Although it be Tuesday, there will be no letters or responses today. It is a long and unhappy tale, what with me being on the road, and the wireless on my laptop konking out, such that I am reduced to typing with one finger on my iPad, and I don’t have ready access to your letters. So you can see how the consensus should be that I am more to be pitied than censured.
That being the case, what shall we talk about?
We have talked about the Kavanaugh confirmation enough already, but we still need to talk about the meaning of the Kavanaugh confirmation. And by this, I am not referring to the balance of the Court, or what it might do to the midterms, or anything like that. The meaning of the Kavanaugh fiasco is that America no longer has a visible center.
It makes no sense to say something like “we may not agree on the lawfulness of dismembering children in the womb, but at least we are all Americans.” That kind of rallying cry can work with what might be called regular political issues, but it does not and cannot work when you are dealing with a clash of alien civilizations.
We have always had regional and ethnic and class differences, and while those differences sometimes led to violence, they were generally accommodated. But what can we do with this? We are talking about total estrangement.
Now the fact of this estrangement has been with us at least since Roe. What we are dealing with now is the obvious fact of the estrangement. The accounts are coming due.
For a long time, our culture wars were disguised as ordinary politics, and we thought we could deal with it all through ordinary means. But then our culture war entered into its Cold War phase — meaning that we are now in the midst of another Civil War, but one that has not had a ton of active shooting. Yet.
The gap is unbridgeable. No shared Americanism, or any other immanent civic religion, will be able to broker a peace on these issues. It has to go one way or the other. It has to come to a head. This has to break, and break it will.
This has all come about through the hubris of progressives. They have a vision for the world that includes the blood lust of abortion, the civilization-destroying corruption of unfettered lusts, the miseries brought in by unhinged feminism, not to mention the right of Bruno to shower with the junior high girls. If you fail to applaud like a good North Korean, they will wrap you up in lawsuits, you renegade cake-baker, you. Their vision teems with ideas so good they have to be mandatory. They are totalitarians all.
And so they have been bullying ordinary people. We have gotten to the point in the story where the bullied have decided to fight back, in their ordinary people way. And this is the point where the cry must will soon go up, “We are so tired of all this conflict! Why, oh why must we always be fighting?”
And a number of sweet Christians — bless their hearts — will take up the cry with them. They will post their detestation of conflict on Facebook. That will resolve things.
But nothing like that will resolve anything. This has to play out, and it is going to be bumpy. More on all of this later.