On the need to find a composed & not unhinged response to things

In the last month of 2022 I am reminded of 2020, when I felt pressed to ask,

Do you struggle, as I do, with disbelief at unfolding events? I find myself regularly bewildered by the news….

I was talking then to the few kind people signed on at my Patreon page, the only people around. I had just begun writing a kind of monthly in which I struggled to make sense of various things in the news – like a man tipped into the water and casting about for flotsam to cling to. I found myself 

repeatedly travelling the same path, from How can this be? to, in the end, Everything is normal: at first baffled, then wandering here and there in my thoughts, [etc.]

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Forgive me for quoting myself, which I have never done before, but I am afflicted with the same restlessness at the end of 2022 and am revisiting this process.

I believe we are still in the same maelstrom, I think we can call it – I like Jason Morgan’s summation:

These past several years, we Americans have been living in an accelerating anti-cultural vortex.

Jason Morgan, “Now Is The Best Time To Be Southern,” The Abbeville Blog (10 March 2021)

I feel the need to re-read what I wrote then and revise my thoughts accordingly. If you are baffled by events too, there might be something here for you.

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Here, then, is the first issue of The Expurgated YAWP (title explained within), which included the items listed

YAWP 01 | Click here for the full issue

1 | GOODBYE TO LIBERALISM (MAY IT RETURN!)

(including comment on Ross Douthat’s proposal that we are seeing the rise of a “successor ideology” that is replacing true liberalism). Excerpts:

Would you say that free speech, the rejection of censorship, is a liberal cause? – No doubt about it. Did you ever wait, as I did, for the liberal critiques of the repeated censorship of speakers on university campuses? But where were they? …

… But all of this raises the question of whether the Culture War of the past sixty years has ever really been a conflict of principle. Involving principle, Yes, but the ease with which liberalism is being abandoned on the left suggests that the battle has been the old one: Me & My Values dominating You & Yours. Liberty came via the Hand of God to say We will move beyond that – and (everything is sadly normal) the people were unfaithful.

2 | THE BELOVED COUNTRY

You might love your country as a way of loving yourself; this it seems to me is an available possibility and an entirely sham love of country. That might make sense in some monocultural countries but it rather spoils our love of country if we are Canadians or Americans (citizens of modern federations)….

I note today, in December 2022, that Stephen Wolfe in The Case for Christian Nationalism disagrees. He says (in ch. 3) that 

the nation is reflected in a pre-reflective, pre-positional love for one’s own, … [etc.].

If the nation is America, or Canada, however, as the cover of Wolfe’s book suggests, this seems to paint the face of my people onto it – which is the very problem noted above in the comment on the Culture War. 

You cannot love a country like Canada or the
United States of America with all of it reduced to
the way of life of your own particular culture
(conservative traditionalism or liberal progressivism).

Am I wrong about this?  It’s a perfect time to review. I am agreeing with Wolfe, however, when I say the following, as I still do:

I have no fondness whatsoever – not the slightest – for the ugly shambles generated by progressivism, the culture of so-called liberalism. I contributed to that chaos when I was a part of it and I look back with penitence on those I wronged, and wronged deeply, doing what is normal in that culture. I reject that culture for its chaos and street map of dead ends. Chaos simply cannot be loved.

3 | Finally, a REVIEW OF A GOOD ARTICLE by Bruce Pardy explaining why “Liberals [the Canadian party] are not liberal but progressive” – & (my contribution) why they have so easily slid into illiberalism (hello Covid!)

Pardy:

Disenfranchised Canadians are fed up with identity politics, authoritarian victimhood, and scolding from righteous elites telling them what to think and how to behave. They are liberals in the true sense of the word – … people who believe in freedom of speech and in the idea that the same rules should apply to everyone. Large swaths of Canadians have no political home and are wondering where their country went.

I ended with a criticism of Douthat’s proposal (above) of a “successor ideology” to waning liberalism:

That we think, this illiberal behaviour must be coming from another ideology is owing to the fact that we have credulously accepted the notion that progressives love freedom (and we have played along by calling them liberals). They love ‘progress’.