“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Today is Halloween.
It's also Reformation Day.
Everyone sort of knows what Halloween is, although in its extremely secularized form. It's become so popular in that style that its now the second most popular holiday in the US, and you don't even get the da off from work or school.
Originally, and in Catholic and Orthodox Churches, it was All Hallowed Evening, the day before All Saints Day, which in the Catholic Church is a Holy Day of Obligation. There are some debates about it, but the secular traditions that are observed stem from Celtic cultures of Great Britain in a much modified form. The door to door trick or treating stems from a religious tradition in which the poor went door to door for food and were given it.
Reformation Day is a day not much observed in North America commemorating Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the Cathedral door at Worms, which he actually didn't do. The legend was that he did it on this day. No matter, he did get the rebellion of the reformation going, and with it the concept that people can make up their own minds on anything, no matter how ill informed they are. Luther was fairly well informed on some things, but that was the unintentional result of his act of rebellion.
At the time of his 95 Theses, he hadn't intended a rebellion at all, but he worked his way sort of around to it. It'd be interesting to know what he thought he'd done by the time of his death, but one thing he knew is that he'd caused others with more radical ideas than his to also break away and create their own Christian sects.
Many of those new denominations have considerably changed over the years. Some of the Lutherans, who followed Luther, often with no choice due to their localities, have become almost more Catholic than the Catholics, while others have gone in another direction. The Reformation, at any rate, is winding down,and its really collapsing.
With its collapse has come the mess of contemporary culture, much of which we seeing being fought out in the United States right now, which is a Protestant country. The massive secularization is a minor example of that, but is evident in all of our religion derived holidays, including this one, but also including Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The last acts of rebellion were those against nature, which we also see playing out doay. They began in the late 1940s and came into full bloom in the 1960s, and are still enormously playing out today. Part of that has been the acceptance of rebelling against truth, which we see in the current election in more than one way, and in both political parties, although certainly Donald Trump has manifested it in a heretofore unseen level.
So its Reformation Day and Halloween in 2024. Lots of tricks on the culture are being played, and not too many treats being received.
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I don't really think J. D. Vance is weird.
I think Trump is pretty weird. I'm concerned that he has accelerating dementia. His press conference the other day was jammed packed with gibberish. A rational GOP, which doesn't exist, would at this point show him the door. Rather than a rational GOP, however, we have the Populist masses and a collection of forces with agendas, such as the National Conservatives, Christian Nationalist, etc. Some adore his meandering gibberish as they are unthinking or actually quit thinking about what's going on years ago. Some tolerate it as they know that when he's in office they can basically shove him aside and run the bus. Some, I strongly suspect, figure that if elected, which they were planning on, age and the 25th Amendment or a pine box will take him out the back door of the White House and put them in the leather upholstered executive chair.
I think J. D. Vance was in that last category. By supporting Donald Trump, I suspect, he and people in his obit, were figuring that that Trump would play the same role that the Ghost plays in Hamlet. . . departed and out of power.
If that's what Vance was figuring, that's not weird. It's probably correct in terms of the expiration of Trump's mortal coil or his cerebrum. The latter would be, of course, slightly more problematic than the former, but in a pinch, would likely work just as well, save for some disruptions from the Maga Militia crowd.Anyhow, Trump is getting weird, but neither Harris or Vance are weird. What they are is poles apart in existential views, and they both really have one.
Harris is a politician of the political left, which has gone increasingly leftward since the mid 20th Century. Indeed, it's final descent into the far left is what sparked, in part, the populist counter reaction. It's adopted lifestyle politics with lifestyle's that were regarded as "weird" until fairly recently, and frankly many still are.
At the same time, the full bore assault on culture that commenced in the 1960s was hugely successful, normalizing behaviors regarded as immoral at the time, but which now are not. That's why, in no small part, people are proclaiming J. D. Vance as "weird". As I noted here earlier, Vance isn't of the populist line of thought, he's an actual conservative, but a National Conservative of the Rusty Reno, Patrick Dineen, Kevin Roberts, type. Vance expresses cultural views that have in varying degrees been under attack since the 1960s, but which have remained all along in some sectors of the culture and are attempting to stage a comeback, or even more, gain entry and acceptance for the first time.
That race, if it were on the surface, would be a really interesting existential one.
Chance are high that the country isn't really comfortable with it. Certainly the unwashed populists who see nothing inconsistent about proclaiming themselves Christian while admiring the Hailey Welch or Sydney Sweeny wouldn't really be all that comfortable with the views of Roberts and Vance. But for that matter, a lot of suburban moms or the now lauded/condemned "cat ladies" are probably not all that comfortable with the views of Sanders and Harris.
That contrast would serve a purpose in and of itself.
The race, however, we actually have is a national embarrassment due to the figure leading the GOP.
The weather report for today from the Trib:
A headline from Cowboy State Daily:
Some headlines from today's Trib:
And a common political theme in Wyoming, albeit here from a doomed attempt at displacing the current incumbent Senator, with the incumbent right below him:
Wyomingites claim, and very often really do, have a deep love of the wildness of our state and nature. And yet, at the same time, the economy of the state, and its reliance upon extractive industries, causes a deep loyalty to the fossil fuel industries, beyond that, very ironically, which those industries have themselves.
Speak to any of the more knowledgeable and powerful people within the coal or petroleum industries, and you will not tend to get debate on anthropocentric caused global warming. They accept it, and frankly accept that they're going away in their current forms. They will debate how rapidly they can go away, with quite a bit of variance between that. Many in the industry are realpolitik practitioners in regard to energy, accepting the decline as inevitable, but cynical about how fast it can occur. Some, however, are nearly "green" in their view, and see a rapid phase out.
It's at the wellhead level, and the coal shovel level, that you have those who can't accept it. The same people will look forward to elk season, but can't imagine that what's happening is happening, and that it's bad for the elk. But then many of the same people imagine themselves being outdoorsman while planted on the back of an ATV.
Politicians, some genuine, and some not, emphasize the wallet end of this. "America needs", "America depends", etc. Well, it's passing away.
Passing away with it may be the town of Heartville Wyoming, but not due to economics, but due to catastrophic fire.
Human memories are flawed, and that's where we get into false debates and the The Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. The flipside, interestingly enough, is the Imposter Syndrome, in which highly competent people imagine that they are not.
Combine the Dunning-Kruger effect with poor memories, poor education and dislocation from your native place, and you get what we have here.
Add in economic self interest, and well you really get what we have here.
I'll hear all the time that the weather today is the same as it always was. BS. My memory on these things is good, and I can recall that 100F days were so rare when I was a kid that entire years went by in which we didn't experience them. Nor did we experience constant year after year fires like this. Indeed, as a National Guardsmen I was sent to two fires, back when resources were so thin on this topic, as they weren't really needed, that this was routine for the Guard.
Two fires in six years.
I've never heard of a Wyoming town being evacuated for a fire until now.
Yes, fires have always occurred, as the naysayers will note, but not so often and not like this.
And to add to it, whether Wyomingites want to believe it or not, coal in particular is on its way out. It simply is. 500,000 people can sit in a corner of the country saying "nuh uh", but that's not going to make it change. It's been on the way out for a century or more:
Petroleum is less vulnerable than coal, in part because of the often forgotten petrochemical industry. A friend of mine who was a geologist and and an engineer was of the view that the consumption of petroleum for ground transportation ought to be phased out simply for that reason, to save it for petrochemicals. But big changes are coming here too. Electric vehicles are coming in, like it or not. The switch to green, and all that means, some good and some bad, is coming.
Denying that and maintaining that the rest of the country must pretend its 1973 isn't going to change that.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar.
July 17, 2024
The Republican National Convention is into day three as of the time of this writing. It's a populist party now, and as others have been pointing out, it's shedding values, as all populist movements do, as rapidly as it once claimed them.
Populist movements are famously shallow, having no real political thesis behind them other than that the "will of the people" is right, because it must be. For this reason, they're also nearly universally co opted in the end by other movements. The American Populist movement of the late 19th Century was absorbed by the Progressive movement, which had a real thesis behind it. American Populist who hadn't been absorbed by first the Republicans of the Theodore Roosevelt era or by Democrats following the rise of Woodrow Wilson, ended up various far left wing movement of the 20s and 30s, including American Socialism and Communism, which again had a deeper thesis. The Communist road had already been laid for Populist in Russia, where populist movements against the Crown in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries ended up in revolution, with the revolution being co opted by the Bolsheviks, who again had a real thesis, and would absorb and destroy populism in their country. In the German Weimar Republic street level populsits, and they're always street level, would gravitate towards the KDP and the NADSP, with the Nazi's, which had a heavily populist element which again was amazingly think, winning out in the end. Post war debates on whether the Nazi Party was socialist or fascist miss the reality entirely, it was populist, making it the most successful populist party, in terms of gaining control of a major nation, of all times.
Because populism is shallow, in the end it only reflect the thin surface of a populace's culture, and often the worst elements of it, once it is allowed to establish itself. German populism yielded to insane racial theories and hatred and worshipped with fanatical loyalty the German Volk in the form of a single man, Adolf Hitler. Southern populism of the 20th Century had, as a claimed feature, a deep love of culture and Protestantism, but it also featured a profound prejudice against anyone who was not a white Protestant.
And so we've arrived at that point.
Donald Trump's rise was adopted by and backed by Christian Nationalist, who just held a convention within the last two weeks. Open about their desire to establish the United States as an exclusively Christian (Protestant) nation, they've seen Trump as a Cyrus the Great who is their divinely appointed ally. In the wake of last week's assassination attempt by a young registered Republican who, in numerous ways, demonstrated that he didn't know diddly about marksmanship, rank and file and more elite members of the movement have declared that Trump was saved by Devine Providence.
That may in fact be true, but it's worth remembering that Adolf Hitler was the target of 42 known assassination plots, more than one of which went right to the edge of success. It's also worth remembering that God does in fact work in mysterious ways, and God's acts don't necessarily corelate with human desires, and life may in fact be preserved for reasons we don't really grasp, but which do not necessarily equal our political goals.
At any rate, the Republican Convention in fact with numerous prayers offered by Christian clerics, including Catholic ones, who should be cautious about Christian Nationalism. But it's worth noting that it also opened by a prayer from a conservative Sikh female lawyer. I'm not saying that's not admirable, but the hardcore Protestant backers of a man who last year said that he would keep out of the country people who did not adhere to "our religion" are now scrambling to suggest that this isn't contrary to their view.
And beyond that, an opening speaker was one Amber Rose, about whom I know nothing other than that she has a pornographic past and present, and who does not seem to stand for anything that MAGA populist claim to is revealing. Essentially, she evokes the very type of "wokeism" that actually did give rise to the movement in significant ways, as people instinctively reacted to what they knew to be contrary to common sense and morality.
The point, therefore, at which a populist movement is absorbed into something else has been reached. The "conservative" element of populism has been boiled out. Now the Republican Party and the Populist movement stands for one thing only, Donald Trump. Almost anything that a person thinks Trump stands for is now suspect in additional. We already know, for example, a movement which was deeply opposed to abortion in a party that had been deeply opposed to abortion, has abandoned that plank, as Trump is wishy washy on the whole thing.
Not that there weren't signs of this already.
Nearly coincident with the conference on Christian Nationalism, the "Hawk tuah Girl" rose to temporary fame regarding her TikTok interview on engaging in fellatio. Deeply antithetical to Christian morality, she showed up shortly thereafter featured in Daisy Duke's al la Playboy helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now. This past week, as already noted, the RNC gave a prime speaking slot to a pro-abortion feminist and self-proclaimed slut whose claim to fame is having sex with rappers. It turns out, accordingly, that lots of rank and file MAGA adherents don't really have a concern for traditional morality, indeed, they're okay with immorality as long as its fairly conventional, or in the case of same sex marriage, with Don Jr. claims Don Sr. has always been in favor of, in spite of what he said post Obergefell, it's become conventional as our memories only stretch back to last week.
Hawk tuah.
Well, this isn't that surprising. Much of the "Christian" and "moral" nature of the current populist was paper thin. Donald Trump is a serial polygamist who took rides on the Lolita Express. Lots of ardent populists saluting Christian Nationalism have long ignored Matthew 19:9.
Sic transit gloria mundi et reductio ad absurdum.
Last edition:
Indeed, if I had power for some thirty years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing, dance, sail, and dig, and those that would not should be compelled by force.
Hillaire Belloc
Radical refusal to consent.
More specifically, radical refusal to consent to the spirit of the times. It's part of what I admire in them, but it didn't strike me until recently.
John Pondoro Taylor, in his memoirs, recalled having seen Maasai walking through Nairobi as if it simply wasn't there, as they had always done, dressed in their traditional fashion, and carrying spears. On their way from one place to another, refusing to consent that the development of the city meant anything in real terms.
I was recently waiting in the Church for the confession line to form. One of the Mantilla Girls walked in. I've seen this one once or twice before, but not at this Church. She not only wears the mantilla, and is very pretty, but she carries herself with pride.
They don't all do that. Some of the younger women who wear chapel veils do so very naturally. Some sort of timidly, or uncomfortably. With at least one, and I could be massively off the mark, it's almost sort of an affectation. But here, you see something quite different.
Or so it seems.
I don't know her. I could be wrong. But it's clear she isn't timid and it's not an affectation.
It is, it seems to me, a radical rejection of the modern secular world in favor of existential nature.
For those who believe in the modern world, in modernism, or the spirit of the times, or who are hostile to religion, that may seem like a shocking statement. But the essence of our modern lives (or post-modern, if you insist) is a radical rejection of nature, most particularly our own natures. Wearing a chapel veil indicates that the person deeply believes in a set of beliefs that are enormously grounded in nature. The wearer is a woman, in radical alignment with biology in every sense, and accepting everything that means, including what the modern world, left and right, detest. I nolunt. She's accepting of the derision, and ironically, or in actuality not ironically, probably vastly happier than those who have accommodated modernity.
Moreover, those who think they're reaching out for a radical inclusion of the natural, who don't take the same approach, never can quite reach authenticity. There can always be a slight feeling that something isn't authentic, and there isn't. Reserving an element of modernity defeats it.
Related Thread:
By this time, most observant conservative Catholics are either so fatigued from Papal issuances that they either disregard them, or cringe when they come out. They seem to come out with a high degree of regularity.
And, while we don't technically have a new one, a "study document" issued by the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity has put out something that has the Pope's approval to be issued, that being something that looks at the role of the Papacy itself:
Now, it's a very large document, so I'm not going to attempt to put it all out here, and I haven't read all of it either. So, we're going to turn to The Pillar to find out what it holds. The Pillar states:
What does it say?
Helpfully, the text has a section summarizing the four sections (beginning on p106).
1) Regarding responses to Ut unum sint, the document says that the question of papal primacy is being discussed in “a new and positive ecumenical spirit.”
“This new climate is indicative of the good relations established between Christian communions, and especially between their leaders,” it says.
2) Concerning disputed theological questions, the text welcomes what it calls “a renewed reading” of the classic “Petrine texts,” which set out the Apostle Peter’s role in the Church.
“On the basis of contemporary exegesis and patristic research, new insights and mutual enrichment have been achieved, challenging some traditional confessional interpretations,” it notes.
One particularly controversial issue, it says, is the Catholic conviction that the primacy of the Bishop of Rome was established de iure divino (by divine law), “while most other Christians understand it as being instituted merely de iure humano” (by human law).
But the document says that new interpretations are helping to overcome “this traditional dichotomy, by considering primacy as both de iure divino and de iure humano, that is, being part of God’s will for the Church and mediated through human history.”
Another enduring obstacle is the First Vatican Council. But the document says that here too there has been “promising progress,” thanks to ecumenical dialogues that seek “a ‘rereading’ or ‘re-reception’” of the Council’s decrees.
This approach, it says, “emphasizes the importance of interpreting the dogmatic statements of Vatican I not in isolation, but in the light of their historical context, of their intention and of their reception — especially through the teaching of Vatican II.”
Addressing this point in a June 13 Vatican News interview, Cardinal Koch said that since Vatican I’s “dogmatic definitions were profoundly conditioned by historical circumstances,” ecumenical partners were encouraging the Catholic Church to “seek new expressions and vocabulary faithful to the original intention, integrating them into an ecclesiology of communion and adapting them to the current cultural and ecumenical context.”
“There is therefore talk of a ‘re-reception,’ or even ‘reformulation,’ of the teachings of Vatican I,” the Swiss cardinal explained.
3) Summarizing the document’s third section, the text says that fresh approaches to disputed questions have “opened new perspectives for a ministry of unity in a reconciled Church.”
Crucially, the document suggests there is a common understanding that although the first millennium of Christian history is “decisive,” it “should not be idealized nor simply re-created since the developments of the second millennium cannot be ignored and also because a primacy at the universal level should respond to contemporary challenges.”
From the ecumenical dialogues, it’s possible to deduce “principles for the exercise of primacy in the 21st century,” the text says.
One is that there must be an interplay between primacy and synodality at every level of the Church. In other words, there is a need for “a synodal exercise of primacy.”
Synodality is notoriously difficult to define, but the document describes it at one point as “the renewed practice of the Synod of Bishops, including a broader consultation of the whole People of God.”
4) Among the practical suggestions for a renewed exercise of the ministry of unity, the document highlights the possibility of “a Catholic ‘re-reception’, ‘re-interpretation’, ‘official interpretation’, ‘updated commentary’ or even ‘rewording’ of the teachings of Vatican I.”
It also stresses appeals for “a clearer distinction between the different responsibilities of the Bishop of Rome, especially between his patriarchal ministry in the Church of the West and his primatial ministry of unity in the communion of Churches, both West and East.”
“There is also a need to distinguish the patriarchal and primatial roles of the Bishop of Rome from his political function as head of state,” the text says, adding: “A greater accent on the exercise of the ministry of the pope in his own particular Church, the Diocese of Rome, would highlight the episcopal ministry he shares with his brother bishops, and renew the image of the papacy.”
The new document appears months after Pope Francis restored the title “Patriarch of the West” among the list of papal titles in the Vatican’s annual yearbook, after it was dropped by his predecessor Benedict XVI.
Commenting on that development at the June 13 Vatican press conference, Cardinal Koch said that neither Francis nor Benedict XVI offered detailed explanations for the change.
“But I am convinced they did not want to do something against anyone, but both wanted to do something ecumenically respectful,” he commented.
Another suggestion is for the Catholic Church to further develop its practice of synodality, particularly through “further reflection on the authority of national and regional Catholic bishops’ conferences, their relationship with the Synod of Bishops and with the Roman Curia.”
Finally, the text mentions a request for regular meetings among Church leaders at a worldwide level, in a spirit of “conciliar fellowship.”
What does that mean?
Well, frankly, I don't grasp it.
Without having read it, I sort of vaguely grasp that the Pope, who recently revived using the title Patriarch of the West, is sort of modeling this view of the Papacy on the Churches of the East, sort of. In the East, each Church is autocephalous, with the Patriarch of Constantinople holding a "first among equals" position. I don't think the Pope intends to fully go in that direction, but vaguely suggest that the synodal model of the East should apply more in the West, and that as Patriarch of the West, perhaps the entire Apostolic Church could be reunited, and perhaps even sort of vaguely include the "mainline" Protestant Churches, by which we'd mean the Lutheran and Anglican Churches.
It sort of interestingly brings up the Zoghby Initiative of the 1970s, in which Melkite Greek Catholic Church bishop Elias Zoghby sought to allow for inter-communion between the Melkites and the Antiochian Orthodox Church after a short period of dialogue. His position was, basically, that this reunion could occur with a two point profession of faith, those being a statement of belief in the teaching gof the Eastern Orthodox churches and being in communion with the Bishop of Rome as the first among the bishops "according to the limits recognized by the Holy Fathers of the East during the first millennium, before the separation."
Thing was, there really were no limits. In the first thousand years before the separation it's pretty clear that the Pope was head of the Church. Indeed, from the earliest days that was recognized.
Bishop Zoghby's initiative went nowhere and he's since passed on, but this sort of interestingly recalls it. His effort received criticism from figures within Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic Church, although a few Eastern Catholics admired it. Here, I'd predict that conservative Catholics are not going to be too impressed.
Additionally, a recent problem barely noticed in the West is that the recent focus of Pope Francis on blessings for people in irregular unions, which is widely interpreted to mean homosexuals, has not only upset conservative Catholics, but Eastern Churches in some cases have backed away from the Catholic Church. One Eastern Bishop who was getting quite close to Rome came out and stated that Fiducia Supplicans basically prevented any chance of reunion with his church.
This gets back to some things we've noted here before. One is that this Papacy seems very focused on Europe, although the fact that this also looks towards the East cuts against that statement a bit. Having said that, a good deal of the early focus of this Papacy was on European conditions, which have continued to be a problem as the German Church is outright ignoring Pope Francis to a large degree. Loosening the role of the Papacy may stand to make those conditions worse, and probably won't bring the mainstream of the Lutherans and Anglicans in. Which gets to the next point. The Reformation is dying.
Seemingly hardly noticed is that the real story in Christianity, to a large degree, is the rapid decline in the old Reformation Protestant churches. People like to note "well Catholic numbers are declining too", but frankly real statistical data shows that while there may be a decline, it's slight. Indeed, what appears to be occurring in the Western World is that conversions to Catholicism offset departures. That's not growth, but what that sort of shows is the decline in cultural affiliation with a certain religion and, at least in the US, the end of the byproduct of the Kennedy Era Americanization of the Church. Indeed, at the same time this is going on, the growth in Catholic conservatism and traditionalism in younger generations has grown too big to ignore.1 At the same time, Eastern Catholic Churches are gaining members from outside their ethnic communities, and the Easter Orthodox are gaining adherents from conservative Protestants who are leaving their liberalizing denominations.
This is a study document, so it's not a proclamation. Twenty years ago or maybe even ten, I would have thought this a really good idea. My instinct now is that its time has passed. While conservative Catholics hold their breaths about the upcoming next session of the Synod on Synodality, there's sort of a general sense of marking time here as well, and indeed, an uncomfortable one. The current Papacy has is very near its end, everyone knows this, but it puts out a lot of material that's of a highly substantive, and often controversial, nature. Much of this is going to have to be dealt with after this Papcy concludes. Both the volume and speed at which things are occurring may reflect this, as that knowledge operates against the clock, but it might also be a reason to slow down at the Vatican level, or even put a bit of a time-out on things.
Footnotes:
1. Indeed, I was at Confession recently on an average Saturday and noted that as I was there a young woman with her two children were waiting in front of me, with both children saying Rosaries and the mother wearing a chapel veil. Her mother came in and also was wearing one, and a stunning young woman of maybe 20 came in also wearing one. Every woman, and most of them were young, were attired in that fashion.
It's a minor example, but very notable. This is becoming common.
Today we know that World War II began not in 1939 or 1941 but in the 1920's and 1930's when those who should have known better persuaded themselves that they were not their brother's keeper.
Hubert H. Humphrey
Today is Memorial Day.
I've done a Memorial Day reflection post a couple of times, and I did a short history of Memorial Day once on our companion blog here:
It's worth remembering here that Memorial Day has its origin in a great act of national hatred, the Civil War. That is, the day commenced here and there as an effort to remember the Civil War dead, which, at the end of the day, divide sharply into two groups; 1) those who gave their lives to keep their fellow human beings in cruel enslaved bondage, and those who fought to end it.
Now, no doubt, it can be pointed out that those who died for slavery by serving the South, and that is what they died for if they were killed fighting for the South, didn't always see their service that way. It doesn't matter. That was the cause they were serving. And just as pointedly, many in the North who went as they had no choice were serving to "make men free", as the Battle Hymn of the Republic holds it, irrespective of how they thought of their own service.
And it's really that latter sort of sacrifice this day commemorates.
The first principal of democracy is democracy itself.
And because of that, it is inevitably the case that people will win elections whom you do not wish to. Perhaps you may even detest what they stand for.
Democracy is a messy business and people, no matter what they claim to espouse, will often operate against democratic results if they don't like them. In the 1950s through at least the 1990s, the American left abandoned democracy to a significant degree in favor of rule by the courts, taking up the concept that average people couldn't really be trusted to adopt a benighted view of the liberalism that they hoped for which would be free of anything, ultimately, liberally. An enforced libertine liberalism.
The results of that have come home to roost in our own era as a counter reaction, building since the 1980s, has now found expression in large parts of the GOP which have gone to populism and Illiberal Democracy.
We have a draft thread on Illiberal Democracy, which is a term that most people aren't familiar with, but it's best expressed currently by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, to the horror of Buckeyite conservatives like George F. Will.
Defining illiberal democracy isn't easy, in part because it's most commonly defined by its opponents. Setting aside their definitions, which it probably would be best defined as is a system in which a set of beliefs and values are societally defined and adopted which are external to the government and constitution of a county, and a democracy can only exist within it. The best historical example, if a good one can actually be found, might be Vichy France, which contrary to some assumptions was not a puppet of Nazi Germany so much as a species of near ally, but which had a right wing government, with elections, that operated only within the confines of the beliefs of the far right government.
Much of what we see going on now in the far right of the country, which is now the province of the GOP, is described in this fashion, although not without its ironies. Viewed in that fashion, the January 6, insurrection actually makes sense, as the election was "stolen" because it produced the wrong results, culturally. I.e., if you assume that the basic concepts of the Democratic Party fall outside of the cultural features which the far right populist wing of the GOP holds as legitimate, such an election would be illegitimate by definition.
The United States, however, has never viewed democracy that way. Not even the Confederate South, which may be the American example that treads on being the closest to that concept, did. The Southerners felt comfortable with human bondage, but they did not feel comfortable instituting an unwritten set of values into an unwritten constitution. Slavery, the core value of the South, was presumed justified, but it was written into the law.
Much of the nation now does.
Indeed, in the Trump wing of the GOP, or the wing which came over to trump, and brought populist Democrats into the party, that is a strong central tenant. When the far right in the current GOP speaks about being a "Constitutional Conservative", they don't mean being Constitutional Originalists. Rather, they are speaking about interpreting the Constitution according to a second, unwritten, and vaguely defined "constitution".
The ironies this piles on are thick, as the unwritten social constitution this piles on looks back to an American of decades ago, much of which has indeed unfortunately changed, but much of which the current backers of this movement are not close to comporting with themselves. The imagined perfect America that is looked back towards, the one that we wish to "Make Great Again", was culturally an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, or at least a European Christian one, with very strong traditional values in that area. Those who now look at that past as an ideal age in part because social movements involving such things as homosexuality and the like need to appreciate that the original of the same set of beliefs and concerns would make heterosexual couples living outside of marriage and no fault divorce just as looked down upon. Put another way, the personal traits of Donald F. Trump, in this world, would be just as abhorrent as those of Barney Frank.
This is not to discuss the pluses or minuses of social conservatism or of social liberalism in any form. That's a different topic. But American democracy, no matter how imperfect, has always rested on the absolute that its first principal of democracy is democracy. Taken one step further, a central concept of democracy is that bad ideas die in the sunlight.
That has always proven true in the past, and there's any number of movements that rose and fell in the United States not because they were suppressed, but because they simply proved themselves to be poor ideas. In contrast, nations which tried to enforce a certain cultural norm upon their people by force, such as Vichy France or Francoist Spain, ended up doing damage to it, even where some of the core values they sought to enforce were not bad (which is not to excuse the many which were).
All of that may seem a long ways from Memorial Day, but it's not. No matter how a person defines it, as the end of the day the lost lives being commemorated today were lost for that concept of democracy and no other. Those who would honor them, from the left or the right, can only honor them in that context.
That means that those who would support insurrections as their side didn't win, aren't honoring the spirit of the day. And those who would impose rule by courts, as people can't be trusted to vote the right way, aren't either.
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