A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration . . .
Dear Intelligent American,
A pal called and said, “Hey, Action Jackson,” and we began to sing the commercial jingle, from the first Nixon Administration, about that GI Joe wannabe “action figure”—because that’s what goofs of a certain age do.
(Please don’t call and mention horses lest Your Crooning Epistler start bellowing the theme to Marvel the Mustang.)
Ancient commercials are sticky as heck in the noggin and never too far below the conscience’s surface. Here’s a fact, Jack: Like it or not, ads play a prominent part in the popular culture. And it’s not always pleasant, as the marketers behind Bud Light can tell you. And maybe as the “rebranding” marketers behind the new, car-less, weirdo Jaguar commercial will someday do.
As of yet, the luxury automaker’s front-office geniuses are standing defiant (“vile hatred and intolerance”) against the ideology-marinated spot’s onslaught of critics.
Car sales may change the bosses’ tune.
And so goes another day—this being Black Friday—in America. Meanwhile, Advent commences on this coming Sunday for most Christians. Emmanuel O Come, O Comes. Prepare.
A Nice List Awaits
1. At TomKlingenstein.com, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney finds the middle way of American Equality. From the essay:
It has not always been noted or sufficiently stated that the advocates of debased egalitarianism reject the moral grounding in a created order that allows civic equality to find a place in the hearts of men and in the operations of a free and lawful political order. They reject equality in the name of “equity,” a fervent desire to redress and to level that respects neither the diversity of talents and human efforts highlighted in Federalist #10, nor the hierarchies implicit in any social order, even the most egalitarian.
For today’s activist-ideologues, the defining trait of America is “white supremacy.” Traditional American understandings of equality are racist to their core. There is no “promissory note” to deliver upon, since American principles and practice never contained, and never will contain, moral grounds for civic hope. Behind such fevered egalitarianism lie despair and negation. Indeed, the new racialist oligarchs wish to turn self-loathing into a public philosophy, a new national creed.
But what hope can such a hate-filled creed offer “people of color” and Americans more broadly? Can one preserve a free republic, a community of mutually accountable citizens, when the young are taught ingratitude and are deprived of any reasons to love their country? How shall we defend ourselves against China (or any foreign enemy) if we do not believe we are worthy of defending? Such self-hatred cannot give rise to any enduring project, but only civic dissolution and ideological tyranny.
2. More Mahoney, More Middle: At Law & Liberty, the great Solzhenitsyn scholar assesses The Red Wheel’s final installment, March 1917. From the review:
In the closing half of the volume, Lenin, still in exile in Zurich, Switzerland, becomes more and more of a looming presence. Other revolutionaries have already returned home to Russia and Lenin is eager to join them. Lenin is shrewd, daring, single-minded, fanatical, and devoid of moral scruples in the ordinary sense of the term. As with all Solzhenitsyn’s main characters, we hear Lenin’s thoughts from the inside, so to speak, even if the author has no sympathy for his machinations or the ideological fanaticism that drives them. This diversity of inner voices heightens the interest and intelligibility of the drama. The Red Wheel is in no way “monologic” even if its author is anything but neutral in the great contest between civilized order and revolutionary subversion.
Just a few months before, the Bolshevik leader, still plotting away in his Swiss exile, had lamented to his fellow revolutionaries in Zurich that they would not live to see a revolutionary conflagration break out in their native land. Now, we see a wily revolutionary at work who is “on fire” yet again and determined to join (and exploit) the revolutionary carnival in Petrograd. He is now rid of all equivocations and is committed to doing anything necessary to bring down the hapless Provisional Government. He and his agents successfully negotiated with German authorities (Russia’s deadly enemy in the war) to return up to forty Bolshevik revolutionaries and agitators to the Russian capital in a “sealed train.” In the penultimate chapter of Book 4 of March 1917 (chapter 654), we see a triumphant Lenin preparing to return to Russia, his birthplace, though he has no real patriotic attachment to this land. In the most subversive way imaginable, his only purpose is to “intervene in the Russian revolution!” Every reader of the book already knows that he will succeed.
3. At Front Porch Republic, Laurie Johnson laments the decrease in volunteerism and charitable giving. From the beginning of the article:
One way that churches engage the larger community is to help the poor and marginalized through liberal charity and charitable outreach (think paying for food and services, or organizing a community meal night or food pantry). But this engagement does not necessarily lead to a stronger, more involved church community. Indeed, whether in or beyond the church environment, despite increasing levels of giving and outreach in absolute terms, there has been a steady decrease in numbers of volunteers and numbers of people involved in charitable giving in America.
The University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute reported in 2018 that, despite a record increase in total hours and dollars given, “fewer Americans are engaging in their community by volunteering and giving than in any time in the last two decades.” This is important because the data the institute examined (from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey) was recent but pre-pandemic when one would expect a deep slide in volunteerism and charitable giving. The institute explained that fewer people volunteered more hours and gave more money, and this made up for the continual decrease in the total numbers of people involved. In other words, a small number of relatively privileged people were giving a lot because they had so much, but most people were not, perhaps because they had little extra time or money. The institute reported that “further illustrating this trend, rural and suburban areas—which traditionally exhibit much higher rates of social capital versus urban areas—experienced the most significant declines in volunteering over this period.”
4. At The Spectator, Marc Oestreich finds museums have a preference for moralizing over exhibitions. From the article:
This is the heart of our modern museums: the drive to inspire has been overtaken by the gratuitous need to moralize. You see it at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, where the achievements of the Founding Fathers now come second to lectures on their moral failures, and at the British Museum, where plaques lamenting colonialist guilt outshine the history of ancient civilizations. Even dinosaur exhibits at the Natural History Museum in London now immerse themselves in climate guilt rather than letting us marvel at prehistoric life. It’s no longer enough to present history; we must be instructed on how to feel about it. . . .
Museums across the country are shifting from educating to pandering. Take a look at the numbers: in the 1980s, American museums of all sorts were thriving, with over 500 million annual visitors. Their mission was clear—to preserve and display the greatest achievements of human civilization. But since even before the pandemic, attendance has been in steady decline, with some museums reporting decline anywhere from 20 to 35 percent.
5. At National Review, Patrick Bobko has a plan for reinvigorating the U.S. Air Force Academy. From the article:
Colonel Robin Olds holds a place in U.S. Air Force lore as one of its greatest fighter pilots. Olds, a triple ace (16 air-to-air kills) with an out-of-regulation handlebar moustache, famously led the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing (later called “The Wolf Pack”) in Vietnam. Olds is best known for “Operation Bolo,” in which his pilots downed between seven and nine North Vietnamese MiGs in a single, ingenious fighter sweep. Bob Hope, while on tour, later referred to Olds’ Wolf Pack as “the greatest distributor of MiG parts in the world.”
When Olds left the war, he returned to the Academy as its commandant, putting a bona fide war hero and combat leader front and center in the cadets’ day-to-day lives.
Cadets must see combat leaders early in their careers. It’s even more critical that cadets hear their stories. They must have examples of what warriors look like, in the flesh, and see how the men who have been in harm’s way interact with subordinates, and how subordinates interact with them. Having these examples is a crucial element of a young officer’s development.
6. At Religion & Liberty Online, Daniel Flynn checks out F.H. Buckley’s tome exploring the meaning of “liberalism.” From the review:
Buckley claims, perhaps accurately, that liberalism grows out of “emotions” and not reason. “One thing that is central to liberalism is a feeling of benevolence,” he insists, “an altruistic desire to look beyond self-interest and take the interests of others into account.” In this telling, liberalism becomes the “feelings, nothing more than feelings” of political philosophies. Morris Albert’s 1975 hit song seems an odd foundation for a political philosophy.
Indeed, this altruistic desire manifests itself in an, for lack of a better term, alienism in which liberals demonstrate their goodness by reflexively embracing the exotic over the familiar, the distant over the close, and the stranger over a neighbor. Recent examples of this phenomenon of exaggerated—and showy—benevolence include “Queers for Palestine,” Sanctuary Cities clutching to that title after an influx of illegal immigrants made a mockery of it by unleashing crime and depleting social services, and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) instilling a simplistic good-guys-vs.-bad-guys narrative upon the Rest and the West. Progressives perversely long to show to those inside their clique that they defend those outside their group. It amounts to a reversal of Edmund Burke’s concept of “little platoons.”
7. Free-Range Files: At The Free Press, Leighton Woodhouse reports on a mother’s arrest. From the article:
Then the two officers turned Patterson around, pushed her sleeves above her wrists, and handcuffed her behind her back, as her 10-year-old son Soren watched from inside the house. Afterward, Patterson was hauled to jail, forced to strip in front of a female officer, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, and locked up.
Her crime?
“Reckless endangerment,” she was told.
Patterson was shocked. Around noon earlier that day, she had been at a medical appointment when Officer Robertson called her with the news that a stranger had seen Soren wandering down a country road, about a mile from his home, and phoned 911. Officer Robertson, who said Soren was in danger of being hit by a car in the 25–35 mph zone, picked up the child and brought him home at 1:30 p.m. Patterson returned home about 20 minutes later.
Six hours later, Patterson was charged with a crime.
8. At Strategika, Russell Berman searches for the whither of what’s happened to declarations of war and treaties of peace. From the article:
Declarations of war and treaties of peace are by no means exclusively modern phenomena; they are as old as war and peace. However, the widespread expectation that states frame military action in formalized political statements that include a justification for the use of organized violence and an explanation of the motivating grievances, is a result of the gradual formalization of statehood and international relations in the course of modernity. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which codified the modern terms of sovereignty, was a turning point in this process that involved at its core the modernization of political authority, i.e., the move away from dynastic rule or other forms of premodern domination toward legalized legitimacy, the rule of law. States must henceforth explain the grounds for their actions, especially those actions that impinge on other sovereignties.
While not explicitly a declaration of war, the American Declaration of Independence exemplifies this imperative of providing justifications for steps that will lead to armed conflict. This obligation underpins the famous opening sentence of the Declaration: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” The final clause is vital. Prevailing political culture evidently “requires” that the “causes” be enumerated in a declaration in order to explain the justification of the pending violence: violence without justification is disallowed. The Continental Congress, which issued the Declaration, was of course not the body of an already existing state but rather only a representation of the thirteen separate colonies acting in concert to declare their rejection of rule by England. Since there was not yet a unified American state, the document cannot be viewed as a full-fledged declaration of war in the modern sense, but rather an announcement of hostilities by a still nascent “America” against England. Yet the text did provide a justification for acts of rebellion that would lead to war, and it therefore approximates a declaration of war in its act of explaining the necessity of violence as the appropriate means to correct a long list of accumulated grievances.
9. At Commentary, Seth Mandel says there should be no sympathy for college administrators. From the piece:
The article is astonishingly dishonest—it just falsely reframes policy proposals as if the writer is reading off of teachers union notecards. But that’s not what galls. What galls is the fact that universities that receive lots and lots of taxpayer money have been ostentatiously violating the civil rights of Jews on campus for over a year, and they are upset that a Republican won the presidential election and might enforce the Civil Rights Act.
That’s all that’s happening here. School administrators are worried that America elected a president who will enforce the Civil Rights Act. Everything else is noise—whiny, high-pitched, screechingly childish noise.
Am I being unkind? Or am I being too kind?
The anti-Semitism crisis on campus is getting worse, despite the fact that it is slightly less visible. Campus Jew-baiting is being expressed in ways other than trust-fund posers sleeping in expensive tents next to the expensive dorms their parents are paying for. So perhaps it’s easier to miss this time around.
10. At Philanthropy Roundtable, Meaghan Mobbs, interviewed by Patrice Onwuka, discusses the falloff in military enrollment, and the disability milieu of veterans. From the Q & A:
Any philanthropists who want to be involved in the veteran space should take a hard look at what we’ve done to veterans in our Veterans Administration (VA) system. We have effectively told veterans that we will pay them to stay sick when it comes to psychological disorders in particular.
I did my residency at the VA. The way that we currently do compensation and pension evaluations for veterans creates a disincentive to helping them get better. And the way that we tell them they don’t have to seek treatment; we’re just going to pay them forever is not a way to thank a veteran for their service.
A reckoning at the VA system will truly show veterans that we value their service and what they’ve done for our country. A recalibration of how we go about investing in veteran programs and how the VA is providing veteran services is the best and most important way that we can honor our veterans.
11. At UnHerd, Sarah Ditum says the talk show is dead, and there is blame to be had. From the piece:
It’s not the audience—either at home or in the studio—who are being enjoined to “look inward, take some accountability”. Almost everyone listening to Meyers already agrees with him: this is a polemic for the faithful. The effect is to reassure everyone watching that they don’t, in fact, need to engage in any reflection at all: all accountability can be directed outwards. The audience rewarded him with a warm bath of clapter.
“Clapter” according to Tina Fey is “when you do a political joke and people go, ‘Woo-hoo’. It means they sort of approve but didn’t really like it that much.” She gives credit for the coinage to, surprisingly, Meyers (then on SNL with Fey). And she also pointed to late-night TV hosts as particular culprits, name-checking The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Later she said she hadn’t meant to single it out, but it wasn’t an unfair comment, because The Daily Show is probably the single most influential force in the history of clapter.
12. Just a Perfect Blendship: At Comment, David Henreckson tells of a friendship miscarriage. From the piece:
But after a mid-week lecture one day, he approached me and asked me to lunch. We had never hung out one-on-one, and rarely in groups. It seemed a strange request, but also impossible to turn down in the moment. So later that week he took me out to a local coffeeshop. Soon after sitting down, he asked me directly: Would I like to try being friends? And would I perhaps even talk with him about his ongoing thesis project?
What ought one to do in this situation? From my perspective as a not-quite-mature adult, he and I possessed very few common interests. We had never connected before, and he was not part of any of the social cliques of which I was a member, or of which I desired to become a member. There were no obvious prospects, I assumed, for a friendship that would outlast our final year in college. And yet here he was, proposing friendship, almost experimentally.
In my recollection, which is admittedly clouded by some remorse, I agreed to his proposal. But I never acted on it. I never reciprocated his lunch invitation, and I never read a word of his thesis. It wasn’t a term at the time, but I suppose I ghosted him, despite seeing him in class several times a week for the rest of the year.
When I teach on friendship now, I ask my students whether they think I was morally culpable for what I did—or did not do—in this situation. Most, strikingly, do not think so. Possibly motivated by a desire to assuage my guilt, or perhaps their own, they generally think that I was under no obligation to accept his offer of friendship. Friendship is not—and cannot be—universal, they tell me. Certainly, it would have been a wonderful thing if my classmate and I had had enough in common to sustain a meaningful friendship. But why feel guilty decades later about the fact that no such commonality existed?
Lucky 13. At Religion Unplugged, Terry Mattingly spotlights American clergy’s timidity when it comes to the “smartphone crisis.” From the article:
Here is the question that haunts Harrison: Why haven’t more religious leaders been willing to address the scary trends linked to smartphone abuse in the urgent, even fiery language used by secular figures such as Haidt and Maher?
“I think many church people don’t want to hurt the feelings of people—to shame them, even. . . . We don’t want to say, ‘It’s a mistake to give these devices to children.’ We don’t want to say that smartphones are dangerous to young people—even if the evidence clearly shows that is true,” said Harrison, reached by telephone days before speaking at Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Nov. 21 “Reclaiming Childhood” summit on mental health issues.
“As believers, we don’t want to say things that make people walk away feeling sad, and our pastors certainly don’t want to make people mad,” she added. “It’s like we don’t have enough faith to trust that telling them the truth could help them in the long run.”
Bonus. At The American Mind, Joel Kotkin explains how the Left betrayed the Jews. From the article:
Much of the Left’s decision to abandon the Jews can be explained on grounds of political expediency. This is particularly true in Europe, where Muslims now outnumber Jews by ten to 15 times in places like France or the UK. Given the far greater voting power of the Islamists, center-left figures like France’s Emmanuel Macron or Britain’s Keir Starmer have turned on the Jewish state, banning arm sales to Israel and generally blaming it for the extended conflict.
Yet the roots of the great betrayal lie far deeper than the current tragedies in Gaza and Lebanon. The intellectual poison originates with the canon of left-wing literature. It was amplified by the anti-Western writings of intellectuals like Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and Edward Saïd; support for Hamas comes naturally to those who have embraced such writings.
Today Jews find themselves on the wrong side of a Kulturkampf against Western civilization in which the Left blames them for being too influential and too successful. In America these attitudes are driven by minority activists and white progressives, who see the world as a Manichean conflict between BIPOC (“Black, Indigenous, and People of Color”) and the hegemonic representatives of “white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.” In this context, Israel is seen as an ultra-white colonialist outpost, even though close to half its citizens originally came as refugees from other Mideast countries.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Eric Streiff brings the expertise that many a nonprofit fundraiser needs to comprendo. From the piece:
I can’t emphasize this enough: putting in the work to tailor your fundraising is worth the effort. The key to fundraising success is adapting your fundraising and communications to move at the donor’s pace, rather than pushing a formulaic, one-size-fits-all message and agenda.
Due. Get the tumbler, the ice, and the libation ready . . . for the next AmPhil “Scotch Talks” webinar—scheduled for Thursday, December 12 from 3:00 to 4:00p.m. (Eastern)—this one hosted by Jeremy Beer and featuring the terrific trio of Chivaun Wolter, Allison Rigterink, and James Davenport, on hand to talk about the savviest ways to find new foundations and win them over. It’s free, and for thee, so sign up right here.
Tre. Nonprofit worker bees who have a hand in writing grant applications should avail themselves of the Center for Civil Society’s forthcoming “In the Trenches” Master Class on “Elements of Grant Writing.” The invaluable three-hour training takes place Thursday, December 5th. Get complete information, and register, right here.
Points of Personal Privilege
Uno. At RealClearPolitics, Your Intrepid Pontificator contemplates how his old boss, the late William F. Buckley Jr., might assess the forthcoming president. Read it here.
Due. At Philanthropy Daily, Your Amateur Homilist wraps up the site’s nine-part “Working for Mercy” series on the Corporal Works. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What is stuffing's favorite mode of transportation?
A: The gravy train.
A Dios
The problem with Thanksgiving is that there is never enough stuffing left over.
May We Remember that Gluttony Is Not a Virtue,
Jack Fowler, who is eating a drumstick at jfowler@amphil.com.
