LOL, would be Immanentizer of The Eschaton Josh Hawley is lone No vote in US Senate to admit Sweden and Finland to NATO

 Rand Paul votes Present!

Hawley had a perfect chance to vote for global thermonuclear war, and missed it!

Story.

A grandmother of Bolshevism over at The American Conservative is upset with her children

Hey, we are the chosen immanentizers of the eschaton, not you!

Kelly Marcum, here:

The left, which continues to decry the social faux pas of cultural appropriation with ever-increasing vehemence, is itself guilty of the very same crime. They, the proponents of a predominantly liberal post-Christian culture, have undertaken a great project of appropriating and reinventing orthodox Christian values. ...

The left has made it its mission to culturally appropriate Christianity and use it for its own ends; in too many cases, it has been allowed to do so and even aided in its efforts by Christians themselves. ...

If orthodox Christianity is to survive in an evermore hostile culture, its practitioners and leaders will need not only to withstand the pressure to accommodate and self-censor, but to repossess their own language and tenets that have been exploited by the left.

Is It A Coincidence John Roberts' Law Clerk Is A Utopian Progressive?

Birds of a feather flock together.

Joshua D. Hawley, here, clearly a friend of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic":

Christians’ purpose in politics should be to advance the kingdom of God—to make it more real, more tangible, more present. Or should I say, to immanentize the eschaton.

Rush Limbaugh's comments on the pope have been nothing if not lazy, so what's new?

Rush Limbaugh's comments on the pope have been nothing if not lazy, which most of his comments are in this late period of his career, and which is why one week after he made them on the pope we are still hearing about them in the media and on his own radio show. If Rush is being talked about, it's there on the show that you're sure to hear about it, because relevance was never so hard to keep up as it is in these days.

Here's Rush this very day in fact, claiming Reuters translated "unfettered capitalism" from the pope's remarks when Reuters hadn't done any such thing, one of the many little half-truths which are the stock in trade of The Rush Limbaugh Program; that phrase "unfettered capitalism" was never in quotation marks in the original Reuters story:

Now, what I had was a Reuters story that was reporting via the translation of the Holy Father's remarks, and in that translation were "unfettered capitalism," a huge, huge hit on what the pope was said to have called "trickle-down," and a plea for leaders of the world to do something about "income inequality" and about poverty and so forth, as though no one's been doing that.  I remember when I saw it, I was really shocked.  I could not believe...

Here's the original Reuters story speaking of unfettered capitalism but not in quotation marks:

Pope Francis called for renewal of the Roman Catholic Church and attacked unfettered capitalism as "a new tyranny," urging global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality in the first major work he has authored alone as pontiff.

The fact is Reuters skewed this story in the direction of "unfettered capitalism" while the pope never used the words "unfettered" or "capitalism", choosing instead "the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation" as the "new tyranny".

Here's as close as the pope comes to "unfettered capitalism" (this is easy to find online, but Rush cannot seem to), who only spoke of "unbridled consumerism" and never once mentioned unfettered capitalism, which comes as a surprise to Rush when callers protest as one did just today:

60. Today’s economic mechanisms promote inordinate consumption, yet it is evident that unbridled consumerism combined with inequality proves doubly damaging to the social fabric. Inequality eventually engenders a violence which recourse to arms cannot and never will be able to resolve. It serves only to offer false hopes to those clamouring for heightened security, even though nowadays we know that weapons and violence, rather than providing solutions, create new and more serious conflicts. Some simply content themselves with blaming the poor and the poorer countries themselves for their troubles; indulging in unwarranted generalizations, they claim that the solution is an “education” that would tranquilize them, making them tame and harmless. All this becomes even more exasperating for the marginalized in the light of the widespread and deeply rooted corruption found in many countries – in their governments, businesses and institutions – whatever the political ideology of their leaders.

The pope's message, after all is said and done, is really quite simple, as all ideologies are, the difference being that his is a heavenly one, not a terrestrial. He's obviously uncomfortable with American Catholics of the conservative persuasion who have been allying themselves with what is commonly called libertarian ideology, the devotees of which Russell Kirk famously named the "chirping sectarians" of the conservative movement, Rep. Paul Ryan being a prominent contemporary example thereof. For Kirk, it was their ideological habit of mind which marked them out as outsiders of the movement because they could not abide the persistent lack of conformity to principle which is endemic to fallen, human nature in need of salvation, and substituted for it a bastardized, immanentized eschaton of infinite freedom:

208. If anyone feels offended by my words, I would respond that I speak them with affection and with the best of intentions, quite apart from any personal interest or political ideology. My words are not those of a foe or an opponent. I am interested only in helping those who are in thrall to an individualistic, indifferent and self-centred mentality to be freed from those unworthy chains and to attain a way of living and thinking which is more humane, noble and fruitful, and which will bring dignity to their presence on this earth.

In the final analysis, conservatism represents an acquiescence to the sad predicament of human existence against which libertarianism never stops revolting, and Christianity represents a temporal and by definition incomplete response of God to life in that world. But for libertarianism, incomplete just isn't good enough.

The Real Fascist Threat To America Comes From The Left, But Only Because It Won

Dennis Prager, here:

[I]f there is a real fascist threat to America, it comes from the left, whose appetite for state power is essentially unlimited. But because the left has so long dominated American intellectual, academic, artistic, and media life, it has succeeded in implanting fear of the right. ... First, it does not mean, or have anything in common with, Nazism. Nazism may have been a form of fascism. But Nazism was a unique form of fascism and a unique evil. It was race-based and it was genocidal. No other expression of fascism was race-based. And not all fascism is genocidal. So my fear that the American left is moving America toward an expression of fascism in no way implies anything Nazi-like or genocidal. ... Second, it is not liberals or liberalism that presents a threat of fascism. It is the left. Liberals of the 1940s to 1970s such as John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and so many others were not leftists. They were liberals.

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

I beg to differ in most of the particulars while seconding the main point.

The advent of fascist elements in American life specifically as a phenomenon of the left has gone hand in glove with the advance of liberalism under Wilson, FDR and Lyndon Johnson, in addition to the fact that the left won World War II, not the "right", whatever that is. One can hardly explain the growth of the state to its current proportions nor its growing oppressive reach without that liberalism and its spokesmen's early admiration for people like Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Nor can one explain our alliance with left socialism in joining the war on the side of Stalin apart from a natural affinity for that form of it as opposed to the other. "Fear of the right" is an artifact of the victory of Stalin and FDR over Hitler and Mussolini, but should more correctly be styled "fear of right socialism". 

Nor is it conceivable to imagine the rise of liberalism in America without the revolution in theology which immanentized the eschaton in the social gospel movement. For Marx religion may have been the opiate of the people, but to Spengler it was the very grandmother of Bolshevism. Russia and Germany went to war as developed rival socialisms while the majority of Americans resisted becoming involved in a fight where they had not yet a dog. They were still children in the classroom of The State. But now that we have grown up we routinely invade in the name of "freedom" because we have come to believe it is our destiny to impose it everywhere we can while ensuring cradle to grave security for one and all at home.

That's not to say America hasn't been fertile ground for fascism from the beginning, quite apart from the dominating influence of a psychology derived from Christianity and its tendency toward totalitarian-like moral conformity. But that involves the economic history, which Prager doesn't address. The contemporary corporatist model lauded by Wall Street has its roots planted comfortably deep in our origins in English colonialism, going all the way back to the crown's banking operations on behalf of the sea-trading companies. Many of the original American colonial charters were patterned on this model of state sponsorship and were first and foremost state-capitalist business ventures. So it should come as no surprise that American capitalism after independence has become more crony than capitalist as it has gotten so very long in the tooth. You can take the Tory out of England, but you can't take the England out of the Tory. Jeffrey Immelt of GE in his admiration for the Chicoms is no different than Henry Ford in his for Hitler.

Lastly, it is troubling to me that a person such as Dennis Prager, who is a student of communism, doesn't mention the fundamental bloodthirstiness inherent in all socialisms, whether communist or fascist. The "unique" evil of Nazism shouldn't blind us to Stalin's anti-German crimes anymore than it should blind us to Stalin's crimes against Ukraine and the millions "disappeared" during his purges. And where is the serious reflection on left socialism's responsibility for the many millions of Chinese who perished at the hands of Mao, who specifically imitated Stalin? And perhaps more to the point for us, the fact that as fascist socialism advances in America millions of unborn children have paid and continue to pay everyday the price for it, all in the name of "freedom"?

Blame Utopianism On Christians Like Joshua D. Hawley

Blame utopianism on Christians like Joshua D. Hawley.

He's an example of a contemporary who understands full well the implications of the broad expanse of Christian teaching as understood from "Scripture", namely an ideological view of reality wholly in keeping with secularized ideologies like Marxism. The key similarity is the denial of reality and the assertion of an alternate one.

Christians of a prior age in America were not "enthusiasts" like this guy who, ominously, clerked for John Roberts (all italics are the author's own):

Isn’t immanentizing the eschaton precisely what Christians citizens should be doing? ... The New Testament teaches that this long-looked-for kingdom has dawned now, in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Christ has become king and, as Scripture says, presently rules over the world and over earthly government. That last point is central. Scripture teaches that political government is mandated by God for his service and is one means by which the enthroned Christ carries out his rule.

Ongoing suffering, death and injustice mean nothing to such people. Those things are inconvenient truths incapable of penetrating the ideological mind. To call it the fanatical mind in a political age is to short-change it because so many no longer have such religious understanding. For religious ideologues unjust government must be endured or ignored, but always obeyed.

People who think such things would never oppose kings like George III, let alone totalitarian dictators, with force of arms. Europe would still be in the grip of Hitlers and Stalins, and so might we, had American Christians had such scruples in 1776 and 1941, or British Christians in 1939.

There is no such thing as immanentizing the eschaton, only instantiating the fall. If it were otherwise, there would be no such thing as a Christian cemetary.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Roman Catholics Avoid Abortion Hypocrisy Of Republicans, Slam Libertarianism Instead

Most of the commentary I'm reading from Catholic critiques of the Republicans is avoiding the manifest hypocrisy of the "life of the mother" and "cases of rape" excuses for abortion advocated by many Catholic Republicans and the Romney campaign.

Those excuses are contrary to Catholic teaching, yet there they are, so-called Catholics, so-called conservatives, hounding out of the Republican Party a man whose point was that pregnancies resulting from rape are rare, which they manifestly are, and that allowing them to come to full term and enjoy life isn't an "option" in some policy world. It's a moral imperative. In this Rep. Todd Akin, a conservative Presbyterian from Missouri, is a better Catholic than the Catholics.

Instead, the critiques are focusing on the libertarianism of Rep. Paul Ryan.

This makes excellent sense, after some reflection, for the simple reason that Catholicism sees in libertarianism a rival ideology, not unlike what Bolshevism saw in National Socialism. The point says more about Catholicism than it does about libertarianism. Catholicism fell victim to the ideological habit of mind long enough ago that Spengler in the 1930s could say:

"[A]ll Communist systems in the West are in fact derived from Christian theological thought . . . Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism."

This observation makes the history of political economy necessarily a topic under the study of the history of religion. The concept of the church, which was totally foreign to Jesus, took the place of the failed imminent coming of the kingdom of God in his teaching, and immanentizes the eschaton he expected before the disciples had finished preaching in Israel. That false kingdom is now administered by popes, cardinals, bishops and priests. As such the church has been responsible for spinning off rival, "heretical", ideologies ever since. And if not the ideologies themselves, at a minimum the ideological habit of mind.

The conservative response to this is most certainly not to keep thinking ideologically. A dead Catholic named Russell Kirk also tried hard to tell us these things before he died.

Like Spengler's, his remains a voice crying in an impoverished wilderness of idealisms.

Obama's Enthusiasm For Bailouts Becomes National Socialism in Colorado Remarks

Obama views the GM auto bailout as an example of a successful government investment in the private sector, never mentioning, of course, that the success is at the expense of the former private investors in GM, its non-union elements, and of the tax-paying public. Without those, GM is still a failure, and should be again.

That Obama now says in Colorado that he wants to similarly rescue more companies, however, indicates that the bailout model was more to him than a one-off which he fortuitously inherited from the Republican establishment, an intellectually lazy cohort of Baby Boomers which long ago had betrayed free market principles. Obama's commitment to a model of government superintendence of private industry marks a new public face for an old familiar mixture of State and industry, the inspiration for which Herbert Hoover noted in his memoirs FDR had derived from Mussolini and the other strong men of Europe.

We all know what is the result of this type of thinking because we've already experienced it, not just in FDR's long failure, and not just in the recent auto company bailouts, but also in the rescue of the financial industry:

• more moral hazard which has allowed so-called private banking players like the five or ten biggest banks to take even more unwarranted risks and grow ever larger and more too big to fail than ever, knowing the public purse is backing them up;
• taxpayer-funded bailouts whose pain is never really felt by the taxpayers because, like most public spending, the bailouts are simply financed by more borrowing, which in their turn have only worsened the fiscal health of the nation and contributed to the loss of its once vaunted AAA rating;
• corruption of elected public officials and bureaucrats whose crimes destroy the public's consent to be governed, as witnessed by the rise of protest movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, and by the capital strike by individual investors;
• picking winners like multinational GE and Wall Street firms who reaped huge rewards in the form of tax breaks and bonuses because of their close relationship with government, and therefore by definition also picking losers on Main Street like small banks and entrepreneurs who can't beat the system because it is rigged against them, crushing confidence in "capitalism";
• a complete repudiation of free market principles in which failure and bankruptcy become as unacceptable as saying "No" to the kids or as marking an "F" on a report card, unless for unrelated political reasons your industry happens to become a target for elimination, you know, like Chick-Fil-A, or the Roman Catholic Church in America.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Obama's remarks in Colorado is the way he is now touting his commitment to this model in explicitly nationalistic terms, emphasizing his as a patriotic concern for the American people to bring their jobs home, and Romney's as an unpatriotic intent to export those jobs.

Obama's socialism has been deemed a distraction by establishment Republicans, who find all the purported links between Obama and the communist left made by conservatives just a little too disturbing for polite conversation. It reminds them too much of the McCarthy era. But now explicitly linked to nationalism, Obama's remarks become an opportunity to refocus the conversation on the coincidence of these elements in fascism, which the left has hitherto succeeded in attacking and marginalizing as a phenomenon of the right, of conservatism.

Locating Obama in fascism actually makes better sense of his presidency to date. It explains the disillusionment of the left with him as a sell-out who has had the temerity to spend so much of his time enjoying himself instead of pushing their agenda, crafting policy to maximize campaign contributions from favored industries, and throwing his weight around as Commander In Chief. After one year progressives were already ridiculing his administration as a squandered presidency. And fascism also coheres with the interpretation of his experience in Chicago where he allied himself with financial, insurance and real estate interests and the Democrat Party to take over the property of the South Loop,  enrich themselves, and further their political careers. The president's friendship with Jeffrey Immelt is not a bug. It's a feature. 

The historical reality is that the fight between the communists and the fascists was always a fight on the common ground of socialism, rather like the fight between Democrats and Republicans has been a fight on the common ground of liberalism. The radicalization which occurred in the arguments between socialists culminating in the Second World War occurred because the conservatism of a prior monarchical age had completely lost its tempering force in society. The civilization of Europe was completely overcome from within by a capitulation to eschaton-immanentizing ideologies before it destroyed itself from without in war. In that process, liberalism was the vanguard softening up the enemy for the totalitarianism to come. Conservatism was beside the point then, but not here, not now.

In the arguments between Democrats and Republicans in our time, matters have not yet degenerated into such violence because the unique contributions of conservatism from the American Founding still inform much of the body politic. And the most important of those contributions, derived from human and religious experience both, has been the self-limiting conviction that human nature is not perfectible and always remains a mixture of good and evil which no rearrangement of human affairs can alter.  In the person of Barack Obama, however, we have met with someone who explicitly asserts otherwise, as an ideologue, that the union is perfectible. He deliberately goes out of his way to attack those individuals and institutions who know, believe and say otherwise. And armed with the imperial accoutrements gathered by his predecessors in the presidency, one might say that the people actually face for the first time a real and foreign threat in charge of the executive, a foreigner in his heart, mind, and affections who keeps his past sealed precisely because the revelation that he once presented himself as a foreigner for his own advantage even though he was born in Hawaii would offend more than actually being a foreigner.

Liberalism is defenseless against this because it drinks from the same cup of idealism. This is why it keeps quiet and doesn't look too deeply into President Obama. It is afraid it might see its own reflection. And this is also why a liberal like Mitt Romney can't bring himself to entertain Obama's socialism, let alone his national socialism. If it worked, he'd actually agree with it.

ABC News has the most recent formulations of Obama's national socialist vision here:

"When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse, more than 1 million jobs at stake, Gov. Romney said, let’s ‘let Detroit go bankrupt.’ I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back and GM is number one again. So now, I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry. I don’t want those jobs taking root in places like China. I want them taking root in places like Pueblo.  Gov. Romney brags about his private sector experience, but it was mostly investing in companies, some of which were called “pioneers” of outsourcing.  I don’t want to be a pioneer of outsourcing.  I want to in-source.  I want to stop giving tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas.” ...

"When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse, 1 million jobs at stake, Mr. Romney said, ‘Let Detroit go bankrupt.’  I said, let’s bet on America’s workers.  And we got management and workers to come together, making better cars than ever. And now, GM is number one again and the American auto industry has come roaring back.   So now, I want to say what we did with the auto industry, we can do it in manufacturing across America.  Let’s make sure advanced, high-tech manufacturing jobs take root here, not in China.  Let’s have them here in Colorado.  And that means supporting investment here.”

To Forgo Something is Acting, Says Judge Kessler

But National Review's Rich Lowry is having none of it, here, responding to this statement by Kessler:

"It is pure semantics to argue that an individual who makes a choice to forgo health insurance is not 'acting,' especially given the serious economic and health-related consequences to every individual of that choice. Making a choice is an affirmative action, whether one decides to do something or not do something." ...

Long ago, the Commerce Clause got stretched beyond recognition. In 1942, the Supreme Court used it to uphold a law penalizing a farmer for growing wheat in excess of his approved allotment, even though it was for his own consumption. At least the poor sap was doing something. According to Kessler, Congress could also punish him for acting on a thought not to grow wheat.

Opponents of ObamaCare say that if it's blessed by the courts, there will no longer be any limiting principle on federal regulatory power. If that seems far-fetched, behold the mental activities of one Judge Gladys Kessler.

Which begs the question, Isn't Kessler's reasoning a residual influence of the Christian religion on matters of state?

Christianity teaches that there are plenty of sins of commission, but also of omission, as per Paul's letter to the Romans, and the letter of James. By refusing to purchase health insurance, by Kessler's reasoning, one is almost committing a sin against the state, of, by and for the people, who will have to bear the costs of paying for the deadbeat's omission.

At the Last Judgment the offender would be punished in hell, but in the Immanentized Eschaton which ideologues are trying to foist upon us, he'll just pay a fine.

Virtue should be so easy.