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Notes -
GK Chesterton and MAGA
Chesterton personifies the paradoxes he loves to pursue in his writing. A member of the Fabian (socialist) party, he is remembered primarily as a bulwark of conservatism. Deeply immersed in early 20th century high British society and culture, he was Catholic rather than Church of England. Writing prose and poetry on the transcendence of family, he never had children.
A populist, he writes a warning to MAGA.
To be sure, Chesterton does not shy away from condemning progressive society. In one memorable anecdote he tells a relativist that in a functioning democracy, the relativist would be burned on a pyre. In his pithy essay "The Return of the Barbarian" (1934), Chesterton states "I do not mean that any of that sort of liberty or laxity or liberal-mindedness has ever had anything to do with civilization." Yet Chesterton writes the essay not as a warning against Liberalism, but to identify the rising Nationalist Socialism of Germany as the true enemy of civilization. Even though the civilization may be decadent, flabby, and decayed, civilization must still fight for civilization. For barbarism is an uncontrollable beast. It contains no introspection, no self-corrective. Chesterton ends the essay in his typical incisive style:
"There are many marks by which anybody of historical imagination can recognize the recurrence: the monstrous and monotonous omnipresence of one symbol, and that a symbol of which nobody knows the meaning; the relish of the tyrant for exaggerating even his own tyranny, and barking so loud that nobody can even suspect that his bark is worse than his bite; the impatient indifference to all the former friends of Germany, among those who are yet making Germany the only test—all these things have a savor of savage and hasty simplification, which may, in many individuals, correspond to an honest indignation or even idealism, but which, when taken altogether, give an uncomfortable impression of wild men who have merely grown weary of the complexity that we call civilization." [Emphasis added].
As a confirmed MAGAt myself, I feel a distinct discomfort reading this warning. There is a cold nihilism and gleeful cruelty in the MAGA intelligentsia. The rank-and-file MAGA populists cower from modern complexity, preferring the comfort of totalizing and simple narratives. If MAGA feels less barbaric than the Brown Shirts it may only be because our civilization doesn’t have the will or vitality to produce real barbarians.
Yet what is else is the solution when faced with Weimar problems? Chesterton lived in the relatively prudish Britain, and did not need to directly confront the debauchery of Weimar Germany. Easy for him to work within his civilization to promote his conceptualization of the common good. What would he have suggested when faced with the ubiquitous celebration of buggery or an importation of an alternative "civilization"?
But, of course, Chesterton (or rather, custom and common sense as channeled by Chesterton) does have the solution. In his essay "On the Instability of the State" he counters the prevailing notions of the Total State by satirizing the ephemerality of modern nations. In contrast, true societal stability is only found in the Family, the bedrock on which all civilization stands. And while the modern assault on the Family threatens to break civilization as assuredly as any barbarian uprising, it is still an institution that takes only two willing companions and the providence of God to initiate. And it is on this rock that the next great civilization will be built. "In the break-up of the modern world, the Family will stand out stark and strong as it did before the beginning of history."
Honestly, this resonated with me in the sense that a lot of left-leaning people I've talked with are OK with:
Meanwhile, someone on the left could make their own list of what right-leaning people are doing:
I think our nation is broken and I'm sad about it. I do not know how to restore a sense of common brotherhood between the blue haired Karen and the MAGA HVAC repair guy. If we're lucky we'll get attacked from the outside and band together against a common threat. If we're unlucky I think we'll just struggle against each other until one group loses all hope of pretense to power.
I think that the Trump administration displays unique characteristics which were not displayed by recent other presidents.
There is his utter inability to even understand that some people use language to communicate information about the state about that hypothetical generalization of human perception we call reality, sadly imitated by his underlings. If he is making noises which might sound to the initiated like factual claims about how many dog sleds defend Greenland, anyone who has followed him for more than two tweets will notice that he is utterly incapable of making anything which is a factual claim. Presumably, if he were to call 911 to report that the White House was on fire, the operator would simply wonder what political message he would want to transport with that.
Likewise, he seems dangerously removed from a common understanding of the upper classes how things are done, the informal rules on how society is conducted. When Biden pardoned his son, that was noteworthy, scandalous. With the Trump administration, pardons of political allies, people who bribe him by buying his shitcoin etc is not a scandal but a Tuesday.
This also makes him certainly more unpredictable. A sane-ish, elite ruler might certainly make decisions which are terrible for the country, but will likely fail in predictable ways, like some king starting a stupid war he can't win. A ruler not bound by elite expectations is much more likely to find novel and exciting failure modes, like le terreur or WW2. Sometimes out-of-the-box thinking is useful, but often the box was placed there intentionally. GWB and his cronies, for all their many faults, would not have tried to dismantle free trade or dismantle the alliance the US had build under the banner of the polite fiction of the international rule-based order.
While I am sure that a lot of the grassroot left is lying, I think their leadership is a bit better. OTOH, from the WH you will get plenty of takes on laws which are just plain wrong.
ICE can arrest an US citizen for disrupting their work illegally, sure. But detaining someone on the suspicion of them being an illegal immigrant seems to be a-ok only if the arestee is not a citizen. The government rounding up people and IDing them, effectively forcing their focus groups to carry proof of citizenship on pain of being hassled for a few hours feels very Unamerican.
That's complete opposite of what happened. When Biden made his pardons, the pro-establishment people barely discussed it. Nowadays they bring up Trump's pardons as some unthinkable line to cross, and they do so without any reference to what Biden did.
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