in question is the creation of one of the more outrageous Japanese hentai cartoonists, the stereotypical schoolmarm is a straightlaced, morally restrained spinster without detectable sexuality, which she reserves for the handsome cowpoke whom she hopes to marry. Nobody, not even someone as stupid as Joy Behar, would describe the lamentable former "disinformation" czarina Nina Jankowicz as the schoolmarm type -- a fascist propaganda artist trying to outdo Joseph Goebbels with half the intellect, yes, but a schoolmarm? There are no schoolmarms on the left, only lunatics, idiots, and coldly evil conspirators.
Labor and environmental arbitrage with liberal credit emissions.
It's in the interest of the liberal/progressive Establishment to categorize people who disagree with them as "radicals." It's also in the interest of Democrats to classify Trump voters as "Ultra MAGA." Positions that half the country (and now much more than half the country) support aren't radical, and people who voted for Trump (close to half the country) aren't so easily pigeonholed. Hochman is trying to make "Republicans Pounce" the story when every week gives more evidence of the corruption in government an the irrelevance of National Review conservatism.
"Trump ran on two main issues:
"1. Stop illegal immigration
"2. Stop shipping our jobs overseas"
Illegal immigration has seen a decline in the past decade. It remains a good hobby horse to bring up to rouse the voters, like those running on "law and order" platforms even as violent crime has declined in the past 20 years. Pandering always works.
Jobs are sent overseas by capitalist enterprises who want to increase their profits by paying as little as possible to the workers who make their revenues/profits possible. Trump failed to bring jobs back from overseas. American consumers are very happy to buy lower-cost clothing and other goods built by low-paid workers in (literal or virtual) sweatshops abroad.
1.3+ million illegals have entered the nation since Biden invited them in.
Illegal immigrant population increased by 1M in Biden's first year
Is this Bullshit Day at Althouse? Or just a reflection of EVERY utterance from the left?
The problem is that after a few of these, you just tune out.
I discovered that I was a "conservative" at the age of 17 when I read Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative". Before that I thought I must be a "liberal" because libertas in Latin meant freedom, and I was pro-freedom. In the last 62 years, my principles haven't changed all that much, but the freedom I want to conserve has changed, because the enemies of freedom have changed.
It is obviously true that "The left is now widely seen as the schoolmarm of American public life, and the right is associated with the gleeful violation of convention. Contemporary social pieties are distinctly left wing, and progressives enforce them with at least as much moral ardor as the most zealous members of the religious right." Is it the Right that's changed? No. The Right used to support "conventions" and "social peities" based on long-established philosophical and religious beliefs and conventions, that were consistent with individual choice and freedom. Now the predominant pieties are newly invented by the "woke", and enforced without mercy wherever the woke are in power. The fact is that today, if you have courage and like to think for yourself, you'll join the conservative counterrevolution -- and we'll welcome you!
Robert Cook said...
"Trump ran on two main issues:
"1. Stop illegal immigration
"2. Stop shipping our jobs overseas"
"Illegal immigration has seen a decline in the past decade. It remains a good hobby horse to bring up to rouse the voters, like those running on "law and order" platforms even as violent crime has declined in the past 20 years. Pandering always works.
Yes, but the cost of dealing with it have steadily risen. Mainly because your friends insist on awarding Illegal behavior.
Jobs are sent overseas by capitalist enterprises who want to increase their profits by paying as little as possible to the workers who make their revenues/profits possible. Trump failed to bring jobs back from overseas. American consumers are very happy to buy lower-cost clothing and other goods built by low-paid workers in (literal or virtual) sweatshops abroad."
Much of the jobs that require skill are coming back or have come back. Mainly because there are serious QA issues on work done in China. The comparative advantage is still there, but there are other Pacific rim countries that offer better quality. As I have said many times, aquiring a skill that does not need a degree is a good path to prosperity.
"The right’s new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called 'Middle American radicals,' or M.A.Rs. This demographic, which makes up the heart of Mr. Trump’s electoral base, is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people, and it is characterized by a populist hostility to elite pieties that often converges with the old social conservatism. But M.A.Rs do not share the same religious moral commitments as their devoutly Christian counterparts, both in their political views and in their lifestyles.... They 'unapologetically place citizens over foreigners, majorities over minorities, the native-born over recent immigrants, the normal over the transgressive and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.'"
1: 2/3 of American voters do not have college degrees
2: It's not just "whites". it's why Hispanics are moving to the GOP, because the vast majority of them aren't stupid enough to fall for the "elite pieties" either
3: If I wanted to create a list of "this is why everyone sane should support the GOP", I'd pretty much use that list of positions you ended your quote with. Because those are the positions that any non-wretched person should take.
Should we be actively and aggressively hostile to "minorities"? Well, that depends. Are they actively and aggressively hostile to us? Do they demand that we should change our lives to accommodate them?
Yes?
Then yes, we SHOUDL be actively and aggressively hostile to them.
"Live and let live" is something that starts with the freaks understanding that they have to do that for the rest of us.
"Stop making me feel like a freak!" Well, then, stop being one. If there's two groups, and you're in the one that's less than 10% of the population, then in that your'e a freak. You're not like everyone else. You can embrace that, or you can change to be like everyone else.
What you can not reasonable do is demand the people in the 90%+ group value what you are.
Robert Cook said...
"Trump ran on two main issues:
"1. Stop illegal immigration
"2. Stop shipping our jobs overseas"
"Illegal immigration has seen a decline in the past decade.
Support for illegal immigration by Democrats has soared over the last decade. This generates a response, that is entirely deserved.
DACA, and the President's entirely illegitimate ignoring of immigration law, entirely justified a massive and hostile response
Jobs are sent overseas by capitalist enterprises who want to increase their profits by paying as little as possible to the workers who make their revenues/profits possible. Trump failed to bring jobs back from overseas
The first is true. Why is it you lefties are such big fans of those rapacious capitalists?
The second is false. Which is why Trump gave us the lowest unemployment rates ever recorded in America for blacks and hispanics, because his economy spawned a lot of jobs for people who do NOT have a piece of paper from some 4+ year institutions
I've had the option to vote for a far more racially diverse set of candidates since I started voting conservative. And almost half the women I know well in the real New Conservative movement are non-Cuban Hispanics. Some of the candidates are stage dressing, you know, like the Democrats almost always do. But far fewer of them. And I have seen no prejudice, zero, at hundreds of events.
A large number of STEM professors, doctors, engineers, teachers, and social workers are in the movement too, mostly retired (employed ones wouldn't dare).
Just so long as we can save our legislative priorities from the pothead leftitarians, David Frenchites, and Reason dolts.
This guy knows little about conservative politics, people, or issues. Barstool Sports is not the paragon of Midwestern MAGAs. World Magazine, especially, and First Things are swinging away from the core political issues that animate the movement. He conflates job protectionism, and border control with animosity towards minorities, yet these are the precise issues that draw minorities into the movement. Elsewhere, he has lazily conflated manual laborers with drunkeness. Mark Rufo is Phyllis Schlafly's intellectual and political heir, if anyone is. And so on.
This is what happens when you are a youngster who lives in a bubble.
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