On Suffering Fools Gladly

Introduction

If I might, I would like to introduce another metric to help us understand our social and cultural and political landscape, the landscape that is disintegrating all around us. This is not meant to replace some of the standard ways of discussing things—red state/blue state, or right wing/left wing, or conservative/progressive, or based/RINO, or lizard overlords/regular folks—but rather to supplement such categories. And in at least a few cases, this new metric might help to clear away some of the debris that has been heaped on top of our standard taxonomies.

NETTR NUTTRS

The debris to be cleared has accumulated as the result of a predictable abuse of the NETTR approach (that being “no enemies to the right”). A sensible approach to this standard would be that conservatives should never denounce anything to their right simply because some very shrill people on the left are demanding that they do so. So much is good and wholesome. Proper, in fact.

But if we are Christians, and we realize that God has some enemies to my right, then it follows that I should have them as enemies also. If we are pastors, and we simply say that we will have no enemies to the right “period,” then all we have done is announce to the devil which flank of ours he really ought to attack next.

Put another way, the grotesque abuse of the NETTR principle has rapidly degenerated into an epistemic open borders policy. The morass of ostensibly conservative voices on the right now resembles—more than anything else it resembles—the Mexican border under Biden’s border patrol in, say, 2022. We might call it the infamous NETTS approach—no enemies to the south.

Now that Andrew Torba of Gab has recommended the Stone Choir Podcast to us (“the number one Christian nationalist podcast in the world”), along with Sacra Press (where you can find “race realist” Michael Spangler cheek by jowl with Franciscus Junius), not to mention another book arguing the compatibility of Christianity with National Socialism, the only thing left is to breathlessly await the suggestion that we start placing cartel members, pole dancers, and fentanyl dealers on the executive board of the Edmund Burke Society. And if you protest any such suggested follies, even when they get to a dunsical apogee, you will be accused of the mortal sin of “gatekeeping.”

But when these people sneer at all gatekeeping, they have essentially embraced . . . open borders. Well, open borders for the most part. They are open to race realists, and to Nazis, and to who knows what other miscreants, but like Kevin DeYoung, they do have their standards. They do draw the line at the Moscow Mood, for which we are most grateful. This indicates that they understand, probably at a primal level, that their version of ethno-nationalism and our version of Christian nationalism are very different things, the same way that a Canadian moose and a little yellow canary are different things. The tenets of ethno-nationalism do not follow from Christian premises, not at all, and I for one am glad about the clarity they seem to have on that point at least.

Ethno-nationalism is not a subset of Christian nationalism. But can a genuine Christian embrace the tenets of ethno-nationalism? Sure, but only in the way that a Christian can commit adultery with his neighbor’s wife. That can happen too.

So what are we doing here in Moscow? We are keeping the Christian in Christian nationalism.

So What Is This New Metric?

There are basically two kinds of people in the world, at least on the receiving end—those who put up with crap and abuse, and those who do not. The former are quite adept at inventing rationalizations and excuses for various outrages, while the latter say things like, “What did you do that for?”

The line that divides these people is a line that runs through all human relationships—from a mother dealing with a surly toddler on a rainy day to Chamberlain dealing with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. It can be seen in familial settings, church settings, and geopolitical settings. The surly toddler “didn’t get his nap.” Hitler was going to stop, most certainly he was finally going to stop it, resting content with just Poland. I mean, that’s what we all want him to do. The soul of the appeaser is fully convinced that this latest outrage will be the very last demand.

There are people who accept such rationalizations, and there are people who don’t. There are people who believe the appeasement will work, and there are people who see and understand that every act of appeasement is just begging for another outrage, only three times as bad.

Judges who accommodate, judges with this appeasement frame of mind oversee their “catch and release” programs for violent criminals, which is what happened to that poor girl on the train. Employers do it when they in effect put their slowest and most incompetent employees in charge of the pace of production. Sociologists do it when they talk about the “root causes” of crime. Teachers do it when they flatter the dunces. Pastors and elders do it when they tolerate abusive members who bully their way into positions of influence.

And Paul addresses this sinful bent directly—and it is a sinful bent to have the heart of an appeaser. It is a very great sin that has caused enormous problems in the world. Here it is:

An appeaser will accept the most absurd explanations for bad behavior. No matter what is said or done, the appeaser will bring out his five gallon bucket of lame sauce. And what they don’t understand is that what they are doing is entirely visible to sensible people. When the lamest explanations are given, or when the iniquity is fully transparent, it is not Bulverism to say that the appeaser is proceeding on the basis of a psychological kink in his soul, and not on the basis of facts, history, data, or reason. He may gesture in the general direction of facts and reason, but the thing that clearly makes his motor run is the jet fuel of moral timidity.

One of the reasons why that famous Norm Macdonald joke works so well is that there are plenty of people out there who will actually “do the meme,” and they will do it without any self-awareness at all.

An Additional Category

So I divided the human race into two groups—those who put up with it, and those who do not. But if you have been following closely, this presupposes a third group, waiting in the wings, made up of those people who generate or manufacture the “it” that must be tolerated or not.

This gives us three categories in total—the appeasers, the non-appeasers, and the instigators. Chamberlain, Churchill, Hitler.

Now the Second World War was a terribly complicated business, but certain aspects of it are simple enough to provide us with a handy Rorschach test . . . you know, European geopolitical ink blots. Was Churchill a man hungry for war and blood? Or was he just someone who saw plainly, long before anyone else, what Hitler was actually up to? Was Chamberlain a long-suffering saint, or was he an appeaser—to use Churchill’s metaphor, a man who throws others to the alligators, hoping to be the last one eaten? Was Hitler a bad actor from the get go, or was he simply trying to rectify some of the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles? Poor baby.

Now it is a standard move for the appeasers to categorize the non-appeaser as though he were the instigator. We saw this most recently with the murder of the two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C. The president had brought in the Guard to deal with the crime-ridden state of affairs there in D.C. and an Afghan national named Rahmanullah Lakanwal is the alleged gunman who shot them. Naturally, the left blamed the president for the incident, saying that he caused it by bringing the Guard into D.C. in the first place.

Delinquents in the Snow

If you have a volume of Lewis that contains an essay called Delinquents in the Snow, I would ask you to fetch it down and have yourself an edifying read. I wrote a bit about this essay just a few years ago, which I commend to you as well.

In the essay, Lewis argues that the genesis of rough justice, vigilante justice, is the legacy of the appeasers, and that it is not the full bloom of the approach of the non-appeasers. In other words, a law and order approach does not evolve into vigilante justice, but is rather a bulwark against vigilante justice. A soft-on-crime approach does not hold back the forces of reaction, but rather provokes ordinary people past the point of endurance, at which point they erupt into the rough justice of vigilantism. When they do this, there will certainly be reactionary outrages, along with numerous people who do not understand what is motivating them. And with Lewis, I do not threaten. But also with Lewis, I predict that this is the inevitable result of decades of spongy liberal governance. And saying that the appeasers are not going to like the new rules is not the same thing as applauding the new rules. But it is to identify the headwaters of our cultural tragedy.

Lest I be accused of trafficking in airy abstractions, my point is that Russell Moore is responsible for Joel Webbon. And of course, to whatever extent he understands it, so is Joel Webbon.

So where did all this inchoate and irrational rage on the right come from? The assertion of the left is that it is the necessary and logical next step up from ordinary conservatism, hard line conservatism, or perhaps the school of thought I most identify with, which is crawl-over-broken-glass conservatism. They regard it as a long slow development up from the Mitt Romney version of fascism, then to the George W. Bush form of fascism, then to the Donald Trump style of fascism, until it finally explodes into the deadliest form of fascism possible, which will be the subject of their next breathless fund-raising mailer. But if everything is fascist, then nothing is fascist. And if nothing is fascist, why should we care when we are accused of being fascist?

Let me ask you. Who was it that made accusations of fascism such a meaningless charge? Who was it that made accusations of racism an empty accusation? Who was it that transformed the term antisemitism into an all-purpose slander? Who was it that turned charges of misogyny into a joke? When you have answered that question, you will be equipped to answer this one. Who is responsible for the fact that a large swath of American young men are not at all troubled now when they are accused in such terms? Same people. But like Aesop’s boy who cried fascist wolf! too many times, it turns out that there really are actual fascists in the world, and they are not Christian.

“I am of Paul, I am of Apollos” . . . that was a first century pastoral problem. “I am of Luther, I am of Calvin, I am of Wesley” . . . that is a post-Reformation pastoral problem. “I am of Kuyper, I am of Nietzsche” . . . wut?

So this has not been a long slow slide into extremism at all. It is an eruption, an explosive over-reaction to the decades of liberal tarring everyone they disagreed with as deeply compromised—fascist, antisemitic, misogynist, racist. And once you started checking your privilege, you discovered that everything accelerated into problematic territory. Vanilla ice cream was racist. Showing up to work on time was white supremacy. Doing math problems correctly gave white students an unfair advantage.

And just as deep calls unto deep (Ps. 42:7), so also lunacy calleth unto moonshine.