Election years tend to be when pundits rush to put their cards on the table and Douglas Wilson has been no exception.
https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/on-shooting-your-way-out.html
Wednesday, July 31,
2024 by Douglas Wilson
…
The one essential thing
is that you must resolve to do, the thing that Christians must learn to start doing,
is to contradict manifest lies. Has Oceania always been at war with Eastasia?
We need to learn how to say really?
I trust that you are
braced for Operation Gaslight. You are about to witness the power of
propaganda, where the principalities of the media, by sheer dint of brazen and
shameless lying, will try to convince millions of people that Kamala was never
ever the border czar. That, my friend, is what we here at Fact Checkers
Incorporated call “misinformation.” You know, fake news. What were you
thinking?
In response to this, we
need to make it our disciplined practice to contradict all manifest lies. Kill
every cockroach you see, whether it is a big one or a little one or an in
between one.
Contradict them in
whatever manner you deem best. It might be the horse laugh, it could be a mere
shake of the head, or it could be a long debate with your woke cousin. If you
really want to make a statement, you could cancel your subscription to Christianity
Today.
I occasionally wonder if Douglas Wilson actually reads
progressives and leftists or merely reads about them.
I have not seen the likes of Freddie deBoer or Nathan
Robinson enthusiastic about Kamala Harris.
deBoer had a piece at his Substack recently and …
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/kamala-harris-isnt-winning-this-race
the subheader is “this is some very premature
football-spiking”
Then there’s this:
…
And yet this current
state of affairs has produced some of the most wildly unrestrained
football-spiking and expressions of certainty that I’ve seen in 24 years of
following presidential elections. Matt Yglesias’s piece today -
which continues his genuinely sad collapse into just pure anti-left bitterness
- is more or less a declaration of victory. The entire crew at New
York magazine is rabidly invested in the notion that Harris’s victory
is assured, to the point where I doubt anyone affiliated with the magazine
would be able to get real sustained skepticism into its pages. (And if you did
the company Slack would call you a fascist.) The stentorian New York
Times has been having a month-long collective orgasm about what’s
happening, seeming to drop even the tattered fig leaf of impartiality, which
until recently they’ve still pretended to embrace. Social media is stuffed with
gloating, gleeful overconfidence about Harris’s coming victory. Democrats are
not playing defense with their emotions, here, which is absolutely bonkers to
me considering what happened just eight years ago.
…
Look -
·
Donald Trump has significantly outperformed
polling in two consecutive presidential elections
·
The Electoral College favors the Republicans
·
Eventually, Kamala has to make her case in an
unscripted and adversarial format, which she proved entirely incapable of doing
in the 2020 primary
·
There’s still more than two months to go
Harris is doing better
than I would have possibly thought a month or so ago. For that I’m very
grateful. I feel increasingly hopeful about the election, and I hope to go the
good news continues. But you all lived through Trump winning an
election that you were certain he would lose.
…
Robinson spelled out his skepticism in the subheader of the
following article
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-kamala-conundrum
“Is there an alternative? Doesn’t look like it. Can she
win? Unclear. Would she be a great president? Probably not.”
Because Nathan Robinson writes like he does I’m not going
to even bother quoting him at length when the subheader has distilled his
points so well. Wilson’s rhetoric seems to hinge on the surmise that “left” and
“progressive” and “liberal” and Clintonian centrists all amount to exactly the
same people who live in clown world and live by monkeyshines and want to take
away your freedoms. The ways in which
Wilson reveals himself to be a pundit and a guru is to write to “you” as though
you are carefully thinking through these things while he does the thinking for
you. Liberals and progressives and
leftist can certainly do this hat trick, too, but part of the game is acting as
if it is what “they” do and not what “we” do.
So, it is possible for deBoer and Robinson to agree with
Wilson that the DNC has anointed Harris the Chosen One to defeat Agent Smith
but that doesn’t mean Agent Smith won’t kill Neo before things are over.
There are times when I have found myself thinking that
Douglas Wilson says he’s a fundamentalist and that part I don’t doubt. What I
find baffling about him is that he wants to embrace whole hog the conventional
demonology of fundamentalism a la Merrill Unger but when it comes to a theology
of the powers and principalities and the power of the sword his exousiology is
200 proof Walter Wink—the powers were created good, the powers are fallen but
the powers can be redeemed.
If that seems abstruse to the point of impossibility I
grant that point but I’m going to give you a pull quote or two to demonstrate
what I mean. Wilson regards it as possible
for Christians to redeem the power of the sword. Here Wilson’s adversaries are not secular
atheist progressives but any and all anabaptists or people who might really be
conservative Presbyterians who take any caveats from anabaptists or Christian anarchists
about the corrupting power of the sword in worldly empires to hear:.
https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/the-fatal-confusion.html
Monday, August 5, 2024
by Douglas Wilson
…
The issue is not
whether swords can make men Christian. They cannot. The issue is whether
Christian men can make swords Christian.
…
Let’s build up to it
from the foundation. Can the sword be used to enforce any laws whatever? Can a
particular standard of behavior be required of a population, and with civil
penalties attached for disobedience? The answer to this is clearly yes.
We do not require the laws to be enforced as a means of giving cops exercise.
So yes. Laws enforced
by the sword can be used to impose something.
This leads to the
second question. Can the sword be used to impose unrighteous standards?
Did Pol Pot enforce unrighteous standards in Cambodia between 1976 and 1978?
The answer there is yes. Can the sword be used to impose righteous standards?
Did the British use their naval power between 1807 and 1860 to capture
approximately 1600 vessels and set free around 150,000 slaves? And did they
effectively suppress the international slave trade? Again yes. Did they do it
with nerf bats? No to that question. They used military power.
…
So swords must be used to impose order and that begs the
question of the assumption that because the sword must be wielded to impose
standards that the best possible thing is for Christians (implicitly Christian
Nationalists?) to wield the sword so as to make it righteous.
It’s not a surprise that Wilson cherry picks examples from
British imperial history that are used to make his point that the sword can be
made righteous and because it has been made righteous in the past it has to be
made righteous now, implicitly by the likes of Wilson and his associates.
To read Wilson’s Blog and Mablog week after week or month
after month is to realize he is not actually a theologian, not in this capacity
in which he acts at his blog. You’re not going to read him making exegetical
cases for his views so much as telling his peeps how to handle potential
electoral outcomes and advise on how in crazy clown world we need more men to
man up and pump out babies with their willing womanly wives. Not that there’s no reason at all to
encourage natalism but Christian conservatives generally don’t need to be
cheerleaders of natalism. Countless
people were willingly and enthusiastically coming together and bringing forth
babies into the world before Christian writers were advocating for, say, a
Protestant pronatalism.
Wilson may agree with Robinson and deBoer that Harris as
the anointed Democratic candidate doesn’t prove that she’s been given to the
American public as the result of really democratic processes. He’s not even working at the level of dog
whistles in 2024 because a dog whistle is generally taken to be something which
means something to insiders but is coded in such a way that outsiders will not
pick up on the dog whistle. Wilson is
not even working at the level of shibboleths. Wilson has his plethora of dog whistles and
shibboleths but in 2024 he’s just out in the open in his political punditry.
Wednesday, August 7, 2024 by Douglas Wilson
…
This slow walk approach
is only going to work if Trump is defeated in November. If he wins, then there
will be an actual investigation, actual accountability, which will mean the end
of the line for some bad actors. That means that between now and November,
these bad actors know that they are in a death match. It is him or them.
Anybody who thinks that they won’t try some other stuff between now and then is
extraordinarily naive. We are not looking at an old-fashioned October surprise,
or dirty tricks, like some critical remarks on JD Vance’s 7th grade report card
being leaked to the press. We are talking about, I don’t know, war with Iran,
or climate change election postponement, or a terrorist nuke being set off in
Baltimore.
The key for us is
this. Do not believe any official narrative that emanates from
the DC area, or from any mainstream media outlet. If the weather guy announces
that the sun is going to rise in the east tomorrow, you should squint at him
quizzically. You should squint that way because it is going to be connected to
a climate change lecture. Fortunately, this skepticism I am urging is a task
that has been made a lot easier by the behavior of our institutions over the
last few years. Name an official institution that has not been laboring
mightily (and successfully) to divest itself of all credibility through various
duplicitous monkeyshines. I mean, the military, the media, Congress, the
Justice Department, the CDC, the colleges and universities, the governor of
Minnesota, you know, the lot.
…
Even if in the history of Reformed thought it has been said
that the Fifth Commandment entails respecting not just honoring father and
mother but also having the best and most trusting disposition toward the
magistrate, well, so what? Casting doubt
on the legitimacy and honesty of the government is a fairly omnipresent trend
among people. There has been someone somewhere
questioning the validity and viability of democratic norms, institutions and
outcomes since Bush vs. Gore.
To keep track of Wilson these days is to understand he’s
made it clear that a Trump victory will be legitimate in a way a Harris victory
can’t be.
https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/books/interposition.html
Wednesday, August 21, 2024 by Douglas Wilson
...
I spoke above about the
possibility of funny business come November. Our opponents, who are still
functioning as though it were ten years ago, are trying to shame and shush us
as “conspiracy theorists” because we are budgeting for the prospect of the election
in November being an event that stinks to high heaven. As we most certainly
are.
Keep in mind that the
reason we think the election will stink to high heaven in November is because
it stinks to high heaven now. We believe there will be attempts to rig the
election then because they are rigging the election now.
Think of it—bogus impeachment attempts, ginned up indictments, stupid raids, a
disease-riddled conviction, possible imprisonment before the election, an
assassination attempt that our church security team could have handled better
than the Secret Service did, topped off with some truly lame bureaucratic
stonewalling to cover up what the Secret Service did or did not do. If Trump is
reelected, he really needs to make his own arrangements for security with
Blackwater, dispatching the Secret Service to guard some kindergartners’
birthday parties.
The coverage that the
media is currently giving the Harris/Walz ticket—and by “coverage” I mean
tongue bath—is remarkable. Biden retaliated against those who perpetrated the
coup by endorsing Kamala, which the powers that be did not want, and it was an
effective punch. She really is the word salad queen, and you can almost see
that buffering circle on her face while she talks. She is a terrible
campaigner, not very smart, and yet VERY entitled. You can’t do DEI hires, I
would remark mildly, without getting DEI hires. She was widely recognized as
being like this—unlikable, not competent, incoherent, and untroubled by what
has been. And then, overnight, whammo, she became America’s
sweetheart. What does this mean?
The full court press
propaganda move is intended to persuade conservatives that Kamala is within
range. They want to create the illusion that she could win the
election, counting only the fair and square votes. But if you note my point
above, the election is already being rigged. What fair and square votes? Do we
count all the votes that Trump would have gotten had there been no deep state
collusion against him? And what do we do with all the votes that Trump has
picked up because of the deep state collusion? We are already deep inside
Counterfactualville. The prospect of an ordinary election, where the people are
allowed to decide what direction they would prefer to go, without a gun at
their temple, is a prospect that is long gone. We don’t live there anymore.
…
I have also said before that an
effective response to manifest shenanigans would be to take a page from the
Solidarity playbook. No government on earth, however despotic, can muscle
through a general strike. If they require us to believe the unbelievable and
accept the unacceptable, the answer should be “let us think about it, no.” And
tying this in with all the foregoing, this general strike should be organized
and led by governors, backed up by their state legislatures.
If there is clear resolve
beforehand to not accept any ungodly power grab, this diminishes the likelihood
that there will be an attempt at an ungodly power grab. This scenario might not
unfold. But if it does not unfold, the possibility of lesser magistrates doing
their duty might well be one of the reasons.
Trump won
when, as deBoer noted, “everyone” in mainstream liberal centrist media found it
inconceivable he could win. Then years were spent insisting that the victory
was illegitimate. Biden won and, lo, the
system worked. January 6, 2020 was a
putsch and a failed one. The possibility
that Harris will lose is on the table for people who aren’t invested in her. A friend was asking whether it seemed as
though we were being gaslit as to Harris’ fitness and chances for the Oval
Office. This is a conservative friend
who thought it was ghastly that someone as manifestly unfit for any public
office as Trump got the GOP nomination.
Among the likes of Wilson and his fans this kind of never Trump
conservative would be consigned to the underworld with the likes of David
French.
That liberalism itself is seen as being in crisis has been
happening on the left and the right. Deneen’s
Why Liberalim Failed is fairly overt.
deBoer recently wrote of liberalism:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/liberalism-cannot-produce-outcomes
…
The larger point is
simply this. Contemporary American liberalism, by which I mean the substantive
project of the American center-left that is meant to emerge from the
philosophical underpinnings of classical liberalism, is a bizarre and
jerry-rigged thing. It articulates a vision of the public good that I largely
agree with, but it embeds that public good in a system that seems almost
tailor-made not to produce that public good. It’s a philosophy
of well-meaning proceduralists who want the best for everyone but who cannot
admit to themselves that the procedure they worship is entirely incapable of
resulting in the best for everyone. It is a belief in both a process (the rules
of liberalism) and a product (the compassionate outcomes that contemporary
liberals prefer) that are, inconveniently, mutually incompatible. And it’s hard
for me to imagine someone who better exemplifies this tension than Hayes, a fundamentally
good dude with a compassionate nature whose fretful attachment to the rules
leaves him unable to really demand the moral outcomes that he deeply desires.
Which is why I find him, and the cohort he represents, to be fundamentally
tragic.
…
Charles W Mills wrote in his books that white European
liberalism reinscribed and reinforced racial inequalities in opportunities and
outcomes that the entire Rawlsian tradition of liberalism has been incapable of
addressing. Mills further contended that
it was ironically in the ideas of Nozick that a more coherent case for
reparations could be made. Being half
Native American (Dad) I think one of the challenges of black political activism
and theory in the United States is to forget the Native American legacy. There are wrongs that, once perpetrated and
perpetuated, can never be undone. The
moral impulse that says wrongs should be made right is praiseworthy but to go
by the invectives of Hebrew prophets there’s such a thing as recognizing some
systemic evils or so evil conquest, exile, and displacement are coming. This is the part that white Christian
nationalists would object to and reject.
The possibility of legitimate armed rebellion against an unjust state in
Christian nationalist circles is more a white privilege than an option for
advocates of Black Power. Douglas Wilson
can keep asking “by what standard?” as a rhetorical question all he wants. That’s his business model and I grant he also
sincerely believes it. Valorizing
Wilberforce and Dabney at the same time is quite possibly the core of who
Douglas Wilson is and he sees that as coherent while he views his adversaries
as not having coherent or moral positions.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how it’s weird that among
white Christian cultural conservatives they simultaneously give off this vibe
that liberalism was and is bad and godless, okay? But … critical race theory is the spawn of
Hell because it attacks the treasured freedoms and benefits and security of
life that conservative white Christians celebrate in the United States because …
liberalism happened. White Christian
Nationalists who would take aim at the problems of Rawlsian liberalism might
discover they have that in common with critical race theorists if they could be
bothered to read them, and to read them without the foregone aim of showing how
satanic they are for being critical of Anglo-American colonial/imperial
wrongdoing.
deBoer and other leftists may be right that liberalism
fails to procure for the citizens the freedoms promised. The freedoms themselves would not necessarily
be bad things if they could, in fact, be provided, but this has been the part
where, in my conversations with a progressive friend, the anthropogenic climate
situation comes in. Is it a good faith
venture to want more Americans to have the freedoms of the white middle to upper
class if giving them those material and social freedoms imperils the global
ecosphere? There is a possibility lurking
within white liberalism of the trans-Atlantic variety a kind of bad faith
relationship between the ideals and implementation. The bad faith within the conservative wing of
liberalism seems to be that white conservatives denigrate liberalism right up
to the point where liberalism is argued to have been incapable of truly
liberating people the world over.
Fukuyama was wrong, obviously, but neocons don’t want the likes of deBoer
or Robinson going on too much about imperialism.
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