[FRIAM] oversight

Fri May 20 17:48:25 EDT 2022

In the last several exchanges, the discussion of engaging with their “ideas” has felt to me like following the chaff thrown off by an airplane rather than following the airplane that is on the attack run and needs to be shot down.

I am finding, in the general cloud of news articles, more instances of people saying explicitly the thing that “feels” (there’s that word again) to me like it is on the right center.

Tom Edsall had a piece in NYT sometime recently past, 
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/18/opinion/christian-nationalism-great-replacement.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/18/opinion/christian-nationalism-great-replacement.html>
in which one of his email correspondents said (and I won’t get this quite right, but the keyword “instrumental” is verbatim), that what issues they claim to argue from at any time is not essential, but rather instrumental.  The thing that is essential is the cultivation of a persecution complex and the seeking for conflict as an identity group against somebody.

There was another piece (I think also NYT) by some professor from Yale who specializes in Fascism, that had two distillations I liked a lot.  
(It was Snyder — duh — here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/russia-fascism-ukraine-putin.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/russia-fascism-ukraine-putin.html>
). This ties back to our earlier thread about what it is institutionally, and what it is culturally.  One of the professor’s formulations early in the piece is that Fascism is a social movement of irrationality and violence.  He comes back later, in more systematic mode, to say that the detailed themes can be quite variable across times and places, but the one theme that is always there is the “triumph of will over reason”.  This thing about “will” feathers well with Susan Sondheim’s “Fascist aesthetics” that I raised some months ago as a topic, and the fact that this is expressly _against_ reason goes well with what has become one of Justin King’s (Beau of the fifth column and other channels) themes: the long-term and consistent anti-education position of this movement that at the moment we call the “political right”.  The Yale prof is helpful because he doesn’t center on the word “education”, which is an institutional system with a developmental job to do; he focuses on “rationality”, which really gets at the anti-enlightenment (and broader) fabric in this, a whole framework for experience and behavior.

In a sense, anything I said above has been in our discussions all along, because we acknowledge the blanket term “bad faith” routinely, and I still think it is a fine term to get back to this theme.  But these other glosses on it seem helpful to add thickness to the picture.

I do, however, want to get to Glen’s mention of ideas, because it deserves to be addressed and not just dismissed.  Do I think that people don’t “believe” things they advocate for?  Like ACB advocating the Handmaid role for women, or the various anti-abortionists of one stripe or another?  Two answers: One, “belief” in people itself seems instrumental enough that I wouldn’t put it past them to ardently “believe” whatever train they are on, even if once they weren’t on it at all.  There are also, of course, completely cynical liars, but we put them into a different bin already.  But second, and more to the social dynamic, I think all this looks different through a social-Darwinian lens.  There is no idea so divergent that you can’t find somebody on the internet who is committed to it.  Yet those “beliefs” can still be non-essential, as long as, whenever they become the instrumental passing fad, you have ways to recruit the believers from that fringe to do that month’s (or year’s or decade’s) work in service of the real core-goal of maintaining the narrative of persecution and conflict-seeking as a way of propping up some kind of identity that people feel a need to have.  So maybe however “essential” beliefs ever get, to the individual, but completely instrumental relative to the social dynamic and the problem that sinks us if we don’t find an effective response to it.

Eric

> On May 20, 2022, at 11:02 PM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Yeah, I get that. But there's an inertia to consider. If we manage to put the Right back into place tenuously, without convincing enough of the other side to relax or compromise, then they'll dig in even more. The tenuous installation feeds into their rhetoric. We need at least a semblance of cooperative consensus.
> 
> The Federalist Society (and orgs like The Fellowship <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fellowship_%28Christian_organization%29>) are not going to simply give up and go home. They've worked for decades to overturn Roe and other tenuously established values could soon topple, as well.
> 
> There seems to be 2 options: 1) engage with their good arguments and shelve their bad arguments, cafeteria style, or 2) come up with our own Illuminati style insidious strategy. (2) requires discipline lefties just don't have, in part because we criticize ourselves. (1) is the practical path.
> 
> On 5/19/22 12:14, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> This why I won’t be “pretending” to consider the other side of this issue.  It could cause harm for the sake of stupid people.
>>> On May 19, 2022, at 11:47 AM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I agree. But I don't think that's obvious to many people. I also think the foundations of math are political (... or perhaps ideological). And the understandable tendency to reduce sociology to psychology to biology to chemistry to physics is also political (or ideological). But there are plenty of people smarter and more well-intentioned than me who disagree.
>>> 
>>> So for those people, whether originalists or evolutionists, who believe in the Rule of Law, it's up to them (or us if we play along with the pretense) to derive the right from the Constitution ... and perhaps peri-Constitution precedent. And if the right *can't* be so derived, then it has to be grafted on as an additional axiom, either a federal amendment or a diversity of state laws/amendments.
>>> 
>>>> On 5/19/22 11:35, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>> What first principles?   The court is a political organization.
> 
> 
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