Jonathan Haidt on Hate

For conservatives the liberal psychology professor Jonathan Haidt is an impossibility. A liberal and a psychologist who wrote a book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion in which he found, to his surprise, that conservatives are not just racists, sexists, and homophobes, but people.

Deciding that humans have a "righteous mind" that is set up to make moral distinctions and judgements Haidt constructed a matrix of moral axes: care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation. Then he applied the matrix to the belief system of American liberals, libertarians, and conservatives. He found that liberals defined themselves mainly on the care/harm axis, moderately on the liberty/oppression axis and somewhat on the fairness/cheating axis. Libertarians were really big on liberty/oppression, so-so on fairness/cheating. Conservatives, on the other hand, were pretty well balanced on all six axes.

Wow. Like wow. Since then, Jonathan Haidt has developed a strange new respect for conservatives. For if conservative moral minds were balanced across the six axes, that kinda tells you something about the balanced nature of conservatism.

Recently he went to give a speech at a prestigious private school (probably Lakeside School in Seattle) and ran slam-bang into the modern snowflake fascist culture during the Q&A after his speech. The little snowflake teenage girls at that august institution had fully ingested the present culture that we have been seeing all across America's elite universities this fall.

But then the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?”

 But it was just the girls asking questions and snapping their fingers. The boys said nothing at all, except at the end when they gave him a standing ovation. What was going on? Haidt found out in a smaller breakout session.

[Haidt:] When there is a class discussion about gender issues, do you feel free to speak up and say what you are thinking? Or do you feel that you are walking on eggshells and you must heavily censor yourself? Just the girls in the class, raise your hand if you feel you can speak up? [about 70% said they feel free, vs about 10% who said eggshells ]. Now just the boys? [about 80% said eggshells, nobody said they feel free].

And so on, with race and politics. Same thing. There was only one boy who was Republican and also dared to speak out on political issues. At the end of the discussion, Haidt told them it was high time for the school to make "viewpoint diversity a priority." (Hey Jonathan, why do you think that Bill Gates turned out a conventional liberal?)

Golly. Who would have thunk it in America?

It shows, I think, the fundamental error at the heart of liberalism. When you bring moral issues into politics, it means that all moral issues become grist for the political mill. Moral issues become political issues. And politics always comes down to a fight: my way or the highway.

This is why in America the Founders proposed a separation between Church and State. In America you can -- or you could -- choose your own moral community, and if you don't like one you can choose another. But we are all more or less stuck with the state we have, so when we bring moral issues into politics then we inevitably find that we must fight to the death over it.

You can tell from the outbreak of snowflake fascists at the nation's universities (and apparently at its prestigious private high schools) this fall that liberals really don't understand this. They don't understand that when they go on a PC rampage that they are telling us all "my way or the highway." They don't understand that they are creating enemies all across America because most people don't want to be made to care about racism, sexism, and climate change, and not allowed to have a dissenting position. You see everyone, especially including liberals, hates it when somebody is playing the morality card on them.

It all takes me back to the last Great Awakening of liberal hysteria in the 1960s. Average Americans started to hate it almost immediately, and so elected Richard Nixon twice over. But it really wasn't until the B-movie actor won the presidency by two landslides that liberals got the message and pretended, for a couple of elections, that they were "New Democrats."

Now, egged on by George Soros' money and Barack Obama's crazed faith in community organizing, they are back in full liberal Puritanical fever, complete with witch-hunts for the fabled right-wing extremist unicorn, and the rest of America hates it.

I think that liberals are going to get a terrible shock in November 2016. Just like those boys at that private high schools, about half of America is forced to button its lip at work, at school, and elsewhere wherever ruling-class liberals make the rules. And that half of America hates it.

But here's the good news. Just like back in the 1970s it will take a few election cycles before liberals realize what has happened. After all, nobody they know voted for Trump/Cruz/Rubio, whoever.  Maybe, in the interregnum, before liberals come to their senses, we can fix the economy, and roll back a bit of the liberal bossy-boots state.

Assimilation and the Crime of the Century

Once upon a time there were a bunch of Educated Youth around and they decided to help the suffering factory workers, the people they called the working class. Looking back, these elite "best men" had two options: they could teach the factory workers how to wive and thrive in the capitalist, post-industrial-revolution society and economy that had changed everything; or they could assist the factory workers with "social protection" and make them comfortable in their factory work.

The Educated Youth chose the latter option. They captured the ramparts of cultural and political power and forced society to make life comfortable for the people that toiled in the factories under near slave-labor discipline. They created wage and hour laws; the legitimized restraint of trade in labor; they initiated government pension and health care plans; they forced safety legislation on employers. And life got pretty comfortable for the factory workers. In the heyday of factory work, for one brief moment, a kid could graduate from high school and go down the road to the local factory, and expect to work there, a good job at good wages, for a lifetime.

But then factory work ended, the grandchildren of the educated youth fell out of love for the working class, and the working class sank like a stone. Of course it did: protected and cosseted and confirmed in its pre-modern culture, it was utterly unprepared for the real world of the modern, global economy.

Over at According to Hoyt, author and immigrant Sarah A. Hoyt discusses this issue from the US immigrant's perspective in "Prepare to be Assimilated." She discusses her choice to assimilate to US culture against maintaining the culture of the old country, Portugal.

But today I want to talk about assimilation, or, in sociological terms, acculturation.  I, and Kate Paulk, and Dave Freer, and a ton of the rest of us are immigrants who went to another country with the intention of living there the rest of our lives and who had incentives to fit in and be part of that country...

But even then, with the best will to fit in, it’s a HARD thing.  Really hard.

Sarah then writes at great length just how hard it was for a literate girl from a village in Portugal to "fit in" to America. Today, she feels 90% American and 10% Portuguese, but it took a long time to get there.

Yet today's Educated Youth encourages immigrants to retain their culture and denies the hard road that any immigrant must travel in order to "fit in." And the popular culture encourages non-whites to cleave to their tribal identity instead of fitting into the white middle-class culture of America.

This is the message these new refugee-immigrants will get, though TV, through movies, through social workers.  How important it is they hold on to their all vital tribalism.  Not just in food and clothing, but in thought.  How it’s somehow “racism” to demand they fit in into their new homeland.

Only it doesn't work. It didn't work for the working class; it isn't working for African Americans that have been culturally separated and socially demoralized by the Great Society and race preferences. It's turned college women into bullying special snowflakes.

The Educated Youth are now hard at work on Hispanics, to get them to define themselves as separate from America. And then there are the Muslims.

The message from Sarah A. Hoyt to immigrants is "Don't." Don't listen to the liberals and the identity activists and the Educated Youth. Learn to love the land and the people you have chosen. Only she makes the point more strongly.

Fit in or f*ck off.

Well, she didn't come up with that on her own. She got it from an immigrant to Australia, Dave Freer, from South Africa. And he got it, the first two words, from another immigrant to Australia.

(Myself, I've always avoided the company of fellow ex-pat Brits in the US. I just don't like their "in the old country" talk. That's why the Aussies say: "go back to Britain you whingeing Pom." All I want to do is to be an American.)

This stuff is getting a bit old. Now that we have seen what happened to the Soviet Union. Now that we see what Mao's China was all about. Now that the old white working class in Britain and the US is descended into alcoholism and drug dependency. Now that we know without a doubt where the left's politics leads.

It's time to say that progressive politics is the Crime of the Century.

Because the only thing for peasants first arriving in the city, or immigrants arriving in America, is to "fit in or f*ck off." Anything else is misery and failure.

And anyone that encourages the new arrivals in their separation and segregation is a monster.

My Thanks to America

My love for America began on my first morning in America. It was in December 1965 when I woke up early in my parents' apartment in Denver, Colorado, and saw the crystal clear dawn come up on the great prairie horizon.

It only got better. I loved the way that everything worked, from the heating that heated to the cars that lumbered along confidently with their great iron V8s. I loved the confidence of 6th Avenue, six lanes  of highway that led straight to the Rockies. I loved the Chevies powering up US40 into the mountains. And I loved the can-do spirit of the nation.

Since then America has been good to me. It has given me work and pleasure, a wife, children, and now six grandchildren. And the prosperity to relax and enjoy it all.

Of course, America has a lot of problems, and I am eager to solve them. But problems are the stuff of life; it in only in meeting challenges and difficulties that we humans realize our humanity. We long for paradise and the Isle of the Blessed, but only really achieve paradise by rising to the challenge of life. For a life without challenge and without adversity is not a life at all, but a pretty tableau inside someone's fantasy of life; it is really a hell.

No doubt there are problems in America; no doubt there are injustices. No doubt there are threats of every kind. But I am thankful for the life I have been given in America, and I always will.

The Left Has Always Been Totalitarian, Robert Ehrlich

In NRO today Robert Ehrlich, former Republican governor of Maryland, has some sensible things to say about the ungenerous and anti-democratic Left in America. His piece is titled "A Syllabus of the Dangerous Errors of the Left." (The link and the tag say things like "Progressivism and Democratic Party: Exteme and Dangerous" so you can see that the editors had a bit of a struggle with the lead.)

But I think that Ehrlich is being too gentle with the left. So let's go through his syllabus item by item and shine his list of errors up a bit.

Possibly the most perplexing aspect of modern progressivism is its intolerance of alternative viewpoints.

Really? Hasn't the left always been intolerant of alternative viewpoints? That was the whole point of Marx's inflammatory rhetoric: to put opponents on the defensive, to make out modern popular governments as merely the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, and defenders of the middle-class republics as "bribed apologists" of the evil capitalists. And then there was Lenin and his secret police. And Stalin with his purges. And Mao and his cultural revolution. And Herbert Marcuse with his intolerant tolerance. Hey, politics is violence, after all.

A progressive anti-Israel bias has been clear since Day One of the Obama administration.

No kidding. And the left has been anti-Israel way longer than that, at least since the 1967 war. The left always sides with the non-western victims against the supposed colonizers, and non-whites against whites. In recent years this anti-Israel thing has blossomed into outright anti-semitism, but who cares?

You know the old saying that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that some people aren’t out to get you.

Yeah. The left has always been out to get people that advocate against the left. The whole "McCarthyism" thing has always been a leftist campaign to shut up the Republicans that, rightly, accused a ton of supposed liberals of being Communists and spying for the Soviet Union. As in Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White.

So of course liberals are using IRS agents like little Lois Lerner to savage conservative groups applying for non-profit status. Of course Democrats tried to shut up Wisconsin conservatives and Republican Governor Scott Walker with their unjust and secretive "John Doe" investigation. Of course Barack Obama's Organizing for Action is fomenting race and identity activism all around the nation.

We throw the term “sanctuary city” around so lightly today, it’s now part of our lexicon.

Imagine that! When liberals don't like a law they declare their cities exempt. So there! In the good old days of slavery and King Cotton, this was called "nullification" and every liberal knows it was evil. But when liberals do it, well, you are a bigot and a racist for complaining.

Black Lives Matter!

The nods and winks say that Black Lives Matter is a creature of funding from George Soros's foundations and encouragement from Obama's Organizing for Action. Who knows? But this movement is a cruel joke. What blacks need above all is to stop separating themselves from the mainstream of American life and just get on and fit in.

It's pretty obvious what Black Lives Matter is all about. It is a combination of profound disappointment with the Obama years and Democratic need for angry voters that will go to the polls. Blacks were told that America was irretrievably racist. Then America elected a black president and it seemed that the millennium had arrived. Only it hadn't, in particular because the policies of the Obama administration could not have been better designed to keep minorities down. So now blacks are angry and despondent at the disappointment of their millennial hopes. Meanwhile Democrats need to keep blacks energized and angry so they will go tot he polls in 2016.

It's all so sad, but it all issues out of the necessities of left-wing politics. Our current ruling class relies on the votes of a Coalition of the Fringes, people that believe that only government and its free stuff can protect them against a racist and sexist America. It's a neverending job to keep these people angry and keep them separate from the rest of America. But liberals are up to the job, because everything, their power and their money and the love of their beautiful women, depends on it.

I think that all this Alinskyism and Cloward-Piven stuff, the idea that activism and "peaceful protest" is the essence of politics, will prove to be an epic mistake. Maybe it will make the reaction against the Sixties look like a picnic. I think that the American people hates all this elite-driven activism, and will remind its ruling class of this in November 2016.

Why Working Class Whites Vote GOP

The New York Times has finally committed journalism on the topic of What's the Matter With Kansas, the fact that the white working class is not voting for its economic interest as it should, but is voting instead for racist, sexist, homophobe Republicans that don't give a good goddam about them and their real interests, as properly understood by elite liberals. Alex MacGillis writes,

The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own interests.

Why do they do it, those "godforsaken white-working-class provincials"?

It's because they want to draw a line between themselves and the folks on welfare. First, of all, the folks on welfare and Medicaid don't really vote at all, so there's that.

The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.

This confirms with what I was reading and writing about years ago in The Road to the Middle Class. I focused on a woman that feminist liberal Hanna Rosin condescendingly interviewed in a 2000 article about the Christian Right. Mary Johnston, a resident of the striver suburbs around Charlotte, NC., was ashamed of her cracker origins in the red-neck town of Chester.

It's not just snobbery in the Mary Johnstons. It's the fear, the nagging fear that they could one day slip back into the helplessness and squalor of the underclass life.

MacGillis writes about a nurse, Pamela Dougherty, who had married as a teenager, had a child, divorced, went on welfare, and then trained as a nurse -- with the help of government benefits. Now she's remarried and has a steady job at a kidney dialysis center. But is she a supporter of the programs that had helped her? Not a bit of it.

She was reacting, she said, against the sense of entitlement she saw on display at the dialysis center. The federal government has for years covered kidney dialysis treatment in outpatient centers through Medicare, regardless of patients’ age, partly on the logic that treatment allows people with kidney disease to remain productive. But, Ms. Dougherty said, only a small fraction of the 54 people getting dialysis at her center had regular jobs.

This is something that liberals have a problem understanding: the fear of slipping back into dependency. That's why the responsible lower middle class is so anti-welfare. It's not so much that they want to pull up that ladder to stop other people benefiting from the programs they used. It's to cut off the option of retreat back into dependency for themselves. 

OK, so what are Democrats to do about this? Here is MacGillis' peroration.

The best way to reduce resentment, though, would be to bring about true economic growth in the areas where the use of government benefits is on the rise, the sort of improvement that is now belatedly being discussed for coal country, including on the presidential campaign trail. If fewer people need the safety net to get by, the stigma will fade, and low-income citizens will be more likely to re-engage in their communities — not least by turning out to vote.

Oh yeah. That should do it: big government at its best. But here is what I think. I think that with President Obama off the ballot we are going to see a big falloff in black voting in November 2016. It's just going to be very hard to get low-income blacks all riled up to vote, especially after the collapse of the millennial hopes of 2008. I just don't think that Black Lives Matter is going to get the job done.

And I wonder when the working blacks of America will follow the Mary Johnstons and the Pamela Doughertys into the GOP. Every now and again you read a piece that indicates that the black church ladies are not that different in outlook and philosophy from the white working class ladies. Come on in ladies, the water's fine.

A Short History of Safe Spaces

All of us bitter clingers are pretty pissed off by the liberal safe-spacers, the young college students that need a place to go and cry when they hear anything that offends their delicate sensibilities.

But let us not pretend that this is anything new under the sun. This safe space culture started way, way before liberal cultural Marxists and their bribed apologists, the community organizers, cast their dark shadow across the land.

It all started with the Garden of Eden. Yeah, what would you call the place where Adam and Eve gamboled together in perfect innocence other than the First Safe Space? Then the Serpent showed up and that was the end of the First Safe Space.

One day, agriculture showed up and it looked like ordinary people could shelter in the benevolent safe space of the king. Only, of course, the kings tended to take advantage of the farmers and peasants under their protection, and needed them as spear fodder in their endless wars. So life wasn't quite as safe as the farmers hoped when they came in from the steppe.

Fast forward to the feudal era, and well-born sons and daughters of the nobility liked to shelter in the safe spaces of monasteries to get away from the knightly challenges of the Dark Ages. The monastic safe spaces might have gone on forever if merchants across Europe hadn't wrecked the monastic economic model with their global commerce. The safe-spacing peasants also found themselves hurled onto the labor market in consequence of the agricultural revolution that needed a lot fewer "useless retainers."

It took a while but finally the sons of the bourgeoisie came up with a new safe space. They would provide "social protection" for the factory workers traumatized by the industrial revolution. All the workers had to do was vote for lefties and all their problems would be taken care of by community organizers and educated experts. This new safe-space model worked like a charm for a while until the factory system was replaced by automated manufacturing and the white working class collapsed into drink and drugs.

Now we have a new safe-space movement. It provides protection for college students traumatized by hate speech and bigotry. It provides racism-free zones for African Americans. And it provides Muslims with safe spaces purged of Islamophobia.

I wonder if the new safe spaces will prove any better than the old ones.

Is This the Fall of the Euro Empire?

Good old Niall Ferguson is telling the Boston Brahmins today that this might be the End. As in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defenses to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.

And, of course, as 1,600 years ago, the ruling class is clueless. Ferguson recalls his youth, 30 years ago at Oxford.

We learned nothing that mattered. Indeed, we learned a lot of nonsense to the effect that nationalism was a bad thing, nation-states worse, and empires the worst things of all.

This was the lesson that the educated and evolved ruling class learned from Hitler and Mussolini. The people could not be trusted; they would fall for the man on the white horse. That's what the European Union is all about. The wise elite extracts the levers of power away from the hoi-polloi and concentrates it in the hands of the educated, evolved, and expert elite that has the wisdom and the knowledge to rule.

This lesson is, of course, the wrong lesson. The lesson of the inter-war era is that, when the normal ruling class fails to keep the wheels of commerce and prosperity turning and people look down and don't see the floor but a gaping precipice, then and only then do the people look to a Hitler, a Mussolini or a Trump.

In other words, fascism is a product of ruling-class failure. Period. Today, ruling class means liberal politicians, liberal media, liberal corporate elite, liberal Hollywood, liberal professors, liberal teachers that, e.g., won't let little boys play with Legos.

Right now, everyone -- especially women -- is trending on the Paris massacre, and now the Mali massacre. But frankly I am not paying attention out here in Oz. I don't need to pay attention. Instead, I am feeling serene. We were never going to be able to deal with the Islamic reaction until the anti-nationalist, anti-nation-state, educated and evolved ruling class was utterly discredited. Now it starts to seem to me that Barack Obama and Angela Merkel were sent by God to do the dirty work, and clear the decks with their follies for a response to the Islamist challenge.

Of course, as Winston Churchill famously said, in 1942, after Monty's victory at El Alamein:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

We are certainly nowhere near the End of the Beginning. But we are approaching the real Beginning of the Beginning, and that is why I am feeling serene. "Events, dear boy, events" are starting to cook the goose of our liberal ruling class. And we can't get to the middle, let alone the beginning of the end of the current World Crisis until the liberal goose is well and truly cooked, served, eaten and the bones thrown to the Tasmanian Devils. (Little bit of Tassie stuff there).

Europe may still fall the to Islamic revolt against the modern culture and economy; this may indeed be the End of the European Empire. But it won't fall without a fight.