Rod Dreher writes of his long affection for NPR, and how he was recently driven from it to trying Joe Rogan on Spotify. What resonated with me was the constant battle between people who say "but how can you vote for so-and-so, knowing how awful he and his fellow-travelers are"--from both sides of the aisle.
I am sure Joe Rogan differs from Orthodox Christian socially conservative me in a number of ways, but I would a thousand million times rather live in Joe Rogan World than NPR/NYT World. The stories Joe Rogan lives by are not the stories I live by, mostly, but I would trust Joe Rogan to defend people like me against the Pink Police State that the left seems bound and determined to create. One thing he said in that Douglas Murray podcast that resonated deeply with me: him and Murray agreeing on how insane Trump is, but how people on the left simply cannot grasp that they alarm many center-right people so much that they are less worried about crazy Trump than they are about the crazy left. This seems to be the neuralgic point between my self-described anti-woke liberal reader, and me: that we look at the same things, and dislike the same things, but that he is much more alarmed by Trump than by the woke, while I come down on the opposite side.
Where will each of us be in five years? Will we be able to talk to each other at all? This is not at all a crazy question. This was the story of Spain. It went from the fall of the monarchy and the installment of a democratic republic in 1931 to civil war in 1936, because neither the left nor the right trusted each other, and each came to see liberal democracy as a menace, because it provided a means for the Other to come to power.
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This was the story of Spain. It went from the fall of the monarchy and the installment of a democratic republic in 1931 to civil war in 1936, because neither the left nor the right trusted each other, and each came to see liberal democracy as a menace, because it provided a means for the Other to come to power.
This right here is what frightens me. Our advantage over Spain is we have almost two hundred and fifty years of practice at the liberal democracy game. But the Democrat leadership has outright declared their intention to throw all that away and try to set things up so "the Other" can never come to power again. And they think this will be met by "the Other" with a shrug and resignation to the situation. It's not just that they've badly misread the situation, but that they never even bothered to try reading the situation.
1) NPR. I first became aware of NPR bias during its reporting of the 1984 election. I had voted Third Party during the Reagan years, so was neutral regarding Reagan/Mondale. I noted the sneer in the NPR announcer's voice in reporting Reagan's victory. After that, I listened to NPR less and less.
2) Spain. Most histories of the period focus on the Civil War, instead of the reasons for it. Stanley Payne's books on Spain give a good background on why it occurred. Not at all the traditional narrative that the Right was unable to accept the results of a democratic election. The point of no return for the Right was when leftist police kidnapped and killed Jose Calvo Sotelo, the Right's leader in Parliament, in revenge for the Falange killing a leftist policemen. Although the government knew his kidnappers and killer, it made no arrests. That informed the Right there was no impartial rule of law. After the left killed thousands of Roman Catholic clerics soon after the military uprising, the Right concluded the Left had made it a war without mercy. And it was, to the regret of the Left.
Grtingo,
"Stanley Paynes books on Spain". Sounds a bit like a tongue twister! - but thanks- I will look them up. I am currently watching a series on the Spanish Civil war, this one-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu5f9hp0IP4
Perhaps you have seen it? Any comments about it?
Trying to get some understanding about the why- so far, the most insightful comment was from one of the Royalists, who said, "purely and simply, we hated one another".
And another from a foreign volunteer for the Republicans, who found to his chagrin this was not some diverse group of believers in representative government, but a bunch of hard core communists.
Trying to get some understanding about the why- so far, the most insightful comment was from one of the Royalists, who said, "purely and simply, we hated one another".
And another from a foreign volunteer for the Republicans, who found to his chagrin this was not some diverse group of believers in representative government, but a bunch of hard core communists.
I once read a comment from a defeated Republican to the effect that the decades of Franco's dictatorship were needed to have a cooling off period.
Orwell was far from the only foreign volunteer/visitor and author who discovered that there was a not-so-Democratic side to the Republicans. John Dos Passos Laurie Lee, and Jef Last are other authors who wised up in Spain. Not Hemingway, though.
Isabel Allende's recent novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, traces the life of a refugee from the Spanish Civil War who emigrated to Chile. Both the narrator and a character in the book acknowledge that both sides committed atrocities. But when it comes to Allende's Chile, there is no attempt at even-handedness in the book. All is the fault of the military and the US. One might reply that given Isabel Allende's background, even-handedness should not be expected. After all, Salvador Allende acted as a surrogate father to Isabel when her father, a first cousin to Salvador, abandoned the family. After the coup, the otherwise apolitical Isabel assisted some people in fleeing the country, for which she got some threatening phone calls, and decided her family also needed to flee. Yet in previous works, she was somewhat even-handed. In Paula, a memoir that weaves her life in with the life of her daughter Paula, who died in her 20s, she does mention that her maternal grandfather, with whom Isabel was close, supported the coup. She also mentioned in Paula that the Chamber of Deputies declared Allende in violation of the Constitution. As Allende said, that promoted a coup. That is, in Paula, Isabel Allende admitted that Chile during the Allende years was deeply divided and that division wasn't an invention of the Yankees or the Generals. For some reason, Isabel Allende could not admit that in Long Petal of the Sea.
I'll take a look at that video.
Worse comes to worst, we do have the option which we rejected back in the 19th Century: secession. As a Union of Sovereign States (in theory), we've got dividing lines in place which would allow for peaceful dis-integration of the country.
I'm not confident that such a division would actually work out peacefully, and I certainly have my own opinions as to which of the two or more successor states would be more successful (by various criteria). Regardless, it's not the ideal outcome, but better than a civil war.
Better peaceful Secession than violent Civil War. I would be most happy to let both sides run their countries how they saw fit. I just don't think the Left would be happy with the bargain (given that the West Coast and North East would never be able to feed itself).
we've got dividing lines in place which would allow for peaceful dis-integration of the country.
I recall, during the primary campaigns of 2015-2016, a petition campaign of State secessions, and the seven States that got Obama's threshold of 100,000 signatures to force a government response of some sort had in their aggregate nuclear weapons, a contiguous geographic relationship, access to the sea, virtual self-sufficiency in critical natural resources, actual self-sufficiency in meat and plants for food, and around 40% of the nation's then-GDP.
I suspect close to 40 States would join such an action today, omitting only the West coast, Illinois, New York, and a few others.
It remains, though, an outcome of which I'm not in favor.
Eric Hines
"(given that the West Coast and North East would never be able to feed itself)."
I'll dispute that-at least for the West coast- Washington, Oregon, and especially California have a lot of agriculture. The Northeast would be screwed I think.
Enjoying the discussion of the Spanish Civil War. Thank you.
Fish. We've got lots.
AVI:
Fish. We've got lots.
That, I assume, is written in jest: collapse of cod fishing off Grand Banks.
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