The Post-Partisan Emporium

  You can't handle the truth "We needed a bad cop anyway, and there are always more good cops." For the past two decades, I’ve been watching the world wake up to the obvious. As Orwell said, nothing is so difficult as noticing the nose in front of your face. A few people, me among them, were seeing that the whole story of reality that we lived in was as false and narcissistic—at least!—as the Soviet Union’s narrative of itself. Yet none of us could accept the darkest aspect of that truth. We all had the idea that we could stand up and speak the truth and, if it was true enough, it would flash around the world like lightning. Nothing could prevail against the truth. The Father of Lies could not stand against the Lord of Hosts. That this fantasy itself was part of the lie—that truth has no army, that no angels will ride to our rescue—was too much. Perhaps if I had known it, I never would have said anything. This truth is only available to the most advanced atheists and the ...

  A Wolf by the Ears: Or Why the Left Can't Moderate The Patronage–Client Trap John Slaughter Definitions up front: By “Left,” I mean today’s progressive coalition clustered around the Democratic Party and the administrative class. By “dominant culture,” I mean the historic high-status bloc that set a nation’s public norms (in the U.S., White Christian Historically Protestant America). And by “Bioleninism,” I mean Spandrell’s idea that regimes recruit marginal or low-status groups with promises of power and protection, using their resentment to upend the old hierarchy/status quo. A coalition that survives by perpetual grievance must either mint new enemies or pay ever-rising rents to its clients.  — the Patronage–Client Trap The Left cannot tone down its rhetoric. It cannot moderate its positions. The Left is, by nature, a revolutionary force, and a revolutionary force needs an enemy. Every nation has a high-status ethnic or religious group that sets the public norm. That grou...