David French is a conservative thinker and writer who comes at life from a decidedly Christian approach—you know, all that “love your neighbor”, “turn the other cheek”, and “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye” stuff that drives Bro-Populists crazy. David has found a home at “The Dispatch”, which for my money is the go-to site for thinking conservatives these days.
His latest essay is titled “The Cult of Ideology vs. The Cult of Personality”, and it is a good one. Mostly what I like about it is its insightful identification of cult behavior on both the left and the right, although I care more about this kind of stuff on the right.
Here’s a bit from the essay, where the subtitle of this post is found:
Right-wing ideology is so up for grabs that it’s hard to know “the right’s” position on everything from the size and role of government, the First Amendment (for example, it’s somewhat fashionable now for Republican governors to sign obviously unconstitutional bills regulating corporate speech), and foreign policy. After all, the right’s top cable host is now openly echoing the Kremlin’s line in its looming conflict with Ukraine.
The right’s cult is different. Hamilton calls it a cult of personality. That can imply “Trump,” but I think it’s deeper (and Hamilton notes that it’s deeper). It’s a cult of a certain type of personality, one that is relentlessly, personally, and often punitively aggressive. The aggression is mandatory. The ideology is malleable.
I couldn’t agree more, and the GOP is in thrall to this cult. What passes for conduct on the right these days isn’t ideology, so much as it is emotion. Raw emotion. Conservatism properly understood, is not only ideological, it is proud of it. Having a few principles and sticking to them has worked for western conservatism for centuries, but those claiming the title of conservative these days (as French points out) are all over the map and unprincipled. The nucleus around which they revolve is comprised of aggression, anger, and entitlement, not ideas. What does this sound like? It sounds like progressivism.
Back before the right lost its mind, leading lights would look across the way at leading Liberals (what progressives used to call themselves) and point how how emotional they were about issues, about how their feelings seemed to dominate their worldview, and how rational thought and evidence were sublimated to narrative and grievance.
Parallel lines are meeting in left and right wing populism, as both extremes eschew ideas and dive instead into politics of emotion—and in the case of the right, it is aggressive emotion. When I think of the modern GOP, I think of “'roid rage”, I think of “Ultimate Fighting”, and I think of sucker punches. What we saw on January 6, 2021 was this approach raised to low-art.
French continues to warn of its dangers, and as a result, he is reviled by the Trumpenproletariat. We need more of David French and people like him.
On the Olympics
We are on the cusp of yet another Olympic Games, and I am (as usual) non-plussed. This particular iteration (Beijing) is shot through with controversy, given the host-nation’s complicity in COVID 19, its genocidal treatment of ethnic minorities, and its muscular discomfort with the rules based international system.
As for the COVID charge, yes, I just wrote that. I feel pretty confident in saying it started there, and that they kept it under wraps. That is complicity. HOW it started and HOW it joined the general population, I don’t know. Perhaps we never will.
That said, my enjoyment of the Olympics (Summer or Winter, makes no diff) has declined as I’ve gotten older, and I attribute it almost exclusively to the way the games are covered on TV. To put it bluntly, there is both too much of it and too little of it. Too much of it means that there are too numerous to mention silly spectacles that are now considered Olympic sports, and that silliness is breathlessly covered across the sixteen channels on your cable system associated with whatever mega-media organization has the contract this year. To little means that we spend far too much time watching gauzy, mandolin-accompanied human interest telenovelas, and far too little time watching actual sports.
There is a move afoot for Americans to “boycott” the coverage of these games, and I am all in favor of Americans boycotting, or not boycotting, whatever it is they damn well please. But I won’t not be watching as a political statement. Generally speaking, I won’t be watching out of boredom.
Digital Addiction Update
Faithful readers recall that the subject of my last Substack was a renewed effort to get my internet addition under control. You can read it here. Aside from a few (predictable, tiresome) wags pointing out the irony of reading about it on the internet spurred by a Tweet, generally the reaction was positive.
I’m being unfair. Of course there was irony in reading about someone who claims to be taking internet addition head on, on the internet. Of course there was irony in being pointed to this effort through a Tweet. It’s just that I never said I was going to give up the internet or wipe my account on Twitter. It was all about trying to exert some control. Let us review the elements of the effort, with a brief update on whether I was successful.
1. Remove Twitter/Facebook from phone. I can still use these programs, but I have to be at my PC or have a laptop handy to do so.
Still removed. Only use of either has been on my PC. I cannot underestimate how many times I’ve picked up the phone only to realize that neither was there anymore. I suppose this will fade if I stay true to it.
2. No Twitter/Facebook after dinner. If I am at my computer (and not in enraptured conversation with my inamorata) I’d better be doing something other than social media.
Again, I’ve been successful here. Given the already in place “eShabbat” extending from Friday at 1800hrs to Saturday at 1800hrs, this creates solid blackout from Friday evening until Sunday morning. I’m writing this on Sunday morning after some time on both programs. What I was most interested in was reading the lamentation of fellow UVA Basketball fans after another horrific game, and I was not disappointed.
3. No use of Twitter as an adjunct to other activities (watching sports, events, debates, etc.). This practice REALLY amps things up, primarily my ugly, negative, snarky side while watching UVA Basketball beclown itself.
Also successful. Sat down to watch the UVA v. NC State game yesterday and quietly watched the first half. No outbursts, no Twitter. And then I went to the kitchen to start dinner and didn’t think about the game again until this morning.
4. Minimize/eliminate “likes” and “retweets” when I am on social media. This is a hard one, because it is so easy to do that I don’t even think about it. I’ve got to be more conscious of this.
Given that there isn’t any social media on my primary device (phone), this one hasn’t been hard. But as I stated in #1 above, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reaching for it….
5. Serious culling of Facebook friends/liberal use of unfollow feature. No offense to those caught up in my self-improvement. The bottom line is that the less there is on my Facebook feed, the less I’ll look at it.
My Facebook feed really has diminished in interest to me, after only a week.
6. No radio or podcasts in the car for journeys of less than an hour. This is all about exploiting solitude, using the time to think and to be with my thoughts.
Really, really hard. I love podcasts, and I pretty much feel like most of the ones I listen to are as “legitimate” as reading, which I cannot do while driving. But I stuck to it on my commutes back and forth to Northern Virginia last week, turning on good podcasts after an hour of reflection. Driving around the Eastern Shore on errands in silence was no problem.
7. No more than 1 episode a day of any single streamed series. This is really gonna be hard, because I can binge me some TV.
Also, very hard. I cheated here, not gonna lie about it.
8. Think REALLY hard about every tweet or Facebook post. Ask myself, “why do I want to do this?” Does the world REALLY need to hear this opinion from me? Is what I’m about to write particularly insightful, intelligent, or funny? Is this just showing off?
Very successful here. Given that my use of these platforms dramatically declined this week, I had a level of concentration when using them that permitted me to insert the “does the world really need this?” pause. Over the years, I must have tweeted “YBTBFSM” thousands of times, usually in response to some identity-fueled woke BS. Stopped myself from doing so a few times this week.
I’ll likely flack this essay on Twitter and Facebook, but I’ll do it before dinner and after contemplating it. Which is Kosher.
“ David has found a home at “The Dispatch”, which for my money is the go-to site for thinking conservatives these days.”
It is.
“ We need more of David French and people like him.”
We do.
“ Parallel lines are meeting in left and right wing populism, as both extremes eschew ideas and dive instead into politics of emotion.”
Bingo.
Donald Trump exploited grievance politics and remade the Right with it. Leftists invented victimhood culture, but he was our first victimhood president.