RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/17/what-we-neglect-in-tocqueville/

Democracy in America is about a lot more than democracy .

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French aristocrat and one of America’s very best friends, the special, rare kind that tells you the truth. His Democracy in America is quoted often for support, but less often sought for advice. Here are a few points in his great book, often neglected, from which we can learn. (An anniversary is a time to celebrate, but any time is a good time to learn.) 

The meaning of democracy. Many readers today wonder how Tocqueville could speak of “democracy” in 1835, when women had no vote and blacks were enslaved. Tocqueville specifies “equality of conditions” to define democracy, a state in which each individual thinks he has sufficient intelligence to rule himself, resulting in the rule of the majority of such individuals. It’s not that individuals are equal, but that they think they are. Others are held to be “similar” to oneself, neither inferior nor superior. Democracy is not a self-evident truth taken from nature’s God but a plausible convention held to be true. Democracy can become more equal — give women the vote and abolish slavery — when the majority rules it to happen, but the majority can also accept imperfections and inequalities if it wishes and still remain democratic. Such inequalities, for example offices filled by elections, often make democracy work better. Even in its normal functioning, even when officials have powers unequal to those of citizens, democracy has hidden aristocratic aspects necessary to its good functioning.

Democracy and aristocracy. Tocqueville — an aristocrat himself, living just after the French Revolution — knew the contrast between the Old Regime and the democratic future that he found in America in a way we cannot today. For us there is only one way to live justly and reasonably — in democracy. Even the hateful regimes we know, such as communism and Nazism, are perversions of democracy. Tocqueville refers to the “providential fact” that democracy in our time is inescapable, but he explains democracy to itself in constant contrast with its rival, aristocracy.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2020/11/28/a-holiday-gift-idea-new-books-by-joshua-mitchell-michael-walsh-and-brandon-weichert-n1179894

Three new books that every conservative should read appeared in time for the holiday season, and I recommend them enthusiastically as holiday presents. (I assume you’ve already read my book You Will Be Assimilated: Chiina’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, which would have done nicely for Halloween).

The first is American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, by Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown University. Here’s what I wrote about it:

“American Awakening” is a tour-de-force, the sort of book that forever changes the way one looks at the subject. It is the most important book on American politics of the past several years. Joshua Mitchell argues persuasively that America’s political crisis has a religious origin, and that the extremes of identity politics are an expression of a dislodged Protestantism.This is a bold and deeply convincing alternative to  conventional thinking that combines a subtle grasp of theology with profound insights into American political process and deep knowledge of history. So skillful a writer is Prof. Mitchell that the reader has the sense of remembering something that was always known, while learning something that was never imagined.

Mitchell diagnoses America’s spiritual maladies with a unique religious sensibility. It’s the best book on American politics since Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age  in 2014.

Second on my holiday list is Michael Walsh’s Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All is Lost. I’ve read the first third or so, and it’s riveting. Michael  is a Renaissance man, a successful Hollywood screenwriter and novelist, as well as a fine classical pianist and former music critic of Time Magazine. Here’s what VIctor Davis Hanson says about it:

Last Stands is a thoroughly original study of doomed or trapped soldiers often fighting to the last man, from Thermopylae to the Korean War. But Michael Walsh’s book is more than a military history of heroic resistance. It is also a philosophical and spiritual defense of the premodern world, of the tragic view, of physical courage, and of masculinity and self-sacrifice in an age when those ancient virtues are too often caricatured and dismissed. A much needed essay on why rare men would prefer death to dishonor, and would perish in the hope that others thereby might live.

Last but not least is Brandon Weichert’s Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower. Brandon is a brilliant strategic analyst and an adviser to several parts of the US military, and he has a unique understanding of how our future security depends on space. Here’s what Dennis Prager had to say about it:

There are many good books published each year, but few truly important ones. This book is truly important. If America fails to heed this warning, it will no longer be the world’s superpower. And that will be a calamity not just for America, but for mankind and the cause of freedom on Earth.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/natan-sharansky-and-the-meaning-of-freedom/

Life lessons from the dissident, politician, and activist.

Natan Sharansky has been a computer scientist, a chess player, a refusenik, a dissident, a political prisoner, a party leader, a government minister, a nonprofit executive, and a bestselling author. He never expected to be a school counselor.

But the coronavirus dashes expectations. In early March, when the virus began to appear in Jewish communities outside New York City, Sharansky found himself online, in an unaccustomed position. He began to share with students and parents whose schools were closed how he had coped during years in confinement.“At first, it seemed absurd, even obscene,” Sharansky writes in his latest book, Never Alone, coauthored with the historian Gil Troy. “How could my experience of playing chess in my head in my punishment cell compare to being cooped up in gadget-filled homes wired to the internet — with computer chess — especially because this isolation is imposed to protect people, not break them?”

What Sharansky realized is that the costs of lockdowns do not depend on the reasons behind them. The sudden and seemingly arbitrary interruption of individual plans, movements, and relationships causes psychological harm. Sharansky recorded a brief YouTube video for the Jewish Agency — you can watch it here — offering his five tips for quarantine. Recognize the importance of your choices and behavior, Sharansky advised. Understand that some things are beyond your control. Keep laughing. Enjoy your hobbies. Consider yourself part of a larger cause.

“Surprisingly,” Sharansky writes, “this short clip went viral, reaching so many people all over the world within a few days that it made me wonder why even bother writing this book.” His reaction was another example of his droll and often self-deprecating wit. The video, however helpful it may be, does not match the power and wisdom of Never Alone. Part autobiography, part meditation on Jewish community, the book ties together the themes of Sharansky’s earlier work, from his prison memoir, Fear No Evil (1988), to his defense of cultural particularity, Defending Identity (2008). It is a moving story of emancipation and connection, of freedom and meaning.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/unmasking-antifa-mark-tapson/

The other day on Facebook a friend posted something critical of the domestic terror group known as Antifa, and someone came to its defense by echoing Clueless Joe Biden’s recent, bizarre declaration that Antifa is not an organization but “an idea.”

It is true that Antifa is not an organization in the strict sense, but Biden’s vague description is either stunningly uninformed or a weak attempt to deflect criticism from its masked militant members. I’m betting on the latter, because Democrat leaders have been curiously reluctant to condemn Antifa’s strategy of violence and intimidation toward the purportedly “fascist” supporters of President Trump.

To educate the Facebook commenter and Biden supporter who believes Antifa actually opposes fascism, I recommended the new book Unmasking Antifa: Five Perspectives on a Growing Threat, edited by the Center for Security Policy and featuring FrontPage Mag contributor Matthew Vadum, because there is no better dissection of the origins, nature, tactics, and aims of this anarchic “idea” and its dangerous adherents than this compact exposé.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/obamas-reason-hate-lloyd-billingsley/

In his new book A Promised Land, former president Obama claims he sought “a broader struggle for a fair, just and generous society.” That quest brought criticisms including: “how whites avoid taking the full measure of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and their own racial attitudes. How this left Black people with a psychic burden, expected to constantly swallow legitimate anger and frustration in the name of some far-off ideal.” This recalls a theme from the author’s first book.

“Black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is. For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it’s not. So you might as well get used to it.”

Thus spake the poet “Frank” in Dreams from My Father. Frank is giving advice to young Barry, about to leave Hawaii for Occidental College in Los Angeles. As Frank warns, “They’ll train you so good you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.”

After Dreams from My Father was published in 1995, the author acknowledged that “Frank” was Frank Marshall Davis, still identified as a black journalist and poet. Davis was also a longtime Communist Party activist on the FBI’s security index. When the Dreams author became a rising star in politics, Davis disappeared from the audio version of the book and made no appearance in The Audacity of Hope.

That book mentioned David Axelrod, who in 2007 had been proclaimed “Obama’s narrator” by the New York Times. The next year, the Dreams author became president and set about transforming the United States. As Paul Kengor documented in The Communist, the domestic agenda of the Dreams author bore striking similarities to the views of Frank Marshall Davis. In 2015, Davis did not appear in David Axelrod’s massive Believer, which still proved enlightening on racial themes.