#west coast straussianism

[tanadrin]

Which podcasts are you listening to / do you recommend? You've started to refer to some new ones (Ultra, Why is This Happening?), and you've been a good source of podcasts in the past (I started to listen to Data Over Dogma because you talked about it so much, for instance).

Ultra is a limited series from a while back that I'm just now getting around to, because I needed more history-themed audio content. It's pretty good, if you like 20th century American political history.

I've been listening to Why is this Happening for ages, but it is sometimes unfortunately kinda dull. Definitely has its moments, though. It's basically just interviews, mostly about semi-current events.

I'm not sure I have any other new recommendations. Current standbys include If Books Could Kill (part of the Michael Hobbes Extended Podcasting Universe), You're Wrong About, Maintenance Phase, and Know Your Enemy. That last one is a nice mix of contemporary politics and political history, but sometimes it absolutely disappears up its own ass on the sort of things that really only someone deeply invested in the inside baseball of conservative philosophy is going to care about, like on extended discussions of West Coast vs East Coast Straussians. But the discussions are high-quality at least, even if the subject matter isn't always of the greatest interest to me.

I've also been watching a lot of the back catalogue of Well There's Your Problem on Youtube (it's a podcast with slides, though I think there's an audio-only version of it too). The engineering disasters they talk about are really interesting, but it's a podcast much closer to the "three friends just shoot the shit for an hour and a half" spectrum. Sometimes they get lost on really long tangents that just have nothing to do with anything, and their news segment at the beginning of each episode is, I fear, slowly cannibalizing the whole thing. But it's pretty good background listening while you're getting other stuff done.

[raglanphd]

[jmrphy]

Both wings of the “new right” are heavily influenced by followers of the philosopher Leo Strauss: Krein is a former student of the East Coast Straussian Harvey Mansfield, while the Claremont intellectuals, including Anton, are almost all partisans of the West Coast Straussian Harry Jaffa.

The Battle on the New Right for the Soul of Trump's America – Tablet Magazine

[kontextmaschine]

The “Flight 93 Election” author was the same guy who put that false yellowcake claim in the 2003 SotU in pursuit of a casus belli in Iraq, then he was an investment banker and wrote a men’s style guide/Machiavelli parody under a different pseudonym, as of today he’s senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council

[arcticdementor]

To begin with, you can’t understand the political transformation of California without understanding how much it has been shaped by a long-term middle class exodus — the out-migration, across years and decades, of the kind of people who in the Trump era tend to vote Republican, the native-born petit-bourgeoisie. This out-migration has been compensated for by in-migration, but the new arrivals are more likely to be either immigrants or well-educated professionals: Since the 1990s new Californians are disproportionately likely to make around $200,000 a year, ex-Californians are disproportionately likely to make around $45,000.

This trend, and the extremity of inequality it has encouraged, is palpable to any tourist, but particularly if you have a personal connection to California’s modern history. In my case I can drive through the neighborhoods of Santa Monica where my father grew up, and see the one-story mission-style house where my grandfather raised three kids as a struggling salesman and small-business man. Or rather, I could until recently, but not on this visit — because it was finally torn down to make way for the more lavish residences that now squat in what was a middle-class paradise two generations back.

…

So the same trends that have made California so uniformly liberal have also encouraged Trumpism elsewhere — and not only elsewhere, since as Jason Willick and James Hitchcock pointed out in 2016 in The American Interest, Trumpism-the-ideology is very much a made-in-California affair. Not many members of the right-wing intelligentsia backed Trump, but the writers and thinkers who did — from mainstream conservatives to the alt-right fringe — were heavily Californian: the Claremont Institute’s West Coast Straussians, Michael “Flight 93 Election” Anton, Mickey Kaus, Victor Davis Hanson, Ron Unz, Steve Sailer, Scott Adams, Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin … and of course the one and only Peter Thiel.

This clutch of internal dissidents doesn’t pose a threat to liberal hegemony in California. But the state’s larger exile population does present a problem for the “make America California” project, because while you can displace Republican-leaning voters from one state, you can’t do the same for the country as a whole. There will be no white-middle-class out-migration to, say, Hungary to ease the path to a Democratic supermajority.

(Never say never, Mr. Douthat. Give the Democrats a few more years…)

Under one-party liberal rule, California is presently as unequal as a Central American republic, with one of the highest poverty rates in the country once you control for its exorbitant cost of living. Its educational performance is lousy and its racial gaps are stark — which is why it’s not only lower-middle class whites moving back to red America, and why black complaints about white liberal gentrifiers in SoCal or the Bay Area can resemble the complaints of Trump-leaning ex-Californians. As in other enclaves where Democrats are dominant, its ruling party has proved itself pretty good at rentier-friendly environmentalism and kicking social conservatives while they’re down, O.K. enough at redistribution, and completely terrible at figuring how to build an information-age middle class.

[savegraduation]

John Hensle, 1993-2016

It was three years ago today that my friend and fellow NYRAnian John Hensle passed away.

I first met John in 2010 when he was 16. I had finished the first draft of my libretto for The Bittersweet Generation (then called Angst). For those who haven't read my previous posts wherein I reference it, The Bittersweet Generation is a rock musical I'm writing that tells the story of a year in the life of six teens (Melanie Hayworth, Bryce Schlitter, Paul Moreno, Trina Evangelisti, Alan Isaacs, and Sarah Chiang) in the fictional Sun Belt suburb of Armando, starting in the summer of 2007 just before school begins, and ending with the alternative prom in 2008. They experience their struggles with youth rights issues. Their high school, Dulcevida High, has an assistant-principal named Mr. Pittman who lectures students about how they "must obey the rules", despite being very underhanded himself, a social conformist math teacher named Mrs. Dahlgren, and a believe-the-worst-stereotypes-about-Millennials AP Bio teacher named Mr. Orozco, among other faculty. One student is even framed for doing graffiti in the boys' restroom by Mr. Pittman as revenge for being intransigent when his teacher and assistant-principal expect him to take his hat off. It is highly recommended reading. (Oh, and the songs are great too.)

I had the libretto and lyrics, but wanted someone to set my lyrics to music. John, who was posting under the screenname Badlands1790, contacted me by PM on the NYRA Internet forum, telling me he was willing to collaborate on my rock musical. He said he played guitar and had had writer's block "for the longest time". He put up a YouTube video for our song "Students of the World, Unite!", which he later took down. "Students of the World, Unite!", the song sung at the climax of the story, is a pop-punky rocking tune that sounds something like Green Day, the Offspring, or Lit. John's melisma on such lines as "Now we form a wall that is gia-ant" is superb.

I researched John Hensle's activities with NYRA and learned that John had coauthored a booklet to help youth with students' rights issues with a number of other NYRAnians. I maintained an interest in John's posts on the NYRA board.

After a few Facebook conversations with John, I discovered John and I had many things in common. I discovered, for instance, that we were both youth rights supporters and both rocked out. We were both fascinated with drugs. We also share our dislike for the way the holidays are hyped and our deist religious views. There are some differences, though. For example, John is an INTP per the Myers-Briggs taxonomy of personality, while I'm an ENFP. And John was an avid cyclist, whereas hearing or reading the word "bxke" makes me have to pick my navel due to my logaesthesia (it feels as if a jagged piece of metal is caught in my navel).

Shortly after we met, I discussed my logaesthesia with John. He told me he had been diagnosed with Asperger's when he was 2 years old, but called for an end to all the IEP's in the eighth grade after he stopped meeting the diagnostic criteria. He had his diagnosis revoked, and said it was the only time a student with a diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder had been undiagnosed and taken out of special ed in his school district.

Once I was discussing the cynicism that led many people to McCarthyesquely accuse youth rights supporters of being pedophiles, and commented that if a state senator or assemblyperson wants to lower her or his state's age of consent from 18 to 16, someone in the audience is sure to claim that that politician really wants to touch 7-year-olds' junk. John replied: "Yeah, I wish the general public could have intellectual debates about actually understanding articulate points, instead of reacting to a word or two and painting a negative stereotype. The world would be a lot better of a place if we could do that." That has become one of my favorite John Hensle quotes of all time!

Another time John said: "Youth is largely a relative construct, I would agree . . . but it's a matter of society seeing potential in youth. Society does not see youth as a period immediately useful to it so it marginalizes it and doesn't give young people meaningful opportunities."

When I asked John about his religion, John said: "I have come to believe in destiny and it's a great way to live life. You can't prove it either way, so you might as well believe what makes you happiest is true."

Sometimes when I created art, I'd listen to John Hensle's masterpiece with Secret Lands, "Voyager Golden Record". It is still my favorite Secret Lands song, as it makes me think of creating alien conlangs!

John hoped to meet me in person when he was coming over to the West Coast, but that never materialized. John began smoking weed and attending Buddhist meditation sessions and later Bahá'í temples in college. As his college years progressed, John became deeply into weed and later psychedelics. He once rode his car into the wilderness under the influence of drugs. He became a Shia LaBeouf fan and suggested I try a guided psychedelic experience to help me with my logaesthesia. In 2015, John was diagnosed with schizophrenia. While he had been a down-to-earth, even cynical realist when I met him -- he reminded me of Howe & Strauss' description of the Nomad archetype -- his drug-induced schizophrenia made John start to sound like what Howe & Strauss would call a Prophet instead. All this for a Millennial born in 1993. (Although, to be fair, few Millennials I know fit the dutiful authoritarian description of the Straussian generational theory.) At the end of 2015, he closed down his Facebook account. I emailed him, and he replied that there were too many people he didn't care about following him on Facebook (but that I wasn't one of said people). In May of 2016, his Facebook account was reactivated. I last spoke with John on October 22. We never met in person.

In mid-December of 2016, I was shattered when I went to John's Facebook wall and saw messages about how he had passed away. At first I was just numb -- in shock -- but then I lay down on my bed and started to feel ill. I knew John was into psychedelics, so at first I suspected it was a drug overdose, but then I read the obituary that said he "passed away on Dec. 5, 2016, in his sleep". At first I was just in shock -- stunned. Then I lay on my bed and felt really bad.

When I heard John had passed away, I thought about the things Landau & Hensle will never be able to do together, like accept music awards. I read the stale obituary, which didn't do justice to this amazing friend with an amazing and unconventional mind. I want to meet John again, but I don't know when or under what circumstances it's going to be. I want to share so many new songs with him, but I don't know whether he's hearing them as I play.

Until December of 2016, my circle of friends didn't overlap much with John's circle of friends. To the people in my life, John was just "the boy who's writing the music for James' play". And to John's Facebook friends, I was just "the boy who's writing a rock musical with John". But after John passed away, I've had his friends reach out to me.

I wrote John Hensle's mother on Facebook on January 3. For almost 5 months, she didn't even read my IM. Then, on June 2, she read my IM and friended me. I later learned that John was hit by an 18-wheeler while riding his bicycle in Terre Haute (where he’s from) in November. He had his tibia replaced with a rod, and John said, "Thank you all. I hope I didn't bum out your day too much." as he was lifted into the ambulance. On December 5, John finally passed away. The official cause of death was given as cardiac arrhythmia.

John jammed with Daniel Mutchler in the John Hensle & Daniel Mutchler Unnamed Project. He also did a number of songs on a project called Secret Lands, which are up at Soundcloud. Secret Lands released such songs as "Trap", "Ebbinghaus", "Floating" (about his transmale ex-girlfriend), and "The Final Girl Lives On", which can be read at the /secretlands directory on Soundcloud. I enjoyed all the times I spent songwriting with John and remember the dreams we share to have our music become part of the national repertoire.

I never met John in person, even though we discussed meeting up on many occasions. Our friendship was an online friendship, and yet it was much more than another online friendship. We were like soulmates. We were artistic partners. I was his brother from another mother.

After Avatar composer James Horner was killed in a plane crash, someone wrote, "I hope, you are somewhere, you would want to be after the death". This is the best wish John can receive. I, too, hope John went where he wanted to go, instead of the popularized version of the Christian Heaven where angels play harps and sit on clouds all day, doing notiing but singing songs that never run out of things to say about the glory of God and how he has saved us all from our sins.

And that song, "Students of the World, Unite!"? A few days after John passed away, I searched for it in my email box at Yahoo, and finally found a demo version of John singing the first verse, with his guitar, on video. You may email me at savegraduation@yahoo.com if you'd like a copy.

In commemoration of John today, I've been listening to his favorite artists on my iPod -- the ones I also have (Muse, Primitive Radio Gods, the Sundays, Third Eye Blind).

John has always had the view towards life and death that Patrick Henry had:"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" He believes life is not worth living if you can't enjoy it, which is a very youth rights attitude. It's ageists who believe in enforcing punitive laws like curfews and MIP's that punish teens "in order to protect them from their own stupidity". His views on life and death are attested to in his song Six Feet Below.

Although I'm sad my friend passed away three years ago today, I hold onto my conviction that it would have been unspeakably wrong to arrest him for smoking weed and trying hallucinogens in college, while his brain was supposedly still developing according to the "25" myth. (Technically, your brain is still developing during the college years, but it turns out this is a canard, as science has now discovered that the brain continues to develop and change all throughout a person's life. It's like saying a 50-year-old shouldn't have any legal rights because her brain is "not finished changing".) It was John's choice, and John's having the freedom to choose drugs without being arrested or jailed for it was so much more important than whether John had a capacity to make what social-conservative arbiters would judge as "good" decisions.

Here's to John Hensle, youth-rightser extraordinaire. You don't look a day over 23. (OK, maybe 5 months over 23.)

R.I.P. John Alfred Hensle, July 5, 1993 - December 5, 2016

[tomperanteau]

Shapiro at 'National Review': Conservatives Oust Radicals, The Left Welcomes Them

Shapiro at 'National Review': Conservatives Oust Radicals, The Left Welcomes Them

The Claremont Institute, a West Coast Straussian institution founded by Harry Jaffa, is philosophically dedicated to small government and traditional values; many of its chief voices were strong proponents for President Trump during the 2016 election. [READ MORE HERE]

[tomperanteau]

New article has been published on The Daily Digest

New article has been published on http://www.thedailydigest.org/2018/08/28/shapiro-at-national-review-conservatives-oust-radicals-the-left-welcomes-them/

Shapiro at 'National Review': Conservatives Oust Radicals, The Left Welcomes Them

The Claremont Institute, a West Coast Straussian institution founded by Harry Jaffa, is philosophically dedicated to small government and traditional values; many of its chief voices were strong proponents for President Trump during the 2016 election. [READ MORE HERE]