And the core reason Israel is now functionally a theocracy?
Israel has never created a constitution separating church and state. As a result, among other things, the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate holds a monopoly on marriage, which forces many secular Israelis to get married in other countries, or even online. Israel has no formal public transportation on Saturdays, which strands the millions of residents who don’t own a car.
As most of the school funding goes to schools that reverse engineer intelligence, having no wheels on a Saturday is going to be the least of Israelis’ problems.
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One silver lining: Normal people are being brought together.
“We should be glad about the greatest achievement we got: the creation of a new kind of centrist identity,” [one observer says]. “This center includes various shades, from the capitalist, hawkish right that believed in Netanyahu so far but not anymore, through the liberal center and up to the social-democratic left.”
“[When] a serving coalition is acting in a frenzy, it makes us feel, every minute of every day, that we are connected,” [says another]. “The liberal camp is a country that is just being formed.”
It’s the same thing here with theocratic attacks on abortion rights; it’s the same thing in Iran with theocratic attacks on women. Outrageous acts bring normal people together in defense of liberty, democracy, decency, equality. Indeed I think we can begin to see, in the polling, the same thing happening in regard to America’s homegrown outrage-generator, Trump. Eventually most normal people can’t take gross abnormality.
… militia. I don’t think this Israeli women’s political movement is going to go after the vile and increasingly powerful ultraorthodox cult in that country with guns; but if you ask UD whether the prospect of armed female avengers against primitive theocrats is pleasant or unpleasant, she’d have to go with pleasant.
See also the millions of Iranian women whose fuck the hijabmilitancy grows with each grotesque effort on the part of the government to frighten them into wearing the modesty cap.
… so I got up and first dealt with our too-high-tech door, which would start whoop whooping if I weren’t careful, and then I walked out onto the still-hot lawn. All day boats drifted along our little canal, and the effect was cinematic, elegant, hushed, charismatic; now, at midnight, the water was empty, vaguely lit, moving only slightly in the heat.
In the darkness I started looking for the outline of an Adirondack or a chaise, and I approached a white glimmering seat of some sort and almost sat down until I realized someone was in it.
“Sorry to disturb,” I said, and settled in a chair a few feet away.
“I don’t want to scare you, but would you come with me and I’ll show you this really beautiful bird.”
The person in the chair was suddenly right in my face. I recognized him: He was the teenager with a missing tooth and thick brown hair who had brought water in a pebbled silver bottle to our table at the lodge’s restaurant that evening. We’d admired the bottle; he’d admired the bottle. “I’m going to bring your group a second bottle in a minute,” he said, “but this one won’t be beautiful.” And indeed it was a very ordinary bottle, and we all complained good-naturedly.
Now he brought me right up to the edge of the water and pointed out an egret of some sort, its whiteness startling against the black trees.
“My step-mother is picking me up pretty soon. I live with my real mother, but I’m staying with my step-mother on Tilghman for the summer. Look at the night sky. I stare at it all the time even though I don’t really know what I’m looking at. Even when things move: Airplane or satellite or…”
“Unidentified aerial phenomenon.”
“Then there’s the bottom of the ocean. From the highest to the lowest. I wouldn’t have minded dying in that Titanic submersible. I want adventures.”
“What other adventures?”
“Scuba. Scuba at a wreck or in a cave. Go into orbit. Highest and lowest.”
I thought of telling him about DeLillo’s novel The Names, where the characters are like that – some of them are fanatical archeologists, always digging deeper and deeper into the earth, and some are international consultants, always flying high above the earth. None of them seems to manage being in the middle, where the farms and the cities and the parks and the people are, very well. The whole novel, that is to say, is about efforts to avoid reality.
But I didn’t tell him about DeLillo. I asked him more questions about the adventures he wanted to have, and as he expanded on them I realized that I sort of loved him and also was very grateful to him because I’d left my room expecting at best a night sky that wouldn’t lift my restlessness, but instead, magically, I encountered an instant cure for my restless spirit, which is to say another human being. The unearthly earthly reality of another human being. Someone who moved me, and lifted me out of what was after all just a spot of convoluted ego.
An opinion piece in the Claremont Colleges student newspaper calls for a forceful public act of separation from the “disgusting” Claremont Institute, home of traitors.
[T]he Claremont Institute is not a normal think tank: their values and platformed beliefs are extremely far outside of anything [the Claremont Colleges stand for]… As a set of small schools we must acknowledge that our small reputation risks association with bad actors such as the Claremont Institute. Combatting that association cannot be a passive process — it requires active combat against the Institution.
Having besmirched the word “Claremont” with their vile and inhumane social positions, and with a hatred of American liberal democracy so intense as to turn their leadership into aiders and abettors of the unspeakable John Eastman, the Claremont Institute has become a damaging embarrassment for the colleges that share its name.
Many extreme ideas that first look wacky and disreputable and then end up sweeping the country originate in California, and such is definitely the case with the Claremont Merry Pranksters and their thing: The urgent need to blow up American democracy.
Named after their ‘sixties precursors who drove a school bus all over the US while similarly denouncing The Establishment, the Claremont group also shares with the original Pranksters a virtually all-male membership, a belief in “the power of a certain kind of approach to politics that’s sensational,” and a commitment to overthrowing the country.
Their creed: Human society is incapable of the kind of rational, deliberative government that liberal democracy requires, man.Y’all need a dictator, like Donald Trump, cuz without him you is making one shitty stinky mess of things.
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Given their belief that (in the slightly altered words of SNCC, another ‘sixties precursor) ‘the only position for women in CMP is prone,’ it must be quite the provocation that not one, not two, but three women have lately written the most in-depth and scathing denunciations to which the organization has ever been subjected. “We’ve been warning people about Vagina Dentata from day one, and here it is,” one Prankster (He goes by the anonym Santa Monica Centurion. Okay, I made him up.) has commented in response to the girl essays. “Now they’ve really gotten their teeth into us.”
The first essay appeared around this time last year and, in a more in sorrow than anger way, noted the increasingly Dennis the Menace feel of the group. This year, as the CMP’s escalating hatred of liberal democracy, coupled with rage at Donald Trump’s and John Eastman’s post-Jan 6 travails, has taken it way, way off the reservation, Laura K. Field and Katherine Stewart both openly express horror at the combination of juvenility and violence inside the organization.
Why has so much of the American conservative movement embraced the story that the principles of equality and the pursuit of a more just society are the greatest threats to Western civilization today? Who or what is responsible for giving these paranoid ideas an intellectual veneer? The Claremont Institute gets you much of the way to an answer.
The paranoid Claremont men have convinced themselves that they must kill nihilist, relativist, progressivist, female-fetid, American democracy before it kills them:
“Given the promise of tyranny, conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd,” argues author Kevin Slack, a professor at Hillsdale College, in a lengthy book excerpt published in Claremont’s online magazine, The American Mind. “Able-bodied men, no longer isolated, are returning to republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry. They are buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.”
The armory might not have been necessary had Eastman’s traitorous January 6 plan, in which Claremont continues fervently to believe, worked.
[C]onsider the cynicism and nihilism necessary to believe in [Eastman’s] theory—or even to take it seriously as a possibility… You must believe that our institutions are so top-to-bottom corrupt that nothing and no one is worthy of civic trust. Not the neighbors who served as election observers, not the poll workers, not county officials, not city governments, not state legislators, and certainly not Republicans in Congress. This is conspiracism in its most unaccountable form... Once you begin understanding our national politics as a matter of emergencies, corruption, and lies reparable only by figures of exceptional heroism, there is no returning to a politics of the everyday, of democratic choice and representation, and of disagreement, contestation, and compromise. There is … no easy weaning from the dystopian hype.
For evidence of the survival of the non-cynical world, read this.
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I remember my first encounter with dystopian hype (“[M]any Republicans … are pushing the view that America is a degenerate society that cannot be saved.”), and I remember how sexually exciting I found its dark Eastwood (Wood, not Man; Clint, not John) pathology: It was my reading, as a Northwestern undergrad, of Kit Lasch’s (I got to know him when we were both at U Rochester) Culture of Narcissism, a book whose utterly black disposition in regard to every aspect of America has been shamelessly adopted by Patrick Deneen and other contemporary theocrats who want to convince you that your secular life in this country is so unbearably empty that you’re desperate to embrace existence under an all-male, all-powerful, Vatican.
Lasch himself, I was excited to discover, was a handsome, brooding, chain-smoking, dead-ringer for John Cassavetes, and the whole spectacle – intellectual, erotic – had me weak at the knees.
But, tu sais, I was twenty-two years old and really dumb and immature – pretty much where the leadership of Claremont is today – and then I grew up and saw how cheap and manipulative radically dystopian anti-Americanism is, left and right variety. I mean, it’s the oldest sales pitch in the world – your Dodge Charger is a total piece of shit you should be embarrassed to be seen in. I’ve got a late-model Mercedes C-Class you’ll feel much more meaningful inside of…
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“They just want to blow the place up,” concludes Katherine Stewart, and oh how the UD I used to be loved this disrupter shit.
Yes bring it on baby pistol whip me with your AR-15 make me feel young again.
He strides like a colossus across the American landscape, doing battle with George Santos for the country’s most powerful young MAGA voice; and, like Santos, the way he got there is nothing short of amazing.
And inspirational. A man who cannot spell Friedrich or most other words wrote a college thesis about Nietzsche! And although almost all of it was plagiarized, with several references made up, he passed with honors!
Anthony Sabatini achieved this feat by choosing an extremely old, give-a-shit thesis director who obviously didn’t cast even a teeny weeny bit of one eye on Sentence Number One (where Freidrich appears – and Nietzsche’s first name will be rendered in this way throughout) before stamping CUM LAUDE on the pile. (Says here this thesis personcommuted a thousand milesfor eight years to Sabatini’s university (?), so maybe therein lies an explanation for a respectable scholar granting a stupid unethical student honors.)
The soul-searching natalists of Ohio could do worse than keep UD‘s little ditty up there in mind as they survey the hulking ruins of their best-laid anti-abortion plans.
Here’s the deal: The US is really strongly distinctly not a theocracy, but it sure looks as though the activist core of the No Abortion Even For Nine Year Old Rape/Incest Victims Or For Any Other Human Atrocity You Can Think Of movement is composed of theocrats.
Now, a few anti-abortion people are not theocrats and they are looking directly away from the ruins of Ohio toward the land o’ compromise. But they can forget it. When you’re taking orders from God, you’re in no mood to fuck with compromise. Compromise will compromise you right out of heaven, and you’re not going to miss your salvation.
In a perfect world, the theocrats would shut up and content themselves with mini-theocracies like Idaho, where they can pursue a heaven-bound life unmolested by rapidly secularizing Americans. But their faith makes that impossible; they must always pursue the impossible dream of absolutely no reproductive rights up and down this great land of ours. Good luck with that.
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LOOSE WOMEN
“Republicans spent half a century working to overturn Roe, yet they weren’t prepared for the democratic policy debate when that finally happened in Dobbs last year. Now they’re seeing abortion regimes as loose as Roe, or potentially looser, imposed by voters even in conservative states. This political liability will persist until the GOP finds an abortion message that most voters can accept.”
[A]bortion-rights groups may yet encounter an electorate that they cannot sway. But for now and for the foreseeable future, the energy and democratic will is on their side. Americans in general have been fairly clear for years that they did not support overturning Roe v. Wade. Roe’s demise strengthened that position instead of diminishing it.
What follows isn’t one of Katherine Stewart’s sexier paragraphs, but since this is a blog about universities, we’ll go with it. To get to the good stuff, you’ll need to read the whole thing.
So, who gets to join the [Claremont Institute’s] secret society of latter-day Greco-Roman authoritarians? A strange fact to remember is that Costin Alamariu, a.k.a. the Bronze Age Pervert, got his Ph.D. from Yale. Curtis Yarvin has degrees from Johns Hopkins, Brown, and the University of California, Berkeley. Anton is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley. Their hero Ron DeSantis has both Harvard and Yale on his C.V. Manly man Josh Hawley is Stanford and Harvard. Yes, Virginia, these very men are themselves the Bugmen. When they talk about sticking it to the administrative state or fantasize about having their dictator-buddy tell all the liberals to suck on it, they seem to be dreaming about revenge on the professors, administrators, and fellow students who were mean to them on their way up.
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Some excerpts from Stewart’s analysis of the Claremont Institute (they’ve changed the name to BEARmont – more masculine) a particularly dramatic and high-profile instance of anti-democracy in America:
In embodying a kind of nihilistic yearning to destroy modernity, [Claremont has] become an indispensable part of right-wing America’s evolution toward authoritarianism… [It has become] openly contemptuous of democracy.
[Its intellectual premise seems to be that] human society is incapable of the kind of rational, deliberative government that liberal democracy requires.
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Therefore, America requires an authoritarian ruler/regime. Cue Trump.