Alan Jacobs

For years now you’ve been hanging out with your friends at a nice little bar, a place you’re all comfortable with. It’s not perfect; it can get a little raucous sometimes — not everyone there is perfectly behaved, to say the least —; but you sort of know when to drop by, and where the quieter corners are. (There’s a big flashy noisy club around the corner, owned by the same people who own this bar, but you never go there. Not any more. It used to be okay, though.)

But some bad shit has gone down recently, shit that has affected all your friends (though some more than others, and people whom you don’t know most of all) and things have changed. Lately, whenever you’ve dropped by, a good many of your friends are having Primal Scream therapy sessions in the bar. You understand why they’re doing this, and you don’t blame them; and from the sympathetic looks on the faces of some quieter folks around, you discover that they don’t blame the Screamers either. In fact, from time to time almost everyone lets out a scream or two.

This goes on for a while. And eventually you realize that it’s not going to stop anytime soon. Not only are there a good many people who simply need to scream, there’s also an emerging sense within the group that to stop screaming would be, implicitly, to say that everything is more-or-less okay.

When someone suggests that the management gently ask the screamers to go elsewhere, you just laugh. It’s not that kind of management. They’re hands-off to a fault, and in fact some of the shit that has gone down has gone down in the bar. So while it may have been a nice social place for you, it hasn’t been so great for everyone else. Which, when you think about it, doesn’t help your attitude towards the place.

Lately when you’ve been walking by at your usual time, you’ve paused … and then kept walking. You haven’t been there in a while. Somehow going home and reading a book or watching a movie seems better for your spirit. Your friends may be wondering where you are, and you feel bad about that, and you really miss them, but … it really belongs to the Primal Scream group now. Which is fine, you guess — they need somewhere to meet. But you probably won’t be back.

The text of a Colorado ballot initiative:

Shall there be an amendment to the Colorado constitution concerning the removal of the exception to the prohibition of slavery and involuntary servitude when used as a punishment for persons duly convicted of a crime?

People voted “No” in large part because they didn’t know what the hell was being said.

All partisan logic is precisely the same:

Strategy 1: Practice deflection by whataboutism. When somebody points out that your side has done something bad, change the subject by saying “but what about…”

Strategy 2: Do your very best to ignore any evidence that your side has behaved badly.

Strategy 3: When forced to confront that your side has behaved badly, argue that such behavior is highly uncharacteristic of your side, but absolutely, indeed almost universally, characteristic of the other side.

Strategy 4: Treat your own emotional intensity as a mark of the righteousness of your cause and the seriousness of your devotion to it, while denouncing people who are equally emotional in the wrong cause as hysterical whining pearl-clutching babies.

Strategy 5: Never fact-check any Facebook post, tweet, or news story that serves your political narrative. Instead, spread it to as many of your fellow partisans as you can, in the secure knowledge that they won’t fact-check it either. Conversely, factcheck the shit out of anything from your opponents, and if you can’t actually disprove it just reply with “lol.”

American politics is now nothing more than rival assertions of tribal identities. There are no Americans; there are no human beings; there are only instantiations of racial and sexual identities looting the store of our economic and cultural capital. In such a world the most ruthless bullies acquire more loot than everyone else. Tomorrow’s bullies will have a different set of policy proposals but will be temperamentally and morally identical to today’s.

When you’re ready to start the political conversation with by affirming that everyone in the room is a human being — not necessarily right about anything in particular, not necessarily good or even decent, but a human being in precisely the same sense that you are a human being, and that every single human being in this country should be subject to the same laws and norms enforced equally across the board, then get back to me. Until then, I don’t know what to say to you. I’m not refusing to speak; I just don’t know how to speak your identity-politics language without giving up everything I believe about humanity, and about what politics is for.

It is not enough for a population or a section of the population to have Christian faith and be docile to the ministers of religion in order to be in a position properly to judge political matters. If this population has no political experience, no taste for seeing clearly for itself nor a tradition of initiative and critical judgment, its position with respect to politics grows more complicated, for nothing is easier for political counterfeiters than to exploit good principles for purposes of deception, and nothing is more disastrous than good principles badly applied. And moreover nothing is easier for human weakness than to merge religion with prejudices of race, family or class, collective hatreds, passions of a clan and political phantoms which compensate for the rigors of individual discipline in a pious but insufficiently purified soul. Politics deal with matters and interests of the world and they depend upon passions natural to man and upon reason. But the point I wish to make here is that without goodness, love and charity, all that is best in us—even divine faith, but passions and reason much more so—turns in our hands to an unhappy use. The point is that right political experience cannot develop in people unless passions and reason are oriented by a solid basis of collective virtues, by faith and honor and thirst for justice. The point is that, without the evangelical instinct and the spiritual potential of a living Christianity, political judgment and political experience are ill protected against the illusions of selfishness and fear; without courage, compassion for mankind and the spirit of sacrifice, the ever-thwarted advance toward an historical ideal of generosity and fraternity is not conceivable.

— Jacques Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, 1944 (emphasis added)

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Louis Lozowick[/caption]

From Ed Yong’s newsletter:

After the last newsletter, one reader wrote in asking me to stop linking to political pieces. He felt it "inappropriate" and said that he comes here to escape from politics. To people who share that view, some suggestions: Recognise how privileged it is to be able to "escape from politics". Be grateful that it isn't constantly in your face, and a matter of life and death. And consider scrolling to the bottom of this email, and click on the magic blue letters that say "Unsubscribe"; there lies your escape, because after the events of this week, and this year in general, the volume of political content in this newsletter will only be going up, not down.

I see your point, Ed. Unsubscribe it is.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Frederick Ardley[/caption]

I almost never look at the replies to my public Twitter account. I only need to hear so many times that I’m a stupid reactionary, or, well — the things you hear when your surname is “Jacobs.” And I have never, not once in my nearly ten years on Twitter, had a really productive debate there with someone I disagree with. So I use that account almost wholly for posting links, without ever visiting Twitter to do so (thanks to the sharing functions in Mac OS and iOS).

Also, I often use the SelfControl app (image above) to prevent myself from accessing twitter.com.

So if you’d like to converse with me about anything, please send me an email. And if you don’t know what my email address is, Google is your friend.

Donald Trump spends eighteen months stoking the fires of racial and ethnic resentment and now says that it is time to bind up the nation’s wounds. Meanwhile, people who two weeks ago denounced Trump as a villainous cynic for even suggesting that the election could possibly be rigged are declaring that the election was rigged.

The reversals are giving me whiplash.

I can’t avoid the conclusion that if there’s one thing almost all Americans share, it’s this: their ethical and intellectual standards are, collectively, a wholly owned subsidiary of their political loyalties.

As the Quaker Amy Fowler says in High Noon: “There’s got to be some better way for people to live.”