Sunday West: December 11

Fascism is all around

Good morning. This week I wrote about how cars destroy cities (free); about the royal family being dragged into the culture war with the Lady Hussey non-scandal; and, ahead of yesterday’s game against France (sob), about the Frenchest things in the world (again free).

****

Elsewhere, in Compact, Stanley Payne on how everything became fascism.

To get at the underlying reason for this fixation, Kuklick speculates that Americans are somehow unable to deal with the reality that they live in a huge, complex, imperfectly democratic country that has evolved (or strayed) far from the very delimited constitutional system with which the Founders had sought to discipline majoritarian representation. This is probably too subtle. More likely the reason for the mindless ubiquity of the f-word is simply that the era of World War II focused a polemical “fascism” as the only major destructive political alternative to emerge from within Western civilization itself since the 18th century, while association with Hitlerism and the Holocaust lent it a uniquely demonic connotation.

All this serves as a mental and political smokescreen. The “really existing” form of Western proto-authoritarianism doesn’t stem from small, scantily armed “militias” and disoriented “insurrectionists,” nor from a chaotic demagogue such as Trump, but from the state apparatus already functioning. Government by executive decree rather than elected legislatures, politicized intelligence services, and a biased, coercive judiciary are its key constituents. In advanced democracies, such things function more from the inside out than from the outside in.

As regular readers will know, political hypochondria is a favourite theme of mine.

****

Ross Douthat on the Canadian euthanasia dystopia.

One answer turns on which dystopian future you fear most. Among those NeverTrumpers who have left the right entirely, the overwhelming fear is of an authoritarian or fascist future, a right-wing threat to democracy requiring all possible resistance.

But in the Canadian experience you can see what America might look like with real right-wing power broken and a tamed conservatism offering minimal resistance to social liberalism. And the dystopian danger there seems not just more immediate than any right-authoritarian scenario, but also harder to resist — because its features are congruent with so many other trends, its path smoothed by so many powerful institutions.

****

Tomiwa Owolade in the Times on how the best way to avoid being cancelled as a heretic — don’t be a believer in the first place.

In her recent Reith lecture, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichieargued that we live in a culture of moral stridency. People who commit “secular blasphemy” are sanctioned by “virtual vigilante action whose aim is not just to silence the person who has spoken but to create a vengeful atmosphere which deters others from speaking”.

Greaves is not a right-wing culture warrior. She was silenced not because she is right-wing but because she is left-wing. She uses all the right terminology; the people who pressured her to apologise come from her tribe. In the sectarian world of student politics, heretics are condemned more vociferously than infidels. A heretic is someone who accepts the main doctrines but might deviate from them. An infidel never believed in them in the first place.

****

On Substack, Tom Jones on doomposting. I liked this a lot, and not just because it mentions me favourable and I’m incredibly vain and susceptible to flattery.

Doomposting isn’t just wailing that Britain’s challenges seem so great, but at the want of courage and ability to tackle them. People are ready for an ideological mission again, to be sold on a political project they can buy into.

Yes they are.

****

There’s much about the BBC website that is annoying, and I especially dislike the style of news item where they interview one person to tell a wider tale about the country. Marlowe’s substack looks at some recent cases.

The problem isn’t that poverty isn’t real and terrifying; it’s that one person’s personal story doesn’t actually tell an accurate picture. It’s poor journalism to simply take someone at their word, because it’s ‘their truth’. Someone might be mistaken, or confused about the world, or obviously mismanaging their life, or stupid — maybe they’re even lying. Maybe they’re none of those things, but the whole point of journalism is to report the facts. It’s part of a wider problem with accepting people’s ‘lived experience’.

****

Good to see Stone Age Herbalist writing in UnHerd on how archaeology is now so politicised it’s easier to write anonymously.

In the absence of genetic data, it was once possible to argue that changes in the material record (objects and artefacts such as pottery, stone and metal tools, craft objects, clothing and so on) reflected some kind of passive or diffuse spread of technologies and fashions, but this is no longer the case. For instance, for many years students and the public were told that “pots are not people” — that new styles of pottery suddenly appearing in the record does not mean that new people had arrived with them — and the appearance of the so-called “Bell Beaker” pottery in the British Bronze Age showed how imitation and trade allowed new styles of ceramics to spread from the continent.

But in 2018, a bombshell paper proved this was fundamentally incorrect. In fact, nearly 90% of the population of Britain was replaced in a short period, corresponding to the movement of the Bell Beaker people into Britain and the subsequent disappearance of the previous Neolithic inhabitants. We know this because careful genetic work, building from paper to paper, shows clearly that the new arrivals were different people, with different maternal and paternal DNA. Papers like this appear almost weekly now. Most recently, the confirmation that the Anglo-Saxons did indeed arrive from northern Europe has caused many academics a great headache, since for years the very idea of an invasion of Germanic peoples has been downplayed and even dismissed.

****

John Ellis in City Journal on higher education. Via Rob Henderson.

In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, academic-freedom disputes routinely took a particular shape. In a small town, somewhere in the heartland, there would be a college campus on which a young academic loudly voiced his opinions on controversial matters—mostly political, but sometimes also on sexual morality, or even on legalizing drugs. This would offend the sensitivities of some local townspeople.

Someone like the local mayor would lean on the college president (probably a personal friend), the president would then lean on the department chair, and the young professor was soon gone. The American Association of University Professors would then intervene, and the individual would be reinstated, because the AAUP would in effect threaten blacklisting. Reports of cases like this were reasonably common.

The AAUP would always insist that college campuses must be the one place with unfettered freedom to discuss and analyze issues of all kinds, no matter who might be offended. The analytical function of academia must never be shut down by a shallow local moralism. This was then the consensus of academic life.

If we fast forward to the present, one feature of what’s happening on the campuses looks similar: that crucial analytical function is still getting stifled whenever it offends an equally shallow local moralism. But there’s a startling difference: the actors have changed places. It’s now the professors who do what the small-minded small-town worthies used to do, shutting down analysis whenever it offends them, which is often.

****

Freddie deBoer on fashionable mental illness.

Actual mental illness is grubby, sad, gross, dispiriting, destabilizing, undermining, exhausting, unpalatable, ugly, and definitely not politically correct. But people like Serrano have marinated for so long in an online culture about mental illness that treats it as a positive set of charming personality quirks that they’re completely incapable of looking actual madness in the face. I so desperately wish people like that could spend some time in a psychiatric facility. Not some boutique upscale hotel for the Ivy-league grads with self-diagnosed depression and anxiety, but the kind of places where the involuntarily committed are sent after being taken off of the streets. The kind of people who left to their own devices would smear shit on the walls, who believe that the Jews are tracking them through the fillings in their teeth, who want to strike first before some shadowy threat strikes them. It doesn’t look like Tumblr.

Here’s what I can tell you for sure: so many self-styled supporters of the mentally ill support the mentally ill only when it’s convenient, only when it’s easy. What a convenient way to imagine mental illness, that it never makes you sympathize with the unsympathetic! What a beautiful mental construct you’ve created, where you’re never forced into the uncomfortable position of feeling for someone you don’t want to feel for.

There won’t be a Sunday post next week as there is too much going on in the pre-Christmas chaos. Have a good day, and thanks for subscribing.