How to See the Present

Are you saying to yourself, "Oh hell, I agree with Franklin"? You're not alone.

Diogenes Sitting in His Tub by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1860 (source)

I wrote this back in May:

[Alan] Harrison does not bother to explain how non-white activists have come to hate Jews. It is via the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion framework that he subsequently endorses. While DEI initiatives often pay lip-service to antisemitism, the underlying progressivism holds three dubious propositions as true. One is that whites are the perpetrators, not the victims, of racism. Two is that the Jews are white. Three is that Israel is a uniquely illegitimate country. Of course they hate Jews. So do their white fellow travelers.

Prescient, no? Now we see that same crowd ripping down posters of Israelis in Hamas’s demonic clutches. Linda Sarsour, co-chair of the 2017 Women’s March, was heard to say this earlier in the month:

I will remind all of you good people that are here that there are provocateurs all across the city. And what they’re waiting for you to do is to waste your energy ripping down their little posters so they can record you and try to get you fired. So when you go home, they have their little people all over the place, trust me I know them, I got a radar for them… you think they’re ordinary people, trust me when I tell you they are everywhere. They’re on your college campus, they’re outside the supermarket, they’re outside Grand Central Station.

We little people and our little posters, conspiring to get you fired! We’ve lined your cities with images of Hamas’s hostages, many of them women and children, like rat traps filled with an especially delicious cheese. This isn’t to call for basic human decency, it’s to pique your entirely justifiable Jew-hatred and lure you to your doom. That we could be so cruel to you!

If you’re a sensible progressive, you read this and question whether the excitement with which you knit your pussyhat back in 2017 was at least somewhat misplaced. At minimum, you’re wondering what on earth happened to progressive movements between then and now. Even if you hung on through the wild rides of trans-inclusive feminism and the 1619 Riots, you can no longer countenance the abject Judenhass revealed all over the body of contemporary progressive politics like a belatedly discovered cancer. In isolation, it’s hard to tell whether Sarsour’s remarks are from New York City in 2023 or Berlin in 1933.

It’s not that your political priorities have changed much, it’s that the umbrella terms for them now include the censorship-industrial complex and Foucauldian nightmares. “Anti-racism” turned out to be just as racist as racism. Environmentalism now entails joining along with Greta Thunberg as she shouts “Crush Zionism!” at the Israeli embassy in Stockholm. As long as anyone can remember, artists were progressives because progressives defended individualism and freedom of expression. Oscar Wilde wrote in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism in 1891:

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Now progressives in the arts defame individualism and have been witnessed tearing down posters of kidnapped Jews.

Perhaps worst of all is the assault on sense-making. Ryna Workman, who was just ousted of the presidency of the New York University Student Bar Association, described the events of October 7 shortly after they happened (and before Israel organized its military response) as Palestinian “resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination.” Her allies within NYU Law described Winston & Strawn’s subsequent decision to rescind her employment offer as violence.

This is not why you signed on to progressive causes. You want out. Except of course, conservatism as you know it is revolting and libertarianism is insane. What to do? I’m here to help.

Why you think conservatism is revolting

Dumb conservatives really do have the IQ of a bag of gravel. Dumb conservatives typically are dumber than dumb progressives. That’s a real phenomenon and you likely know about it already. What you may not appreciate is that smart conservatives typically are smarter than smart progressives. This was illustrated forcefully in 2012 when Ron Paul debated Paul Krugman. Prominent economists regarded the debate as a draw. But a Nobel Prize winner in economics should have been able to argue circles around an obstetrician on the topic of economics, and he couldn’t. The difference between the women is especially striking. Search for a woman who speaks as brilliantly for progressive politics as Helen Dale, Heather Mac Donald, or

Mary Harrington

speaks for conservative politics, and you have to pick through a tiresome list of strident midwits before you find any.

The reasons for that are beyond the scope of this essay,¹ but it’s the kernel of truth around which a duplicitous narrative has been spun: that conservatives are either stupid or evil. The stupid conservatives genuinely are hebetudinous. The “evil” ones are in fact smart and don’t share your values. It’s possible that you could make a study of conservative principles and conclude that they’re wanting in many respects. But wrong is not the same as evil. You think that conservatism is revolting because a herculean, decades-long effort has gone into assuring that your thoughts about it are channeled into one of two damning conclusions, and you will likely never bother to read what smart conservatives have written about those principles.

The narrative holds that Bush was evil, Quayle was stupid. Shrub was stupid, Cheney was evil. Trump was stupid, Pence was evil. Trump was frequently called evil as well, as was Reagan, the supposedly stupid partner in the Reagan-Bush lineup. But Trump mainly has been subjected to headlines like Donald Trump, Whose Brain Is Held Together by Thumbtacks and Silly Putty, Demands “Mental Competency Test” for Presidential Candidates, which appeared in Vanity Fair in February, authored by strident midwit Bess Levin.² Another writer at Vanity Fair recently characterized likely Trump VP pick Vivek Ramaswamy as “admiring his own genius, even as he says the most idiotic shit imaginable.”³

That attitude of combined intellectual and moral superiority leads to what one commentator called the smug style in American progressive politics. One of the problems with the smug style is that it fosters excessive certainty, and the certainty makes you easier to manipulate.

While I hardly dispute the existence of stupid and evil conservatives, it’s probably becoming clear to you that progressives have tried to put more things into the categories of stupid or evil over the last several years than is legitimate. What might be considered bigoted—that is, evil—at this point in history is a list so extensive that it includes math, sleeping, air, roads, lesbianism, ballet, museums, wine, Israel, and much else besides. The list of the stupid includes Ramaswamy, who is a pharmaceutical entrepreneur with a BA from Harvard and a JD from Yale.

You’re reading this, not because you’re a bad progressive (you’re likely one of the good ones), but because you’ve reached the limits of your manipulability. Truly wicked people have been trying to bully you with increasing force toward increasingly outrageous beliefs. You’re now looking for knowledge that they would forbid. You are to be commended.

Why you think that libertarianism is insane

Anarcho-capitalists advocate for the elimination of government intervention in all aspects of society. We believe that a system based on voluntary cooperation and free markets leads to optimal economic outcomes, maximal individual liberty, and greatest happiness. The only sense in which ancaps are reliably conservative is the fiscal one. Socially we’re all over the place, from buttoned-down to libertine, with many of us unexpected combinations of both. We regard Republican and Democrat politics as two implementations of the same broken procedures.

Last week an anarcho-capitalist was elected president of Argentina. Here are some of the germane headlines:

• CNN: “Far-right outsider Javier Milei wins Argentina’s presidency.”

• The Guardian: “Argentina presidential election: far-right libertarian Javier Milei wins after rival concedes.”

• New York Times: “Argentina Elects Javier Milei in Victory for Far Right.”

• AP: “Fiery right-wing populist Javier Milei wins Argentina’s presidency and promises ‘drastic’ changes.”

• Washington Post: “Argentina set for sharp right turn as Trump-like radical wins presidency.”

Argentina has a nationalized airline, Aerolíneas Argentinas. Milei plans to transfer ownership of the airline to its employees. They’re going to own the means of production, without the inconvenience of having to seize them in a revolution of the proletariat. FT’s headline on the matter: “Argentina’s Javier Milei faces airline privatisation backlash; Unions oppose Thatcher-loving libertarian’s plans to remove companies from state ownership.”

You’re likely starting to see a pattern. The reason that leftism is a thing and rightism is not is because the “right” is an artifact of the left’s inadequate conception of reality. Again, you are being bullied toward a conclusion. Like the case of conservatism, an enormous effort has gone into making you think that libertarianism is conservatism’s nutty little brother.

We are extremists, it’s true, but the focus of our extremism is leaving you alone. After a few years of contemporary progressivism, getting left alone is starting to sound kind of pleasant, right?

You don’t know nothing

This line of Yogi Berra’s is one of Darby’s aphorisms. It is profound. It is baseball’s exhortation to seek beginner’s mind.

Orwell: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Maimonides: “Teach thy tongue to say ‘I do not know’ and thou shalt progress.”

Of course, humility can turn into its own conceit. One of my favorite Jewish jokes goes like this:

One Yom Kippur, the rabbi stopped in the middle of the service, prostrated himself beside the bima, and cried out, “O Lord, before You, I am nothing!”

The cantor was so moved by this demonstration that he threw himself to the floor beside the rabbi and cried out, “O Lord, before You, I am nothing!”

The janitor was so moved by the cantor and the rabbi that he prostrated himself in the aisle and cried out, “O Lord, before You, I am nothing!”

Seeing this, the cantor nudged the rabbi and whispered, “Look who thinks he’s nothing.”

There is a middle way between self-inflicted naivete and blinkered certitude, but it’s narrow. It is analogous to drawing. We encourage people to draw from observation because it introduces them to the pleasures and challenges of art in an accessible way. Observational drawing has a perceptual component to it, which is its sacred aspect. If you have determined that the outside contour of an apple crosses a bottle just so as it passes behind it, let no man on earth tell you otherwise. If, indeed, you’re correct about that, and haven’t fallen prey to your own confusion. Your experience is precious.

On the other hand, your drawing is not some kind of final, definitive statement about the world. The draftsmen sitting to your right and left see that contour of the apple a bit differently. They’re entitled to discover their own orientations regarding the subject. Yet again, if the artist to your right has captured the relationships soundly and you have not, his drawing is in an important sense more truthful than yours. The preciousness of your experience is not at all exculpatory in that case.

Observational drawing also has a systematic aspect. Line, hatching, tonal shading, mediums, supports, perspective—there are a repertoire of technique and a supply available materials that exist prior to your commencement of drawing. You have to deal with them sensitively before you produce anything of worthwhile originality. Systems can be both poorly executed and unwisely chosen.

Artistic truth, when it comes to observational art, is four conquering battles at once: against the obdurate world that is right in front of us but nevertheless refrains from revealing its whole being, against mediums of expression that refuse to turn into an honorable, comprehensible record without astute and practiced effort, against the inherited vocabulary that rewards partial competence with cliches and which you must craft to yield meaning, and against the unreliable self. And so it is with all kinds of truth.

This is a high bar, but once you get used to clearing it, you can glance at the Sarsours and Levins of the world, immediately see the idiocy, and start asking questions about what’s really going on. John Alexander Smith, who lectured on philosophy at Oxford around the turn of the 20th century, addressed his charges once:

Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.

Besides which, if you throw your hands up at this work, you will soon be awash in lies, the most heinous of which will be the ones you tell yourself. You may be smarter than a dumb conservative, but you can make yourself his equal by absorbing enough humbug.

I’m fond of a quote from Thích Nhất Hạnh:

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth.

I say, inspired by those lines, that the real miracle is not to see the future, but to see the present. My comments from May may seem prescient in retrospect, but at the time I was just trying to describe what was going on. Recent communications with several readers indicate that there’s a growing desire for true, clear description of what’s happening in the arts and beyond. While I’m glad that I can provide it in some limited measure, the real need is for a community of the clearer-sighted. I say clearer and not clear because nothing shuts down correct perception quite like excess certainty. But it remains that some things are true, and some things aren’t.

So be progressive, conservative, libertarian, independent, or whatever you like, but only outwardly. Inwardly, join the community of the clearer-sighted and act accordingly.

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1. In summary, conservatism is the male tendency in politics, and there’s a correlating effect of greater variability.

2. Meanwhile, Biden is so senescent and gross that he just hit on a six-year-old girl.

3. This is the magazine that used to publish a column by Christopher Hitchens, for pity’s sake. Michael Lind: “The centralized and authoritarian control of American progressivism by major foundations and the nonprofits that they fund, and the large media institutions, universities, corporations, and banks that disseminate the progressive party line, has made it impossible for there to be public intellectuals on the American center-left.”