In the final years before the sack of Constantinople, the Byzantine court (silk-robed, incense-choked, endlessly self-assured) was busy debating whether angels had weight and if Christ’s sandals would pass through fire. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Bosporus, real fire. Latin soldiers sharpening swords. Ships being stocked. The empire's greatest minds were measuring the distance between dogma and doctrine while the walls groaned. That’s what came to mind reading yet another performance by the so-called defenders of Western civilization, who clutch their pearls over campus posters while applauding leaders who are actively dynamiting the global institutions that gave the West whatever moral weight it ever had. They are arguing over pronouns while the city burns.
And I’m not being metaphorical. These guys aren’t just neglecting the walls—they're handing the sledgehammers to the arsonists. People sell themselves as guardians of Enlightenment values, but the second those values get in the way of their cultural vengeance fantasies, they throw them under the bus and call it a trolley problem. NATO? Optional. International law? Too slow. Decency? Complicated. The “least bad option” logic they use to back demagogues isn’t pragmatic—it’s lazy and cowardly. It’s comfort food for people who want to be angry and righteous at the same time. They’ll tell you Trump is rough but necessary, like a bitter medicine. No. He’s arsenic. And they’re mixing the dose because they hate the taste of kale.
The impulse is understandable. The left can be smug and censorious. Institutions feel broken. It’s fun to flip tables. But if your idea of defending Western civilization is cheering for its erosion—as long as it offends the right people—then you were never defending it in the first place. You were decorating the foyer while someone sawed through the foundation. The Byzantines thought their scrolls and ceremonies would protect them from what was real. They didn’t. The sack came anyway. And the historians who wrote it down didn’t bother to distinguish between the court jesters and the court philosophers. They all went down together.
This is a very insightful point but I think you can also point to analogies in the western empire as well. Nero after all promised to restore a "New Golden Age" and wound up letting much of the city burn down after which he claimed it for a new palace. The games were in full swing, much of the populace was enticed by bloodsport and the elites busied themselves with flattery and climbing over the bodies of their peers while outside the gates the vandals crept closer and closer.
"Conservatism is when something triggers the libs, and the more the libs are triggered the more conservatismer it is."
It feels like the moment the economic and cultural left (with whom on many issues I am in agreement) set one toe past the point of comfort for a lot of self-declared centrist moderates, those moderates immediately abandoned their expressed principles and ran into the embrace of the waiting fascists, while a number of supposedly principled conservatives revealed themselves to have been said fascists all along--and in doing so came to embody that quote meant to parody them, and further provide an illustration of what the left had claimed all along about "fish hook theory". (Or, as the Black Panthers put it, "scratch a liberal and you'll find a fascist". To be clear, I am not claiming this about the author.)
(For two examples from Europe, as I recall, witness the aftermath of the 2019 election in Thuringia, where the liberal Free Democratic Party accepted the support of the fascist Alternative für Deutschland to elect an FDP member as Minister-President and it took the tacit support of the conservative Christian Democratic Union for the Die Linke-SDP-Grüne alliance to stay in power instead; see also the aftermath of the 2024 legislative elections in France, where the conservative Les Républicains splintered between a faction that allied with the fascist Rassemblement national and one that did not, and then despite the Nouveau Front populaire winning a plurality in the Assemblée nationale, their chosen candidate, Lucie Castets, was not given the opportunity to form a government and instead the centrist President Emmanuel Macron chose first a conservative from Les Républicains and then a centrist from his own Ensemble alliance as Prime Minister, in both cases hoping that the Rassemblement national would at least decline to defeat the government, in order not to have a government with the explicit support of La France Insoumise, even after the party agreed that it would not seek any Cabinet positions in a hypothetical Castets government.)
I think you are on to something there. You can also get some mileage out of Dr. Martin Luther King's comments about "White Moderates". In his case he was talking about people who claimed to be on your side but don't want change. I would argue it applies equally to people who say they are "not racists" right up until a black guy becomes president and then they find common cause with open racists.
Yes, I also like to quote Dr. King in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail":
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
He also remarked, "The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity."
And, of course, there's Malcolm X's observation about white liberals:
In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negroes (i.e., the race problem, the integration and civil rights issues) are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power. Among whites here in America, the political teams are no longer divided into Democrats and Republicans. The whites who are now struggling for control of the American political throne are divided into "liberal" and "conservative" camps. The white liberals from both parties cross party lines to work together toward the same goal, and white conservatives from both parties do likewise.
The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro's friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political "football game" that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.
Politically the American Negro is nothing but a football and the white liberals control this mentally dead ball through tricks of tokenism: false promises of integration and civil rights. In this profitable game of deceiving and exploiting the political politician of the American Negro, those white liberals have the willing cooperation of the Negro civil rights leaders. These "leaders" sell out our people for just a few crumbs of token recognition and token gains. These "leaders" are satisfied with token victories and token progress because they themselves are nothing but token leaders.
A pithier way of putting it is that a moderate is someone who looks at the extreme violence done by the far-right and the less violent actions (but still violent) taken by the far-left, and concludes that since both do violence both are equally bad--thus giving cover to the far-right.
It should be noted also that Malcolm X grew up in Lansing, Michigan, and then Boston before moving to Harlem. Malcolm's experience of being black in the United States was that of living in places where racial integration was a legal reality, but not a social one. (Dr. King's experience was of places where integration was not even a legal reality.) For instance, Malcolm elsewhere (maybe "The Ballot or the Bullet") noted that blacks were allowing wealth to drain from their community into white hands, because while both whites and blacks could run businesses and could all shop at each other's businesses (legal integration), his experience was that while black people would shop at white-owned businesses, white people would shop at black-owned businesses far less and thus wealth transferred from blacks to whites (this is the lack of social integration).
As I recall there is an interesting anecdote in "Black Like Me" about that same point. The author who was white toured many communities using pigmentation drugs to appear black. In one of the chapters he recounts meeting with a local community banker who organized housing loans from the community to the community. White bankers would never give the loans because they said people couldn't afford them. However once the local community started showing success the bankers all showed up trying to get a piece of the action. They didn't want to do normal business until someone else showed them the profit. It was integration only to a point.
There's actually another layer to the situation in France that made it even more irritating to the left.
France uses a two-round electoral system, where if no candidate receives a majority in the first round, the top two candidates advance to the second. For legislative elections, there are a few exceptions; in particular, any candidate receiving sufficient support from all registered electors (not just those who actually voted) can advance to the second round even without finishing in the top two. In past elections, even having three candidates advance was rare; having four advance hadn't happened in (I believe) half a century. The second round is simple plurality voting such as is used in Canada and most places in the United States, regardless of the number of candidates.
Five districts in 2024 saw four candidates advance to the second round, and over 300 had three-way contests.
Shortly after the first-round results were announced, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise, announced that the Nouveau Front populaire would withdraw all its candidates who finished third or worse in races where the top two candidates were from the Ensemble alliance and the Rassemblement national. (I don't know about how they treated candidates for Les Républicains.)
In 2022, meanwhile, when Mélenchon had finished a very close third to Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in the Presidential election, he had vociferously supported Macron in the second round because he saw Le Pen as an existential threat to the French Republic.
Some time later, Gabriel Attal, Macron's Prime Minister, announced that the Ensemble alliance would also withdraw candidates who finished third or worse in a contest where the top two were from the NFP and the RN--but only if the NFP candidate was from one of the traditional "republican" parties of the French left, the Socialists, Communists and Greens. This left many districts as three-way races between a RN candidate, a LFI candidate, and a third-place Ensemble candidate. (Again, I do not know what Les Républicains did, or what other parties did regarding races involving their candidates.)
It is very plausible that the RN only won as many seats as it did because of left-centre vote splitting between LFI and Ensemble candidates in the second round in those three-way races, even as the NFP had attempted to engineer an effective left-centre voting alliance that would see the anti-NR vote rally around a single candidate in the second round.
This infuriated the left, who had chosen Macron and Ensemble as the less bad option against Le Pen and the RN, and so then to see Macron outright reject the possibility of a left-centre alliance despite the NFP winning a plurality in the Assemblée nationale and the Ensemble alliance the second-most seats, easily holding a majority between them, and instead nominate a LR Prime Minister and in effect look for a centre-fascist alliance (this is "fish hook theory", that when the centre feels threatened from its left, it runs into the arms of fascists) only further incensed them.
The LR Prime Minister was defeated in the Assemblée when both the NFP and RN voted against his government, but when Macron then nominated a member of his own alliance as Prime Minister, while this still infuriated LFI (the largest of the four parties in the NFP in the Assemblée, though not by much) because he refused to consider Castets despite her being (vaguely) a Socialist and LFI having promised not to accept Cabinet positions in her government, the left-wing bloc splintered somewhat because the Socialists, seeing an opportunity to reassert themselves as the main party of the French left, declined to join LFI's motion to defeat the new government. I haven't looked into it much since then.
Macron's official line on why he declined to nominate Castets was because he didn't think her government would survive an Assemblée vote, but given that the NFP would have backed her fully, and all he had to do was tell his own alliance to back her as well, this smacks of a refusal on his part to consider working with LFI, despite their having sacrificed some of their electoral prospects to stop the RN, with whom Macron promptly tacitly worked in attempting to keep both of his Prime Ministers in office, particularly his first selection from LR.
(Macron had pleaded for "republican" parties to work together to back a government in the immediate aftermath of the election, meaning by that everyone except LFI and the RN, but at the time the NFP was fully united and the three older parties refused to splinter from LFI, knowing that they needed the non-competition agreement between them to elect as many candidates as possible in the event of another snap election.)
In brief, in France in 2024, at least from the left's point of view, the left did everything it could to help the centre stop the fascists, and the centre promptly spat in the left's face and cozied up to the fascists instead. (Though the fascists weren't all that willing to work with the centrists, either, as it proved.)
It's no wonder that that Black Panthers observation has been making a comeback--or, to put it a bit more coarsely, "Scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds."
EDIT: There's another incident, again from France, that I recall. I can't recall what year this was, but Macron's Higher Education Minister was debating the question of Islam in universities with Marine Le Pen on TV. When the Minister made the argument that expression of the Muslim faith (if not Muslims themselves) should be restricted or banned on campus, Le Pen made a face that showed she knows full well that that's the sort of position everyone would expect her to take, and instead she found herself arguing for France's long tradition of religious liberty--an inversion of what you'd expect from someone who claims to be a centrist and someone whom everyone says is a fascist.
For a long time I did not buy the fish hook theory. But now I do with one caveat and Macron I think explains this perfectly. I used to think that the expectation was that the centrists would run to the right out of fear. But I think in Macron's case as in the case of the smart boys in the RNC who ran to Trump it is as much about hubris. Macron thinks he can control Le Pen but not the leftists. The same is true of the Republicans who hitched their brand to Trump. They assumed they could ride him but it is ultimately the other way around because each time they run to the right they elevate it until, as the NYC Democrats found with Adams and Cuomo, they have noone left who can stand. Sooner or later there is no "center" left other than decaying players who are thoroughly compromised and untrustworthy. Until I saw Macron's example which you laid out nicely I never really appreciated how much they mask this crap as cunning.
Macron thinking he can control Le Pen but not Mélenchon is, as I recall, essentially the same rationale that centrist (and even centre-left) politicians in Weimar Germany gave for supporting Hitler--they thought they could control Hitler but not Ernst Thälmann. (This is not to say that I think Mélenchon and Thälmann are comparable.)
The actual answer is that you can't control either of them; it is very often a matter of choosing which one is less bad. (At least, if you have chosen to seek elected office and are successful in doing so, as then making this choice is part of what you've signed up to do. As an ordinary voter it is entirely reasonable, and some would even argue morally necessary, to conclude that both are beyond the pale and refuse to vote, even if one is more so than the other.)
The example of Hitler and Thälmann is also an example of successful fascist framing, casting political struggles as a choice between fascism and communism (back then the term "socialism" was often used instead, and some communists will still use that term, such as in China, with the governing ideology sometimes being termed "socialism with Chinese characteristics") and fearmongering that rejecting fascism necessarily means embracing communism. It should be noted that in each of the last three elections prior to the Nazi takeover (July 1932, November 1932, March 1933) the Nazi and Communist parties between them held a majority of seats (sometimes termed a "negative majority") so that no coalition not involving at least one of those parties could hold a majority of seats. (This is what happened in 2019 in Thuringia with Die Linke and the AfD; Die Linke, it should be noted, can trace its political ancestry to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which governed East Germany as a one-party state.)
Frank Herbert also made this observation in "God Emperor of Dune":
Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It’s true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it’s that patterns are repeated. My oppressions, by and large, are no worse than any of the others and, at least, I teach a new lesson.
While I agree with many of your points, I'm not sure I can agree with you about bureaucratic aristocracies. I don't think all bureaucracy is bad or is a separate thing. I think it is just machinery of a state. You can have an aristocracy of bureaucracy I suppose alongside an aristocracy of politics but it isn't necessarily the case that bureaucracy sides against the intent of the people. Consider a specific bureaucracy like the CFPB. There is no way any one of us can sue a credit card company on our own but the CFPB can. That represents effective bureaucracy that is not an aristocracy.
Likewise I cannot agree with your contention about not voting. If you know one candidate to be better than another even if you loathe both then you should vote for the better one. A vote is not an endorsement and we must do more to get better candidates, but a vote is a choice and when faced with two options a non-choice simply means casting fate to the wind. That is not a viable strategy or, I would argue, morally sound.
I also don't agree with every point I cite; I offer them as various perspectives on the question at hand and attempt to understand those perspectives with which I disagree as a way of sharpening my own convictions. On Herbert's observation (through the character of Leto II Atreides), I agree that there are elements of government that do not ultimately function as oppressive bureaucracies. (But on the CFPB, one might argue that its functions were only made necessary because civil justice has become inaccessible for ordinary citizens! That is, the courts and the legal system more broadly had become a tool of oppressive bureaucracy. And my own experience of dealing with various governmental bodies has given me a look into how their rules and procedures operate to deny service as much as possible, or at least force those seeking to successfully obtain said services to jump through countless hoops and debase themselves repeatedly--and this is to say nothing of my experiences dealing with private-sector bodies serving similar functions.)
As for the question of voting for the candidate you loathe least, again, I do not necessarily agree with the contention, at least to its full extent (and I worded it in a way that I thought made it clear that it was not a position with which I agreed, merely one which I have seen argued cogently, but starting from different priors than my own). To me the true danger of lesser-of-two-evils voting is not the vote itself, but rather the post hoc self-rationalisations for the vote beyond the basic calculation of which is the lesser evil, which is in part, I think, a result of making decisions not rooted in a well-considered, firmly grounded ethical framework, so that the voter slowly convinces herself that her vote was correct in a positive sense, rather than simply being less wrong (that is, correct but only in a negative sense). (Jerry Garcia reportedly quipped that “Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”)
(Jesse Ventura expressed what you may consider a related view in 2016, when he endorsed Gary Johnson for President, even though the nature of the US constitutional and electoral structure is such that Johnson had no hope of becoming President. As I recall, he explained it thus: "I'm not endorsing Gary Johnson because I hate Hillary Clinton or I hate Donald Trump. I'm endorsing Gary Johnson for President because I want Gary Johnson to be President." If you consider voting for a candidate who you know cannot win to be no different from not voting at all, then you may also consider this morally unsound.)
Ah, I don't consider voting for someone who won't win the same as not voting. I do reject the "you're wasting your time" theory but I see the connection. In my view making no choice at all, literally sitting it out, is completely passive and makes no sense. Choosing the best one you can is something you should do. But more than that, you should really take note well before the election and work to get candidates you want. I also think that we should have ranked choice voting and a block on political party locks so that we can actually have choices and so those choices are not so fraught.
As to how the civil service functions, I agree it can be and often is very badly structured. In my experience dealing with those it is less about the bureaucracy itself than it is about the laws that compel them. Far too much effort is spent adding means tests, rule checks, etc. to ensure that help only goes to the "deserving" few. Then it is followed by a host of reporting requirements which are never read. The end result are services that are difficult or useless by design which are due to legislators not bureaucrats.
As a native American gazing on Europe and its colonies, I have to say that so much of what Western people call "civilization" has something to do with form, not substance -- as if the underlying moral order of their caste system were divinely designed, and the only remaining issues had something to do with manners. Western philosophers have argued over who should be on top, with morphing conclusions dependent on the use of force. For all those who get their cultural directions from reading the papers, good luck. No surprise that the chattering class has your brains by the balls.
Perhaps it is operant conditioning in light of the persuasive power of individuals like this comedian turned propagandist “philosopher”; the rewards are not only economic including bitcoin, gold-colored sneakers, and questionable marketing of the American presidency, but also the aggrandizement for political capital (within a dysfunctional climate that has become structural and systemic). The fuse that detonated the pathologic environment we are living through has much to do with the perpetrators (material support aided by corporate news media and the Musk freakish DOGE months-long episode) and the disaffected, unquestioning voters who are fed intentional faux media disinformation like a daily vitamin pill. Education unfettered by particular vested interests is always a challenge in any society but particularly more difficult in an oligarchical society led by a geriatric, Putin-adoring authoritarian whose main fan base in government are other wannabe Heritage Foundation authoritarians who yearn to permanently erode the balance of power guideposts that once allowed a vibrant, democratic society ( envied by a global populace yearning to breathe free of the yoke of government political censorship or unjustified punishment and extrajudicial detainment). Add to the exaggerated disunity in the US, the perception of folks feeling “left behind” reinforced by media messages that habitually expose the listeners to be inclined to point the finger at a cause of economic and societal-born culture shocks.
Until Dems and Independents learn to meaningfully engage with the voters and laws promulgated to protect evidence-based facts and truths and we begin to pull back the curtain on immigrant “enforcers” that the regime pays with tax-payer dollars, the society will become increasingly polarized and paralyzed instead of being empowered to recreate this republic, based on democratic values, the frayed Constitution that awaits the future renaissance of the globally stabilizing country we once were.
Have struggled to find a more accurate term than hypocrisy. Thank you for this: “This represents more than mere hypocrisy. It represents the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy…”
In the final years before the sack of Constantinople, the Byzantine court (silk-robed, incense-choked, endlessly self-assured) was busy debating whether angels had weight and if Christ’s sandals would pass through fire. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Bosporus, real fire. Latin soldiers sharpening swords. Ships being stocked. The empire's greatest minds were measuring the distance between dogma and doctrine while the walls groaned. That’s what came to mind reading yet another performance by the so-called defenders of Western civilization, who clutch their pearls over campus posters while applauding leaders who are actively dynamiting the global institutions that gave the West whatever moral weight it ever had. They are arguing over pronouns while the city burns.
And I’m not being metaphorical. These guys aren’t just neglecting the walls—they're handing the sledgehammers to the arsonists. People sell themselves as guardians of Enlightenment values, but the second those values get in the way of their cultural vengeance fantasies, they throw them under the bus and call it a trolley problem. NATO? Optional. International law? Too slow. Decency? Complicated. The “least bad option” logic they use to back demagogues isn’t pragmatic—it’s lazy and cowardly. It’s comfort food for people who want to be angry and righteous at the same time. They’ll tell you Trump is rough but necessary, like a bitter medicine. No. He’s arsenic. And they’re mixing the dose because they hate the taste of kale.
The impulse is understandable. The left can be smug and censorious. Institutions feel broken. It’s fun to flip tables. But if your idea of defending Western civilization is cheering for its erosion—as long as it offends the right people—then you were never defending it in the first place. You were decorating the foyer while someone sawed through the foundation. The Byzantines thought their scrolls and ceremonies would protect them from what was real. They didn’t. The sack came anyway. And the historians who wrote it down didn’t bother to distinguish between the court jesters and the court philosophers. They all went down together.
This is a very insightful point but I think you can also point to analogies in the western empire as well. Nero after all promised to restore a "New Golden Age" and wound up letting much of the city burn down after which he claimed it for a new palace. The games were in full swing, much of the populace was enticed by bloodsport and the elites busied themselves with flattery and climbing over the bodies of their peers while outside the gates the vandals crept closer and closer.
"Conservatism is when something triggers the libs, and the more the libs are triggered the more conservatismer it is."
It feels like the moment the economic and cultural left (with whom on many issues I am in agreement) set one toe past the point of comfort for a lot of self-declared centrist moderates, those moderates immediately abandoned their expressed principles and ran into the embrace of the waiting fascists, while a number of supposedly principled conservatives revealed themselves to have been said fascists all along--and in doing so came to embody that quote meant to parody them, and further provide an illustration of what the left had claimed all along about "fish hook theory". (Or, as the Black Panthers put it, "scratch a liberal and you'll find a fascist". To be clear, I am not claiming this about the author.)
(For two examples from Europe, as I recall, witness the aftermath of the 2019 election in Thuringia, where the liberal Free Democratic Party accepted the support of the fascist Alternative für Deutschland to elect an FDP member as Minister-President and it took the tacit support of the conservative Christian Democratic Union for the Die Linke-SDP-Grüne alliance to stay in power instead; see also the aftermath of the 2024 legislative elections in France, where the conservative Les Républicains splintered between a faction that allied with the fascist Rassemblement national and one that did not, and then despite the Nouveau Front populaire winning a plurality in the Assemblée nationale, their chosen candidate, Lucie Castets, was not given the opportunity to form a government and instead the centrist President Emmanuel Macron chose first a conservative from Les Républicains and then a centrist from his own Ensemble alliance as Prime Minister, in both cases hoping that the Rassemblement national would at least decline to defeat the government, in order not to have a government with the explicit support of La France Insoumise, even after the party agreed that it would not seek any Cabinet positions in a hypothetical Castets government.)
I think you are on to something there. You can also get some mileage out of Dr. Martin Luther King's comments about "White Moderates". In his case he was talking about people who claimed to be on your side but don't want change. I would argue it applies equally to people who say they are "not racists" right up until a black guy becomes president and then they find common cause with open racists.
Yes, I also like to quote Dr. King in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail":
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
He also remarked, "The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity."
And, of course, there's Malcolm X's observation about white liberals:
In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negroes (i.e., the race problem, the integration and civil rights issues) are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power. Among whites here in America, the political teams are no longer divided into Democrats and Republicans. The whites who are now struggling for control of the American political throne are divided into "liberal" and "conservative" camps. The white liberals from both parties cross party lines to work together toward the same goal, and white conservatives from both parties do likewise.
The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro's friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political "football game" that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.
Politically the American Negro is nothing but a football and the white liberals control this mentally dead ball through tricks of tokenism: false promises of integration and civil rights. In this profitable game of deceiving and exploiting the political politician of the American Negro, those white liberals have the willing cooperation of the Negro civil rights leaders. These "leaders" sell out our people for just a few crumbs of token recognition and token gains. These "leaders" are satisfied with token victories and token progress because they themselves are nothing but token leaders.
A pithier way of putting it is that a moderate is someone who looks at the extreme violence done by the far-right and the less violent actions (but still violent) taken by the far-left, and concludes that since both do violence both are equally bad--thus giving cover to the far-right.
These are excellent. Thank you for sharing. I was not familiar with Malcom X's points.
It should be noted also that Malcolm X grew up in Lansing, Michigan, and then Boston before moving to Harlem. Malcolm's experience of being black in the United States was that of living in places where racial integration was a legal reality, but not a social one. (Dr. King's experience was of places where integration was not even a legal reality.) For instance, Malcolm elsewhere (maybe "The Ballot or the Bullet") noted that blacks were allowing wealth to drain from their community into white hands, because while both whites and blacks could run businesses and could all shop at each other's businesses (legal integration), his experience was that while black people would shop at white-owned businesses, white people would shop at black-owned businesses far less and thus wealth transferred from blacks to whites (this is the lack of social integration).
As I recall there is an interesting anecdote in "Black Like Me" about that same point. The author who was white toured many communities using pigmentation drugs to appear black. In one of the chapters he recounts meeting with a local community banker who organized housing loans from the community to the community. White bankers would never give the loans because they said people couldn't afford them. However once the local community started showing success the bankers all showed up trying to get a piece of the action. They didn't want to do normal business until someone else showed them the profit. It was integration only to a point.
There's actually another layer to the situation in France that made it even more irritating to the left.
France uses a two-round electoral system, where if no candidate receives a majority in the first round, the top two candidates advance to the second. For legislative elections, there are a few exceptions; in particular, any candidate receiving sufficient support from all registered electors (not just those who actually voted) can advance to the second round even without finishing in the top two. In past elections, even having three candidates advance was rare; having four advance hadn't happened in (I believe) half a century. The second round is simple plurality voting such as is used in Canada and most places in the United States, regardless of the number of candidates.
Five districts in 2024 saw four candidates advance to the second round, and over 300 had three-way contests.
Shortly after the first-round results were announced, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise, announced that the Nouveau Front populaire would withdraw all its candidates who finished third or worse in races where the top two candidates were from the Ensemble alliance and the Rassemblement national. (I don't know about how they treated candidates for Les Républicains.)
In 2022, meanwhile, when Mélenchon had finished a very close third to Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in the Presidential election, he had vociferously supported Macron in the second round because he saw Le Pen as an existential threat to the French Republic.
Some time later, Gabriel Attal, Macron's Prime Minister, announced that the Ensemble alliance would also withdraw candidates who finished third or worse in a contest where the top two were from the NFP and the RN--but only if the NFP candidate was from one of the traditional "republican" parties of the French left, the Socialists, Communists and Greens. This left many districts as three-way races between a RN candidate, a LFI candidate, and a third-place Ensemble candidate. (Again, I do not know what Les Républicains did, or what other parties did regarding races involving their candidates.)
It is very plausible that the RN only won as many seats as it did because of left-centre vote splitting between LFI and Ensemble candidates in the second round in those three-way races, even as the NFP had attempted to engineer an effective left-centre voting alliance that would see the anti-NR vote rally around a single candidate in the second round.
This infuriated the left, who had chosen Macron and Ensemble as the less bad option against Le Pen and the RN, and so then to see Macron outright reject the possibility of a left-centre alliance despite the NFP winning a plurality in the Assemblée nationale and the Ensemble alliance the second-most seats, easily holding a majority between them, and instead nominate a LR Prime Minister and in effect look for a centre-fascist alliance (this is "fish hook theory", that when the centre feels threatened from its left, it runs into the arms of fascists) only further incensed them.
The LR Prime Minister was defeated in the Assemblée when both the NFP and RN voted against his government, but when Macron then nominated a member of his own alliance as Prime Minister, while this still infuriated LFI (the largest of the four parties in the NFP in the Assemblée, though not by much) because he refused to consider Castets despite her being (vaguely) a Socialist and LFI having promised not to accept Cabinet positions in her government, the left-wing bloc splintered somewhat because the Socialists, seeing an opportunity to reassert themselves as the main party of the French left, declined to join LFI's motion to defeat the new government. I haven't looked into it much since then.
Macron's official line on why he declined to nominate Castets was because he didn't think her government would survive an Assemblée vote, but given that the NFP would have backed her fully, and all he had to do was tell his own alliance to back her as well, this smacks of a refusal on his part to consider working with LFI, despite their having sacrificed some of their electoral prospects to stop the RN, with whom Macron promptly tacitly worked in attempting to keep both of his Prime Ministers in office, particularly his first selection from LR.
(Macron had pleaded for "republican" parties to work together to back a government in the immediate aftermath of the election, meaning by that everyone except LFI and the RN, but at the time the NFP was fully united and the three older parties refused to splinter from LFI, knowing that they needed the non-competition agreement between them to elect as many candidates as possible in the event of another snap election.)
In brief, in France in 2024, at least from the left's point of view, the left did everything it could to help the centre stop the fascists, and the centre promptly spat in the left's face and cozied up to the fascists instead. (Though the fascists weren't all that willing to work with the centrists, either, as it proved.)
It's no wonder that that Black Panthers observation has been making a comeback--or, to put it a bit more coarsely, "Scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds."
EDIT: There's another incident, again from France, that I recall. I can't recall what year this was, but Macron's Higher Education Minister was debating the question of Islam in universities with Marine Le Pen on TV. When the Minister made the argument that expression of the Muslim faith (if not Muslims themselves) should be restricted or banned on campus, Le Pen made a face that showed she knows full well that that's the sort of position everyone would expect her to take, and instead she found herself arguing for France's long tradition of religious liberty--an inversion of what you'd expect from someone who claims to be a centrist and someone whom everyone says is a fascist.
For a long time I did not buy the fish hook theory. But now I do with one caveat and Macron I think explains this perfectly. I used to think that the expectation was that the centrists would run to the right out of fear. But I think in Macron's case as in the case of the smart boys in the RNC who ran to Trump it is as much about hubris. Macron thinks he can control Le Pen but not the leftists. The same is true of the Republicans who hitched their brand to Trump. They assumed they could ride him but it is ultimately the other way around because each time they run to the right they elevate it until, as the NYC Democrats found with Adams and Cuomo, they have noone left who can stand. Sooner or later there is no "center" left other than decaying players who are thoroughly compromised and untrustworthy. Until I saw Macron's example which you laid out nicely I never really appreciated how much they mask this crap as cunning.
Macron thinking he can control Le Pen but not Mélenchon is, as I recall, essentially the same rationale that centrist (and even centre-left) politicians in Weimar Germany gave for supporting Hitler--they thought they could control Hitler but not Ernst Thälmann. (This is not to say that I think Mélenchon and Thälmann are comparable.)
The actual answer is that you can't control either of them; it is very often a matter of choosing which one is less bad. (At least, if you have chosen to seek elected office and are successful in doing so, as then making this choice is part of what you've signed up to do. As an ordinary voter it is entirely reasonable, and some would even argue morally necessary, to conclude that both are beyond the pale and refuse to vote, even if one is more so than the other.)
The example of Hitler and Thälmann is also an example of successful fascist framing, casting political struggles as a choice between fascism and communism (back then the term "socialism" was often used instead, and some communists will still use that term, such as in China, with the governing ideology sometimes being termed "socialism with Chinese characteristics") and fearmongering that rejecting fascism necessarily means embracing communism. It should be noted that in each of the last three elections prior to the Nazi takeover (July 1932, November 1932, March 1933) the Nazi and Communist parties between them held a majority of seats (sometimes termed a "negative majority") so that no coalition not involving at least one of those parties could hold a majority of seats. (This is what happened in 2019 in Thuringia with Die Linke and the AfD; Die Linke, it should be noted, can trace its political ancestry to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which governed East Germany as a one-party state.)
Frank Herbert also made this observation in "God Emperor of Dune":
Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It’s true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it’s that patterns are repeated. My oppressions, by and large, are no worse than any of the others and, at least, I teach a new lesson.
While I agree with many of your points, I'm not sure I can agree with you about bureaucratic aristocracies. I don't think all bureaucracy is bad or is a separate thing. I think it is just machinery of a state. You can have an aristocracy of bureaucracy I suppose alongside an aristocracy of politics but it isn't necessarily the case that bureaucracy sides against the intent of the people. Consider a specific bureaucracy like the CFPB. There is no way any one of us can sue a credit card company on our own but the CFPB can. That represents effective bureaucracy that is not an aristocracy.
Likewise I cannot agree with your contention about not voting. If you know one candidate to be better than another even if you loathe both then you should vote for the better one. A vote is not an endorsement and we must do more to get better candidates, but a vote is a choice and when faced with two options a non-choice simply means casting fate to the wind. That is not a viable strategy or, I would argue, morally sound.
I also don't agree with every point I cite; I offer them as various perspectives on the question at hand and attempt to understand those perspectives with which I disagree as a way of sharpening my own convictions. On Herbert's observation (through the character of Leto II Atreides), I agree that there are elements of government that do not ultimately function as oppressive bureaucracies. (But on the CFPB, one might argue that its functions were only made necessary because civil justice has become inaccessible for ordinary citizens! That is, the courts and the legal system more broadly had become a tool of oppressive bureaucracy. And my own experience of dealing with various governmental bodies has given me a look into how their rules and procedures operate to deny service as much as possible, or at least force those seeking to successfully obtain said services to jump through countless hoops and debase themselves repeatedly--and this is to say nothing of my experiences dealing with private-sector bodies serving similar functions.)
As for the question of voting for the candidate you loathe least, again, I do not necessarily agree with the contention, at least to its full extent (and I worded it in a way that I thought made it clear that it was not a position with which I agreed, merely one which I have seen argued cogently, but starting from different priors than my own). To me the true danger of lesser-of-two-evils voting is not the vote itself, but rather the post hoc self-rationalisations for the vote beyond the basic calculation of which is the lesser evil, which is in part, I think, a result of making decisions not rooted in a well-considered, firmly grounded ethical framework, so that the voter slowly convinces herself that her vote was correct in a positive sense, rather than simply being less wrong (that is, correct but only in a negative sense). (Jerry Garcia reportedly quipped that “Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”)
(Jesse Ventura expressed what you may consider a related view in 2016, when he endorsed Gary Johnson for President, even though the nature of the US constitutional and electoral structure is such that Johnson had no hope of becoming President. As I recall, he explained it thus: "I'm not endorsing Gary Johnson because I hate Hillary Clinton or I hate Donald Trump. I'm endorsing Gary Johnson for President because I want Gary Johnson to be President." If you consider voting for a candidate who you know cannot win to be no different from not voting at all, then you may also consider this morally unsound.)
Ah, I don't consider voting for someone who won't win the same as not voting. I do reject the "you're wasting your time" theory but I see the connection. In my view making no choice at all, literally sitting it out, is completely passive and makes no sense. Choosing the best one you can is something you should do. But more than that, you should really take note well before the election and work to get candidates you want. I also think that we should have ranked choice voting and a block on political party locks so that we can actually have choices and so those choices are not so fraught.
As to how the civil service functions, I agree it can be and often is very badly structured. In my experience dealing with those it is less about the bureaucracy itself than it is about the laws that compel them. Far too much effort is spent adding means tests, rule checks, etc. to ensure that help only goes to the "deserving" few. Then it is followed by a host of reporting requirements which are never read. The end result are services that are difficult or useless by design which are due to legislators not bureaucrats.
As a native American gazing on Europe and its colonies, I have to say that so much of what Western people call "civilization" has something to do with form, not substance -- as if the underlying moral order of their caste system were divinely designed, and the only remaining issues had something to do with manners. Western philosophers have argued over who should be on top, with morphing conclusions dependent on the use of force. For all those who get their cultural directions from reading the papers, good luck. No surprise that the chattering class has your brains by the balls.
Ironically, our administrative branches are modeled on the Spartans, not the Athenians.
Perhaps it is operant conditioning in light of the persuasive power of individuals like this comedian turned propagandist “philosopher”; the rewards are not only economic including bitcoin, gold-colored sneakers, and questionable marketing of the American presidency, but also the aggrandizement for political capital (within a dysfunctional climate that has become structural and systemic). The fuse that detonated the pathologic environment we are living through has much to do with the perpetrators (material support aided by corporate news media and the Musk freakish DOGE months-long episode) and the disaffected, unquestioning voters who are fed intentional faux media disinformation like a daily vitamin pill. Education unfettered by particular vested interests is always a challenge in any society but particularly more difficult in an oligarchical society led by a geriatric, Putin-adoring authoritarian whose main fan base in government are other wannabe Heritage Foundation authoritarians who yearn to permanently erode the balance of power guideposts that once allowed a vibrant, democratic society ( envied by a global populace yearning to breathe free of the yoke of government political censorship or unjustified punishment and extrajudicial detainment). Add to the exaggerated disunity in the US, the perception of folks feeling “left behind” reinforced by media messages that habitually expose the listeners to be inclined to point the finger at a cause of economic and societal-born culture shocks.
Until Dems and Independents learn to meaningfully engage with the voters and laws promulgated to protect evidence-based facts and truths and we begin to pull back the curtain on immigrant “enforcers” that the regime pays with tax-payer dollars, the society will become increasingly polarized and paralyzed instead of being empowered to recreate this republic, based on democratic values, the frayed Constitution that awaits the future renaissance of the globally stabilizing country we once were.
Yes, one of many problems with civilisationism is that it is a collectivist and often authoritarian view on humans. Many "defenders of the West" are right-wing collectivists and not in favor of democracy and freedoms https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/478958/mod_resource/content/1/Brubaker_Between_Nationalism_and_Civilizationism.pdf
Have struggled to find a more accurate term than hypocrisy. Thank you for this: “This represents more than mere hypocrisy. It represents the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy…”