The siege mentality starts with a sense of collective victimhood. It’s not just that our group has opponents. The whole “culture” or the whole world is irredeemably hostile.
As Handle points out, Brooks seems to be siding with Yuval Levin in what I call his debate with Victor Davis Hanson. My thoughts:
1. It is possible for both sides to believe that they under siege. Palestinians can believe that the Israelis want all their land. Israelis can believe that the Palestinians want to drive Jews out of Israel. Each side can point to evidence that seems convincing.
2. But that does not preclude the possibility that one side really is under siege and the other side really does wish for the other side to either adopt the “correct” religion or be annihilated. My father, whose family escaped Cossack pogroms in Russia and who had relatives murdered in the Holocaust, used to say that it is not always wrong to believe that there are people out to get you.
3. I am still reading Colin Woodard, who describes the Puritan mindset as a belief that they are the chosen people and everyone else should be like them. If you suppose, as does Woodard, that progressives are the descendants of the Puritans, then they are quite capable of being intolerant. Woodard says that the Puritans saw it as their mission to reform the sinners who were all around them. Puritanism has a propensity both to feel under siege (by the sinners) and to make others feel as though they are under siege.
It’s also possible, and rather common, for both sides to actually be under siege. Groups often have irreconcilable interests.
I lean toward a view of international politics called offensive realism, which says (1) all states want security most of all, (2) states use deterrence to achieve security, and (3) an increase in the security of one state necessarily diminishes other states’ ability to achieve deterrence. It follows that states will often conflict, because every state’s security needs conflict with its neighbors.
I think this is quite true. I was told once that in chess, if you’re not winning (on the offensive), you’re losing. States often seem to fight hard to get or keep things they don’t even have any reason to want, and I think this is why. It creates a buffer zone or bargaining chip, and keeps up the appearance of strength. This may be how we can make sense of how it seems countries often go to war over scraps of land no one really wants.
“It follows that states will often conflict, because every state’s security needs conflict with its neighbors.”
The US and Canada would seem to be a counterexample. Canadian Mounties don’t really present a threat to the US. Somehow, adherence to (classically) liberal values correlates negatively with conflict.
Canada is an odd case, because they have less than a tenth of the U.S. population and can’t deter the U.S. They stay nominally independent because they don’t have much the U.S. wants, and because Americans mostly think Canada is too cold to bother with. The similar cultures help.
The offensive realism perspective explains major power relations better than minor states (e.g. Canada or the Vatican). Minor states have no meaningful deterrent ability.
The other interpretation is that Canada is already a part of the U.S. empire, and that for administrative efficiency they remain nominally independent.
One might judge the situation using the following questions:
1) Would the U.S. tolerate Putin invading Canada?
2) Would the U.S. tolerate a Putin-like regime forming in Canada?
If Canada were truly independent, I would expect the answers to those questions to be:
1) We wouldn’t need to bother since Canada could handle itself
2) Canada would be able to tell the U.S. to mind it’s own business
Growing up in the north I was taught the Woodward view on people from “The South”. It alternated between them being evil racist assholes in their deep dark hearts to them being ignorant troglodytes who were racist out of their own stupidity (which would be cured by their betters, even if it meant tough love for these unsympathetic creatures). I believed it all. I now realize the incredible hatred and hubris behind it all. We were meant to hate southerners in much the way we assumed they hated blacks.
Then I moved to the south (or close enough in Baltimore) and I had to learn how hard it is to live around lots of blacks. You can’t just ignore them or white flight your way out. There isn’t Wall Street money to pay them off. The puritan attitude on this is easy in Boston, San Fran, or Manhatten where there are few blacks, those that are left are high end enough to afford the rent, and everyone is rich and there is money to buy off problems.
Once you have to live with what they’ve lived with you get the logic behind all these “indefensible” southern attitudes. You also see rather clearly that the northern attitude isn’t enlightenment, but a form of intolerant moral zealotry completely divorced from reality and solely for the benefit of the zealot.
Tolerance of intolerance is no virtue, intolerance of intolerance no vice. It does require constant self examination to determine what side is virtuous as there are many grey areas and times change, nuance and reflection many are oblivious to or have difficulty grasping.
“Tolerance” has, unfortunately, become quite the Orwellian term in our times, which is easy to observe if one tries putting some meat on the bones instead of using vague abstractions.
What exactly does ‘intolerance’ even mean though? Let’s face it: most of the people accused of being intolerant are actuatperfectly tolerant of the people of whom they’re supposed to be intolerant. Most people who disapprove of gay marriage are tolerant of gays. They just don’t acknowledge the moral validity of their marriage. People who believe IQ correlates with race mostly seem fine tolerating other ethnicities, but just don’t believe their average accomplishments will be equal to other ethnicities.
‘To tolerate’ is not what the modern usage of tolerance means. When people say ‘tolerance’ today in a political context, they mean things like: to like, to approve of, to acknowledge as one’s intellectual equal, or even to admit some moral debt to. If tolerance merely meant to tolerate others, then almost no one in America today is particularly intolerant.
Good comment. Great observation!
All subcultures have their unifying symbols, and those symbols eventually come to symbolize the group- often to the exclusion of whatever they originally stood for. It’s the same reason Republicans are big on the Bible, but think Jesus was in favor of the wealthy (very much no, stated frequently).
Boy, David Brooks is the master of false equivalences: especially, when one drills down to specifics and beyond generalities.
Name some examples of broadly-reaching, influential and powerful, cultural agents which disproportionately promote views that should leave Progressives feeling under represented, let alone under siege? Then compare that list to the one Conservatives could produce. And among those making the Progressive list, what does the trend suggest — cultural agent getting more or less oppressively Progressive?
At times it seems that the only cultural agent that Progressives can list, and certainly want to talk about, is the (Trump, Bush, even Reagan) White House. Yet to even suggest that institution makes the list would belie Progressive hubris, in that the Presidency is an institution that they have adequately shared with non-Progressives, and that has aggressively promoted Progressive views when in Progressive hands. At times, one feels that they feel entitled to that institution too.
I would argue that if they applied the Yuval Levin principle to themselves, and acknowledge their successes instead of promising more domination, the Trump White House would have never happened.
“Woodard says that the Puritans saw it as their mission to reform the sinners who were all around them.”
Progressives have a direct link to the radical pietists of the mid-19th century. A lot of conventional wisdom on Puritans comes from Hawthorne and others using stories of Puritans to attack their contemporary Pietists.
Murry Rothbard assessed the radical pietists :
“Most pietists took the following view: Since we can’t gauge an individual’s morality by his following rituals or even by his professed adherence to creed, we must watch his actions and see if he is really moral.
“From there the pietists concluded that it was everyone’s moral duty to his own salvation to see to it that his fellow men as well as himself are kept out of temptation’s path. That is, it was supposed to be the State’s business to enforce compulsory morality, to create the proper moral climate for maximizing salvation. In short, instead of an individualist, the pietist now tended to become a pest, a busybody, a moral watchdog for his fellow man, and a compulsory moralist using the State to outlaw “vice” as well as crime.”
https://mises.org/library/lysander-spooner-libertarian-pietist
The way I see it the modern Progressives simply broke with Christianity in the early 20th century, taking up Marxism as their dogma. Evangelicals stayed with Christianity. Sadly, both seek to use the state to impose their morality upon all society.
It seems like the oppressor-oppressed axis in the three-axis model, the concept of privilege, and the siege mentality are all inter-related. First, it seems like privilege is unfalsifiable. All humans can either interact or not interact. If two groups do not interact, then one can say that one group is “ignoring”, “neglecting”, or “excluding” the other, hence privilege. (Example: neglecting minority ethnic cultures.) If the two groups do interact, then one can say that one group is “exploiting” the other, also privilege. (Example: “cultural appropriation”, immigrants “taking over” a community.) Economic transactions involve both a buyer and seller. To make the buyer the oppressor or privileged party, one says that the buyer is exploiting the seller’s efforts and/or taking away from other buyers. (Ex: Walmart exploits labor, foreigners bid up housing prices.) To make the seller the privileged party, one says that the seller is “profiting from” or “getting rich off” the buyer’s needs. (Ex: Chinese exporters, price gougers, and too many other examples to name.)
Because privilege is unfalsifiable, it is indeed possible for all parties to believe that they are oppressed. It’s also true that one side really could be oppressed. Saying that the existence of God is unfalsifiable literally means that one can’t prove that God doesn’t exist. When all parties insist that they are the oppressed without recognizing that all such claims are unfalsifiable, the siege mentality arises. The cure for the siege mentality is to stop thinking in terms of privilege.
Yes to #2: one side really is under siege and the other side really does wish for the other side to either adopt the “correct” religion or be annihilated.
On gay marriage, for one example, in 2008 Obama was against gay marriage, as were most voters. He and other leaders changed, and persecuted those who continued to oppose gay-marriage — with the persecution including resigning a job (leader of Mozilla), and gov’t punishment against bakers.
That is objective persecution, and justifies a siege mentality.
Tolerance of gays, rather than promotion of them, is not objective persecution of gays. Yet the Democrats who “feel under siege” feel that way because of Trump’s toleration rather than promotion.
The Google engineer who was fired, most conservative professors in college. Innocent folk being persecuted.
Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option is a very important acceptance of the siege and how to minimize the harm.
Brooks is claiming that Dems who have not yet been successful in total domination of conservatives feel under siege because their domination dreams have been, temporarily, thwarted.
This was a Flight 93 election. When was the Flight 93 election for Venezuela? Those GOPe neverTrumpers don’t have an answer.
Brooks and Levin are on the same page, indeed, the same team.
The team project is commendable, or would be, if it weren’t too little, and far too late.
There is definitely a ready market for advocacy of that project, and I am certainly not questioning the sincerity of the good motives of these advocates, but when it’s clear the project doesn’t have any possibility whatsoever of successful implementation in one of those ‘broad social movements’, then one has to wonder whether the only incidental benefits of that project will accrue to the suppliers of that advocacy. Wouldn’t be the first time.
In “The Siege Mentality”, Brooks mentions going to the Faith Angle Forum’s “the gathering”, which he has done regularly for a decade, as he is on the advisory council (along with Yuval Levin), and which is run out of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where Levin re-published “Conservatism in an Age of Alienation”. A lot of familiar names on the ‘meta-theophilic’ public intellectual right show up all over these places; it’s a very small world.
In his follow-up op-ed, “Our Elites Still Don’t Get It” (subtitle: But I do, so you bewildered elites will want to keep inviting me to Aspen, South Beach, etc. to explain these deplorable masses to you) Brooks also directly links to Levin’s “Taking the Long Way” essay from three years ago, and makes repeated reference (repetition is a favorite signal for Brooks) to the importance of ‘covenantal attachments’, which seems calculated to avoid the more obvious and familiar terms so as to not trigger the alarms of certain progressive secularists and also to potentially allow for some of them to imagine themselves inside a ‘values’ tent so large no pole can support it.
So, what’s all this really all about? Well, that’s a long story, and the general idea goes back to ancient times in both the eastern and western traditions, but it was expressed in particular regard to the American context by de Tocqueville and several founders, e.g. Washington in his farewell address, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”
Or, as Ross Douthat tweeted in February of last year, even before Trump won the primary but as the writing began to appear on the wall, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.”
One could have written the same thing about the left anytime in the last few centuries, for when they swept religious constraints away, murderous insanity tended to fill the vacuum either gradually or all at once.
How to handle the lesson of this historical fact in the aftermath of the second world war – when it was already clear to many intellectuals that religion was inevitably doomed everywhere among the elites and it was only a matter of a generation or so before cultural trickle-down would cause it to cease to perform its beneficial function in maintaining this social capital asset – become something of an urgent obsession among the Straussians. But, alas, one they could not solve while facing the dominant progressive secularist headwinds. At least we won the Cold War, so there’s that, but you know, that was almost 30 years ago now, and that “muscular, confident, interventionist” foreign policy outlived its usefulness and mutated into as much as a liability as an asset.
Eight months later, Douthat also wrote, “America needs a religious right. … the Trump era has revealed what you get when you leach the Christianity out of conservatism: A right-of-center politics that cares less about marriage and abortion, just as some liberals would wish, but one that’s ultimately far more divisive than the evangelical politics of George W. Bush … But some kind of religious conservatism must be rebuilt, because without the pull of transcendence, the future of the right promises to be tribal, cruel, and very dark indeed.”
Again, one could add, “just like the present of the left,” which likewise pulls no punches in deploying cruel, tribal darkness in the interest of their agenda and motivating their own troops. That’s what prison gang politics is like; welcome to the new clientalist normal, with the level of public ‘discourse’ falling to the strategically appropriate level of, “partisan tabloid trash propaganda,” and whatever it takes to help one’s own side and hurt the other side, to be judged in the post-modern sense not of truth but of the effectiveness and impact of the marketing.
Well, I could go on with further examples, but I think most people get the idea. We are emerging out of an era and context where American democratic political dynamics were nicer and more civil than the historical norms, and, somewhat ironically from Levin and Brooks who are tag-teaming on the message of naïve false-nostalgia, they are expressing a naïve nostalgia for those long-gone nicer times in the hopes of resurrecting it. They can’t; it’s dead. It was a good game, but game over.
What Brooks and Levin are saying is that part of the blame for the collapse of American post-war political discourse can be laid at the feet of secularization which was goosed by the unrelentingly hostile (and mostly anti-Christian) efforts of elite progressive activists when it was useful for their agenda. But that snake can turn around and bite you too, and now we’re living with the unintended consequences. That is to say, secularization was a mistake, and we’ve lost the ability to replace the social capital inherited from a more religiously uniform American past. Furthermore, the grand, centuries-old project to find an adequate substitute for common religion with a combination of identity-blind civic-nationalism and progressive values (i.e., the Harry Jaffa use of Lincoln as a focal point thing) has also failed, in no small part because that combination was always inherently contradictory and unstable.
Even putting aside the evolution of progressive ideology to a point where it holds the notions in disdain, there has been far too much water under the bridge to get any of that old “shared basis of enlightened freedom” / “American civic-nationalism tempered by widely-held religious moral commitments” back. That shared inheritance was a vulnerable commons just asking for an exploitative tragedy, which has now happened, and irresistible political temptations, which were yielded to long ago.
What Levin and Brooks seem to want is to signal the possibility of a kind of new peace and truce that could restore the calm. Brooks is of course correct that prison gang politics follows from zero-sum contests and existential threats when someone is threatening the very basis of one’s sub-cultural turf, and Levin is correct that without a new movement in favor of widespread quasi-religious character-formation we won’t have anything like a conservative society following traditional principles of liberty for long. So, what they seem to be offering elite progressives is a ‘deal’, where, if they agree to lay off the religious folks, then what they get back in return is Pre-Trump, ‘nicer’ right-wing gentle-opposition democratic politics and ‘discourse’.
The deal for the religious folks is, well, a chance at survival, maybe, maybe not, but which will require them to concede total defeat in the culture war, and devote themselves to being non-proselytizing charitable NGOs (this was in a previous column from Brooks), keeping those eternal verities mostly to themselves unless someone is so attracted by their winsomeness that they seek out their capital-T Truths, and by which they will hopefully be preserving some of that social civility and doing some of that character formation so essential to the preservation of ordered liberty.
Well, that’s the idea. I can certainly appreciate the way in which it’s an attractive idea. But it’s not a good idea, because it’s naively nostalgic and now obviously impossible. To borrow a term from Russian diplomats, there are no “agreement capable” parties to that deal.
So the only salvaging of the idea is to embrace a “sophisticated take”, that is, not take it at face value and understand it to be a kind of noble lie. That is, to assume Brooks, Levin, et all are engaged in some kind of strategic positioning, and that they understand full well that the old jig is up, but that they think there’s still something to achieve in terms of nudging future outcomes towards a more preferable end state by positioning right-wing public intellectuals in this particular way today. That is, the only hope at all for the future of civilization is for enlightened elite non-progressives to do and say whatever is required in order to stay on the progressives’ good side, in the hope that they can use whatever influence they have to nudge the progressives away from the most dangerously insane implications of their fundamental ideological premises.
Even if that involves the humiliating absurdity of conspicuously positioning themselves against the necessity of prison gang politics, while standing on a soap box in the middle of the prison yard.
What are the options for the religious right at present? The Benedict Option is looking more appealing these days.
It’s their only chance, but even that will require poltical protection or it’s utterly hopeless.
Or, as many evangelicals did, vote for a anti-PC fighter.
Look at colleges, and judge them on whether or not they discriminate, illegally, on the basis of “creed”, like Christian, pro-life beliefs.
If they do, as is the truth, they should lose Fed funding for student loans AND their non-profit status.
Use more of the tools the Dems have been using against the Dems…
Accept that America has already degenerated into Prison Gang zero-sum legal competition for power, and use the power now available to reduce the power of the Dems.
To those who don’t like it, remind them of the injustices the Dems have been supporting. There’s disagreement on whether bakers should be allowed to opt out of supporting gay marriage. There’s disagreement on whether a human fetal baby at 8 months deserves gov’t protection for its life, or whether the mother can choose to kill it because it’s inconvenient.
Keep arguing for Christian values, and when faced with a tolerant neo-(or non?) Christian or an intolerant dishonest-Christian (whose policies are anti-Christian), vote against the anti-Christian.
Try, as much as possible, to cut off the gov’t money (collected hugely from Christians) from going to Democrat Party supporters and the orgs they support.
“Fight”. With all legal, peaceful means possible, including comments on blogs (like this one).