We Happy Few

What did Irving Kristol have against Darwin?

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Jonah’s even more bleary-eyed than usual on today’s Ruminant, which begins innocently enough before transforming into an epic rant of astonishingly nerdy proportions. After opening with a few thoughts on why free speech absolutism might actually not be something to strive for, he dives into an ultra-indulgent reflection on the legacy of Liberal Fascism prompted by a recent Niall Ferguson piece on the goals of higher education. Listeners with a penchant for intellectual history will delight in the esoteric questions raised: How did antisemitism originate? What did the Nazis do to change institutions? And how can members of the Remnant remain in high spirits?

Show Notes:

–Jonah: “Speaking Freely About Free Speech”

–The Remnant with Sarah Isgur on Nazis marching in Skokie

–Niall Ferguson: “The Treason of the Intellectuals”

–Julian Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals

–The Remnant with Bret Devereaux

–Jonah on Trump the day-one dictator

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Comments (41)
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  1. Isabel Leininger

    During your description of young men who don’t understand that any philosophy, especially a strong premise that can never be proven false, must always be part of the learning process (e.g, “evolution”) required by human knowledge, I was hauntingly thinking of “MAGA world” which added to my depressed expectations for 2024 if we don’t see Herr Trump end up in a straight jacket.

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  2. Dave Pattie

    Jonah - Loved this one. I happened to tie two thoughts together (it's a good day!) that I've heard from you recently. In your Dan Crenshaw interview, you and he spoke about Sowell's "constrained" vs "unconstrained" visions. And in this podcast, you spoke about the ideas of the "youth" versus the elderly and explained that the elderly "know more stuff."

    I think that's true, but I also think that one distinguishing feature of the elderly is that they've experienced "constraints" (tradeoffs, self-interest, bureaucracy, etc) and consider them as part of their calculus in developing ideas.

    I hadn't drawn this (potentially) straight line before. Maybe experience with constraints is a primary reason people tend to move toward "conservative" as they age?

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  3. Andrew Z

    This is my favorite type of Ruminant: separating from the immediate news, philosophically examining the roots of conservatism, and meandering along a common historical theme. Please disconnect more often from the news of the day before recording these. I think it leads to a much more fulsome product.

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    The Bell Tower

    Excellent as always. The most important lesson in politics is that there are no good guys, only varying degrees of bad guys.

    That sounds extreme but what makes so many American leaders great is often the difficulty they have in seizing enough power to do all the things they wish they could do. With the exceptions of perhaps Washington and Lincoln, no president has been able to take the kind of control required to be a real dictator. Washington turned it away, Lincoln laid down his sword.

    It’s even worse for factions who are constantly thwarted by consensus and elections. Lord knows that plenty of factions in this country have pursued total power. It remains out of reach.

    The hallmark of really bad ideology to my mind is the rejection of agency. That’s really what all this historical determinism, racial determinism, ethnic determinism, etc is about. Individuals have no agency, they are the pawns of destiny.

    “I am inevitable!” said Thanos.

    The Nazis said much the same. Arian domination is an inevitability. Resistance is futile. Jews can never be good by the simple constraint that they are Jews. Black people can never be free because they’re black. Dirty blood.

    I hate all that crap with the burning intensity of ten million suns and to see it rising up on college campuses with the force of zealous groupthink is disheartening in the extreme.

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    C C Writer

    OK, now that I've finished, several comments:

    1) About the tendency back in the day for budding dictatorships to say "We couldn't possibly have lost"--that should remind everyone of similar situations in the present century (like the 2020 election).

    2) Don't accept "sanctimonious and self-righteous" as characterizations when you're simply making an effort to do the right thing and discuss the right thing and figure out what the right thing is. Slapping you with those labels is classic gaslighting. It's an attempt to conflate the effort to practice integrity with the act of taking unwarranted pride or declaring oneself the embodiment of integrity.

    The intended implication is that trying to be good is bad. Or as I began saying as far back as 2015 in mockery of the defenders of crazy people and liars, "Being moral is wrong!" And why is it wrong? Because it makes people who are doing bad things look . . . bad!

    Liz Cheney gives some wonderful examples of this in her recent book (chapter 21). "Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey . . . said my vote had made it hard for him to explain to people in his swing district why he hadn't voted to impeach. I had heard this same complaint a few weeks earlier from an angry Elise Stefanik of New York. She told me that, because of my vote to impeach, people were writing letters to the editors of her local papers criticizing her and asking why she hadn't taken the same 'principled' stand I had. That seemed less my problem than hers."

    3) Finally, I always listen to the end, no matter how long it is. I got some serious housework done. The reason a podcast goes so well with housework is that the podcast is verbal at a high level, while housework tasks generally don't have much of a verbal component, and having something to occupy my mind makes the tasks get done in what seems like a very short time, besides giving me an incentive to get started in the first place.

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  6. Bigdonmck

    Sorry. An hour and a half podcast is too much time for me to invest in.
    I love your stuff. Without a doubt, you are the wittiest and most broadly knowledgable person on The Dispatch staff. You particularly shine on shared broadcasts which I really enjoy.

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      Erik.Kravets

      I listen while driving or while doing construction work.

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      1. Bigdonmck

        Old age and spending parts of 7 decades on a bar stool have diminished my multitasking abilities.
        I probably could still drive and listen to Jonah, but I am retired and my "behind the wheel" days are increasingly dimished. And the mere thought of a power tool in my hand while Jonah reduces me to fits of laughter would be a hazardous to the general population. LOL.
        Thanks for the post and have a good day.

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    Charley Warns

    If your neighbor wants his car alarm to, er . . . continuously keep alarming just because he likes the sound of it going off, or wants to do Karaoke at high volume in his backyard in the middle of the night every night ... that's not free speech. It's not free speech because he's infringing on my liberty and infringing on my right of peace of mind. It's the crime of Disturbing The Peace (California Penal Code 415). I don't think that's as obvious as it should be to many.

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    Ben Connelly

    Of course we listen all the way to the end! This is my favorite podcast! Hope I can make it to one of these meetups one day.

    I still don’t think horseshoe theory is correct.

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    Anthonyjohnmartyr

    Pope Benedict had it right....

    https://aleteia.org/2016/06/13/when-cardinal-joseph-ratzinger-predicted-the-future-of-the-church/

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      Charley Warns

      Speaking as a Catholic, that's weak. You're making us look bad. Don't you appreciate the challenge of putting it in your own words and the challenge of explaining how it applies?

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        C C Writer

        Such things will probably not make you look bad to me, simply because I make a practice of not following links that are unexplained or described only cryptically.

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        Anthonyjohnmartyr

        Damn - there's no such thing as a passing comment, is there?

        Pope Benedict, while still Father Ratzinger in 1969, predicted that the future of the Catholic Church was as a remnant, which will "issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith".

        The last piece of this podcast, when Jonah restates his convictions about what you might call political morality and conviction, it put me in mind of Ratzinger's prediction.

        Even more so - "From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge - a church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning". And, "As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members".

        It's a short piece, very clearly spoken and worth reading in its entirety. Many times, Jonah's reflections on "the Remnant" have put me in mind of it, but this is the first time his obvious passion has made me go back and look it up again. And I think Father Ratzinger makes a better, shorter and clearer enunciation of the concept, and what it means, than Nock's "Isaiah's Job", which is where I think Jonah gets it from.

        "The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality". When you contemplate that, as a Catholic, it's scary. And some, maybe many, of those saints won't start out as "Catholics".

        A different context, perhaps...but only perhaps. I think Jonah's, Nock's and Ratzinger's remnants are all fleeing the same upheaval, and may well find themselves as unlikely companions, with more in common than what sets them apart.

        There, how's that?

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  10. Michael.Mcchesney

    The discussion of the horseshoe theory reminded me of a conversation I had with a left-wing anthropology professor the morning after the 1994 election in which the GOP captured the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years. She had begun the class by attempting to cheer us up by saying that we shouldn't be too despondent because "when you grow up, err become more politically active you will be able to change things." (I was 26 and one of the youngest people in the class so she rethought "grow up.") I told her that I wasn't despondent, I was ECSTATIC. We talked after class and she told me she was concerned about the rise of fascism. I told her that I was more of a libertarian, and that was, in my opinion, about as far from fascism as an ideology could be. But she said that libertarianism could lead to populism and that could become fascism. Like Jonah, I didn't see conservatism leading to fascism as a realistic threat. I guess that goes to prove Jonah's point about young people not knowing anything. Did I mention I am a year older than Jonah? But I will say that the ideology of libertarianism/classical liberalism is about as far from fascism as an ideology can get. I just hope that statement is just as true 30 years from now as I thought it would have been about conservatism 30 years ago.

    On the subject of what it means to be from New York, I have a story about what it means to live in the Bronx. I once shared an office with a woman who lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She was like many Riverdale residents who didn't like to think of themselves as living in the Bronx. They would give their address as Riverdale, NY. I grew up on the other side of VanCortlandt Park from Riverdale in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx. I didn't know a single person from Woodlawn who gave their address as Woodlawn, NY. The closest I saw were people that wore t-shirts that read Woodlawn, 10470 in the 1990s when Beverly Hills, 90210 was on the air. My officemate had lost her mother and was endeavoring to sell her mother's apartment located in the same building where she lived. This was her half of a conversation with a prospective buyer. "It's located in Riverdale. --- Oh, Riverdale is located between Manhattan and Westchester. ---What county is it in? Well, it's in Bronx County." That was the end of that conversation.

    I went to college in upstate NY and when people asked me where I was from, I would say I was from the Bronx. The reactions I got were interesting. "But you're so mellow" and "Were you in a gang?" were two of my favorites. When I went to law school at Washington & Lee University in Virginia a decade later, I don't recall getting reactions like that. It might have been that I was more likely to answer NYC when asked where I was from, but I don't know that I did that. Even if I was, the entire law school was less than 350 students, and I didn't hide that I was from the Bronx. Perhaps, I was much less mellow, but I think the difference was probably that "the Bronx" wasn't nearly as synonymous with high crime as it was in the mid-1980s. America's Mayor had become NYC's mayor by then. Boy do I wish I wondered what ever happened to that guy...Show lessShow less

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