Jean-François Revel recognized in America's Protestant legacy its key strength in 2003, he just didn't call it that

Nor did the New York Times in his obituary, here, but that's what it is:

In an interview in 1970 with The New York Post after publication of "Without Marx or Jesus," he said his research did not involve talking to political leaders.

"I just looked around, talked to people, to students," he said. "And in the 20th century the information is pretty good, and I read a lot of your press and books."

In the introduction to his "Anti-Americanism" book, Mr. Revel wrote that he found an America "in complete contrast to the conventional portrayal then generally accepted in Europe." In particular, he was impressed with Americans' willingness to address and correct their own faults.

From the Confession of Sins in the Lutheran liturgy:

Most merciful God, we confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean. We have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved You with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We justly deserve Your present and eternal punishment. For the sake of Your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in Your will and walk in Your ways to the glory of Your holy name. Amen.

Nothing sank NeverTrump lower in the estimation of the voters than its "blithe indifference to the Clintons' gangsterism"

Yes indeed.

Here:

"Trump’s base was fighting a war; these guys were sipping tea." 

The article insists much of NeverTrump is Jewish, agnostic and libertarian, which is true, while failing to mention its many Christian, especially Catholic, representatives, the very same crowd which mercilessly destroyed conservative Presbyterian minister Todd Akin of Missouri. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The narrowness of Trump's 2016 victory continues unexamined in the cold light of reason. Though badly outnumbered, Protestant America proved it isn't dead yet. Trump's partisans naturally would rather talk about why their winner won than why the loser lost. But Hillary lost primarily because 5 million former Obama voters failed to show up, a fact Trump himself acknowledged in the immediate aftermath. They were as disgusted with her as the rest of us were. Had just some of them shown up in the right places, we'd be in year ten of the biggest political disaster this country has faced since FDR.

Trump proves the dictum that one man can change history when all the rest cannot. And for this they hate him. He might as well be Martin Luther. 

A cuck at Taki's Magazine falsifies some "moral equivalency" between Antifa and White Nationalism

From an "apocalyptic psychologist", here:

Lacking any higher values, and surrounded on all sides by the base and the untrue, white nationalists and diversity’s agents, Antifa and Black Lives Matter, understandably turn to violence—for at least it is real, a brutal assertion of something true in the midst of so much deception. Inspired by envy and pride, these groups all deserve one another, and the American public, relishing the opportunity to hate while appearing righteous, will delight in the evil spectacle.

The violence is all Antifa's, but hey, it takes a cuck to recognize cuckery in white nationalism, right? The truth is there is no white nationalist violence to speak of, let alone any white nationalism. One gets the impression for a moment that this cuckologist secretly isn't too happy about this. It's almost as if he's goading his readers with the unpleasant truth that, just like him, they're all just pussies.

Well, he is a Calvinist atheist.

White nationalism is pretty much a phenomenon limited to the internet's world of anonymous commenters, such as at Taki's. In the main the commenters there do a good job of giving voice to white identity, but most of the discussion ends up in arguments refighting every war ever fought and no one seems to be able to agree about much of anything important, including religion. Ardent Protestants and Catholics spar with each other, as do the theists with the atheists. The editors typically feature articles which tread right up to the line, creating the playground, but go no farther. Meanwhile the actual Party of Violence is threatening the real thing, the latest action being a nationwide event set to begin on Nov. 4.

We'll see how that goes. So far if it rains Antifa's legions have shown that they will find something better to do, so if the weather interferes, Nov. 4 may turn out to be just another bust no less than every demonstration of white nationalism has turned out to be a bust. In any case Antifa only makes its biggest splashes when the whites plan to show up to contest the field, so barring that I'm expecting nothing very remarkable on the first Saturday in November.

Besides, the nation's property owners, most of whom are white, have property to protect and keep busy doing just that. There are about 75 million owner-occupied single family homes in this country, occupied by 60% of the population. They look askance at anyone threatening that property, or the businesses in which they work or which they own, whether it's Black Lives Matter doing the rioting, burning and looting and killing the cops whose duty it is to protect that property, or any other group of hooligans promising this kind of trouble.

Until the lives and fortunes of these ordinary white Americans are at real risk, there will be no sympathy for movements claiming to fight on their behalf, despite what the alarmists at the Southern Poverty Law Center may tell you.

And from a theoretical point of view, ordinary whites have no sympathy either for those who only wish matters were so dire, or half-believe they really are. 

John O'Sullivan still refuses to accept the meaning of "ourselves and our Posterity"

Here:

Notice that Ronald Reagan did not say that the great civil ideas of the West were the property of those Notre Dame graduates who were descended from the Founding Fathers and their generation. Nor did he say that they were the property of white Anglophone Protestants who had fetched up on these shores in the meantime — since that would have excluded the son of an Irish Catholic father like himself. Nor that the children of black slaves or other non-white migrants were excluded from that same moral and intellectual Western inheritance which the black former slave and passionate reader, Frederick Douglass, so cherished and claimed as his own.

Ann Coulter's excellent rant against Heritage Foundation

We can bring Ann up to speed on the Germans later.

Best one: Burke said Americans were descendants of Englishmen, and Protestant.

Heritage should sell everything and donate it to the Center for American Progress. They're already doing their work anyway:

"champion the common good over narrow self-interest, and harness the strength of our diversity."

Publius Decius Mus imagines there is a transcendence which is outside of religion

Yes, there is. They used to call it "idolatry".

In any event, this excerpt shows that Decius simply fails to take the Protestantism of the American Founding seriously. One could blame the Founders for being too particular in this regard, but that's a different topic altogether.

Here:

The Old Right was, in my view, too particular in that it tried to base everything on tradition, on kith and kin, blood and soil and so on. It rejected any transcendence (beyond the religious) as “universalist” and liberal. This is my ultimate problem with Kirk, Bradford and the like.  They want to say that certain things are good while rejecting any fundamental, permanent ground for the good.  The New Right swung way to the other direction and insists on universals and sees all particulars—at least when asserted by Americans and Europeans—as insular and racist. The truth is that both are true in their sphere and both are necessary. Restoring a proper relationship between the universal and the particular is in my view the paramount theoretical challenge for whatever it is that follows conservatism.

What's wrong with America, epitomized by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

He thinks gay libertarian Peter Thiel would be an excellent nominee to the US Supreme Court.

Here.

The libertarian vote is like 1% of the population. LGBTQLSMFT is less than 4% of the population, but there isn't one Protestant on the Supreme Court even though 50% of the country is.  

Romney won the Christian vote but lost the election by losing the NONES to Obama 74%-26%

So says Matthew Sheffield, here, with data for IA, FL, PA, VA, WI, MI and NH showing Romney won Protestants on average with 54% and Catholics with 53%.

The problem for Republicans is the growth of the non-Christian population, especially among the young:

"[T]he Godless Gap cost Mitt Romney the election".

The difference between conservative talk radio and Donald J. Trump is basically religious

Conservative talk radio accepts the rules but Donald J. Trump flouts them.

He's a good Protestant, and a great American: The father of our country, George Washington, refused to take communion, and wouldn't kneel in prayer.

The GOPe can write all the rules they want, and then they can rewrite them.

Better get started.

Laugh of the Day: Libertarian Charles Murray says only business elites, the Republican establishment and New Dealers remain true to the American creed!

In The Wall Street Journal, here:

For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, “Who Are We?” (2004), two components of that national identity stand out. One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions. The other is the very idea of America, something unique to us. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”

What does this ideology—Huntington called it the “American creed”—consist of? Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority. ...

Who continues to embrace this creed in its entirety? Large portions of the middle class and upper middle class (especially those who run small businesses), many people in the corporate and financial worlds and much of the senior leadership of the Republican Party. They remain principled upholders of the ideals of egalitarianism, liberty and individualism.

And let’s not forget moderate Democrats, the spiritual legatees of the New Deal. ... But these are fragments of the population, not the national consensus that bound the U.S. together for the first 175 years of the nation’s existence. ... Operationally as well as ideologically, the American creed is shattered.

---------------------------------

Of all the objections to the essay which leap to mind perhaps the most important objection is the way Murray glosses over the religious interpretation of the formation of the American character in favor of the modernist preoccupation with ideology.

The English Dissenters who helped establish our country from the beginning did so finally out of a frustration born of being treated as second class citizens, for whom the chartered rights of Englishmen were denied on specifically religious grounds. The desire for equal status has to be understood from its Christian setting, not from the arid point of view of a seminar in political philosophy. These Dissenters went on to populate our country along with other Christians who set about erecting a society, not a libertarian paradise where everyone did as he pleased. Built on agrarianism and the local Protestant church, it is hard to imagine a place less conducive to letting people be all that they could be.

The Richard Hofstadter reference is telling. A former communist, the liberal historian was a life-long anti-capitalist who had a reputation as an historian as something of a hack because he relied on secondary sources, ignoring the primary.

As every ideologue knows, when the evidence doesn't support your view, just ignore it.

Rand Paul emphasizes debt is our biggest threat in closing remarks in tonight's CNN debate

He says it over and over again to no effect, but he is surely right.

The country wasn't built and didn't become great on debt, it was built on Protestant thrift.

The endorsement of Ted Cruz by so-called values voters means little, except for Ben Carson and Donald Trump

From the story at The Hill, here:

Sen. Ted Cruz won the Values Voter Summit straw poll for the third year in a row on Saturday, a strong showing of support from evangelical voters for his 2016 presidential bid. The firebrand Texas senator won a whopping 35 percent in the poll of summit-goers, ahead of runner-up Ben Carson’s 18 percent. That margin is significantly wider than last year, where he edged out Carson by just 5 percentage points. Former Gov. Mike Huckabee (Ark.) took third with 14 percent, followed by Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) with 13 percent. Real estate magnate Donald Trump finished a distant fifth with 5 percent.

So "values voters" have finally figured out one thing: Ben Carson's values may be traditional, but they are rooted in a crackpot religion which was born of a failed prediction of the end of the world in 1844.

Now if they could only figure that out about their own religion.

What's happening here is that the evangelical base is clearly choosing a Southern Baptist over a Seventh-day Adventist, and distancing itself dramatically from the mainline Protestant in the race, Donald Trump.

Meanwhile Ted Cruz isn't going to be the nominee, not as long as he garners just 27% of the support enjoyed by the frontrunner.

Charles Cook embraces the impotence of contemporary conservatism faced with Donald Trump

Where else but in National Review here, the locus of conservatism as ineffectual cult and ideology, which finds it impossible to revolt against anything except for the rebels:

"As it happens, Trump’s critics do grasp the appeal [of revolt]. What they do not do, however, is act upon it in this manner. The temptation to deliver a bloody nose to one’s ideological enemies is a human and comprehensible one, by no means limited in its allure to the disgruntled part of the Republican primary electorate. But temptation and reasonable conduct are two separate things entirely, and they should always be treated as such. Can one understand the instinct that is on display? Sure. Can one look beneath the surface and do anything other than despair? I’m afraid not. Such as they are, the explanations provided by Trump’s discordant choir are entirely risible and easily dismantled. Great, you’re annoyed! But then what?"

He's obviously proud of it. In 1776 he'd be called a royalist.

Was taking up arms against England "reasonable conduct"? Only a Catholic sensibility could fail to grasp the point. "But then what?" Well, a long war of several years, full of privations and without guaranty of success, followed by another long period of several years preparing for and culminating in a constitutional convention, during which local and colonial institutions were strong enough to support the absence of a centralized framework. The same is still true today, if only the locals more frequently told the federal courts to go to hell, as the Kentucky county clerk recently did.

By definition, an ideology ought to have some ideas in it which form a system, and should be, when all is said and done, unrealistic. That pretty much describes American conservatism since forever: unable to roll back anything, including the income tax, direct election of Senators, universal suffrage, the Federal Reserve Act, the Reapportionment Act of 1929, Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, Obamacare, and the enormous regulatory code, and unable to permanently refound the country on any constitutional principles, say, of limited government or separation of powers. Conservatism has a massive record of zero achievement while liberalism's untruths keep marching on like tanks in Tiananmen Square.

Trump's camp, meanwhile, thinks three modest things: the way to make America great again is to restore law and order by starting with enforcing its borders and putting an end to illegal immigration, to bring jobs back to Americans by reforming the tax code, developing energy independence, cutting wasteful spending and punishing unpatriotic corporations who profit from exporting jobs, and to rebuild the military to protect freedom at home and for our friends and allies abroad.

It takes near religious nuttery to call the proponent of these measures "a self-interested narcissist and serial heretic whose entirely inchoate political platform bends cynically to the demands of the moment."

To understand Trump, it takes a village . . . of Protestants.

You can blame The Greatest Generation for same sex marriage

From Joel Miller, here:

'The values changed all the way back in the forties and fifties. In that sense, the gay marriage battle was already over when Eisenhower was in the White House. How so?

'[Historian Alan] Petigny describes what he calls the Permissive Turn, a liberalization of values that happened following World War II. Some of it came down to a “renunciation of renunciation.” The war had demanded a great deal of austerity and self-sacrifice. But with Germany and Japan subdued, it was time to live it up. Americans plowed their prosperity into material self-gratification. But there was more.

'At the same time, the culture witnessed a shift in the way we viewed human nature. We swapped the traditional American view, grounded in a certain pessimism inherited from the Protestant understanding of original sin, for the newly refurbished and Americanized psychotherapy. ... Religion, morality, even reality were now questions of self-fulfillment—making truth subjective and traditional truth claims irrelevant and meaningless.'

Without the Protestant reformers, the USA had never existed

“I love and revere the memories of Huss Wickliff Luther Calvin Zwinglius Melancton and all the other reformers how muchsoever I may differ from them all in many theological metaphysical & philosophical points. As you justly observe, without their great exertions & severe sufferings, the USA had never existed.”

-- John Adams

Michael Savage attacks the pope for saying limits exist to free speech, ends up saying the same thing

Michael Alan Weiner

Michael Savage attacked the pope yesterday for two things: for stating that there are limits to freedom of speech, and for opining that human beings bear some responsibility for global warming.

Savage found the first idea an affront to the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights ("Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"), wondering how the pope never heard of it.

The pope in his capacity as the vicar of Christ on earth, however, wasn't telling Congress to abridge the freedom of speech of anyone. He was simply reminding Christians everywhere (and chiding the secularists of France and the United States especially--hello Hugh Hewitt) to restrain their own speech as a matter of spiritual principle, in obedience to the teaching of Jesus:

"Hear and understand: not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man. ... [W]hat comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man."

-- Matthew 15:10f, 18ff.

The pope was reminding the world that there is a higher law than the laws of France or the laws of the United States when it comes to what we say. Every Jew should be able instantly to recognize this idea, since practicing Jews frequently restrain their own speech as a matter of principle. They will often write "G-d" instead of "God" for fear of taking God's name in vain as the commandment in the decalogue warns. More to the point, every Jew should already grasp the Jewish basis for the Christian idea of self-restrained speaking because it comes from the prophet Jeremiah who said that "the heart is evil above all things". And neither do Jews have any excuse to be surprised by the doctrine since it is well worked out by the rabbis in the doctrine of "the evil inclination" which must always be guarded against.

Michael Savage, however, is lately more interested in removing the guards, indeed in "unprotected talk", rather than in the circumspect speech implied by his well-known motto of borders, language, culture. Freedom of speech as understood absolutely by civil libertarians is at war with that, because it leads to open borders, many languages and multiculturalism. Savage should understand by now that such libertarianism is incompatible with conservatism, and that when it comes to mental disorders, liberalism does not have a corner on the market.

The coup de grace came yesterday when Savage turned to the global warming statement made by the pope. Savage said he objected to the pope addressing a matter that had nothing to do with religion because it was outside the pope's area of expertise, outside his scope, as Savage put it, which it certainly is.

But isn't that nice. The pope exercises his freedom of speech on a matter not expressly religious and Savage all of a sudden wants to limit it, obviously because he disagrees with it but also because the pope is not an expert. But the pope has every right to speak his nonsense in the United States, whether religious or otherwise. The point of criticism on this matter should be on the substance of what the pope says, not on his role as pope supposedly "pontificating" about it.

In this still Protestant country, the pope is viewed as nothing more than a man who is no different from us, whether he speaks about the teaching of Jesus or anything else. We can say that the pope is right about the limits to freedom of speech as he stated them, and that he is probably quite mistaken about the human role in global warming, because on both counts we can look into the matter and decide for ourselves from the evidence.

We read, mark, learn and inwardly digest, but unless we do, we risk appearing Christians or Jews or Americans in name only.

Pew study shows no religious group in America rates itself more highly than Jews do

Story here, except you have to figure it out from the table. The summary artfully skirts that conclusion:

"Evangelicals also hold very positive views of Jews, with white evangelical Protestants giving Jews an average thermometer rating of 69. Only Jews themselves rate Jews more positively."

No kidding. White evangelicals win walking away for a positive evaluation of Jews, except for Jews themselves. Jews nearest competitors in self-love in the study are atheists, white evangelicals and Catholics, but none of them come close to the Jews themeselves when it comes to rating themselves positively. Meanwhile Jews rate white evangelicals the lowest of any group, lower even than Muslims.

Where is the love, man?

What unites some Christians and libertarians is radically unconservative: belief in human change for the better

Here's Christian libertarian economist David Brat, Cantor-killer:

"Preach the gospel and change hearts and souls. If we make all of the people good, markets will be good. Markets are made up of people. Supply and Demand are curves, but they are also people. Nothing else. If markets are bad, which they are, that means people are bad, which they are. Want good markets? Change the people. If there are not nervous twitches in the pews when we preach, then we are not doing our jobs."

--------------------------------------------------------

Conservatives generally haven't believed human nature changes for the better, but it is central to the Catholic doctrine of grace that grace infuses the baptized and changes them, and the belief is central also to the doctrine of some protestants.

These were called Schwaermer by Luther, "enthusiasts".

In politics we called them ideologues.

Sorry Mark Judge, the original punk rockers of Christendom were Lutherans

Why can't Mark Judge write a decent opener? He starts off, here, with this:

"With the takeover of liberalism and secularism in the West, Catholicism is now a subculture."

What he means is:

"With the takeover of the West by liberalism and secularism, Catholicism is now reduced to a subculture."

And it's too bad, too, because the rest of what he writes is worth reading . . . if only he could imagine a subculture. You know, like Lutherans. The original punk rockers of Christendom, who shouted like Joey Ramone 

I don't like sacraments

I don't like celibates

I don't like priests and nuns

I don't like what the pope has done

Well I'm against it

The truth is Catholics could never be punkers and never have been. Being a punker requires being an individual, and saying no to something, like disco and rap, and instead Catholics have been busy for centuries saying yes to everyone and everything, absorbing every culture and every cult under the aegis of their big tent. It's been the secret to their success.

To take only the latest example, they see illegals coming across the border and immediately want to welcome the stranger, give them a shower, a meal and a place to sleep. The protestants see this and want to kick their asses all the way back to Guatemala.

Catholics aren't really against anything, and never have been.

That's why if they get their way, America is finished.

I'm against it. 

Blaming negative GDP on the harsh winter is already forecast to get worse

The consensus estimate of the third and final report of 1Q2014 GDP, coming out on Wednesday next week, is already 60% worse than the actual second report at -1.6%. What, is the late winter suddenly become worse in the last month?

The first estimate, you will recall, came in at +0.1%, and was quickly downgraded in various places to something ranging between -0.2% and -0.4%. When the second estimate came in at a much worse -1.0%, just about everyone blamed the harsh winter for the pathetic print, including the White House, which incredibly credited GDP from spending on utilities at the same time it debited GDP because people weren't traveling (which isn't true--just examine the government's miles-traveled reports over the winter), weren't vacationing and weren't spending money on hotels and restaurants, and other such drivel.

Having it both ways, it seems, only applies south of the Canadian border, where real GDP was a negative almost $40 billion. North of it real GDP was actually positive, despite the winter, at about $4.7 billion US. A much smaller economy Canada's is, to be sure, but for that reason you'd think it more vulnerable to the harshest winter in decades whereas our much larger, more varied economy ought to be more resilient.

But up against an Obama, you would be wrong. He is secretly happy that things are going as poorly as they are, because it means that the middle class is steadily shrinking and soon will no longer be able to stand in his way, and the Democrat Party's way, of remaking America into a few haves and a lot of have-nots.

In this they are assisted by the libertarians who have successfully infiltrated the Republican Party as conservatives, who see this as their natural mission, too. Politically speaking, they are out to defeat Republicanism just as much as the Democrats are. The successful individual lone ranger is the sine qua non of their vision, after all, whose fabulous wealth is the only object of their affection. And the only thing standing in his way are people who believe in something bigger than themselves.

People who believe in something larger than themselves in America today occupy the extremes of the left and the right, and seem to be getting fewer in number as we speak, a fact noted in a recent article in The New Republic. Between them are a mass of social and economic libertines who are already the slaves of the elites, for whom neither the economic nor the moral restraint of the Protestant founders which built our country are a value. Unless we recover something of the latter the America of the past will cease to exist, if it hasn't already.

And persistently poor GDP proves it.