He's Roger Kimball, so of course you should read the whole thing

hecate at the crossroads

Highways to Utopia Kimball is a historian, so he takes us all the way back to Greece, before bringing us to the modern day, and that’s a long journey, and a lengthy read; time well spent. Here are just a few snippets (note: in order to preserve Kimball’s format, I have not indented his own writing so that the quotes he uses stand out. Everything below is either Kimball’s or, as indicated, those quotes – ED)

One bleak route on the crossroads we face involves the willful throttling of those mighty currents. Angry at the Gyndes River for sweeping away and drowning one of his sacred white horses, Cyrus decided to punish the river by having his slaves cut 360 channels into it, stanching its flow to a trickle. This we have done to ourselves, applying mental tourniquets to the arteries that fed us from the past in order that we might gambol undisturbed in distracted present-tense ignorance. An illustrative case in point is the Princeton classics department, where woke educationists panting for relevance recently jettisoned the requirement that its students learn Latin or Greek, never mind both. At the same time, they publicly celebrate the fifty-seven varieties of racial-trans-wonderfulness that have become the focus of academic obsession. It is a situation that is as absurd as it is malignant. In The Present Age (1846), Kierkegaard described the jaded spirit that “leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.” That is where we are today: occupying a husk of decadence assiduously emptied of vitality. Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and the rest of the querulous educational establishment are sodden with money but spiritually and intellectually bankrupt. They continue to look like educational institutions: leafy walks, imposing libraries, impressive buildings. But most of the activities they sponsor are inimical to real education, inciting thousands of puny Cyruses to divert and stymie the waters of tradition in order to polish the mirror of their narcissism.

What we are talking about is the drift, the tendency of our culture. And that is to be measured not so much by what we permit or forbid as by what we unthinkingly accept as normal. This crossroads, that is to say, is part of a process, one of whose markers is the normalization of the outré. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan described this development as “defining deviancy down.” It is, as the late columnist Charles Krauthammer observed, a two-way process. “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling,” he wrote,

it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant. . . . Large areas of ordinary behavior hitherto considered benign have had their threshold radically redefined up, so that once innocent behavior now stands condemned as deviant. Normal middle-class life then stands exposed as the true home of violence and abuse and a whole catalog of aberrant acting and thinking.

Hilaire Belloc espied the culmination of this process in Survivals and New Arrivals (1929):

When it is mature we shall have, not the present isolated, self-conscious insults to beauty and right living, but a positive coordination and organized affirmation of the repulsive and the vile.

In some ways, Anton’s list reads like a variation on the litany offered in the passage from Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints (1973) that I quote as an epigraph.That dystopian novel imagines a world in which Western civilization is overrun and destroyed by unfettered third-world immigration. It describes an instance of wholesale cultural suicide in which demography is weaponized and deployed as an instrument of retribution. Conspicuous in that apocalypse is the feckless collusion of white Europeans and Americans in their own supersession. They faced an existential crossroads. They chose extinction, laced with the emotion of higher virtue, rather than survival.

Although published in the early 1970s, Camp of the Saints sounds a distinctly contemporary note. Ibram X. Kendi is not actually a character in Raspail’s book. But he might have stepped right out of its pages. “The only remedy to racist discrimination,” Kendi has written, “is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In other words, Kendi advises race-based discrimination today, race-based discrimination tomorrow, race-based discrimination forever. Compare Raspail:

Now, it’s a known fact that racism comes in two forms: that practiced by whites—heinous and inexcusable, whatever its motives—and that practiced by blacks—quite justified, whatever its excesses, since it’s merely the expression of a righteous revenge, and it’s up to the whites to be patient and understanding.

In the West, what we have witnessed since the so-called “Progressive” movement of the 1910s and 1920s is the rise of a bureaucratic elite that has increasingly absorbed the prerogatives of power from legislative bodies. In the United States, for example, Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress. For many decades, however, Americans have been ruled less by laws duly enacted by their representatives in Congress and more by an alphabet soup of regulatory agencies. The members of these bodies are elected by no one; they typically work outside the purview of public scrutiny; and yet their diktats have the force of law. Already in the 1940s, James Burnham was warning about the prospect of a “managerial revolution” that would accomplish by bureaucracy what traditional politics had failed to produce. Succeeding decades have seen the extraordinary growth of this leviathan, the unchecked multiplication of its offices and powers, and the encroaching reach of its tentacles into the interstices of everyday life. We are now, to an extent difficult to calculate, ruled by this “administrative state,” the “deep state,” the “regulatory state.”

The location of sovereignty

When in September 2020 the World Economic Forum at Davos announced its blueprint for a “Great Reset” in the wake of the worldwide panic over covid, a new crossroads had been uncovered. Never letting a crisis go to waste, the Davos initiative was an extensive menu of progressive, i.e., socialistic imperatives. Here at last was an opportunity to enact a worldwide tax on wealth, a far-reaching (and deeply impoverishing) “green-energy” agenda, rules that would dilute national sovereignty, and various schemes to insinuate politically correct attitudes into the fabric of everyday life. All this was being promulgated for our own good, of course. But it was difficult to overlook the fact that the wef plan involved nothing less than the absorption of liberty by the extension of bureaucratic power. “Of all tyrannies,” C. S. Lewis wrote,

a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

The social commentator Joel Kotkin, noting the class element of this process, has recently traced the emergence of a “neo-feudalist” impulse throughout the West. Drawing on the managerial apparatus of the administrative state, this twenty-first-century form of feudalism lacks the regalia of its medieval precursors. But it operates by enacting an equally thoroughgoing agenda of dependency.

The political scientist John Marini may not have coined the term “administrative state,” but he has done more than anyone has to plumb its Stygian depths and anatomize its assaults on liberty. Drawing on Marini’s work, the Claremont Institute’s Glenn Ellmers has recently articulated the essential tension between constitutional government, which is based upon a broadly shared common sense, and its would-be replacement: technocratic government, which is populated by an unaccountable elite, “experts” whose leading characteristic is faith in their own prerogatives. This “permanent government,” Ellmers writes, “is a powerful force”:

It has established its own legitimacy apart from its political or constitutional authority, within the ranks of both political parties and the courts. Bureaucratic rule is defended as essential to solving, in a non-partisan way, the problems of modern government and society. But the bureaucracy has become a political faction on behalf of its own interests. Moreover, the party that defends progressivism and elite authority is increasingly open about politicizing the last vestiges of non-partisan government, including the Justice Department and federal law enforcement. As their power has grown, these defenders of administrative government are increasingly unable to understand, let alone tolerate, anyone who fails to recognize the legitimacy of the administrative state.

As I have noted elsewhere, it is important to acknowledge that this progressive project is as much a Republican as a Democratic pursuit. Despite some rhetorical differences, both parties are fully paid-up worker bees in this hive. The “pragmatic” cover they give themselves is the supposed “complexity” of modern life and complication of contemporary governance. Who but they are equipped to manage the machinery of the state, the minutiae of government? Ellmers nails it: “The pursuit of progress, social justice, and equity becomes for them the moral equivalent of constitutional authority.” Welcome to Davos.